John Travolta Bullied Roman Polanski

https://www.datalounge.com/thread/25928389

1996: when the director had announced plans to shoot an extravagantly budgeted drama written by Gerard Brach and himself called The Double, starring John Travolta. Travolta was to be paid $17 million. Sparks flew immediately on the star's arrival in Paris. Still attired in his personally designed pilot's uniform, Travolta complained in the course of a heated production meeting that his part had been 'totally rewritten' ('fucking totally', in some accounts) without his consent.

A witness to the scene remembers 'John having sat there and gone very slowly and methodically through every one of the lines with his name next to it like a tortoise chewing an unpleasantly tough bit of cabbage,' before having 'erupted.'

Polanski countered that he was completely within his rights, indeed under an obligation, to change the script as he saw fit. At that stage, Travolta left the set and flew himself and his family back to Los Angeles. This abrupt 'withdrawal of labour', to use the term in the subsequent lawsuit, The project was then scrapped.

Buzz magazine reports that John Travolta walked off the set of the ill-fated movie, "The Double," because director Roman Polanski "had the bad form to start an argument over Travolta's belief in Scientology."

Travolta, however, gave the Paris-Match other reasons, saying Polanski wanted to make a cartoon, not a movie, and that the director added a nude scene "for no reason. . . . I have never acted naked in my whole career, and it's not now that I'm fat that I'm going to start."

Two years on, the director 'still [hadn't] forgiven Travolta ... So many people had put so much effort into the project when all of a sudden everything fell apart. Pierre Guffroy, my long-time designer, cried.