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Date: 18 Oct 1995 00:30:40 +0100
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Travolta fever - The onetime teen idol has had his share of career
ups and downs. Get set for a big up in Get Shorty
Time
Monday, October 16, 1995
By Richard Schickel

There's nothing more depressing than finding a guy as tough as
nails and as mean as dirt," Norman Mailer once remarked. We have,
Mailer thought, a deep, profoundly sentimental need to believe that
a hard exterior invariably hides a sweet, yearning, essentially
decent nature. The alternate idea--that toughness disguises nothing
but more toughness--may be the more accurate take on reality. But
it's also an intolerable one, especially in the movies, the basic
business of which is to redeem us, for a couple of hours now and
then, from our darker suspicions about human nature.

It has been John Travolta's peculiar fate to personify our
desperate hope that a certain modern delinquent type--the
grammatically challenged guy wearing tight pants and sporting a
duck's-ass haircut--may not be quite as dangerous as he appears to
be at first appalled-bourgeois glance. It is what made him a star
almost two decades ago in Saturday Night Fever and Grease. And now
that he's 41 and finally able to play grownup versions of the punk
that was, it is what's making him--after a long season of
neglect--a star again.

Last year his turn as Vincent Vega, the menacing, ingratiating hit
man in Pulp Fiction--linguistic philosopher, dancing man, heroin
addict--earned him an Academy Award nomination. And the picture
earned the gratitude of that minority among us who think most
contemporary movies, far from being too violent, are suffering a
terminal case of the blahs. Now he's about to return as another
unlikely hoodlum, at once incisive and dreamy, in Get Shorty, also
a smart, shrewdly crafted movie, but one that's less dangerous,
easier for everyone to like, than Pulp Fiction. There's every
chance it will renew Travolta's Oscar eligibility.

Deservedly so. His Chili Palmer is a Miami loan shark, the kind of
good fellow who can shatter his competitor's nose and with a
casually aimed shot nip a sliver off his scalp, in the process
neither raising his voice nor losing his shy little smile. He's a
much neater operative than Pulp's Vinnie. And his drug of choice is
much less threatening; it's old movies. For he's also the kind of
film geek who can identify Rio Bravo from a few snippets overheard
on the TV set in another room, or mouth all the dialogue from the
last scene of Touch of Evil as he sits entranced before the screen
in a revival house.

Imagine tough-tender Chili's delight when the demands of business
and the dictates of pleasure combine in the form of a trip to
Tinseltown to collect some overdue debts. His pursuit of one
deadbeat provides him with a pitchable story idea, while the
pursuit of another one brings him into the presence of a producer
and a star who, in his naivete, he thinks may be able to help him.
Harry Zimm (Gene Hackman) may be a schlockmeister down on his luck,
and Karen Flores (Rene Russo) may be famous mainly for the
authentic terror with which she invests her screams, but Chili is
still impressed; he knows their work.

Actually--in his uncritical affection for all things cinematic--he
loves their work. Can a co-production deal be far behind? Nope. It
requires less than two hours of hilarious, intricately plotted,
beautifully acted screen time for Chili to free Harry from the
toils of some menacing drug dealers who own a piece of a film he
has neglected to produce, fall into a rewarding relationship with
Karen and, yes, get Shorty. That is to say, get a major movie
star--diminutive, egomaniacal Martin Weir (Danny DeVito, whose
company produced this film)--to commit to their project.

Based quite faithfully on an Elmore Leonard best seller, Get Shorty
is most significantly true to the book's basic attitude toward
Hollywood. Perhaps because he deals with the movie business from a
position of strength--he writes things it needs--Leonard omits the
contempt with which novelists traditionally drench their Hollywood
horror stories. Leonard simply drops a real killer in among the
rubber sharks, then sits back watchfully, his only comment a benign
(or, at worst, sardonic) chuckle as his hero quietly chews them up.

Like all of Hollywood's self-satires, Get Shorty understands that
movie people are, by nature and calling, melodramatists, with an
unfortunate tendency to get self-love, self-loathing and self-pity
all mixed up. Screenwriter Scott Frank and director Barry
Sonnenfeld also understand that the proper response to all that
confusion is not heavy-hitting moralism but wry compassion. And a
good-humored respect for the gumption and cunning of people whose
lives forever hinge on whether or not their phone calls get
returned.

