There’s that floor again, that famous floor — geometric, primary colors, flashing in the perpetuity of pop culture memory, an icon of the long-ago disco era. Surely you’ve seen it, pulsing beneath John Travolta’s platform shoes in the 1977 film “Saturday Night Fever.” It’s up for auction in Los Angeles later this month along with other items of Hollywood lore, including the Ark of the Covenant prop from “Raiders of the Lost Ark.
” The auction is a joint project of Julien’s Auctions and Turner Classic Movies (on which ads have been relentless). At the moment, bidding for the dance floor is at $50,000; the estimated sale price is $200,000 to $300,000. This news caught my eye because I haven’t just seen that flashy floor.
I know it personally. I met it in the years after the movie, while it lived semi-obscurely in the club featured in the film, 2001 Odyssey, in a Brooklyn neighborhood called Bay Ridge. Who says Hollywood legends don’t have second and even third lives? I played bass in a high school band called the Zones, and we rented out the club to play.
We’d charge $4 and give $1 to the house — a tidy profit. We packed the place. We played a mix of original songs and contemporary covers — “Message in a Bottle” by the Police and “Pulling Mussels (From the Shell)” by Squeeze always got a big response.
About two or three songs into our set, the guy behind the bar would switch on that floor, and any last holdouts would come out and dance. The .
