Thir­ty-five years ago today, New York mag­a­zine pub­lished “Trib­al Rights of Sat­ur­day Night,” a beau­ti­ful­ly-writ­ten paean to the danc­ing teens of the city’s bor­oughs. And the sto­ry focused on a work­ing-class dis­co dancer named Vin­cent:

Vin­cent was the very best dancer in Bay Ridge—the ulti­mate Face. He owned four­teen flo­ral shirts, five suits, eight pairs of shoes, three over­coats, and had appeared on Amer­i­can Band­stand. Some­times music peo­ple came out from Man­hat­tan to watch him, and one man who owned a club on the East Side had even offered him a con­tract. A hun­dred dol­lars a week. Just to dance.

“Vin­cent” become the mod­el for Tony Manero, the hero of John Bad­ham’s 1977 dis­co-gan­za Sat­ur­day Night Fever, a hit film which launched the 70’s hottest dance craze and the career of young John Tra­vol­ta. Plus it gave us the best-sell­ing sound­track album of all time and intro­duced the line dance, an exer­cise in ine­bri­at­ed com­mu­nal humil­i­a­tion that would dom­i­nate the dance floors of Amer­i­can wed­ding recep­tions for decades to come.

With all this to its cred­it, per­haps it should­n’t mat­ter that Nik Kohn’s arti­cle was more fic­tion than non-fic­tion, and that “Vin­cent” was, in Kohn’s own words, “com­plete­ly made up, a total fab­ri­ca­tion.” The osten­si­bly con­science-strick­en jour­nal­ist came clean in the Guardian in 1994:

My sto­ry was a fraud, I’d only recent­ly arrived in New York. Far from being steeped in Brook­lyn street life, I hard­ly knew the place. As for Vin­cent, my sto­ry’s hero, he was large­ly inspired by a Shep­herd’s Bush mod whom I’d known in the Six­ties, a one-time king of Gold­hawk Road.” [Ed. Note: The Guardian piece is not avail­able online, but it was quot­ed exten­sive­ly in Char­lie LeDuf­f’s 1996 arti­cle, “Sat­ur­day Night Fever: The Life”]

Mr. Kohn’s own life sto­ry is also worth a movie or two. In 1983, accord­ing to the New York Times, he was indict­ed on drug traf­fick­ing and con­spir­a­cy counts for the impor­ta­tion of $4 mil­lion worth of Indi­an hero­in. His nar­ra­tive abil­i­ties came to his res­cue once more, this time in the form of a plea-bar­gain in exchange for his tes­ti­mo­ny. His charges were reduced to pro­ba­tion and a $5,000 fine.

Sheer­ly Avni is a San Fran­cis­co-based arts and cul­ture writer. Her work has appeared in Salon, LA Week­ly, Moth­er Jones, and many oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low her on twit­ter at @sheerly.