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He grooved on his vaguely Rasta-esque get-up and amber eyes and the extra talon on one of his hands. "The teeth I added -- you know, they drink this kerbango drink, so I said, 'These teeth should be funky, because they're buzzed all day on this drink.' We're all coffee drinkers and iced-tea drinkers, we all get bad teeth; I'm sure kerbango messes with their teeth. I said, 'Bring it on.'"

On his own Travolta scale of comic-book villainy, he said "Pulp Fiction" was "more subtle," "Broken Arrow" was the start of his "new theatricality" and "Face/Off," his huge hit for John Woo (who'd also done "Broken Arrow"), "went over the top." "Battlefield Earth," he said, went over the top of over the top: "The get-up invited me to have a blast, to get Shakespearean, almost. The dialogue I love. Every day, I couldn't wait, it was delicious to me to say those words: 'Well, I can see someone like you, being old and having no future.' Remember, to the man with the double-chin? It's just delicious. Or when he's at the bar and the bartender doesn't want to be blackmailed, and he says, 'You better start thinking about it. I'm not your friend!'"

If those lines don't particularly resonate on the page -- well, they don't in the movie, either. For an actor, believing in your material no matter how lowly can be a plus. But when that actor becomes a producer-star and tries to impose his own literary standards, one can see it scaring away potential heavyweight collaborators. A sci-fi fan asked why, if Scientology had nothing to do with the making of the film, Travolta didn't get behind a bona fide sci-fi classic like Alfred Bester's "The Demolished Man" or Robert Heinlein's "Stranger in a Strange Land."

Michael Sragow Michael Sragow's column appears every Thursday in Arts & Entertainment + Archives

"'Stranger in a Strange Land' I would like to do," Travolta said. "People for years told me that it should be done. The reason this was easier was because a) I was very popular playing a villain and b) it's such a big book recently -- 6 million copies sold worldwide. And it's more along the 'Star Wars' style of special effects, so I think it was an easier task than 'Strangers in a Strange Land.'"

Travolta said that he has been trying to make the film for 18 years -- but that he originally had the idea of playing the hero. "I got long in the tooth, teeth got dirty, I got heavier," he said with a smile. "I do think that a younger guy -- [the hero] was kind of written for that, it was righter for Barry Pepper. And interestingly enough, the timing made it work because with all these other villain parts I played, it seemed like a perfect challenge to do a new kind of villain."

With the movie's blend of computer graphics imagery, miniatures and full-scale props, "The technology caught up with this book in a way. I don't think 15-20 years ago there would have been the same possibilities." Travolta said that he's nurturing no other dream projects.

"After 'Pulp Fiction,'" he explained, "there was all this brouhaha about my performance there, and it had been almost 20 years since 'Saturday Night Fever,' and I thought, 'All right, what do I do next. People are so excited about my performance, what do I do next?' And then suddenly scripts fell in front of me that I hadn't had before, like 'Get Shorty,' 'Broken Arrow,' 'Michael,' 'Face/Off,' 'Primary Colors,' 'Civil Action.' I never dreamed of playing those kinds of parts, I just knew I could."

And Travolta said he has no master plan for his career, beyond extending it as long as he can. "I don't ever think there's that day when you say, 'Oh, that's it.' I think age-wise there might be. I think Jimmy Cagney, after 'One, Two, Three,' he just said, 'OK, I'm 61, that's it.' Pilots retire. Would I retire? I don't know if I'd be capable of doing that. I like performing too much."
salon.com | May 18, 2000

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