Living for the Moment

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"You make it with some of these chicks, they think you gotta dance with them."

Tony (John Travolta)

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John Travolta was becoming a household name when "Saturday Night Fever" premiered on this day in 1977.

His career had been gathering momentum with his appearance in "Carrie" and his regular role on TV's Welcome Back, Kotter. Then "Saturday Night Fever" became a blockbuster — the fifth–highest grossing movie of 1977 — and Travolta's career took off. After an appearance in the very forgettable "Moment by Moment," his next two movies, "Grease" and "Urban Cowboy," were huge hits.

I don't think Travolta ever played a character quite like Tony Manero.

At the Brooklyn disco where he spent his evenings, Tony was the ruler of all he surveyed. Outside the disco, he was nobody — even in his own home. It was safe to say that he lived for those moments in the disco and that he gave little if any thought to the future. Outside the disco he got into fights with his father and struggled to live up to the example of his brother the priest.

And his job at a paint store was a dead end.

But that all changed when he was in the club. As I say, he lived for the moment there.

Things were different when he met Stephanie (Karen Gorney) whose thoughts and dreams took her beyond Brooklyn and the club. The fact that Tony didn't envision a life beyond Brooklyn frustrated Stephanie, who replaced Annette (Donna Pescow).

"You live with your parents," she told Tony at one point, "you hang with your buddies and on Saturday nights you burn it all off at 2001 Odyssey. You're a cliche. You're nowhere, goin' no place."

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Tony wanted to argue, but what could he say? He knew she was right. And that was his turning point.

What was less clear was what Tony's future treatment of women would be. Like many men of his generation — as well as generations before and since — Tony struggled to relate to women outside the bedroom or the dance floor. While the Tonys of the world are getting paid back today in the form of sexual harassment scandals, I doubt that a movie like "Saturday Night Fever" could be made today. After all there was overt as well as covert sexism going on in that movie that would not be permissible in today's politically correct–charged atmosphere.

"Saturday Night Fever" supposedly told the story of the social scene in the U.S. in the '70s, but ironically it was based on a 1976 article by British journalist Nik Cohn that Cohn admitted — 20 years later — had been fabricated.

"Without Cohn's original story, it's possible that disco would be a dimly remembered fad from the days of the Ford administration: no Bee Gees megahits, no Travolta superstardom, no nostalgic polyester parties for decades ever after," observed Mark Rozzo in the New York Times. "Barry Gibb reportedly once said to Cohn, 'It's all your bloody fault, isn't it?' He may have been right."

Travolta received the movie's only Oscar nomination — for Best Actor — but he couldn't compete with Richard Burton, Woody Allen, Marcello Mastroianni and the winner, Richard Dreyfuss.

The best–selling soundtrack featuring songs recorded mostly (but not exclusively) by the Bee Gees received no Oscar nominations. Nevertheless it is one of the bestselling movie soundtrack albums of all time.

And it is a testament to the influence of disco music on '70s America — even if that influence was exaggerated at times.

The Paradox of 'Pulp Fiction'

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Vincent (John Travolta): And you know what they call a Quarter Pounder with Cheese in Paris?

Jules (Samuel L. Jackson): They don't call it a Quarter Pounder with Cheese?

Vincent: No, man, they got the metric system. They wouldn't know what the fuck a Quarter Pounder is.

Jules: Then what do they call it?

Vincent: They call it a Royale with Cheese.

Jules: A Royale with Cheese. What do they call a Big Mac?

Vincent: Well, a Big Mac's a Big Mac, but they call it le Big Mac.

Jules: Le Big Mac. Ha ha ha ha. What do they call a Whopper?

Vincent: I dunno, I didn't go into Burger King.

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I don't know precisely when I got wise to the fact that, if I was going to watch a Quentin Tarantino movie, I had to be prepared for the likelihood that the story would not be told chronologically.

And sometimes he throws in stuff that has no real meaning to the story. Just to make sure you're paying attention, I suppose.

Roger Ebert really liked the dialogue in "Pulp Fiction," which premiered 20 years ago today. So did I — and for pretty much the same reason. Ebert just expressed it better than I could.

"Dialogue drives Quentin Tarantino's 'Pulp Fiction,'" he wrote, "dialogue of such high quality it deserves comparison with other masters of spare, hard–boiled prose, from Raymond Chandler to Elmore Leonard. Like them, QT finds a way to make the words humorous without ever seeming to ask for a laugh. Like them, he combines utilitarian prose with flights of rough poetry and wicked fancy."

That is the intriguing paradox of "Pulp Fiction," isn't it? A movie that is, ostensibly, about action is, as Ebert put it, driven by dialogue.

The conversation between John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson about Quarter Pounders and what they are called in France is my favorite example. Ebert cites his own, which is just as valid. There are many examples in "Pulp Fiction." The dialogue really is what makes the movie work.

It could have clashed with Tarantino's non–linear style of story telling, but it didn't because, as Ebert wrote, his was a utilitarian prose. There was purpose in each thing that was said, even if it wasn't readily apparent. And when the movie was over, the viewer felt as if he/she had been told the whole story and understood it as if it had been told in a more traditionally linear fashion.

The story began and ended with the same holdup in the same restaurant pulled off by Tim Roth and Amanda Plummer. By the time the robbery was seen for a second time, everything had fallen into place.

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It was the dialogue that made the movie the black comedy that it was. I guess that is always the case, but the subject matter in this movie was really pretty brutal. If the words prompted laughter "without ever seeming to ask for a laugh" — and they often did — that is why it is remembered as a great black comedy.

Of course, there was more of a purpose to the dialogue, as Ebert observed. "[T]here is a chronology in the dialogue," Ebert wrote, "in the sense that what is said before invariably sets up or enriches what comes after." In other words, the dialogue provided a context.

It was the movie that resurrected Travolta's career. He received an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor (but lost to Tom Hanks for "Forrest Gump") and was in some pretty good movies in the years that immediately followed "Pulp Fiction," but his career seems to have slipped from the radar again.

Seems to me I could almost say the same thing about Uma Thurman, who was nominated for Best Supporting Actress (but lost to Dianne Wiest in "Bullets Over Broadway"). She's made some noteworthy movies in the last 20 years — the "Kill Bill" movies come to mind — but she has mostly dropped out of sight lately, too.

In all, "Pulp Fiction" received seven Oscar nominations and won for Best Original Screenplay.

"It's all in the dialogue," Ebert wrote, and I really have to agree. Tarantino richly deserved the Oscar he shared with Roger Avary for the original screenplay — and he also deserved his nomination for Best Director.