Chapter Two
Staying Alive
By Brett Ballard-Beach
July 21, 2011
BoxOfficeProphets.com
--Lyrics from The Bee Gees’ “Stayin’ Alive” for you to ponder
This week, Chapter Two begins an extended look at some of the more notorious, infamous, misguided, unnecessary and perhaps just terrible sequels of all time. My words are chosen to be slightly more diplomatic than necessary because, as much fun as it would be to hurl insults at defenseless celluloid, it’s never been my style. I would actually prefer to see a good film over one that I have a suspicion would suck my time and my gray matter into a black hole. But I have a curious nature and sometimes the aura and history surrounding said films draw me in with the force of a black hole.
In some instances I will be revisiting sequels that I would just as soon prefer not to (say, those that Keanu Reeves chose not to star in, ahem) and in other cases, I will be viewing films I have heard bandied about as punch lines for most of my adult life (anyone up for a Quickening?) This week, I begin with a film that currently registers a solid 0% at Rotten Tomatoes, albeit on only 20 reviews.
More intriguing (yet slightly more positive) stats: At just shy of $65 million in receipts, it was the eighth highest moneymaker of 1983, and one of four Paramount releases in the top ten. Its opening weekend total of $12.1 million was fourth for the year behind only Return of the Jedi, Superman III and uh, Jaws 3-D (?!) and it played in nearly as many theaters as the first two did. What is it? If you guessed Staying Alive, you read the song lyric at the top and have basic inference skills, rudimentary web surfing skills, or astounding box office trivia skills!
To make the kickoff of this Chapter Two mini-fest - which I have just now decided to call “How Bad Do You Want It?” - a little more interesting, I will resist the obvious. Instead of focusing on John Travolta, the STAR - for a film and performance like this only all caps will do - I will begin with an eye turned to the auteur who was co-writer, co-producer and director on this Grammy, Golden Globe and Razzie-nominated project.
Sylvester Stallone has directed eight movies to date and written or co-written about 20 screenplays. These figures include helming four of the six Rocky movies (as well as writing all the screenplays) and the most recent Rambo (and sharing co-writing status on all four in that series), and notching at least a co-writing credit on most all of his 1980s output - films as disparate as Rhinestone, Cobra and Over the Top included. It is helpful to remember that Stallone turned to screenwriting in the mid-1970s as his acting career was fizzling and that in the post-Rocky world, his cachet led to two produced screenplays in 1978: F*I*S*T and Paradise Alley. Stallone starred in both and made his directorial debut with the latter. He was recruited by Travolta to be the director of Staying Alive and turned down an offer to play the director of Satan’s Alley, the musical within the movie.
Staying Alive marks the only film he has directed where he does not have a leading role, or in fact a “role” of any kind. He has a five second blink-and-you-miss-it walk-on (cameo would be too strong a word) and if nothing else, you can pull Staying Alive up on any one of your friendly household media players and see if you can spot him. Those less inclined to play along can skip ahead to the end of the column. One of the things I hope to do with my discussion of the film is to see what Stallone offers the sequel and determine for myself if it is as odd a fit as I have always thought it would (and should) be.
Staying Alive is technically a sequel to 1977’s Saturday Night Fever, and it feels strange to use that word “technically” since the film was marketed explicitly as being the further adventures of Tony Manero - Brooklyn stud, conflicted man-child, and disco dancer (now determined would-be Broadway dancer) par excellence. I opt for it for several reasons relating to both aesthetics and plot issues. The film take place five years after Fever and features obvious references to the prior film - a shot of the disco club 2001 Odyssey, the character of Tony’s mother, a closing sequence in which The Bee Gees’ Stayin’ Alive plays over Tony strutting - but has far more plot holes and fissures that one either wrestles with and finds distressing or completely ignores, thus negating the need for this to be a sequel to Saturday Night Fever.
