Who killed The General's Daughter? In the original Nelson DeMille book, a bestselling murder mystery, the daughter of the title is found murdered. A military investigator's search for the killer is complicated when he uncovers the victim's kinky sexual past and her father, a war hero with political ambitions, tries to hush it up, pinning the blame on the most obvious suspect. But the investigator is not satisfied . . .

Neither were the various filmmakers involved in the property's long process of adaptation to the screen. The star, John Travolta, the producer, