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Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/12/26/the-december-comfort-watches-2025-day-twenty-six-get-shorty/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=58890

F. Scott Fitzgerald once famously said that there are no second acts in American lives. This is an aphorism that is pithy and sounds smart, but isn’t true, not even for F. Scott Fitzgerald, even if his second act (the late blooming popularity of The Great Gatsby) happened after he was dead. Second acts happen all the time, primed by luck and/or talent and/or nostalgia and/or opportunity. The interesting question for me is, what do you do with that second act when the curtain comes back up.

Get Shorty is about two second acts in American lives, one that’s just starting up, and one that’s in full swing. The one that is just beginning belongs to Chili Palmer, the movie-loving loan shark who is the film’s protagonist. The one that’s in mid-swing belongs to John Travolta, who, as this film was released in 1995, was in the middle of a career renaissance that, honestly, had seemed improbable even two years before.

Chili first. He’s a mid-level guy in Miami who as the movie opens is in a bit of a spot; his boss has suddenly died, and the new guy in charge of his book hands him off to Ray “Bones” Barboni (Dennis Farina), whom Chili has recently punched in the face over a coat. Ray Bones wants him to track down money owed by a dry cleaner, who recently died in a plane crash… or did he? One thing leads to another and then Chili finds himself in Los Angeles and making the acquaintance of Harry Zimm (Gene Hackman) a producer who makes C-list horror films, but has one great script in his pocket, if he can just get the funds to get it made.

Well, Chili is a film nut, and he knows a little about getting hold of money, so he decides to stick around and see what he can do. Is this easy? Not at all, since others are circling the script, there’s problems with the Mexican cartels, Ray Bones re-enters the picture, and most of all, Chili has to convince two-time Academy Award nominee Martin Weir (Danny DeVito) to come on board a project, and Weir is, how to put this, every single cliche of an entitled movie actor in one compact package. Oh, and there’s Karen Flores (Rene Russo), who was a “scream queen” for Zimm, and who Chili, quite reasonably, takes a shine to.

This is Chili’s story of remaking himself in Hollywood, but it’s also a travelogue of, if not the underside of the film industry, then at least some of its shabbier quarters. Everyone in this film (excepting Ray Bones and the cartel guys) is on the make in one way or another, looking for more money, more status, more presence and more cool. While this is all obviously exaggerated for the story, anyone who has ever spent any time lurking about the movie industry, either as an observer or as a participant, knows about these guys. Tjey’re all just one script or one movie star attachment away from getting their own big break into the “A”-list, dreaming of clutching that golden statuette and thanking the Academy.

There’s no crime in any of that! (Well, there is crime, and lots of it, in this film, but you know what I mean.) The striving must be exhausting, though. All that smooshing your face against the glass of the hottest restaurants, waiting to get the table, in prime seating time, that’s not by the bathroom or the kitchen door. Only Chili, in this movie, seems entirely immune to all of this. It’s because he’s new and entranced by all of it, but also, it’s because, as a loan shark, he understands the psychology of people who always feel like they’re just one roll of the dice away from their big score. They’re the people who keep him in business, after all. Chili loves the movies, but he’s too cool to lose his cool about them. At least, the money part of it. The big difference between the people he collects vig from and the people making movies, is the people making movies are having a lobster cobb salad for lunch, not the Moons Over My Hammy.

It takes an extremely cool actor to play an extremely cool character, and this is where we come to John Travolta. For a relatively brief moment in the 1970s, John Travolta was the coolest actor in the world — he had landed the one-two punch of Saturday Night Fever and Grease. The first of these exploded the disco craze, was a social phenomenon and a top ten movie at the domestic box office, and garnered Travolta his first Oscar nomination. The second of these was the top grossing film of its year, was also a social phenomenon, and gave Travolta a number one Billboard hit, one of his four top ten musical hits overall. It was literally not possible to be a cooler star than John Travolta was at the end of 1978.

That level of fame is hardly sustainable, and Travolta was not the person to sustain it. After a string of less successful films, some of which were outright flops (Moment to Moment, anyone? Two of a Kind?), Travolta’s career was in a doldrum by the middle 80s. Now, let’s be clear that when I say it was in a doldrum, this is a matter of perception, not necessarily box office: in 1989, Travolta was one of the stars of Look Who’s Talking, which was the number six box office winner of its year, and which is, counting global box office, still the second highest-grossing film of his career after Grease. We should all have such profitable doldrums. But let’s not pretend that as a matter of perception, as a matter of star power, as a matter of coolness, there wasn’t a precipitate drop. When you’re playing second banana to a talking baby, you might be rich, but you’re sure as hell not cool.

Then along came Quentin Tarantino and Pulp Fiction. There are many things to say about Quentin Tarantino, not all of them great, but one thing that cannot be denied is that he does a fantastic job of resurrecting the cool factors of formerly washed-up and washed-out actors. He’s like a financial analyst seeking out value stocks, except the stocks are actors looking to get their mojo back. Tarantino saw that Travolta and his cool factor were severely undervalued, so he dropped the actor into Pulp Fiction as the likeably strung out Vincent Vega. One role, one hit and one Academy Award nomination later, it was like Travolta, and his ability to embody extreme coolness, had never gone away.

Get Shorty was Travolta’s first film after Pulp Fiction, and while Vincent Vega and Chili Palmer are superficially similar (both mid-level cogs in a much bigger crime machine), there’s no question that Chili is the cooler character. He’s smarter, he’s more ambitious and he’s more in control of himself and his fate. Vega is (probably) who a lot of mid-level criminals are; Chili is who they all wish they could be. Travolta needed Vincent Vega to get him back to the level where a character like Chili Palmer was available to him, but once he was there, Travolta showed why the character needed him to work onscreen. It’s said that Warren Beatty, Dustin Hoffman and Michael Keaton were all offered the role before it was given to Travolta. No offense to any of those excellent actors, but not a one of them could have pulled off this role with the same panache.

Travolta’s second act, like his first, wouldn’t last forever. Travolta pretty much put a capper on it in 1999 with a little passion project named Battlefield Earth, which is rightly considered one of the worst films ever made, a genuine turd that no amount of personal cool could ever have saved. But before that moment we got this film, Broken Arrow, Face/Off, Phenomenon and Primary Colors, among others. That’s a pretty decent stretch (after Battlefield, we got Travolta in some Look Who’s Talking-tier comedies like Wild Hogs and Old Dogs, some standard-issue thrillers and also the animated film Bolt, which is a personal favorite of mine. That’s fine! He’s doing fine). Very few people get to be cool forever. I would argue that even fewer get to be the coolest actor alive twice in their career.

This is why I really like rewatching Get Shorty; it’s a study in a movie star being such a goddamned movie star, being so very much the movie star, that everything about the movie is just that much better because he’s in it. This is not role that made Travolta a star, and it’s not the role that resurrected him. It’s not the second act in the making. It’s the role where Travolta is saying, that’s right, I’m back, now watch me own this town. And then he does just that. It’s a blast to watch.

— JS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/12/26/the-december-comfort-watches-2025-day-twenty-six-get-shorty/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=58890