The real story behind John Travolta’s stunning decline: As his latest flop struggles to make even $100, insiders tell TOM LEONARD about the seedy relationship at the heart of his downfall – and what Hollywood really thinks of him behind the scenes

An international criminal kingpin calls up retired master-thief Mason Goddard and makes him an offer he can’t refuse.

If he and his endearingly oddball band of sidekicks can’t steal the contents of a New Orleans casino baron’s near impregnable safe, Goddard can say goodbye to ever seeing his beloved wife again. The kingpin has just kidnapped her.

If you’ve heard of a more hackneyed idea for a Hollywood feature film than this one, High Rollers, do send it to John Travolta as he may be interested in making that, too.

Travolta – a star who once commanded $20million per film – now almost exclusively stars in movies so bad that the phrase ‘straight to video’ seems like a compliment.

Indeed, industry observers believe High Rollers, released in March to an entirely indifferent world, may be on its way to matching the performance of Travolta’s 2023 crime thriller Mob Land. Its UK cinema release (playing in just three theatres) managed to make just £125 ($171).

He’s hardly the first ageing star to sign on to any new project for the money. However, there are whispers in Hollywood that this unfortunate tendency has become even more extreme thanks to his association with a controversial film maker who has been accused of alleged sexual misconduct, which he demies, and who is notorious – even by the low standards of modern Hollywood, for churning out dross.

Travolta’s latest clunker is another tediously formulaic action thriller produced on such a shoe-string that they didn’t even bother to use stuntmen for a scene in which the heroes jump into a swimming pool from the top of a building. Instead, they plop into the water as if they’ve simply hopped off the diving board.

The film is so dismal that it doesn’t even have a rating on the review aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes because so few critics – just nine – have bothered to watch it.

The poster for Travolta’s latest film High Rollers, in which he plays Mason Goddard, a master thief who must pull off a dangerous casino heist when his nemesis kidnaps his lover

High Rollers is so dismal that it doesn’t even have a rating on the review aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes because so few critics – just nine – have bothered to watch it, writes Tom Leonard

Travolta shot to fame when he played disco-loving Tony Manero in Saturday Night Fever (1977)

The Guardian took the plunge and, after noting Travolta had at least ditched his ridiculous hair pieces and finally embraced baldness, witheringly wrote: ‘A heart-slowing work of staggering stupidity and charmlessness, ineptly made and quite frankly dull except when its flaws become so egregious you can’t help but guffaw.’ 

It added: ‘The air of tawdry cost-cutting pervades every level of the film, from the casting to the costumes to the paste jewellery that’s supposed to stand in for posh gemstones.’

Sadly this is not a particularly recent trend for the former superstar estimated to be worth $250million.

His 2018 thriller Speed Kill (in which he played a millionaire speedboat racing champion) was so awful that it got 0 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes. It’s an achievement few films manage – but Travolta did it again the same year when he played mob boss John Gotti in the unsettlingly-sympathetic biopic, Gotti.

Now, none of this would be a surprise to Hollywood insiders who, on the industry website IMDb, voted the 2000 sci-fi howler Battlefield Earth – top star and producer: J. Travolta – the worst film ever made.

However others chiefly remember the 1970s glory days of Grease and Saturday Night Fever, followed by his memorable 1990s comeback dancing the twist with Uma Thurman in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction when he once again became one of the biggest stars in the world. And for those fans, it’s something of a shock. Insiders are now pointing fingers at a certain Randall Emmett, who either produced or directed Travolta’s recent films – Gotti, Cash Out and High Rollers.

Emmett was the subject of a 2022 investigation by the Los Angeles Times and a subsequent Hulu documentary over allegations of abuse against women (including allegedly offering them film roles in return for sex) and mistreating assistants and business partners, accusations which he has denied.

Since the scandal broke, Emmett has begun using his middle name, Ives, as his professional one.

In 1978 Travolta starred as Danny Zuko in the musical Grease

Travolta’s passion project Battlefield Earth (2000), based on Scientology founder L Ron Hubbard’s sci-fi novel of the same name, was derided by critics and bombed at the box office

Kelly Preston, Travolta’s wife of 19 years, died in 2020 aged 57 after battling breast cancer for two years

Emmett is best known for pioneering a genre of films called ‘geezer teasers’ – low-budget productions which brandish the involvement of an ageing star (including Travolta, Bruce Willis, and Sylvester Stallone et al) to pull in investors, only for that actor to barely appear in it, sometimes just for a few minutes.

