The movie that made John Travolta feel like a victim: “You would have thought I had committed murder”
Pulp Fiction is great and all, but it can’t make up for some of the absolute dross that John Travolta has put out into the world.
From stomach-churning comedies to idiotic action romps to whatever the hell Battlefield Earth was, he has a list of flops as long as your arm. Then, there’s one of the earliest examples of his lacklustre output, 1978’s Moment by Moment, a romantic drama that paired Travolta with Jane Fonda’s best pal, Lily Tomlin.
It finds her playing a middle-aged socialite in an unhappy marriage, where Travolta’s character, a young nomad named Strip, blows into her life and begins a whirlwind romance. This was the third movie he had made with producer Robert Stigwood, who had previously worked with him on Saturday Night Fever and Grease, which should have made this a three-peat, but alas, every streak must come to an end.
Moment by Moment was roundly trounced by almost everyone who saw it, and critics wasted no time in ripping it apart, with Variety labelling it “one of the major disappointments of 1978”, while Gene Siskel said it was “a thoroughly awkward, frequently laughable love story that Travolta would do well not to defend”.
The Washington Post joked that the movie was the by-product of HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey, and only Kevin Thomas, the legendary Los Angeles Times critic, had anything positive to say, praising the two leads for their vulnerability.
This was one of the first instances of Travolta getting bad reviews, so he took a lot of it to heart, believing that many reviewers took things too far. “I feel that the criticism after the film became abusive,” he said. “It went beyond mere criticism. You would have thought Lily and I had committed murder. I thought, ‘My God, don’t ever do a movie people don’t like; they’ll murder you’.”
It’s true that the movie was almost universally panned, but the reviews aren’t any more personal or insulting than what was being written for other bad movies at the time. It’s possible that some critics did go a little hard on him because he was such a big name, coming off the back of two massive hits, so there would have been some journalists who relished the chance to cut him down to size.
In 1985, reporter Wayne Robins asked Travolta about Moment by Moment, and with the benefit of hindsight, the actor’s anger at its terrible reviews had turned into a reflective acceptance. “Maybe what one learns from that is invaluable,” he pondered. “So is it wise to regret that? I have a tendency to try not to regret and look at what I’ve learned from something. Where does it get me, to stew in something? You can’t change it. I think half the insanity in this world comes from regret.”
These days, Moment by Moment has been largely forgotten by all but the most diehard of Travolta stans, not even considered among his worst movies, which says more about the tripe he’s made since than anything else.
