Barry Diller had a very successful run as president of Paramount. His great biographical book, “Who Knew?” describes his professional and private life, detailing what went behind many successes and a few disasters.
Get the book if you can. It’s a fantastic read.
In this post, I will concentrate on one chapter of this book, where Diller discovers a huge star (the amazing and surprising mega success of John Travolta in “Saturday Night Fever”, Oscar nomination included) and how they saw the upcoming “Grease” as such a potential disaster that someone suggested scrapping the movie completely. Yes, that “Grease,” the one that everyone has seen and loves.
Let’s start with “Saturday Night Fever” (1977), a film that was a perfect example of how Diller wanted films made at Paramount.
Then, two months later, we opened Saturday Night Fever. All of us inside the company loved the little movie we’d made, and with hubris we decided to preview it for the industry at the grand Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard thinking that if we were standing this tall behind it everyone would take notice. At five of eight, the place was practically empty.
Our old-time head of publicity came over to where I was sitting and whispered in my ear, “Travolta’s the problem; he’s a television person. You don’t put a television person in a movie. The kid just doesn’t put asses in seats.” Well, not old Hollywood asses. But two weeks later we opened the movie, and there were vast lines around the block at every theater across America. Television execs and a television star had broken into the movies.”
Now, time for “Grease”, which opened one year later, in 1978, although it was filmed before “Saturday Night Fever” came out.
Robert Stigwood, a very peculiar music manager who had been with the Beatles and Bee Gees, was a key person in John Travolta’s movie beginnings.
(Stigwood) had signed Travolta to a three-picture deal, and we had shot Grease in the late summer of 1977, before Saturday Night Fever came out.
It was a pretty shoddy production all the way through. Everything looked crummy, including the grass, which was supposed to be bright and green and was mostly patchy brown. Many of the shots didn’t match. The pace was uneven.
Travolta’s instant fame created a dilemma for us, because after seeing the first rough cut, shortly after Fever had become a smash, we thought Grease was going to be a disaster.
Fever was of the moment, and Grease was a throwback bit of goofball nostalgia. We’d been geniuses in creating a superstar, and now we were about to be the dopes who killed his career in the very same year.
We screened the first rough cut at my house. (…) I’d invited Bob Evans (Producer of The Godfather) to join us because he was such a genius at postproduction.
It was like watching a train wreck. The music and sound, on the prerecorded tracks, without full orchestrations, sounded cheap and tinny. After the lights came up, Evans said, “You have to junk it. This picture is un-releasable.”
What happened then? After reshoots and new edits….
The energy changed totally; the audience was charmed, and that carried exuberantly through the whole movie. Moments that made me cringe in screenings got huge laughs. And by the end, it was clear they loved it!
As the great William Goldman states in his classic book about movies, “Adventures in the Screen Trade”, “Nobody Knows Anything”.
Who knew?
Catch this book if you can!
More about biographies? Please check Oliver Stone’s Great Autobiography is a Must, Joseph Cotten, a Great Autobiography, Cinema Speculation: Tarantino Explores the Films that Made him as a Young Man, Take it from the Great Film Director Sidney Lumet, BREAKING BAD’s Bryan Cranston on the Casting Process,More About Film Acting from Master Michael Caine (Part 1), The King of B-movies, Bruce Campbell, on Film Acting and more!
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