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And that's before the demolition team begins detonating the mirrors. As he fires his deafening discharge of blanks at one glass panel after another, the rat-a-tat shattering becomes insanely percussive, like the wildest jazz drum solo played at quadruple speed and jet-engine volume. (Unsurprisingly, jazz is a Woo passion.) The final rounds explode, then all falls quiet. The boom-mike operator retracts his pole as the rotted-orange smell of hot, spent metal casings permeates the air. "Gotta wrap this gig," he says. "I think I'd like to work on a nice comedy next."

To stand out among the din of Hollywood's summer action movies these days, you've got to carry more firepower than ever. And that seems to be why Cage, walking broodily around the set in semi-character between takes, is so delighted to have signed up for a tag-team assault with Con Air, which debuted to a $25 million first weekend June 6, and Face/Off, which opens June 27. "The first time I saw a couple of John Woo movies," says Cage, "it was like an epiphany went off in my mind. This man had taken violence and turned it into a ballet. I know we've all heard Sam Peckinpah movies called 'balletlike' before, but...John Woo approaches a level of operatic emotion. And somehow he did it in a way that I didn't think body count. I didn't feel exploitation. I almost felt it was comedy, it's so over-the-top."

Woo's trademark bombast reaches an apotheosis in a Face/Off sequence where the terrorist's 4-year-old son witnesses a huge shoot-out while wearing headphones. As we watch the carnage from the child's point of view, his audiotape of Judy Garland singing "Over the Rainbow" surges up to take over the soundtrack. (At least, it did in preview screenings; a music-rights tangle has forced Woo to substitute a new version by Olivia Newton-John.) As the lyrics burble about happy bluebirds, images of bullet-riddled bodies and thousands of tiny squib explosions — breakaway glass, torn-up furniture, bullet-rent flesh — go cascading by. It's a nod, Cage says, to the first time Woo saw The Wizard of Oz in a Hong Kong theater as a young boy.

Operatic? Bombastic? Suits Cage just fine, since he's anxious to take tired old action conventions and "breathe a sense of being out of control" into them. "I wanted Castor Troy to have a more mod look than the usual way we see gangsters in movies, with that Armani suit," he says. "So at the start of the movie, I've got him carrying gold guns and wearing gold cuff links. He's sort of the Liberace of crime, is what I've done with him."

Sipping his second espresso over lunch at the Hotel Bel-Air four months later, John Travolta suddenly steps out of his smooth, star-royalty vibe to turn presidential. He's due to leave any moment for the set of Mike Nichols' Primary Colors. But being a man loath to rush past incidental pleasures, he dallies to share his impersonation of Bill Clinton, the thinly disguised subject of Joe Klein's best-selling peek at the road to the White House. "I feeel yer pain, son," he drawls, hilariously, then bends the two-dimensional impression into a rounded, "more impressionistic" performance — and though he's now 43, he does it with all the show-off aplomb he had as Tony Manero strutting down a street in Saturday Night Fever 20 years ago. "I'm half-Irish," he grins. "My mother was Irish. Deadly with imitations. Loved mimicking people. And we all grew up with this fine art of, How well could you get someone down?"


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