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John Travolta, Ron's Man On Earth
Devotion To Scientology Led The Star To Make 'The Worst Film Of The Century'
The Sunday Telegraph (United Kingdom) 4 June 2000 ; Features: Sunday Comment: Profile
Originally posted by Sue M (Xenubat@primenet.com) Mon Jun 5 13:43:33 BST 2000
The good news is that in the year 3000 you'll still be able to find a British accent on the planet. The bad news is it's coming out of John Travolta's mouth, and in his new film Battlefield Earth, Travolta's mouth is not a pretty sight. He plays Terl, an evil alien from the planet Psychlo, and, aside from talking like some moustache-twirling villain complete with maniacal cackle, he's also decked out in bad teeth, metallic green eyes, flapping brows, nostril tubes, oversized claws, lank dreadlocks hanging down the front, and half a Martha-and-the-Vandellas beehive stuck on the back. Presumably we were supposed to look at him and think: "How about that John Travolta? Just when you think you've got him pegged, he takes on a challenging role that really stretches him as an actor." Instead, you look at him and think: "What high-school production of Cats has he wandered out of?"
In Battlefield Earth, Travolta spends two hours as a talking moggie with the worst bad hair day in cinematic history. You'd think a major motion picture star like that would want to kill the producer responsible for making him look such an idiot, but, unfortunately, in this case the producer is John Travolta.
Battlefield Earth was a labour of love for him, which he'd wanted to do ever since he first read the 1982 novel of the same name. "It will be like Star Wars, only better," he promised. He put his wife in it - Kelly Preston, who makes a cameo appearance sporting a three-foot tongue. The book is 1,000 pages long, but, sadly, they were only able to get the first 300 or so into the film, so Travolta says he's now planning a sequel.
It's impossible to overstate how bad the film's reviews have been, with the New York Times describing it as "the worst movie of this century", by which they mean the 20th. Travolta's taken a terrible licking, and not just from Miss Preston's three-foot tongue. In just two hours, the poor guy set his career back six years, back to where it was before Pulp Fiction made him cool again. How, you're probably wondering, can a big-time movie star who gets $20 million per picture up front be so insane as to do this to himself?
And the answer is: L Ron Hubbard. John Travolta is a Scientologist and L Ron is not only the late founder of said Church but also the author of many novels, one of them being Battlefield Earth. Scientologists believe that 75 million years ago an intergalactic tyrant named Xenu banished aliens to earth and then nuked them, leaving their spirits - or "Thetans" - to float around the planet attaching themselves to human beings, whom they fill with malign "engrams" from which you can only be freed by being "audited" until you reach a state of "Clear". Once you're Clear, you're all clear: "The Clear has no engrams which can be re-stimulated to throw out the correctness of computation," as L Ron puts it. To get in the clear you have to take sessions costing up to $1,000 an hour, which is one reason why, like eating at Spago or developing a cocaine habit, Scientology seems to be chiefly prevalent among celebrities. In public, however, most of Travolta's fellow adherents - Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman, Kirstie Alley from Cheers, Isaac Hayes, the woman who does the voice of Bart Simpson - are circumspect about their beliefs.
John Travolta is the exception. A gentle childlike actor on screen, off screen he has a kind of serenely disarming directness about his faith. Four years ago, accepting a Golden Globe for Get Shorty, he made a point of thanking L Ron. "There's no area that Scientology doesn't deal with," he told Richard Rayner, who was interviewing him for Harper's Bazaar. "Look, there are some great Scientology writing classes, and I think you could benefit a lot from them." Maybe, though evidently the screenwriters of Battlefield Earth didn't. Travolta commends Scientology to most of his interviewers, which seems cruel if only because membership in the Church is open to all except homosexuals - and journalists.
Long before he donned Saturday Night Fever's three-piece white suit and took his iconic camp-man-flamboyantly-hailing-a-cab stance, long before he slaughtered a pig and poured its blood over Sissy Spacek in Carrie, John Travolta was a Scientologist. It started in 1974, when he was making The Devil's Rain, the film in which he dissolves into slime while screaming "Blasphemer! Blasphemer!" Young John, just 20, felt he too was slowly dissolving into slime, until his fellow thespian Joan Prather introduced him to Scientology.
Raised Catholic in an Italian-Irish New Jersey household, Travolta has now been a Scientologist for more than half his life and, indeed, more than half his church's life: Hubbard started Scientology the same year, 1954, that Mr and Mrs Travolta started John. He credits the Church with everything good that's happened to him: the hit sitcom the following year, the Fever phenomenon in '77, 1978 - the summer of Grease . . . After that, it all began to fall apart, until, by the time of the Fever sequel, Stayin' Alive, the title song rang peculiarly apt: "I'm goin' nowhere/Somebody help me/Somebody help me, yeah . . ." But no-one did until Quentin Tarantino came along with Pulp Fiction, and, after that, Travolta was still at pains to credit Scientology not only with his comeback but also with keeping him sane through the slump.
He even married a fellow Scientologist, Kelly Preston. When he first met her, on the film The Experts, she was married to Kevin Gage, her co-star in Spacecamp. "How do you like being married?" Travolta asked. "I love it," she said. "I loved that answer," Travolta recalled, "because even though that marriage didn't work out, she loved the idea of being married, and that was important to me." By the time they met again, she was engaged to Charlie Sheen, though the relationship was a painful one: he accidentally shot her in the foot. Travolta made his move. Seven months after they married, she gave birth to his son Jett (named after a Hubbard character but also for Travolta's love of flying). Today, they and their two children divide their time between an adobe in Brentwood, a house in northern California, a mansion in Florida, a chateau in Maine, and an apartment in the Scientology Celebrity Hall of Fame in Los Angeles.
Paunchier than most leading men, he also has a team of chefs on call round the clock. During a marketing meeting for Primary Colours (1998), everyone brought sandwiches, except for Travolta, who was served a five course meal.
According to Mike Nichols, the director of Primary Colors, it's like "taking a meeting with Henry VIII". But Travolta is no wastrel. Underneath the dopey puppy kind of innocence, there's an almost Hubbardesque knack of making and keeping money. The lean years movie-wise were never lean dough-wise: he was on a royalty for the soundtrack albums of Fever and Grease, and they've earned him more money than anything else.
Battlefield Earth is more than just a flop. Travolta's been a highly successful pitchman for his church, schmoozing Bill Clinton to get Scientology into American schools. When this film was first mooted, critics were worried that the Scientologists would use it to ensnare impressionable movie-goers. Instead, the sound you hear from the dwindling number of customers in America's multiplexes is that of coast-to-coast derision.
Battlefield Earth is so bad it must surely be testing the faith of even the most loyal Scientologists like Cruise and Kidman. Despite the assurances of L Ron, Travolta's engrams have apparently been re-stimulated to throw out the correctness of computation. No doubt he'll recover, but will his church?
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