What the PG-marked Staying Alive resembles/feels like is a heavily sanitized version of Fever, or more accurately, a sequel to the bowdlerized PG-rated version of Fever. I have never seen this 1979 re-issue, but I can’t imagine it in any way improves upon what director John Badham and screenwriter Norman Wexler successfully produced two years earlier. The characters in Fever toss off casual sexist comments, racist attitudes and profanities as if they were second nature. They drink to get drunk, snort to get high, engage in ridiculous behavior, exhibit stupid tendencies and view women in one of two modes: as whores, or fast on their way to becoming whores (no Madonna alternatives here to complicate things.)
It may be hard for some to see the forest for the white suits, tight pants, strobe lights and disco music, but Saturday Night Fever plays like a dispassionate anthropological study more than anything. It observes the “Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night” - as the magazine piece the film was inspired by was titled - but it does not condemn or condone, criticize or praise, condescend to nor elevate its characters. Tony Manero has more insight and a little more self-awareness than most of his posse, but at times it is just enough to get him into and not out of trouble. It is telling of the film’s focus that the “big dance-off” is not the climax but that the fallout from that competition is.
Fever may be the only Hollywood film that concludes with a man asking a woman if she will be his friend. From a cultural standpoint, Tony Manero is a man on the verge of the “Me Decade” who finds it more compelling to wonder about everybody else. Staying Alive works tirelessly to rectify those deeper concerns, to the point where the film’s moral message resides somewhere between conflicted and hypocritical.
In Staying Alive, Tony has a long-time girlfriend Jackie, also a fellow dancer and singer in a bar band, who puts up with his bullshit with the patience of a saint. He leers at other girls constantly and in one of only two actions that could honestly be called plot developments in the film, he cheats on her repeatedly with a haughty British dancer who is supposed to be desirable because she is cold and unapproachable (she can even do without him after she has been approached, in the Biblical sense). To see Tony acting like an asshole and a wounded puppy-dog simultaneously is disheartening and confusing. Casting future soap opera and nighttime television mainstay Finola Hughes as Laura the man-eater showed good sense, but the film really belongs to her rival for Tony’s affection, played by Cynthia Rhodes.
Rhodes didn’t go on to a lot after this, in part because she married singer Richard Marx in 1989 and retired from the entertainment scene shortly thereafter, but she did also star in the third highest grossing film of 1983 (more on that shortly) and notched a top 10 pop hit with the group Animotion before the decade ended. Whether through her charisma, inherent likability, or natural talent, she somehow imbues Jackie with strength even when forgiving Tony for the umpteenth time. Instead of wanting to knock sense into her, we can almost buy that Tony might be redeemable (he’s not) because Jackie must see something in him.
Tony and Jackie get cast in the chorus of the aforementioned Satan’s Alley alongside lead Jackie - side note: After perusing the results of a Google search, I must disclaim this Satan’s Alley has no connection to the fake movie featured in Tropic Thunder, but consideration of this throws the aggressively hetero Staying Alive into murky sexual waters indeed - and Tony finagles his way into the lead role. This leads to the extended climax in which the audience (on screen) and the audience (you and I) are subjected to what could best be titled “Yo Adrian! Check Out the MTV Influences in my Musical Number!”
Quick cuts? Check.
Bombast? Check
S&M costuming and choreography lewd and suggestive enough to make you feel dirty, but not dirty enough? Check.
Out-of-control fog machine? Check.
‘80s corporate schlock rock on the soundtrack? Check. (More on that in a minute.)
The scenario laid out by Stallone (and co-writer Wexler, returning from the first film) suggests that what is called for to end the story is something as rousing as Balboa vs. Creed or Balboa vs. Lang, a precursor to John Rambo finally winning the Vietnam War two years later. He dreams up the Broadway show as pulverizing entertainment, extreme hoofing, the musical as literal war. Tony Manero fights his way through whips and chains and blood and scores of chorus dancers (and oh so much fog) until he emerges like the last warrior of The Great White Way, balancing Jackie on just one hand in the musical’s finale, face grimaced, muscles buckling, look of intensity so strong it suggests he would take the ’77 Tony Manero and break him over his knees.
