First, let me clarify that there is no Saturday Night Fever remake, this is just some idle thinking on my part. Apologies if anyone got excited at the thought of seeing a white disco suit on the big screen once more.
Saturday Night Fever is usually considered a classic film (it stands at 88% on Rotten Tomatoes and film critic Gene Siskel declared it his favorite movie ever) and had a lasting cultural impact stretching well beyond its 1977 debut. It helped usher in the era of disco, made John Travolta a superstar and did the same for the Bee Gees. It was a new kind of musical in which music was part of the fabric of the film but where no one suddenly broke out into song. At its core it was a coming of age story in which the young and impudent Tony Manero has to decide whether to break away from his dead-end life in Brooklyn (“Life going nowhere, somebody help me”) for something better in Manhattan.
A lot of people would argue there’s no need to remake the movie. I wouldn’t disagree and am always a bit dismayed when classic, highly-regarded films get remade into inevitably inferior new versions. There are plenty of good but flawed movies that are ripe for improvement via remake but they lack the cachet of a classic and so get passed over.
So if I don’t necessarily want a Saturday Night Fever remake, what am I going on about? I happened to be listening to the soundtrack while on my usual lunch walk (side note: the 8-track version–which I owned, dang it–has a live version of “Jive Talkin'” that blows the doors off the CD/digital studio version of the same song. Why they used a live version on the 8-track I don’t know and probably never will, alas) and it suddenly popped into my head that, given that the film is close to 40 years old it’s perhaps more of a surprise that it hasn’t been remade yet. This led to thinking about how it might be handled if someone greenlit a remake.
Here are the possibilities as I see them:
- the Psycho approach. In 1998 director Gus Van Sant made a mostly shot-for-shot remake of the 1960 classic Psycho. Many saw this not only as inferior to the original, but a pointless experiment in duplication. Given the film was both a critical and financial flop, I doubt this approach would be considered. Also, Saturday Night Fever is as much of its era and wouldn’t necessarily translate to being modernized as Psycho was (see the last entry below for more).
- a comedy remake, also known as the 21 Jump Street approach. The TV series was played straight but the movie remake and sequel play it for laughs and it works, mainly because the premise of 21 Jump Street is flexible enough that it can be stretched without breaking. While it’s obviously possible to make a comedic coming of age story, I think it would change the tone of the movie enough that it would come off more as a parody than just a different take. Speaking of…
- an outright parody. That scene in Airplane! is enough. As are the other million parodies already out there.
- the keep-it-faithful remake. This would keep everything as faithful to the original as possible–setting it in 1977, making the disco central, keeping the characters and story the same. It wouldn’t be a shot-for-shot remake and the biggest question would probably be whether to re-use the songs or create new ones that sound like they are from 1977. It would be challenging and some might still argue a bit pointless to take this approach. It also might come off as unintentional parody.
- the keep-it-faithful-except-not-really remake. In this version the story and characters would stay the same but the trappings surrounding them would change. Instead of being set in 1977 and having everyone go to the disco, it would be set in 2016 and everyone would go to…wherever people go now. Since the music is such a fundamental part of the film, weaving throughout both the background and foreground, it might prove tricky keeping the feel of the original while updating the music. There’s a variety of popular genres to pull from–hip hop, electronica and its many variants and offshoots–but could any of them replicate the feel of the disco music of 1977 and serve as the basis for the film’s dance competition? It’s possible and this is probably the best approach to take.
Simon Cowell was apparently interested in a remake back around 2009 but it looks like nothing came of that. In a way it’s too bad because I suspect it might have been entertainingly awful.
I also thought about a possible remake of 1980’s Xanadu, which featured Olivia Newton-John and the music of ELO. Watching any clip from the movie–and I do mean any clip–quickly convinced me that it would be impossible to remake this without lapsing into parody, whether intended or not.
