Cinema

You're so vain...

John Travolta's vanity project Battlefield Earth has taken 10 years to make and is set to be the turkey of the year. But, as Mark Morris explains, he's not the first star whose labour of love has resulted in risible self-indulgence

Mark Morris

Sunday May 28, 2000

There's nothing like a real Hollywood flop. Not an average bad movie doing averagely badly, but a complete wreck of a film that makes you wonder what the hell anyone was thinking of when they decided to make it and how the hell anyone had the guts to release it.

There's no doubt that this year that film is Battlefield Earth . It's not just that the reviews were beyond brutal (' Battlefield Earth may well turn out to be the worst movie of this century,' suggested the New York Times ), or the fact that the box-office figures have been pitiful for a $70 million movie. It's more precise than that: the statistics showed that the audience crumbled between its first Saturday on release and the Sunday. In other words, people were calling their friends and strongly advising them not to see this film.

But that's barely the start of the Battlefield Earth catastrophe. Because the film isn't just any old lame sci-fi movie about a race of evil aliens who have conquered the earth. This is the film John Travolta has been struggling to make for at least a decade, his true labour of love. Yet even with Travolta's name behind it, no one was dumb enough to stump up the cash until hustling producer Elie Samaha started sucking up to big stars at a time when the studios were starting to worry that they were a waste of cash. Orig inally, Travolta was going to play the hero of Battlefield Earth , Johnny Goodboy Tyler. But the years drifted by and he grew too old for the part, and had to settle instead for playing the 10-foot, dreadlocked alien leader with the bizarre (British?) accent. Travolta wanted Brad Pitt to play Tyler, but had to settle for the little-known Barry Pepper.

'It will be like Star Wars, only better,' Travolta used to say. Well, in a word, no. In two ghastly weeks, Travolta's reputation has dived back to where it was before Pulp Fiction . So why did he do it? Simple: the novel Battlefield Earth was written by L. Ron Hubbard, who apart from being a master of immense, turgid sci-fi epics, was the founder of the Church Of Scientology. And Travolta is one of Hollywood's many devoted followers of Hubbard's weird self-help creed.

In fact, before Battlefield Earth was released, a few over-anxious cult watchers had warned about either overt, or subliminal, propaganda for scientology being pushed by the film. As it is, the film has done scientology more damage than anything its opponents could ever have contrived.

But let's say Travolta wasn't just obsessed by the book because he is a scientologist. It might just be his favourite novel. That's even sadder. Film stars' long-nurtured pet projects usually have an element of tragic over-ambition to them, a yearning to do something that's either more personal or breaks them out of the restrictions of their star persona.

Like Steve McQueen, frustrated with all those years as a taciturn cool guy in cool movies, growing a big bushy beard and donning glasses to star in an Arthur Miller adaptation of Ibsen's An Enemy Of The People . That's Miller and Ibsen . You can imagine how proud McQueen - the executive producer - was to be given the chance to elevate the minds of his audience. And you can imagine how horrified his agent was. It took a couple of years of sitting on a shelf for the film to make it into the cinemas, and then it only had a very short run. And 20 years after McQueen's death, it's clear he's still remembered as that silent guy in the Mustang or on the bike.

At least An Enemy Of The People saw the light of day. No such luck for Jerry Lewis's The Day The Clown Cried . In the 1972 film, which Lewis directed and wrote, he played a clown in a concentration camp who is used to lure the children into the gas chambers. Lewis lost 40lbs to play the role, which was designed to transform the reputation of the star of The Nutty Professor forever. But it was never released, for legal reasons rather than seemingly more pressing matters of taste. Mind you, after Life Is Beautiful and Jakob The Liar, The Day The Clown Cried suddenly doesn't seem such an outlandish idea.

Its fate was almost mirrored by The Brave, Johnny Depp's directorial debut about an illiterate man who sells himself to a producer of snuff movies. Depp talked his friend Marlon Brando into co-starring, and Iggy Pop into writing the soundtrack. The film was shown at the 1997 Cannes festival, to an astonishingly hostile reception. It was never released in the UK or the US.

Even when a star's baby gets merely mediocre reviews and revenues, it can still backfire. Girl, Interrupted appealed to Winona Ryder because of her own history of psychiatric trouble. So naturally, she took the central role as the author/narrator, even though she was a good 10 years too old for the part. She was promptly blown off the screen by the Oscar-nabbing Angelina Jolie.

Worthy intentions can't save you either: Bruce Willis used his own money to get Breakfast Of Champions made, ignoring the conventional wisdom that Kurt Vonnegut's work doesn't translate to film. The film was released last year in the US to utter indifference from the critics and the public.

Which is why even the biggest stars can find it impossible to get their pet projects made. As one old studio hand warned: 'The problem is that you're dealing with people who are so obsessed with a project that they've lost all objectivity.'

At the height of his identification with Native Americans, Marlon Brando tried to get Martin Scorsese to direct The Battle Of Wounded Knee . Scorsese wasn't biting. Brando then spent years cooking up projects with wayward genius Donald Cammell, the co-director of Performance . Unsurprisingly, they never got anywhere.

But the real heartbreaker is Sylvester Stallone's Edgar Allan Poe movie. Stallone started the script in 1970, long before he had found stardom, and plugged away at it throughout the Rocky and Rambo years. Yet even when he was the world's biggest film star, money for him to play Poe was never laid on the table. He was still tinkering with the idea in the 1990s, but as the years passed it began to sound like his heart had gone out of it. 'As I get older, Poe gets older,' he said at one point. No longer, presumably: Stallone has now lived 14 years longer than the opium-eating poet and writer.

Then there's Meg Ryan, who has hauled her Sylvia Plath script from studio to studio for the best part of a decade. It's easy enough to see why they all passed, even before you hear Ryan's reasons for wanting to make the film. 'I am totally fascinated by that woman. I think Sylvia Plath speaks to women forever, but especially now, because more than ever we are these multi-tasking people with a lot to accomplish - and on top of everything else, she was a mother. To be an artist and a mother - those are two very difficult things to reconcile.' And there you were thinking the Plath myth was all about the intensity of the poetry and her tortured relationship with Ted Hughes.

Just occasionally, stars get away with it. Burt Lancaster's The Swimmer was received almost as badly as Battlefield Earth when it was released in 1968, but these days it is largely viewed as a pretty interesting film. In case Travolta tries to take any comfort from the story, he should be reminded that as Lancaster's source material was John Cheever rather than L. Ron Hubbard, respectability was always nearer at hand.

And while in 1984 it seemed truly barmy that Bill Murray was writing and starring in an adaptation of Somerset Maugham's The Razor's Edge , his reputation has grown so much since that it seems like an interesting curiosity rather than an act of stupidity. And there was widespread scepticism when Gary Oldman, at a time when he was Hollywood's evil mastermind of choice, kept insisting he was about to make an autobiographical film in south London. But the sneering stopped after Nil By Mouth . It helped, of course, that Oldman stayed behind the camera and that he wanted to make a realist European film.

There is one star who shows that you can make Hollywood fulfil your dreams, no matter how crazy they are. And they don't come much more deranged than taking a minor Isaac Bashevis Singer short story and blowing it up into a two hour 13 minute musical with 12 songs. Then, casting a 40-year-old woman as a 20-year-old who could pass for a man. Truly, the fact that Barbra Streisand was not only allowed to produce, direct and star in Yentl , but wasn't chased out of town by a lynch mob when the film came out shows that she exists on a different planet from the rest of us. No matter how misguided Battlefield Earth might be, when it comes to untethered self-indulgence, Travolta is strictly a beginner.