“I’m open for it”: John Travolta’s awful Fred Durst movie was technically Joaquin Phoenix’s fault
One of the best things about Tropic Thunder, and there are many, is definitely the ‘fake trailers’ it contains for movies like Satan’s Alley (Robert Downey Jr and Tobey Maguire as monks who fall in love) and The Fatties: Fart 2 starring Jack Black as every flatulent character.
And you could easily have put in the actual, real film The Fanatic, with John Travolta playing an autistic man in a movie directed by Limp Bizkit’s Fred Durst, without anyone thinking twice about it.
But it happened, it was released in 2019, just before the world went suitably mental, and somehow it was a film that was more than a decade in the making, all to end up with a Rotten Tomatoes score of 15%, which surely would have been astonishingly predictable for anyone who wasn’t too scared to say to Travolta or Durst, ‘This sounds like a terrible idea and you should not do it’.
Now, before you go racing off to check we aren’t completely making this up (we’re not) let’s fill in some background on how exactly John Travolta ended up starring in a film written and directed by the red-hatted singer of possibly the world’s most prominent nu-metal rap group, and how it went from a bad theory to a genuine released movie. Oh, and how Joaquin Phoenix got thrown into the mix too, as if things weren’t weird enough.
Travolta himself can shed some light on it, as he told Awards Daily, “Well, a very long time ago, Joaquin Phoenix and I were at a party for Ladder 49, the firefighter movie, and Fred Durst was friends with Joaquin… So we were just there hanging out, and Fred was excited to meet me, but interested in telling me that really his first love is filmmaking and film, and the music that he’s done is just a road to get there, and that one day he’d love to submit something to me.”
Here’s the point at which Travolta should have looked at Durst, in his backwards baseball cap and goatee and really baggy trousers with a chain on them (probably) and gone ‘oh that’s cool but I’m really busy at the moment and I’m sure you’ve got a lot of music to do so let’s just put that one on the back burner’ or something. Did he do that? Let’s find out.
Travolta added, “I said, ‘Sure, I’m open for it’. Of course, that was maybe 15 years ago. Then two years ago, he submitted the script, and when I read it, I fell in love with it, but I knew that it would be hard to get financed because it was such an eccentric and offbeat film. But I did! I got a friend of mine to go to different places to raise money, and they got enough for us to do that movie.”
Sigh. They could have saved an awful lot of time and money by literally asking anyone, even, I don’t know, the make-up lady, whether or not they should ‘work hard’ to finance a film in which Travolta is a street-performer who stalks his favourite actor, and heard the word ‘no’ and then just shut the whole thing down, but they didn’t. And how much, dear reader, do you think The Fanatic took at the box office once it was released? A million maybe? Two? Nope, it brought in the grand total of $3k, about as much as it costs to buy a well-used 2006 Ford Fiesta.
Travolta stuck to his guns and said he didn’t care what critics, or anyone else, thought of The Fanatic, and that’s probably a good thing. In the meantime, you can ‘enjoy’ the trailer below.
