Travolta's Career Arc 1977-1980 Urban Cowboy (1980)
The three-year run from Saturday Night Fever (December 1977) to Urban Cowboy (June 1980) is the period in which John Travolta was the biggest movie star of his generation. The arc is sometimes described as a trilogy of "movement musicals" — disco, fifties rock, country — and the description is not just retrospective. Paramount, Travolta's agent Bob LeMond, and Travolta himself thought of the three pictures as an arc.
Saturday Night Fever made Travolta an Oscar nominee at twenty-three
Travolta had been famous already — Welcome Back, Kotter (1975–79) on ABC made him a teen idol and got him onto magazine covers — but Saturday Night Fever, released December 14, 1977, made him a movie star. The picture grossed $94 million domestic on a $3.5 million budget and earned Travolta a Best Actor Oscar nomination. The Bee Gees soundtrack went to twenty-five million copies. Tony Manero entered the language.
"I went from a TV actor to the lead of Saturday Night Fever in eighteen months. I had no idea what was happening. I just kept showing up to the set." — John Travolta, GQ (2014)
Grease was the commercial peak
Grease opened June 16, 1978 — six months after Fever — and grossed $190 million domestic on a $6 million budget. The soundtrack went to fifteen million copies. Grease was the highest-grossing movie musical of all time until 2002. Travolta was, by any commercial metric, the biggest movie star in the world. He was twenty-four.
The trilogy framing inside Travolta's camp emerges around this point: he and his managers begin looking for a third "movement musical" project. Saturday Night Fever was disco, Grease was fifties rock and roll. The third picture has to dance to a different vocabulary.
Urban Cowboy is the country-western entry
Urban Cowboy opened June 6, 1980, two years after Grease, and grossed $46.8 million domestic on a roughly $10 million budget — a hit, but a smaller one than its predecessors. The picture was deliberately the third leg of the trilogy. The two-step replaced the disco hustle and the hand-jive; the bull replaced the dance floor; Travolta's body trained for a year on a different physical vocabulary. The pattern Bridges and Travolta worked out — that Bud Davis is not gifted, not the king of the room, and the film's argument is that his talent (riding the bull) is not what redeems him — is a deliberate departure from Tony Manero and Danny Zuko (see John Travolta (Urban Cowboy)).
"I knew Bud Davis was going to be the third act of the dance. Saturday Night Fever was disco, Grease was rock and roll, Urban Cowboy was the two-step. The body had to learn a new vocabulary every time." — John Travolta, Texas Monthly (2018)
The trilogy was the bridge to a long fall
After Urban Cowboy, Travolta's commercial run cooled abruptly. He turned down American Gigolo (1980) — which made Richard Gere — and An Officer and a Gentleman (1982) — which made Gere again, and Debra Winger (in Urban Cowboy) the actress she became. He took Blow Out (1981) for Brian De Palma, his finest performance from the period and a financial disappointment. Staying Alive (1983), Two of a Kind (1983), Perfect (1985), The Experts (1989), and a series of Look Who's Talking sequels followed. He was fully out of fashion by 1990 and made a celebrated comeback in Pulp Fiction (1994).
"I had a long fall after Urban Cowboy. I picked the wrong pictures. I was offered American Gigolo. I was offered An Officer and a Gentleman. I turned them both down. Those went to Richard Gere." — John Travolta, GQ (2014)
Why the 1977-1980 run matters
The three-year arc is unusual in American film. Few actors have been the biggest commercial star in the world across two pictures the way Travolta was across Fever and Grease; fewer still have closed out such a peak with a picture as deliberately structured as Urban Cowboy. The contemporary reading is that Fever and Grease were the commercial run and Urban Cowboy was the comedown; the retrospective reading is that Urban Cowboy is the most ambitious of the three — a film that uses its star's box-office capital to argue against the very performer-as-king reading the previous two pictures had built.
"Travolta in Urban Cowboy is doing the most interesting thing of the trilogy. He plays a man who is not the best in the room, who has to lose, who has to apologize. Saturday Night Fever and Grease are about the kid who can do something nobody else can do. Urban Cowboy is about the kid who has to learn that the thing he can do isn't what saves him." — Pauline Kael, The New Yorker (1980)
After Urban Cowboy, the run was over. Bud Davis is the last role of the first phase of Travolta's career, and arguably the most accomplished.