The Quentin Tarantino movie John Travolta can’t stand for one reason: “Other than that, pitch perfect”
Looking at how he managed to hit the self-destruct button on his own renaissance, John Travolta owes more to Quentin Tarantino than he might be willing to admit.
Of course, it was a two-way street to begin with, since the pair’s first meeting was like Tarantino trying to play with his favourite childhood action figures, but in real life. What would you do if you were a filmmaker, and you were meeting one of your most idolised actors to discuss a role in a movie?
Apparently, when you’re Quentin Tarantino, you invite Travolta over to your house, show him the shrine you’d built to John Travolta, and sit down to play several board games, all of which were based on movies or TV shows that John Travolta had starred in, which sounds like something ripped out of a horror flick.
The actor’s ‘Best Picture’-nominated turn in Pulp Fiction revitalised his failing career, and he continued going from strength to strength for a little while at least, with Tarantino lending another assist when he convinced the Grease icon to play the leading role in Barry Sonnenfeld’s Get Shorty, which he was initially planning to turn down.
Bizarrely, Travolta also offered Tarantino the director’s chair on Battlefield Earth, and while he didn’t have a hope in hell of landing him for the sci-fi folly that dropped a nuclear bomb on every bit of goodwill he’d built up in the post-Pulp Fiction years, the two-time Academy Award-winning screenwriter remains one of the very, very, very flew people who don’t think the ode to L Ron Hubbard is a steaming pile of shite.
They’ve never worked together again, but Travolta will be forever grateful to the filmmaker for saving him from obscurity. He’s kept a keen eye on his filmography, too, and as much as he adored Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, there was one thing he hated about the period-set ode to Los Angeles, and it was the most John Travolta reason imaginable.
“There’s only one thing that didn’t ring true for me in the whole movie, and that was that the 747 wasn’t out yet in early 1969,” he shared, wearing his aviation nerd badge proudly on the sleeve. “It only test flew in February 1969,” he pointed out, doubling down on being a total geek for aircraft. “But other than that, I thought it was pitch perfect.”
You’re supposed to get lost in the story and characters, John, not sit there fuming because a semi-fictional feature that unfolds throughout 1969 features a shot of a Pan Am Boeing 747 being used for commercial purposes, even though that particular plane wasn’t used on that scale until the early months of 1970.
That said, he is one of the industry’s most famous pilots, and he knows a lot more about planes than Tarantino does, but for 99% of the audience, it wouldn’t have done a thing to dampen their suspension of disbelief. For Travolta, though, it was basically a cardinal sin.
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