The vast majority of the miniscule budget is spent on securing that big star, even though he will only do a few days’ filming.

The entertainment news website Vulture has said that Emmett’s films are so bad that they deserve a category of their own.

Travolta does at least appear for rather more than a few minutes in his latest movie. Some might argue that at 71, the actor can hardly be blamed for no longer getting decent leading roles but that hasn’t proven a problem for Liam Neeson, 73, or Harrison Ford, 82.

Travolta’s defenders will also note that he has had to cope with crushing setbacks in his private life including the death of his adored wife, Kelly Preston in 2020 and son Jett in 2009.

Meanwhile, continued speculation about his private life – chiefly his involvement with the controversial Church of Scientology and his sexuality – hasn’t been helpful in an age when the ability of Hollywood publicists to ‘control the narrative’ has been destroyed by social media.

However, when it comes to his film career, he has been almost entirely the author of his own misfortune.

A Disney executive who has worked with Travolta told the Mail this week: ‘If Travolta had stopped after his Pulp Fiction comeback he would have gone down in Hollywood history as one of the all-time greats. A legend who came back for one last hurrah. But now he’s like that sad guest who has overstayed his welcome at the party.’

Travolta as Vincent Vega, alongside Samuel L Jackson, in Pulp Fiction (1994). The Tarantino film revived Travolta’s career 

During a White House dinner in 1985, Travolta danced with Princess Diana

Travolta with his wife Kelly Preston, son Jett and daughter Ella. Jett died in 2009 aged 16 after having a seizure

A high school drop-out from suburban New Jersey, Travolta cut his performing teeth in musical theatre rather than acting, having a hit single and TV sitcom before he had a hit movie.

But then in 1977, he played disco king Tony Manero famed for his lithe physique and dance moves in Saturday Night Fever, followed a year later by his portrayal of rocker Danny Zuko in the musical Grease, and he was suddenly a superstar. At 24, he became one of the youngest performers ever nominated for Best Actor for Saturday Night Fever at the Oscars.

In 1978, Rolling Stone magazine ordained that Travolta ‘will be revered forever, in the manner of Elvis, James Dean, [and] Marilyn Monroe’.

Hollywood mogul Barry Diller recently revealed in a new memoir that, shortly after the release of Saturday Night Fever, Princess Margaret expressly asked to meet Travolta on a visit to Los Angeles. She invited him for tea in her hotel suite only for Travolta to later complain that the Queen’s sister ‘hit on me’.

Eight years later in 1985, he had a far more public assignation with royalty when he and a very nervous Princess Diana stole the show as they memorably danced together at a White House party hosted by then President Ronald Reagan and his wife Nancy.

However, by then, the glitter had long since started to fade from his film career. Travolta proved particularly prone to so-called ‘passion projects’ – movies he desperately wanted to make but few film-goers actually wanted to see. 

Even Perfect, a 1985 romantic drama co-starring Jamie Lee Curtis, which sounded like a hit on paper, proved a cinematic turkey, nominated for a string of Golden Raspberry Awards – the anti-Oscars – including Worst Actor for Travolta. Hollywood should have got the message about Travolta and serious romance movies, chided some critics, when he made the similarly dire Moment by Moment with Lily Tomlin in 1978.

Travolta has admitted he almost permanently packed in acting after the third and final Look Who’s Talking – a successful but cheesy franchise about a talking baby – when he got a call from hip director Tarantino.

Tarantino has called Travolta one of ‘the greatest movie stars Hollywood ever produced’, and reportedly infuriated Pulp Fiction’s financiers by rejecting Daniel Day-Lewis in favour of Travolta for the main role of hitman Vincent Vega in the 1994 crime drama.

It won Travolta another Best Actor Oscar nomination and he was suddenly raking in $20million a movie. But again, despite early successes such as the 1997 thriller Face/Off, (in which he played an FBI agent and Nicolas Cage a terrorist, the pair undergoing an experimental surgery to swap their faces) it didn’t last as he allowed his own dubious instincts and his beliefs to dictate his career.

Travolta – a Scientologist convert since 1975 – is actually only the second-most famous Hollywood Scientologist, pipped by Tom Cruise. But Cruise has wisely never allowed himself to risk his stardom by making an overtly Scientologist film and linking his name so obviously to an organisation widely regarded as a cult by critics.

