My sorority parties were bangers that ran just shy of drunken orgies. We’re talking the most expensive DJs in the city, a guest list that required actual negotiation, and a vibe that other houses spent four years trying to reverse-engineer and never quite got there. While every other Greek girl on campus was claiming “Brown Eyed Girl” as her personality (so original, truly, never heard that one before!), we were running a full disco set because we understood that decadence requires a soundtrack worthy of it. Our boyfriends had feelings about this. Actual, visible, pouty little feelings. You could see the wounded energy of a seven-year-old on their faces the second the DJ moved on without them because they wanted Metallica. At our party. Because disco wasn’t real rock-n-roll. Sure, baby. Our closer was always “Last Dance” by Donna Summer and when those piano keys hit, every girl in that basement found the floor, drunk and high as fuck, dancing with ourselves while the boys stood against the wall being irrelevant. That song has been doing that to rooms since 1978, when a gloriously unhinged disco film called Thank God It’s Friday handed Donna Summer a microphone and changed everything.
Thank God It’s Friday takes place over a single Friday night at The Zoo, a Los Angeles disco club where everybody in the city has apparently decided to be simultaneously. The film doesn’t really have a plot so much as it has a pulse, and that pulse is the whole point. A young Jeff Goldblum runs the place with the specific charisma of a man who has never once in his life been told no, and watching him work a room full of people who are drunk and hot and completely out of their depth is genuinely one of the great pleasures this film has to offer. Everyone else is just trying to survive the night, which at The Zoo means dancing, scheming, sneaking in underage, taking whatever is being passed around, and making decisions they’ll be thrilled about tomorrow. The whole gorgeous, sweaty, chaotic thing runs about ninety minutes and doesn’t apologize for a single second of it. That’s The Zoo. That’s the whole movie. And it is absolutely enough.
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Donna Summer shows up in this film as Nicole, an aspiring singer who spends most of the night pestering the DJ to let her perform, and when she finally gets her moment it’s obvious the film was building to this iconic payoff. “Last Dance” is one of those songs that exists on a completely different plane from whatever it’s attached to, and the fact that it was born inside this particular film, on this particular night at The Zoo, surrounded by all this beautiful chaos, feels inevitable. Donna Summer sang it like she meant every single word of it. The Academy agreed and awarded her the Oscar for Best Original Song, which makes it the only Oscar in history that was also the closing song at every sorority party worth attending. The song was so euphoric it transcended the film and became part of every room it ever played in. It belonged to us, drunk and high in that basement, dancing with ourselves while the boys sulked about Metallica. It still does.
What makes Thank God It’s Friday genuinely fascinating in retrospect is how many careers were just getting started inside it. Debra Winger, who would go on to earn three Academy Award nominations and become one of the defining actresses of the 1980s, makes her first major screen appearance here, playing a girl who can’t quite surrender to the chaos of The Zoo. You can already see why she was going to be a star. Terri Nunn, who would go on to front New Wave band Berlin and give the world “Take My Breath Away,” shows up as one of two underage girls who sneak into the club and spend the entire night scheming their way toward the dance contest with a focus that is frankly admirable. And then there’s Goldblum, running his Friday night game of betting he can seduce any married woman in the room, which is the most Jeff Goldblum premise in the history of cinema and he delivers on every second of it. Meanwhile a married couple who absolutely should have stayed home is coming apart at the seams, and Leatherman Marv Gomez is dancing on top of cars in the parking lot, which remains the correct response to a Friday night if you’re doing it right.
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The whole night at The Zoo is technically building toward a midnight concert by the Commodores, which is a premise that should not work as a narrative device but does. Lionel Richie and the band perform “Too Hot ta Trot” in full disco regalia, and if you need a reason to understand why 1978 was a completely different and arguably superior civilization, that performance is your answer. What makes it remarkable is that this is the only theatrically released film the Commodores ever appeared in. One film. This one. A deliriously trashy disco comedy.
The soundtrack deserves its own conversation entirely. Motown Productions and Casablanca Records co-produced this film, which means they had access to essentially every major disco artist on the planet and used all of them. Diana Ross. The Village People. Thelma Houston. Pattie Brooks. Giorgio Moroder. The whole thing was released as a triple album six weeks before the film hit theaters, which tells you everything about where the priorities were and honestly the priorities were correct. The music is the plot. The music is the point. Strip out the soundtrack and you have a perfectly fun ninety minute comedy. Keep it and you have a time capsule of one of the most orgasmic moments in the history of American popular music, sitting right there on your screen, free to watch on a Tuesday night when you can’t sleep and need to remember that people once knew how to have a fucking good time.
Thank God It’s Friday is not Saturday Night Fever. It never tried to be and that’s what makes it worth your time. Saturday Night Fever is a coming of age story that happens to live inside disco. This one is about what disco feels like when nobody is keeping score, when the only thing that matters is the floor and the music and the people you found there. History was not kind to it. Critics dismissed it, audiences moved on, and somewhere along the way it got filed under forgettable when it should have been filed under essential. Because here’s what I know: “Last Dance” came on in a basement in junior year and every girl in the room found each other without a word. We didn’t need the film to tell us what that song meant. We already knew. We always knew. Thank God It’s Friday just showed us where it came from, and that’s more than enough.
