And Party Every Day: The Inside Story of Casablanca Records (28 page)

We included Bill Wardlow in the events and parties at the infamous club to make it even easier for us to exert influence over the charts. Wardlow began to visit our offices just to feel more involved in the disco phenomenon. Neil might have been in his company only half a dozen times, but he always made those times count by lavishing attention on Bill. I felt that Bill had been on my side from the start, but a movie called
Thank God It’s Friday
put him in my back pocket for good. In early 1977, Neil had the idea to do a disco movie featuring Donna Summer, Paul Jabara, and a few of our other artists. If that sounds like an expensive and lengthy commercial for Casablanca, that’s exactly what it was. Neil and Peter Guber had a meeting about the project with the powers at Columbia Pictures, and after some prodding they agreed to the movie, pending their approval of the script. Neil enlisted Ellen Wolf and Walter Wanger, our two brightest publicists, to begin work on the screenplay, with input from our disco people and Paul Jabara. Neil kept a tight rein on the script, adding his own ideas and corrections as it moved along. When it was almost finished, Columbia called to say there was a problem: they had promised Motown that they could make a disco movie, too.

This led to all kinds of bickering, but finally it was agreed that the movie would be a coproduction, with Neil representing us and Rob Klann representing Motown. Casablanca would release the soundtrack, but it would contain songs by both labels’ acts. The budget, as I remember, was pretty skimpy, even for those days—under a million dollars. This would not have presented such a big hurdle if we had been able to find a discotheque willing to serve as our movie set. But no discotheque in the LA area wanted to shut its doors for two months and forgo thousands of dollars in income while we shot our crappy little movie. Eventually, however, we did find one: Osko’s. The odd-shaped, thirty-thousand-square-foot property, located on La Cienega Boulevard, had just been overhauled to the tune of one hundred thousand dollars, and it had been transformed into a veritable Studio 54 West. This gargantuan, multilevel, multiroom club had everything from an arcade to an ice cave to a series of hidden enclaves, all of which ringed the dance floor; an egg-shaped DJ booth was suspended above the stage. My favorite feature was an elevator operated by a guy in a gorilla suit.

Throughout the 1977 holiday season, Neil was always on the set at Osko’s. Whenever I needed to see him, I had to go there. I took Bill Wardlow to these on-set visits as often as I could, knowing that in return I could write next week’s charts.
Thank God It’s Friday
not only kept Bill Wardlow under our influence, but it also gave a significant boost to the careers of Donna Summer, who starred in the movie, and Paul Jabara, who also appeared in the movie and who wrote the award-winning song “Last Dance” for its soundtrack.

This was Neil’s baby, and it was our first real venture into the world of film (
The Deep
was mostly completed by the time we’d merged with Guber). We now kicked everything else to the curb. Everyone at Casablanca had to be focused on
Thank God It’s Friday.
The marketing campaign had to be nothing less than spectacular. The title song, performed by Love and Kisses, had to be huge. Cost was no barrier. The song had to be a hit before the movie was released; it needed to be big enough to get people interested in the movie. We spent two million dollars promoting the movie and the soundtrack—almost double what it cost to produce the film itself. Premieres, each attended by a large portion of the cast and followed by a massive party, were held at Studio 54 and at Osko’s; there was a third gala in San Francisco. A thirty-minute making-of documentary was produced for syndication by FilmWorks, as was a fifty-minute promotional film, which was taped on the Osko’s set. The latter featured Donna hosting a disco fantasy party at which she, Love and Kisses, Paul Jabara, and others performed songs from the soundtrack for an audience of paid extras; it was aired as an episode of
The Midnight Special.
We purchased billboards all over the country, and we sponsored
Thank God It’s Friday
dance contests, which were heavily advertised in high school newspapers. Five promotional 12-inch singles were issued to radio, and we even had a deal with Real cigarettes to print ads on the backs of cigarette packages (try doing that today.) Promoting this movie with a straight face wasn’t easy. The script suffered through several rewrites and conflicting input from the Casablanca and Motown camps. But the movie’s obvious shortcomings didn’t really matter. What finally sank us was the one thing we could not control: the competition.

That competition was one of the biggest movies and soundtracks of the decade, if not of all time:
Saturday Night Fever.
There was only room for one picture centered on dancing, and RSO’s Robert Stigwood (famous primarily for managing Cream and the Bee Gees) had the better one. Yes, we did have a hit album, with sales approaching one million, which should have inspired more people to see the movie than eventually did, but
Saturday Night Fever
left us in the dust. The motion picture was overwhelmingly successful, and the accompanying two-disc soundtrack album spawned five No. 1 singles.

The biggest
Thank God It’s Friday
promotion of them all came during the last week of May, when two ninety-minute
TGIF
-themed episodes of
The Merv Griffin Show
were broadcast. Neil and Bill Wardlow were featured on both episodes as celebrity judges of a disco dance-off. Neil was an easy sell to the show’s producers, but convincing them of Wardlow’s value took more effort. Failure was not an option here: I had to get Bill on the show. After months of enticing him with various carrots—allowing him onto the Osko’s set while Donna performed “Last Dance”; getting him into Studio 54’s first anniversary party—I was finally poised to push
TGIF
to the top. Our LP (which also included a bonus 12-inch single) had debuted in the May 13 issue of
Billboard
at No. 74 and had been quickly moving up the Top 200 LPs and Tapes chart. The chance to put the fifty-eight-year-old Wardlow on national TV—for three hours, no less—would come once in a lifetime, and it would be a real dream come true for Bill, who loved the spotlight maybe even more than Neil did. A few weeks after the Merv episodes aired, Bill promised me our soundtrack would be No. 1 for the week ending July 1. I was over the moon. This was the first time we’d ever had a No. 1 album, and, best of all, we’d go down in the history books as the LP that pushed
Saturday Night Fever
from the No. 1 spot after a twenty-plus-week ride. I told Neil, and everyone was ecstatic.

But, as it turned out, even pulling Wardlow’s strings couldn’t elevate us to the top spot. This triggered a huge blowup between us. I screamed at Wardlow over the phone for reneging on his promise. It was a good demonstration of how much ego and a sense of entitlement had grown at 8255. We had so gorged ourselves on our own press that we had completely lost our perspective. We thought we owned the charts, and to be shafted out of the No. 1 slot when it had been promised to us made me absolutely livid. How
dare
he! After shredding Bill for fifteen minutes, I slammed down the phone and gradually calmed myself. Fortunately, Bill was forgiving, and the incident was pretty much forgotten after a couple of weeks had passed. I’m sure that Neil was torn between thinking I was insane to go off on someone as powerful as Wardlow and impressed that I had it in me to stand up to him.

This will give you an idea of what I was up against. I read somewhere that RSO top man Al Coury had flown to Venice in early May for the 1978 IMIC (International Music Industry Conference). I remember wondering why. I later discovered that it wasn’t the conference he’d been interested in; what he wanted was the chance to sit beside Bill Warlow on the plane. Why? Because he wanted to ensure that Yvonne Elliman’s “If I Can’t Have You” (the fifth and final single from
Saturday Night Fever
) hit No. 1. Sure enough, if you look at the May 13, 1978 issue of
Billboard,
you’ll see the single sitting pretty atop that week’s Hot 100 chart. If Al would travel halfway around the world for a single, what would he do to get Bill to keep the LP at No. 1 for another week?