As great of a film as Saturday Night Fever is, with a smart script, strong direction, and a killer performance by John Travolta, it is the music by the Bee Gees that truly makes the film a classic. Their songs defined the film and the disco era, just as it defined them. The mark they left on the film is also in the title, which they helped come up with.
Their involvement with the film began when Robert Stigwood, who was their manager and was producing the film, asked them to do the movie. “We weren’t looking at ‘Fever’ as a career vehicle. We just got caught up in the Robert Stigwood syndrome: Anyone he managed he also wanted involved in his film projects, as opposed to keeping them separate, and I think we got blinded by that. He asked for three songs, we gave him three songs off what would have been our next studio album,” Maurice Gibb said.
Barry Gibb described the experience, saying, “We didn’t know what the film was about. We didn’t know there was a conflict of images which could perhaps hurt us later on. In those days, you didn’t think too much about images.” Stigwood was planning to title the movie Saturday Night. The Bee Gees did not think that was a good title, but their song Night Fever had a nice ring to it.
Stigwood did not take to that name, but decided to combine the two names into what became the film’s title. The film and soundtrack were both huge hits, with the soundtrack being the biggest ever made at that time, which gave the Bee Gees a huge career boost and made them disco legends. .