Unconventional War of Nerves

A beefy John Travolta slips into a beribboned Army uniform and takes a seat behind a desk in a room without walls. All around him inside a cavernous hangar at Van Nuys Airport are other see-through rooms, each one a replica of the home and office where a young captain lived and worked before she was brutally murdered on an Army base.

Travolta pops a videocassette into a VCR and watches an image of the woman deliver a lecture, when the base general, played by James Cromwell, appears in the doorway. Travolta snaps to attention.

“Well, you didn’t find a single clue in all this?” Cromwell asks Travolta, who plays Warrant Officer Paul Brennen, an investigator with the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division (CID).

“It’s not about what was found,” Travolta replies. “It’s about what stayed hidden.”

As the two actors meticulously deliver their lines for the Paramount film “The General’s Daughter,” British director Simon West calls for another take. He then explains to a visitor that the scene is crucial to the film because the general has come to see how the investigation of his daughter’s murder is progressing.

“Then he goes outside and he gets in the plane with his daughter’s coffin and he flies off,” says West, who was hired to direct the film after making his Hollywood debut in the explosion-filled, cover-your-ears-and-hold-on-for-the-ride summer film “Con Air” in 1997. Ask him now if he learned anything from directing the action film and West replies, only half in jest: “Yeah, don’t do action movies. Physically, it takes it out of you.”

He recalls that on “Con Air” he tried to make a comedy / action movie, something sort of tongue-in-cheek. But that left him in the awkward position of being surrounded by hugely talented actors like Nicolas Cage, John Cusack, John Malkovich and Ving Rhames and then standing on the end of a plane yelling things like, “MORE WIND! MORE WIND! . . . ROCK LEFT! ROCK LEFT!” when what he really wanted to have been saying was something like, “Let’s delve a little deeper into the character, shall we?” With “The General’s Daughter,” he gets that chance.

“This one is about as deep as you can get,” he says.

Based on a best-selling novel by Nelson DeMille, “The General’s Daughter” (opening Friday) tells the story of an Army investigation into the death and apparent rape of a beautiful West Point graduate named Capt. Elizabeth Campbell (Leslie Stefanson). Capt. Campbell is the daughter of three-star Gen. Joe Campbell, the base commander, who is so popular and respected throughout the country that he is being considered as a candidate for vice president.

Assisting Travolta in the inquiry is a rape investigator (and former girlfriend) played by Madeleine Stowe. They learn that the Army expects them to wrap up their investigation quickly so it does not affect the general’s political aspirations. The film also stars James Woods, Timothy Hutton and Clarence Williams III.

With the film having a reported budget of $60 million to $70 million, advance buzz has been mixed. Tradition holds that Paramount should release such a film in the fall, when Hollywood normally turns its attention to more serious fare, but the studio is counting on Travolta’s name and the adult audience’s hunger for dramas during the summer “popcorn” season to carry the day.

“We have Disney’s ‘Tarzan’ opening against us,” says producer Mace Neufeld, “but that’s a totally different film.”

Neufeld concedes that his movie is a nontraditional summer release but adds: “At our screenings, and we’ve done quite a few, it seems to play consistently the same way: The audiences don’t move a muscle, they laugh when they are supposed to, it is a very serious subject and the word of mouth is terrific.”

For the past decade, Neufeld has been the go-to guy whenever Paramount needed to mount a big, star-driven action film, whether it was Harrison Ford in “The Hunt for Red October” and “Patriot Games” or Val Kilmer in “The Saint.”

“I’ve been at Paramount 10 years,” Neufeld says. “The first film I did for them was ‘The Hunt for Red October,” which they put out in March [1990]. Nobody had ever put a big film out in March. It was then considered one of those dead months of the year. But they said, ‘We’re going to make it look like the Fourth of July with our campaign.’ They did, and it took in $125 million domestically. The next year, everybody was fighting to go out in March.”

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“The General’s Daughter” is also a testing ground for Travolta, who at $20 million a picture occupies the top tier of movie stars. In paying those prices, studios count on stars to bring in the audience, but in recent outings his films have had mixed results.

The legal drama “A Civil Action,” released last Christmas, grossed a respectable $56.7 million domestically, but his Clinton-esque portrayal of a Southern-bred presidential candidate in “Primary Colors” took in only $39 million last year. And before that, “Mad City,” co-starring Dustin Hoffman, grossed an embarrassingly feeble $10.5 million.

One has to go back to the summer of 1997 for the last Travolta blockbuster in “Face/Off,” which grossed $112.3 million, and Christmas 1996, when the angel-themed “Michael” took in $95.2 million. (“The Thin Red Line,” which featured Travolta in a cameo role, has grossed about $36 million in North America, while last year’s reissue of “Grease” did $28.4 million.)

Which poses the question: Does Travolta still have the box-office juice to justify his staggering salary?

During a break in filming “The General’s Daughter” last fall, Travolta bears none of the telltale signs of ‘90s celebrity: He doesn’t refer to himself in the third person; he makes an effort to look his interviewer in the eye; he ponders every question as if it’s a White House press briefing--even if his responses often ramble. There is something serene and unaffected about the man up close, dispelling for the moment all the tabloid gossip about the pricey perks he demands on every film and how he surrounds himself with a large entourage to do his bidding.

Long gone is the lean, sexy dancer who captivated millions of moviegoers in “Saturday Night Fever.” Alas, Travolta is now middle-aged--45. Still, he looks rather dapper in his pressed greens, even though the years have added a paunch and thickened his neck.

He is asked if making $20 million a picture has changed him.

“I’m not different than when I was making a lot less,” he says in a surprisingly soft voice. “That part of it doesn’t make you feel different. What makes you feel different [as an actor] is the right to read better material.”

