Word: travolta
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Saturday Night Fever, both of which came out toward the end of 1977 and dominated the screens for the rest of the winter. All three have pulled in something like $130 million apiece, and two-Grease and Fever-not coincidentally star John Travolta, who this time last year was known only to TV viewers. The hungry white shark, or his bereaved mate, that gobbled up the dollars in the summer of 1975 swam back for another big bite in Jaws II, which grossed $98.6 million. Heaven Can Wait, Warren Beatty's good...
Divining public tastes makes moviemaking a very high-risk enterprise. Still, film folk have a set of "rules." One of them is that TV actors cannot succeed in movies. John Travolta has apparently smashed that rule to jam. "The thing always was that people wouldn't pay $4 to see what they could see on television," says Agent Michael Black. "It's not true any more." Another rule still seems intact, though: today's audiences will not step into a theater simply to see a star. Dustin Hoffman did not pull them into Straight Time, Henry Winkler...
...just the vice president and the heads of the major movie studios and television networks discussing how to promote cancer awareness. Then Al Gore marched in with a rough cut of his own: a five-minute video of movie and television scenes in which the hottest stars - John Travolta, Nicolas Cage, Winona Ryder among them - were smoking cigarettes. The 1997 power breakfast quickly became a food fight, with accusations of irresponsibility and censorship flying back and forth between Gore and the angry moguls...
...Whether Travolta is enough to pull in huge audiences this time around is an open question: next to this film, Grease starts to look like Citizen Kane. He appears fairly often in his Saturday Night Fever bikini briefs, but Moment by Moment's sexual drift is more than a little ambiguous. When Tomlin touches his body, she does so in the clinical manner of a doctor probing for telltale lumps...
...When Travolta joins her in bed, he seems to be making love to a mirror image of himself. There is no erotic chemistry whatever, but the romantic trysts do reinforce the guiding spirit behind the movie. For those who toil in the never-never land of camp, heterosexuality is still the biggest joke...