Want to Own John Travolta’s Head? A Denver Man Is Selling It on Craigslist

John Travolta fans, no need to worry. Someone from Denver isn’t selling the actual head of America’s favorite disco-era, faux-greaser, scientologist Sweathog. What Denver resident Jay Gerbino is selling is Travolta’s special-effects head from the 1996 movie Broken Arrow, in which the actor played Major Vic Deakins, an Air Force pilot who’s also (spoiler alert for this almost thirty-year-old popcorn flick) the bad guy.

Modern audiences might remember the end of that movie more than the movie itself, since it’s become something of a meme — Travolta finds himself at the business end of a warhead shot at him by Christian Slater from one end of a hurtling train, and has time to flinch, recognize his doom, and stand up and smile in grim defiance before the missile can shoot the length of a boxcar and bull-rush him full in the chest. Does it make sense? No. But it was the 1990s. It didn’t have to.

And you might think that finding a movie prop like this one for sale in a Denver Craigslist ad wouldn’t make much sense either, but the more you talk with current owner Gerbino, the more it does. He served as a mock-up technician on Broken Arrow during production, working alongside his father, Allen Gerbino, who worked as aerial coordinator.

“I grew up with aircraft and helicopters my entire life,” the younger Gerbino says. His father was an Air Force vet, a commercial helicopter and fixed wing pilot, who’d worked in films since the 1980s as a major contributor behind the scenes to dozens of major productions. “We worked together doing subcontractor movie work for years,” Gerbino says.

One of the first movies on which Gerbino worked alongside his father was the 1991 Charlie Sheen comedy Hot Shots, a satiric take on Top Gun — a parody flick that ironically got a sequel decades before Top Gun returned to the open skies and the big screen. Gerbino still has memorabilia from that movie, too, and many others.

“We collected a lot of stuff together,” Gerbino recalls. “Not so much because of value or whatever, but because it was stuff we worked on. It wasn’t about the movie — it was about my experiences that I’d keep stuff from.”

In 2017, Allen Gerbino came down with dementia, and Jay says he shut down about 4,000 square feet of warehouse space with “all the goodies from over the years.”

Not all the memories are good ones, Gerbino says, describing too many people in the movie industry as “self-centered, egotistical, sons-of-bitches. Pretty much all of them.”

But not Travolta. “Working with John was a treat. It was pretty cool. But we’d known John for years before that movie. We’d been family friends with him in the years leading up to him getting his pilot’s license,” Berbino says. Travolta started flying at fifteen, got his first license at 22 and famously flew a Boeing 707 to Haiti after the 2010 earthquake, bringing medical personnel and supplies into the disaster area. “He used to go flying with us in and out of Chino [California] almost every weekend,” he adds.

So with all that history, why is Gerbino selling now — and why on Craigslist? “I actually saw a couple of years ago where this auction house sold one of the other mock-ups of John’s head, for three or four grand,” he recalls. “They were advertising that it was the only one in existence, that the others had been destroyed during production. Well, I knew I had two of them on a shelf, so I contacted the auction house to correct them. They wanted no part of it. They’d already made their money.” That was around ten years ago.

But the money interested Gerbino, since he’d been carrying on a project — still under wraps for the most part — that has to do with patents and competing with Boeing and quarter-scale mock-ups of a flight device that could change the face of aeronautics, something that his father had started years before. Gerbino is self-funding the project as best he can, and is now close — close enough that a chunk of money possibly being made from selling one of his prized possessions could help finish it all. “It just seemed like it would be full circle,” Gerbino smiles. “That John’s head might be the thing that lets us bring this other project to completion.”

Gerbino says he put it up on Craigslist specifically because he doesn’t really need to sell. He’s already turned down a few lowball offers, one as low as $500. “It would be a cool story, you know,” he says, “if someone comes along with the right amount of money. It would close that circle and do some good for this next project. Do I need it? No. But I would, for the right price.”

Owning a piece of Hollywood memorabilia, and playing a role in what could possibly be an aeronautical technological breakthrough? It’s the stuff of movie magic.