Then came the also successful Tommy, for which he united an ensemble of pop stars, with The Who-clients from back in London-at the center of Ken Russell’s rock opera. Having produced the show’s original Broadway run, Jesus Christ Superstar became Stigwood’s first film production. Directors of the New Hollywood had already started to approach film soundtracks differently than in the studio era, relying more on pop songs to help tell (and sell) stories. Rather than abandoning the music industry proper, however, he had designs on bridging sound and picture in innovative ways.
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When Cream and the Bee Gees both subsequently entered flop eras, Stigwood gained traction in both the theater and film worlds, in part due to his professional relationship with Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice. The solution was obvious to all parties: Stigwood would take his two acts and split off into RSO, and The Beatles would obviously be fine. When Epstein died suddenly in 1967, Stigwood was left as the de facto manager of The Beatles, who’d never particularly liked him (or the Bee Gees, so says the film). A decade later, he was managing Cream and fellow Aussies the Bee Gees, and had professionally joined forces with the Beatles’ manager, Brian Epstein. To rewind a bit, as the film does, the self-effacing Stigwood made his way to London from his birthplace of South Australia in the ‘50s, getting into show business not too long thereafter. To learn about Stigwood and the business moves he made over the course of the ‘70s, it seems it is to better understand a whole chapter of both music and film history. Maggio tells us at the beginning that he first embarked on a project about ‘70s disco culture, but soon shifted gears to zoom in instead on the Wizard of Oz-like figure at its center. He turns out to be something of a Trojan Horse, since the documentary is largely about the making of Saturday Night Fever, for which Cohn’s secretly fictional Vincent became Travolta’s character, Tony Manero. Stigwood is the official but ostensible focus of the latest in HBO’s Music Box docuseries, Mr. It wasn’t yet clear what those pictures would be, but Stigwood was known to have a knack for seeing things that others didn’t-a “sense of smell,” as Cohn once described it. Stigwood had recently signed an up-and-comer named John Travolta-then already a teen idol due to his work on the sitcom Welcome Back, Kotter-to a three-picture Paramount contract. What mattered was that said issue of the magazine happened to come across the desk of Robert Stigwood, the burgeoning music and film mogul who saw in Cohn’s story the makings of a great movie. But none of this mattered just yet in 1976. Vincent, for whom the club is a sort of safe haven, was the story’s complicated main character: “When Saturday night came round and he walked into 2001 Odyssey, all the other Faces automatically fell back before him, cleared a space for him to float in, right at the very center of the dance floor.” Per Cohn’s description, Vincent owned 14 floral shirts and stood at 5’9” in platforms.Īlso per Cohn, Vincent didn’t actually exist the former would admit in the ‘90s that his “ultimate Face,” like the rest of the story, had been completely made-up. “Vincent was the very best dancer in Bay Ridge-the ultimate Face,” wrote Nik Cohn in his 1976 New York cover story “Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night.” The piece was a deep dive on the mostly Italian-American young adults who frequented a discotheque in Brooklyn called 2001 Odyssey.