LOS ANGELES -- There is a kind of performance possible only to a movie star. It's a fascinating morphing process, tied to the power of pop iconography. John Travolta, long on recognition as a pop culture icon, short on recognition as an actor, has delivered two such performances within the past 12 months.
In "Primary Colors," he gave us not exactly Bill Clinton, not exactly John Travolta, but an amalgam of Clinton's honeyed rasp and lively smile with all the outsize information instantly transmitted by the face of a famous movie-star persona. The effect was of Travolta seeming to anoint Clinton with Travolta's own legendary cool and a likability factor even larger than the beleageured president's.The second extraordinary performance is in "A Civil Action," the film based on Jonathan Harr's best-selling book about the landmark nine-year Woburn toxic waste case. Families there sued W. R. Grace and its subsidiary, Beatrice Foods, claiming the manufacturers put toxins into Woburn well water that caused children to die of leukemia. Travolta plays attorney Jan Schlichtmann, a brash young personal injury lawyer who represented the families in a David-and-Goliath squareoff.
Schlichtmann, while fighting the good fight, is depicted as abrasive and arrogant, initially motivated at least as much by greed and hubris as by idealism. Much has been written about Travolta -- his comeback, his career trajectory, his Scientology. Little has been written about his empathetic capacity, his ability to turn himself, chameleonlike, into one character after another.
Sitting in a Los Angeles hotel suite, Travolta says he was attracted to "A Civil Action" partly because of the challenge of engaging an audience's sympathy for an outwardly unsympathetic character.
"Until I read the script aloud with other actors, I didn't really know whether I would want to do it," he says. "When I was able to solve this distant, aloof, arrogant but funny character who evolves into something of a human being, that's what made me decide."
The shoot last fall and winter in and around Boston was an arduous one, Travolta says, although he showed no sign of it during numerous Travolta sightings. At many points, he chatted with fans and signed autographs. "The temperature was rough sometimes, and we had a director (Steve Zallian) who is really quite a brilliant guy, but he had a private vision that I only understood after a month or so."
What Travolta doesn't say is that his natural sense of diplomacy smoothed what could have been troubled waters. Disney, the studio releasing the film, paid Harr $1.2 million for the film rights to the book. Schlichtmann got $250,000 for the rights to his story.
But the Woburn families had sold the film rights to their story to former state Sen. Nick Paleologos, who later proposed a bill banning the filming of anyone's life story without their permission. Disney's position was that they couldn't negotiate with the Woburn families because their rights were owned by a competitor. They were not paid. Still, Travolta met several of the Woburn families who visited the set.
As he recalls it: "When you meet people who have had extraordinary tragedy, you don't quite know how to approach it. 'I'm sorry' doesn't seem enough. Before I could originate much more than a hello, how are you, Anne Anderson said, 'Did you know my son was crazy about you on 'Welcome Back, Kotter'? I was so relieved that I had retroactively contributed something that suddenly I felt more on a par with them. I know what it's like to have family loss. I didn't need to examine that with them. I guess I just enjoyed being a release valve for them."
Travolta also met with Schlichtmann, today an environmental lawyer. "I enjoyed the meeting, but I didn't really lean too much on that because Jan had evolved to what he was at the end of the book. I had to imagine the earlier Jan. I asked him some questions about liking the highs and lows of life, but not the middle ground.
"And I asked him certain things, like whether it was true that he danced in the park after he won his first big case. He really did live it up like that. But Steve wanted me to do an original take on him. Well, you must know that I've had 23 years of dealing with lawyers, so I had a head start on that. I asked several lawyers about technicalities, and I investigated the case as much as I could. Basically, I just absorbed and tried to create a new beingness for this character."
During the 1980s, Travolta turned down "American Gigolo," "Arthur," "Raiders of the Lost Ark," "An Officer and a Gentleman," and "Splash!" Then Quentin Tarantino cast him as Vinny Vega in "Pulp Fiction."
If "Saturday Night Fever" was the film that made him, "Pulp Fiction" was the film that remade him. He got paid $100,000. But having his wife and son on location with him in a more expensive hotel than the budget allowed left him $30,000 in the red. But his instincts, and Tarantino's, were right. After "Get Shorty" and "Broken Arrow" subsequently proved "Pulp Fiction" was no fluke, Travolta joined the $20 million club. He has worked nonstop ever since.
So the '90s will not be the story of missed opportunities that marked the '80s? "Kind of," Travolta says. "I used to say no to a lot of films. I don't want to say no again to a great opportunity. And to be honest, these are better opportunities than the kinds I had when I started in the '70s, so I really wanted to make up for lost opportunities. I like it better now because they're better scripts. Anyone's career, the best parts are in their 40s, 50s and 60s. You have time to rub elbows with other people. It makes the performances that much richer."