Before “Pulp Fiction” reignited his career in 1994, Travolta said, he still worked steadily but wasn’t getting a chance to read the best scripts.

“I still worked, but I didn’t have good material,” he says. “I mean, certain movies like ‘Chains of Gold’ that nobody saw, or ‘Eyes of an Angel,’ they were pretty good scripts for being a cold actor. Any actor would have liked those parts. Do you know what I mean? Except, they didn’t perform, so, therefore, it didn’t allow you to get another good job. Do you know what I mean?”

Now, Travolta is at the level where he keeps busy, cranking out two or three films a year. While some might argue that he risks overexposure by making so many movies, he doesn’t see it that way.

“I don’t make any more than Nic Cage makes, or I don’t make any more than . . . ,” he says, stopping to think of some names. “Who else is out there making a lot of movies? I think Dustin [Hoffman] makes two or three [films] a year. I think [Robert] De Niro might make two a year. [Al] Pacino made two [in 1997]. I just think I was the first one to start doing more than one a year. I don’t think I’m really that different, but I do get more press than most people so; therefore, I may do something, but [it] just seems to attract press.

“I don’t think the press has been unfair to me,” he quickly adds. “I don’t even think the studios were unfair to me during those cold years. I just think I wasn’t, in their estimation, good business, and I understand that. Now, I’m better business.”

Where does he think he’ll be 10 years from now? “Hopefully, in another hangar doing a different movie,” Travolta says, looking around him. “I can’t imagine not acting. I really do love it--some days more than others--which is natural because some scenes are more exciting than others to act in.”

As for his private life, Travolta notes: “I adore my son, love my wife [actress Kelly Preston] and we’re both working,” he says. His favorite hobby remains flying. “I fly as much as I possibly can. Flying is the deal.” And his favorite plane? “I think it’s now the [Boeing] 707, but I also fly a Gulfstream and I fly a Lear and a fighter jet.”

In a few moments, Travolta is back before the cameras, waiting to resume his dialogue with Cromwell, who’s best-known to American audiences as the farmer in “Babe,” and the evil Capt. Dudley Smith in “L.A. Confidential.”

“John is a professional,” Cromwell says. “He’s been around a long time. He’s been up, he’s been down. He has a very strong sense of himself.” A voice calls out for quiet on the set. The actors take up their positions.

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Filming on “The General’s Daughter” began last summer in Georgia. To capture the dark, twisting nature of the story and how, in the director’s words, the general’s daughter “manipulates this whole base,” West chose to film many of the scenes in Savannah, Ga., a city steeped in tradition.

“It’s very atmospheric and spooky down there anyway,” he says. “We also set things at night so it would be mysterious and dark. It feels more threatening at night.

“Sometimes you need incredibly ornate buildings with beautiful interiors and everyone done up with their military finery. And then you go outside, and Travolta’s character lives in a trailer park in a fallen-down houseboat. Two looks. Two worlds.”

During six grueling weeks in Savannah, the cast and crew had to endure searing heat, fierce thunderstorms and even a twister.

“We shut down one day because of a tornado,” West recalls. “They had sirens down there, and every day we were hit by a different thunderstorm. The bolts of lightning [hit] all around us in the field.” And that’s not to mention the chiggers, and the waters around Tybee Island near Savannah that were filled with jellyfish and water moccasins and that often appeared to be polluted by outflow from local crab shacks and houses.

After that, the production shifted to Los Angeles, where Paramount had erected an enormous tented enclosure on its Hollywood lot and filled a pool with a million gallons of water at a cost of about $1 million. The water is heated to 82 degrees. Inside the enclosure, the air is so humid it clings to the skin and a mist drifts like cigar smoke across the dimly lit pool. The set is a replica of a decaying boat dock in Savannah where some of the earlier scenes were filmed.

As men in wetsuits slowly maneuver the cameras, West stares at a monitor, gauging the movements of a man clutching a gun emerging from the water behind a boat tied to the dock. At West’s signal, the boat’s engine roars to life and the blades snap the gun out of the assailant’s hand.

“That looks really good!” the director calls out. “[The gun] went straight at the lens.” Then he sinks back in his chair and asks everyone to do it all over again.

The actor in the water is Peter Weireter, who in real life is a hostage negotiator and SWAT team leader with the Los Angeles Police Department--and not just any hostage negotiator either, Neufeld says, but the man who talked O.J. Simpson out of his Ford Bronco at the end of that infamous, slow-motion freeway chase.

“I had Weireter in a little part in another film of mine called ‘Clear and Present Danger’ with Harrison Ford,” Neufeld says.

In the film, Weireter’s character engages in an illegal arms deal for military weapons, but when the deal goes sour, he comes in the night to kill Travolta.

“Obviously, he does not succeed,” Neufeld deadpans, “otherwise the movie would be over after 10 minutes.”

As he waits for the cameras to get in place for the next shot, West observes that one thing that makes this film different from detective thrillers is that Travolta is an Army CID officer, a strange breed of investigator that has no counterpart in civilian life.

“The CID has sweeping powers,” West explains. “Even though he’s a warrant officer, he can arrest a general. None of these suspects have any rights in the Army. You don’t have the right to an attorney, you don’t have a right to remain silent. It’s like ancient feudal law in the Army and, basically, he can do what he likes.”

Another area rarely explored in films is so-called Psy Ops (psychological operations).

“That was an area I hadn’t seen before, the psychological wing of the military and how they try and wear down the enemy through all these weird techniques,” West says. “And that is what she actually uses on her own father. She wages war against the greatest general in the world, so he uses old-fashioned Army techniques.

“There is a sort of family conflict that makes him a strong suspect for a murder. It’s a corrupt family in a corrupt Army with lots of betrayal and lying and intrigue and an even more bizarre sexual undercurrent. After all, a lot of psychological war is using sex.” *