Disco Fever (1977)
On Dec. 14, 1977, the world was treated to “Saturday Night Fever,” a movie about the growing disco culture and based on a New York article entitled “Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night”. There was just one problem: The article was a lie. The journalist responsible for the article, Englishman Nik Cohn, later admitted that he couldn’t make any sense of the disco subculture, so he invented the main bulk of his story, basing his lead informant on a mod friend from back in Britain. Nevertheless, the movie was so powerful that disco’s popularity exploded, as life rushed to imitate art and Cohn’s fiction became reality.