By this time John Travolta knows all this in his bones, and it
shows in his acting as a kind of acceptant curiosity about the
world's nuttiness, which includes, of course, his own. There's
something uncalculated about what he does, as if he's always
wondering how the next sentence is going to come out, how he's
going to surprise both himself and everyone watching him. "When I
said, 'Action,'" says Sonnenfeld, "I never knew if he would do the
next take in English, Japanese, Spanish or French. It's really hard
not to play with John. He's got this big bag of toys, and you
become a kid around him and want to play with his games."

It's probably because he's been up--once by common teeny-bopper
consent the sexiest dude on the planet--and he's been
down--recently by common show-biz consent a marginal player,
working in hopeless enterprises like Moment to Moment and Perfect,
not to mention projects headed straight to video (The Tender)--and
really doesn't see much difference between the two. Even when he
had a hit like Look Who's Talking, it was an object of contempt in
all the better circles. And along the way, he managed to turn down
eventual winners like Arthur, Splash and An Officer and a Gentleman
and get aced out of things like The Player at the last minute, all
without apparent regret.

"I was probably less preoccupied with my career than others were,"
he now says. "I always had some job offers," even if they "weren't
particularly great ones." He cheerfully admits he was no one's
first choice for Get Shorty and that when the script was submitted
to him, "it didn't push me over the edge." He changed his mind
after talking with Pulp Fiction's writer-director, Quentin
Tarantino, who has become his unofficial adviser. "He said, 'Look
man, what's going on here? This is the one you say yes to.'" This
he finally did after insisting that much of Leonard's dialogue from
the novel be restored. "In the original script it said something
like, 'Where's my coat? You better find it. It cost $400.' But in
the book it was, 'You see a black leather jacket, fingertip length,
has lapels like a suitcoat? You don't, you owe me three
seventy-nine ... You get the coat back or you give me the three
seventy-nine my wife paid for it at Alexander's.' It was the
detail. I said I'd do the movie, but they had to put back
everything they paraphrased." This took three weeks, but "they put
every goodie back."

His next career choice was more dubious. White Man's Burden, due
out later this year, is a flat fantasy about a future in which
American blacks and whites exchange social status--the former
becoming the ruling class, the latter doing the menial work. But
Travolta delivers a heartbreaking portrayal of a desperate working
stiff, unfairly fired from his job and turning to crime in order to
support his family. Next will come Broken Arrow, a John Woo action
film, and a mess of high-concept, high-profile pictures that
signify his return to Hollywood's A list.

Yet Travolta is unimpressed by his "comeback." "It was last year's
story, and prior to that it was a story in '89, and prior to that
it was a story in '83, and prior to that it was a story in '80," he
says, no trace of bitterness in his tone. "I've never quite figured
out why I'm the comeback kid when another actor might just have a
normal career of movies that work and don't work."

Acknowledging this mystery, he refuses to plumb it. As he correctly
observes, he always has had enough work to keep him busy and
support his habit of "doing what I want in life." This includes a
sort of guilt-free materialism--"a millionaire who lives like a
billionaire," someone once called him--as he takes a casual, almost
childlike, pleasure in his Rolls Royces, the Gulfstream II jet he
pilots himself, his mansion in Maine. It also includes marriage to
actress Kelly Preston (they have a three-year-old son, Jett) and
his embrace of Scientology, which he credits for much of his
equanimity. "A belief system, if it works like Scientology does, is
just a way of helping you," he says simply. "You grow from it."

It may be Travolta's apparent indifference to the upward and
downward lurches of his career that draws him the nervous attention
he has trouble comprehending. People in the movie business like to
pretend they inhabit a rational universe, one where you can
determine a star's course through a series of well-plotted career
moves. Strolling equably through a universe he implicitly defines
as chaotic, playing what amounts to a real-life Chili
Palmer--mannerly, sweet-spirited, yet utterly confident of his own
strength--Travolta calls all their operating assumptions into
question. And deepens his own mystery.

A partial key to that enigma may come from James Cagney, that
master of lovable hardness (and the occasion for Mailer's musings
on tough guys). Cagney too was a self-invented, utterly
self-reliant actor-hoofer, and when Travolta was a kid starting
out, he sought out the older actor for advice. Cagney later
recalled telling him, "Start with one thing: they need you. Without
you, they have an empty screen. So when you get on there, just do
what you think is right and stay with it. If you listen to all the
clowns around, you're just dead." Obviously, Cagney spoke directly,
indelibly to the young actor's heart. Travolta is, against the
odds, against the conventional wisdom, triumphantly alive.


ÿ