Horečka sobotní noci (Saturday Night Fever) Czechoslovak movie poster

1979 film poster by Zdeněk Ziegler for the Czechoslovakian release of Saturday Night Fever. Ziegler created a powerful collage, showing the movie’s plot at a glance: John Travolta’s glittering disco universe encapsules and enlightens the daily reality of a brick-wall-innercity.

Apparently, Ziegler or his client expected the name of the movie to be the least convincing selling point of the poster, giving it a supporting role at the bottom. All big type is set in Alan Meeks’ 1975 Plaza Regular and Ultra, making clever use of the many alternate glyphs that came with the design.

If you wanted to reset this cover with digital fonts, Scangraphic’s version is preferrable over ITC’s. The latter sadly doesn’t contain any of the swash alternates. The Scangraphic digitization isn’t perfect either — made in pre-OpenType days, it houses some of the alternates in a separate font, and the lowercase v accidentally contains the glyph for L — but at least it covers all glyphs shown here. Type “John traVolta BEE GEEs” in Plaza SH Regular and Regular Alt, and “HoreckA Sobotni NoCi” in Plaza SH Heavy. All you need to do now is mirror the swash A and add custom diacritical marks like Ziegler did, and you’re there!