Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Mr. Saturday Night’ on HBO Max, A ‘Music Box’ Doc About Music Tycoon Robert Stigwood

Mr. Saturday Night, the latest documentary in HBO’s Bill Simmons-produced Music Box anthology series, looks at music and media impresario Robert Stigwood, who put the Bee Gees in a room with disco, added John Travolta, made Saturday Night Fever, and raked in piles of dough with his savvy for vertically integrated revenue streams. Mr. Saturday Night director John Maggio also helmed the HBO docs The Perfect Weapon and The Newspaperman.

MR. SATURDAY NIGHT: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Music business impresario Robert Stigwood parlayed his early success managing acts like Cream and the Bee Gees into a wider media empire, shepherding the cross-platform phenomenon that became Jesus Christ Superstar and channeling the 1970’s cultural moment of disco into the hugely successful soundtrack and film Saturday Night Fever. Director John Maggio begins Mr. Saturday Night in 1975, when Stigwood was setting up his own shingle in New York City after leaving a fractured business relationship with the Beatles back in the UK and forging ahead with Eric Clapton’s solo comeback, 1974’s 461 Ocean Boulevard, and encouraging the floundering Bee Gees to focus on R&B. The Robert Stigwood Organization also had a definite hit with the concert tour, Broadway show, and film that encompassed Jesus Christ Superstar, and it became RSO’s modus operandi to operate across platforms, retaining not only artists but the wider publishing rights attached to a given media product. And that was the strategy Stigwood envisioned when he first read a New York Magazine article about the bustling disco scene out in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bay Shore. To Stigwood, it already felt like a movie. And he had just the band to craft its soundtrack.

Mr. Saturday Night details how Stigwood stoked interest in Saturday Night Fever the film by releasing its soundtrack first, and as Bee Gees singles like “Stayin’ Alive,” “Night Fever,” and “You Should Be Dancing” became boffo hits, moviegoers responded. He also had a star vehicle in John Travolta, and RSO followed the massive success of Saturday Night Fever with the equally huge Travolta-starring hit Grease. Again and again, former executives with the company remark that Stigwood was a master of synergy, of knowing which gambles to take; he was also, like fellow music biz impresario Clive Davis, adept at putting the right creative people together in a room and monetizing that union.

There are no talking head interviews in Mr. Saturday Night, and Stigwood himself is heard and seen only in archival footage. (Stigwood died in 2016 at age 81.) Instead, the doc is an oral history patois of various voiceovers – people who knew him, people who worked with him, and people who found their own success on projects he produced – as footage and photographs from the era combine on screen with graphics and typography.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart debuted on HBO in December 2020, and Mr. Saturday Night fills in the Robert Stigwood Organization’s side of the band’s career trajectory and disco ascendency. There’s also the wide swath Stigwood and RSO’s productions cut through the 1970’s cultural scene. Saturday Night Fever, of course, but also Jesus Christ Superstar, the movie version of The Who’s Tommy, and Grease.

Performance Worth Watching: John Travolta was just 21 in 1975 when Robert Stigwood signed the TV actor to a three-picture movie deal, and it’s noteworthy to see the young heartthrob in action, whether he’s splashed across the cover of Tiger Beat, dancing like a galoot as Sweathog Vinnie Barbarino on Welcome Back Kotter, or undergoing his full disco emergence as Tony Manero in Saturday Night Fever, strutting under the glitter ball at 2001 Odyssey.

Memorable Quotes: Nik Cohn, the writer whose 1976 New York Magazine piece “Tribal Rites of Saturday Night” became the basis for Saturday Night Fever, recalls of Robert Stigwood’s knack for optimizing talent and business opportunities that he “existed by a sense of smell. And he had a wonderful sense of smell.”

Sex and Skin: Only the runaway libido at play in footage of the early disco scene in 1970’s Manhattan.

Our Take: In his introductory note, which is a regular feature of these Music Box films, Mr. Saturday Night director John Maggio says he was originally making a movie about disco when all of the lines on the era started tracing back to “the Wizard of Oz in the 1970’s,” Robert Stigwood. That decade certainly gives his film its focus – Stigwood arrives fully formed in mid-1960’s Great Britain, at 37 already a millionaire and working alongside Beatles manager Brian Epstein, and the action cuts quickly to New York City, disco, and the synergistic rumblings of RSO. There’s no time spent on childhood or earlier career, and once the disco inferno consumes itself, he drifts off to his luxury hermitage in Bermuda. And so in a way, Maggio still made a movie about disco, since it was the money making potential of the genre that sparked Stigwood’s interest and ignited his play to incorporate the Bee Gees, his young star in Travolta, and the character-driven nightlife tale of Saturday Night Fever into one enormous money machine. Stigwood becomes a background character for entire stretches of Mr. Saturday Night, as Deney Terrio recalls teaching Travolta to dance, or the Bay Ridge locals who filled out the scenes in 2001 Odyssey gush over being a part of the production. Stigwood’s homosexuality is touched on, but not explored, and his swings and misses as an impresario are only mentioned in passing, films like the Travolta-starring 1978 flop Moment by Moment. But if Mr. Saturday Night is going to almost exclusively be about Stigwood’s runaway marketing success with Saturday Night Fever and the disco-fication of the Bee Gees, then at least it has those electric grooves to sustain it. And that’s no jive talkin’.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Mr. Saturday Night dances up the business savvy of its principal subject, Robert Stigwood, with plenty of disco grooves and an assemblage of photos and footage from the era.

Johnny Loftus is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift. Follow him on Twitter: @glennganges

Watch Mr. Saturday Night on HBO Max