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Actually--in his uncritical affection for all things cinematic--he loves their work. Can a co-production deal be far behind? Nope. It requires less than two hours of hilarious, intricately plotted, beautifully acted screen time for Chili to free Harry from the toils of some menacing drug dealers who own a piece of a film he has neglected to produce, fall into a rewarding relationship with Karen and, yes, get Shorty. That is to say, get a major movie star--diminutive, egomaniacal Martin Weir (Danny DeVito, whose company produced this film)--to commit to their project.
Based quite faithfully on an Elmore Leonard best seller, Get Shorty is most significantly true to the book's basic attitude toward Hollywood. Perhaps because he deals with the movie business from a position of strength--he writes things it needs--Leonard omits the contempt with which novelists traditionally drench their Hollywood horror stories. Leonard simply drops a real killer in among the rubber sharks, then sits back watchfully, his only comment a benign (or, at worst, sardonic) chuckle as his hero quietly chews them up.
Like all of Hollywood's self-satires, Get Shorty understands that movie people are, by nature and calling, melodramatists, with an unfortunate tendency to get self-love, self-loathing and self-pity all mixed up. Screenwriter Scott Frank and director Barry Sonnenfeld also understand that the proper response to all that confusion is not heavy-hitting moralism but wry compassion. And a good-humored respect for the gumption and cunning of people whose lives forever hinge on whether or not their phone calls get returned.
By this time John Travolta knows all this in his bones, and it shows in his acting as a kind of acceptant curiosity about the world's nuttiness, which includes, of course, his own. There's something uncalculated about what he does, as if he's always wondering how the next sentence is going to come out, how he's going to surprise both himself and everyone watching him. "When I said, 'Action,'" says Sonnenfeld, "I never knew if he would do the next take in English, Japanese, Spanish or French. It's really hard not to play with John. He's got this big bag of toys, and you become a kid around him and want to play with his games."
It's probably because he's been up--once by common teeny-bopper consent the sexiest dude on the planet--and he's been down--recently by common show-biz consent a marginal player, working in hopeless enterprises like Moment to Moment and Perfect, not to mention projects headed straight to video (The Tender)--and really doesn't see much difference between the two. Even when he had a hit like Look Who's Talking, it was an object of contempt in all the better circles. And along the way, he managed to turn down eventual winners like Arthur, Splash and An Officer and a Gentleman and get aced out of things like The Player at the last minute, all without apparent regret.