Travolta, however, reportedly ignored warnings by pushing ahead with making a 2000 film out of Battlefield Earth, a sci-fi novel by Scientology’s late founder L Ron Hubbard. The film, in which Travolta played the heavily-dreadlocked evil leader of aliens who have enslaved humans on a future Earth, was heavily based on Scientology’s wacky beliefs and accused of being little more than a recruitment film. Hubbard had begged Travolta to make it into a film and it had been the actor’s dream to oblige since the novel was published in 1982.

Travolta became so obsessed with making the project a success that he flew around the world in his own Boeing 707 – he qualified as a pilot aged 22 – looking for filming locations. In interviews, he described the book as ‘like Pulp Fiction for the year 3000’ and ‘like Star Wars, only better’.

Some Hollywood watchers believe Travolta’s reputation has never recovered from the catastrophe of Battlefield Earth.

Apart from a memorable turn wearing drag in the 2007 musical rom-com Hairspray, Travolta has barely had a solid film success ever since.

At the same time as his film career sank (for a second time), the personal life of a reputedly affable but private star came increasingly under scrutiny.

In 2009, his son Jett – the oldest of his three children with Kelly Preston – died aged 16 while on a family holiday in the Bahamas, reportedly hitting his head on the side of a bathtub after having a seizure. Travolta confirmed that Jett was severely autistic and had had a history of frequent fits.

Rumours spread that the Travoltas blamed the Scientology church – which makes extravagant claims of its ability to cure various mental and physical disorders, and reportedly believes that autism is simply ‘psychosomatic’ – for not doing more to help Jett.

At the time, a spokesman from Scientology International said: ‘The Church of Scientology has no position on autism. As with any medical condition, the Church believes that these matters are best diagnosed and treated by a medical doctor. Scientologists can and do then also seek spiritual assistance.’

Preston had campaigned against psychiatric drugs and lawyers for the family revealed that Jett had been taken off Depakote, an anti-seizure drug, because they were convinced it didn’t work.

Travolta later admitted that he and Preston had to resort to years of marriage counselling to keep their relationship on track. On what would have been Jett’s 17th birthday, Travolta flew himself to Tahiti to spend the bleak anniversary on his own.

The actor also piled on vast amounts of weight after Jett’s death and neighbours said that late at night they would see him driving round and round his bizarre £14million Florida home – built to resemble an airport terminal so he could indulge his passion for his fleet of planes.

Travolta remained a Scientologist, however, and on the 10th anniversary of Jett’s death in 2019, he paid tribute to the ‘church’ for its support.

The following year, Preston died aged 57 after a two-year battle with breast cancer and Travolta was plunged into yet more misery.

Although their marriage had been hailed as one of Hollywood’s strongest, there’d long been questions over Travolta’s sexuality.

In 2013, a book about Scientology by Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Lawrence Wright claimed the star was terrified that if he broke with the church, it might use against him confessions he made about his sexuality during his Scientology spiritual counselling sessions, called ‘auditing’.

At the height of Travolta’s fame in the late 1970s, church bosses were reportedly ‘desperately concerned their most valuable member would be revealed as gay’, said the book.

Ex-scientologist executive Marty Rathbun, the church’s most senior defector, told Wright the church had worked hard to protect Travolta’s reputation and made many allegations against him ‘go away’.

The church dismissed Wright’s book as ‘an error-filled, unsubstantiated, bigoted, anti-Scientology book’. Other Scientology defectors have said that church members are never allowed to reveal they are gay.

In 2012, two male masseurs accused Travolta in court of sexually assaulting them on separate occasions in late night spas in Atlanta and Los Angeles. Both lawsuits were subsequently dropped by the complainants.

Two years later, Travolta’s former pilot, Douglas Gotterba, claimed he’d had a six-year affair with him in the 1980s. Travolta strongly denied the accusation.

Karen de la Carriere, once one of Scientology’s most senior spiritual counsellors, described Travolta as ‘a bad boy who likes risky sexual adventures’. Kelly Preston, she said, was ‘either deluded or more likely just deaf’ to her husband’s extramarital behaviour.

According to Tinseltown mogul Barry Diller, Travolta refused to take the lead role in his 1980 crime thriller American Gigolo as ‘he was afraid of playing that character because of its somewhat gay subtext’.

None of this, however, has put Travolta off making more low-rent movies. That’s Amore!, a rom-com co-starring Katherine Heigl who is 25 years his junior, will be released later this year.

While it’s way too late to expect him to bow out of acting gracefully, it’s still sobering to realise that there’s no genre of film that John Travolta thinks is beyond him.