“It was Milton Glaser’s idea that I could act like a visual journalist,” McMullan says now. McMullan’s paintings, however, were drawn closely from photos he took during multiple trips to the Bay Ridge disco called 2001 Odyssey-first with Cohn, then alone. But, of course, I would have been full of it.” “At the time,” Cohn later wrote, “if cornered, I would doubtless have produced some high-flown waffle about Alternative Realities, tried to argue that writing didn’t have to be true to be, at some level, real. The article, written by Nik Cohn, about a group of Bay Ridge “Faces” who colonized a disco every Saturday night, turned out to be almost entirely made up-a combination of New Journalism extrapolating and deadline-pressure riffing. That movie, in turn, owed its life to a portrait painted in a New York Magazine cover story, “ Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night,” that appeared 30 years ago this month-literal portraits, in fact, by illustrator James McMullan, whose work you see reprinted here. So it’s easy to forget that Saturday Night Fever wasn’t all glitz and disco balls and stayin’ alive it was a dark portrait of sexual aggression and suicide among working-class Italian kids stuck at the ass-end of seventies-era Brooklyn. Though he wasn’t born until 1977, Tony Manero, the disco-dancing, white-suit-wearing, finger-pointing-to-the-sky hero of Saturday Night Fever, exists now as a mascot for “the seventies” in the way, say, that Gordon Gekko exists as a mascot for “the eighties,” or Mickey Mouse exists as a mascot for the wonderful world of Disney. Photo: James McMullan/Courtesy of Daryl and Steven Roth (Painting) (3) A still from Saturday Night Fever (1977). (2) An early sketch for an illustration (4) that would accompany Nik Cohn's New York article (and appear on the cover). (1) A photograph that artist James McMullan took at the dance club 2001 Odyssey in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, in 1976.
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