What derailed John Travolta's career

his acting ability is marginal, at best.

when the fascination with being the new, hot young thing on the block is over, you had better have something in your toolkit to back that shit up with.

now that the looks have kind-of run out, i don't know how he keeps getting cast. occasionally, he's ok but not for anything serious.

John Travlota

Staying Alive was not a flop. Grease was a huge hit.

Pulp Fiction is what resurrected his career.

He was also in Blow Out, and he was excellent in that. But both Staying Alive and Two of a Kind were awful and Perfect got horrible reviews.

Scientology. His craziness could no longer be hidden

How big is his dick?

Urban Cowboy is a surprisingly good film. I always just thought it was Saturday Night Fever gone country but it is really a nice story. Debra Winger really gave a star turn there (should have been nominated.) and Travolta is good too.

Denial

Headlining pop phenomenons (SNF/Grease) derailed his career. Expectations were too big for his follow ups.

He’s just dumb.

He lost the cute factor for the younger crowd. I knew him mainly from Welcome Back Kotter and Grease in my childhood and in high school I saw him in Staying Alive and that oiled up muscled guy was a turn off.

Lack of talent. Let's be honest.

He's a great dancer and a decent singer, but not much of an actor.

r11 again, at that time Footloose was the biggest thing. Our senior prom had a Footloose theme "Almost Paradise". Travolta seemed grotesque next to the cute young Spacey character.

^^^^ OOPS not Spacey, Kevin BACON. hee

I think it was too big a fall for it to be purely a few flops and he was screwed.

To go from major Oscar nominated, hot movie star well liked in the industry to films made to go straight to VHS within 3 years. Something major was up.

The studios writing him off as gay and uncontrollable ? He was pretty outrageous with his attitude to male masseurs and other men from the early 80's, wasn't he.

Can see the bigwigs thinking he'd be outed any minute by his own escalating behaviour, just as they had a big budget movie to release with him in

Look Who's Talking was released in 1989, that was considered a comeback. But he really didn't work between Perfect which was released in '85 until Look Who's Talking. Was he not getting any offers at all during that time? That seems odd...

SNF while a hit and now considered a classic fell victim to the disco backlash and Travolta’s performance was associated with the whole era. Grease is a kids movie/nostalgia piece. That leaves Urban Cowboy which was a good film with a solid cast but also had a a gimmicky aspect with the bull riding etc. LWT was a hit and a comeback of sorts but also a lightweight film. His real comeback was Pulp Fiction by then SNF was appreciated as a modern classic the last comeback was derailed by Scientology.

Perfect is,AWFUL on a so bad that it's good way

Jamie Lee Curtis left the scream Queen slasher movie genre to do this and she has ZERO chemistry with Travolta

R6 According to an account by one of the masseuses who got groped by him, it's nothing impressive.

hasn't he been banned from most massage parlor for groping or openly masturbating?

Uh, R18, Jamie Lee Curtis left the Scream Queen genre to do a little movie called Trading Places first.

I think his association with disco. People don’t realize how virulent the anti- disco movement was. It was a stand-in for the ant-gay sentiments of the era. Straight kids in 8th grade had Death to Disco stickers everywhere, they burned disco records, anything disco-related was mocked and degraded in a way that made it clear disco=gay=deserves to be destroyed. Travolta was disco for most straight kids. Also musical theater. His unpopularity was the result of the anti-gay 80s. In the US at least, it was like the racism that’s now pervasive as a backlash to too much “tolerance” in the prior 8 years.

Producers got tired of him trying to play coy and fuck them. Most producers are straights.

r22 hit it on the nail.

He just seemed like old news. He wasn't really a good actor and the heartthrob status was wearing thin. People just got tired of him and moved on.

That was my take, R11.

R22 has it. Travolta became very big,very fast--kind of like a rock star. Think of how little you hear of Lady Gaga these days, but, at one point, she was everywhere. Travolta peaked really fast and went out of fashion.

I don't think he's a bad actor and, of course, he has a lot of charisma and the ability to move well. Not a huge range, though, and, more to the point, he doesn't seem very smart. No eye, whatsoever, for picking good scripts. That also hurt him--he made some truly abysmal movies.

He's a FAG!

Travolta requests very luxurious and expensive treatment on movie sets, and producers got tired of it .

What "career derailment" are you talking about? The one after "Moment By Moment?" The one after "Battlefield Earth?" His career has had its ups and downs. Now he's old and can't play romantic leads anymore so he's trying to be a character actor, but it doesn't really suit him. Anyway, he's reprehensible, a closeted homo Scientologist. And after his poor autistic son died he got a 15 minute memorial service and that was that. I think Travolta was probably relieved that he was gone. What a fucked up creep. But then all Scientologists are.