To those who think the Rocky/Rambo comparison might be inflated, go to IMDb and check out the thumbnails of the original poster art/video box covers (particularly 1 and 5 in the set of 16). Does Travolta not look precisely like Rambo with that feathered hair, sweaty intensity, the suggestion of muscles, and that ridiculous headband? They even over-pronounce the scratch he receives from Jackie to suggest the threat of bodily harm.
This may be one of my favorite movie art images of all time because it promises everything - sex, violence, longing, obsession, and action all lit from within by golden klieg lights - and it’s because it promises so much that I may have held off seeing the film for nearly 30 years. No film, great or so bad it’s great, could deliver on all that. And this one can’t. Staying Alive should at least work as camp, but it never quite carries itself over the edge to where I can laugh and smile and feel a sense of exhilaration and enjoyment at the wrongness of it all. The train wreck spectacle of the finale is visceral, but I feel more embarrassed for all involved than anything.
In a way, the mirror image of Staying Alive in Travolta’s filmography is Battlefield Earth. Both are testaments to the power of box office success to get almost any questionable project made. And in true STAR fashion, Travolta has managed to shrug them off, along with many others, in nearly 40 years in the business. His own natural charisma, evident in Saturday Night Fever, Pulp Fiction, Look Who’s Talking, even a bleak thriller like Blow Out, is missing in Staying Alive. It’s been replaced with a lot of sweat and a lot of self-importance.
Final Thought #1: As well as Staying Alive did, Paramount may have unexpectedly shot themselves in the foot by releasing it so close to the studio’s own Flashdance (That opened in April, three months ahead, and it was still going strong come summer). With a fairly similar story told in an even flashier music-video style, it proved to be the reigning MTV-inspired musical and sleeper of the year, starting out with $4 million its opening weekend and finishing with $94 million by year’s end, not too far behind what Best Picture winner Terms of Endearment would make. (Cynthia Rhodes has a small supporting role as punkish dancer Tina Tech.)
Final Thought #2: The soundtrack to Saturday Night Fever sold 15 million copies, spent 24 weeks at the top of the Billboard Album charts, launched The Bee Gees into a delirious commercial heyday with three straight number one songs - a feat they then matched with their next studio album - and stands as the unofficial musical representation of the disco era. The soundtrack to Staying Alive peaked at #6, spent six months on the charts, sold a million copies, and placed exactly one song in the top ten: the rock song “Far From Over” sung by the director’s brother, Frank Stallone. The Bee Gees have half a dozen songs on the Staying Alive soundtrack and Frank Stallone sings, co-sings (with Rhodes) and/or co-wrote the rest of the songs.
This musical dichotomy, between what was (for the new Bee Gees tunes are pop and ballads but in no way call to mind Saturday Night Fever) and what “is” (the slick, anonymous MOR format that arose in the ‘80s) may be the invisible tug-of-war at the heart of Staying Alive. The disco milieu can in no way be explicitly referenced. (Tony’s mother may show up for two scenes but plans to feature his father, kid sister, and even ex-lover in small supporting roles were either scrapped or shot but not used.) The phenomenon of the first film must be both remembered and forgotten, for disco is the white-suited elephant in the room, the shameful secret that cannot be asked or told.
Saturday Night Fever’s Tony Moreno was a prick in touch with his feelings, who could move with abandon on the dance floor on a weekend night with no fear of reprisal. Staying Alive’s Tony Moreno is a prick with no past, looking out for himself. When he finally grabs the glory and the accolades, there is no use left for him in the story. In an eerie move, Stallone freeze frames him mid-jump in the heart of Times Square and then ghosts him out. All that’s left behind are the glittering lights and broken hearts.
Epilogue: Nik Cohn admitted in 1996 that he made up his magazine article on the New York disco scene, basing it all on working-class disaffected Mods that he had known back in Britain in the 1960s.
Next time: You want The Quickening? You got The Quickening.