Editing Saturday Night Fever (section)

===Development===
The film was inspired by a 1976 ''[[New York (magazine)|New York]]'' magazine article entitled "[[Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night]]" by British writer [[Nik Cohn]]. The article centers on [[working class]] [[Italian Americans|Italian-Americans]] in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, and on the lives of young men who work [[dead-end job]]s but live for their nights dancing at the local discotheque. Cohn later wrote that "the [disco] craze had started in black gay clubs, then progressed to straight blacks and gay whites and from there to mass consumption—Latinos in the Bronx, West Indians on Staten Island, and, yes, Italians in Brooklyn."<ref name="VanityFair" /> Shortly after Cohn's article was published, British music impresario [[Robert Stigwood]] purchased the film rights and hired Cohn to adapt his own article to screen.<ref name="AFI" />

In the mid-1990s Cohn acknowledged that although his account was presented as factual reporting, he fabricated most of the article.<ref name="NYTimes SNF">{{Cite news|last=Leduff|first=Charlie|date=June 9, 1996|title=Saturday Night Fever: The Life|work=[[The New York Times]]|url=https://www.nytimes.com/1996/06/09/nyregion/saturday-night-fever-the-life.html|access-date=2010-05-23}}</ref> He said that as a newcomer to the United States and a stranger to the disco lifestyle, he was unable to make any sense of the subculture he had been assigned to write about; instead, the article's protagonist (who would become Tony Manero) was based on an acquaintance of Cohn who was an English [[Mod (subculture)|mod]].<ref name="NYTimes SNF" />

[[John G. Avildsen]] was originally hired as the film's director but was replaced one month before principal photography by [[John Badham]] over "conceptual disagreements."<ref name="AFI" /><ref name="VanityFair" /> Badham was a lesser-known director who, like his star, had mostly worked in television. His sole prior film credit, ''[[The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings]]'', was released while ''Saturday Night Fever'' was already well into production.<ref name="VanityFair" />

The film went through several different titles, including ''Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night'' and ''Saturday Night''. After the Bee Gees wrote "[[Night Fever]]" and submitted it for the soundtrack, they told Stigwood they disliked the title ''Saturday Night''. It was after this that the film's final title of ''Saturday Night Fever'' was decided upon.<ref name="Bronson">{{cite book |last1=Bronson |first1=Fred |title=The Billboard Book of Number One Hits |chapter=Night Fever |chapter-url=https://books.google.com/books?id=PgGqNrqfrsoC&pg=480 |year=2003 |publisher=Billboard Books |page=480 |isbn=978-0823076772 |access-date=26 September 2023 }}</ref>