Travolta's career was resurrected with "Look Who's Talking," I recall all the reviews saying who knew a talking baby would revive his career.

Two of a Kind was a throw away. Olivia Newton-Lez had a two movie deal after Grease. After Xanadu bombed, the studio was ready to give her anything to end the deal. She was still popular music wise and they managed to think since she and Travolta had chemistry in "Grease" they'd repeat it.

It didn't work. They had no chemistry and the movie was worse than Xanadu, which at least had great music (on the soundtrack anyway).

I wonder if he was offered the Chorus Line movie. He would have made a good Zach and could have dance too unlike Michael Douglas who just sat there.

"The Sorry State of John Travolta":

he made that disastrous movie with Lily Tomlin as his older lover. that made him a laughingstock for a while.

Who cares

[quote]According to an account by one of the masseuses

As if he ever let a masseuse touch him.

[quote]Pulp Fiction is what resurrected his career.

Pulp Fiction, a relatively small Tarantino film, brought back good reviews and an Oscar nomination that many thought he deserved to win (he lost to Tom Hanks in Forrest Gump), but the career resurrector was indeed the Look Who’s Talking franchise, whose movies were big commercial hits. And, as much of a standout as he was in PF, it was not his movie to carry or open, as co-stars Samuel Hackson and Uma Therman had also plenty to do with the movie’s success. But the Oscar nomination and his good reviews got Travolta back in the map and on top with Get Shorty, Phrnomenon, and Michael - all relatively decent movies with good box office returns.

[quote] Was he not getting any offers at all during that time?

Travolta got plenty of great offers during the eighties. He just made a lot of bad choices after Urban Cowboy, not the least of which was working with Stallone as a director, who just tried to turn TONY Manero into a dance version of Rocky Balboa. In the interim he turned down American Gigolo and An Officer and a Gentleman, allowing fellow closeted hunk Richard Gere to build a career out of getting cast in his rejects. Later on it would happen again with Chicago.

THREE WORDS...

Travolta would have been awful in American Giggolo. He's never strayed far from Vinnie Barbarino.

Travolta aged rapidly and not well. He was never conventionally handsome and then resorted to all manner of hairpieces to approximate a full head of hair. He has always seemed inauthentic.

Same thing regarding his "romance" with Diana Hyland, his much older "lover" who died. I never bought that for a moment.

Why are so many Americans ignorant of the word "masseur"? I've even encountered the term "male masseuse"...

He morphed into a kinda creepy guy with a bad toupee.

Tarantino “stunt casted” him as a middle age Vinnie Barbarino, which worked well in Pulp Fiction (but was it really worthy of an Oscar nod?) Travolta is a one-trick pony as an actor. He’s versatile as a dancer, though.

Didn't he have a tumultuous on-again/off-again love affair throughout the '80s with Ms. Marilu Henner that wound up leaving him a shell of a man for quite some time. I always attributed his career downturn to Marilu breaking his heart, though I don't know if that's how Marilu remembers it...

He got older and gained weight, seriously. His early roles featured his physical beauty and youth. At some point, he got put into "Look Who's Talking," and he got a foothold there, maybe.

A blind item on AGC has some interesting things to say about Travolta’s health.

SUCH AS?

Scientology and all the dirt they have on him.

r37, Richard Gere is closeted? I've never heard that before.

no r43.

He was always just friends with Marilu.

I dunno if I buy Gere being gay--he is past the point where he needs a beard, he's no longer a romantic lead, yet he just remarried and his wife is expecting their child. Bi, maybe.

It's time Travolta turned his attention back to television. I think a role on a regular TV series -- perhaps playing a detective in something on Netflix or Hulu -- could be just the thing to resurrect his career.

I sometimes think Travolta hams it up in roles in attempt to appear more masculine. Remember when he tried to kiss Halle Berry.

His latest role as Gotti was universally lambasted. I can't imagine him getting any decent offers soon.

He was nominated for an Emmy for Gotti!

So as much as I didn’t like his performance, you could hardly call that “universally lambasted.”

I could see Travolta having something of a comeback with a British series, a la Jeremy Piven.

The Sorry State of John Travolta: Scientology, Movie Bombs, and Dark Allegations

Travolta has aged horribly and the fake hair situation doesn't help. I find it hard to look at him, with the super black hair and brows, like he thinks he's back in the day of Tony Manero. It's probably a symptom of the inauthentic life he lives, clinging desperately to his perceived image of a heterosexual when the whole world knows otherwise.

So many saying he is not a good actor yet he has Oscar noms. That shows you that not everyone nominated for an Oscar is good. There are lots of Oscar WINNERS that are complete jokes.

Carly Simon says they had a passionate affair shortly before her marriage to James ended.

^Like 35-40 years ago. Carly also had an affair with Cat Stevens. Guess she has an affinity for "bisexuals."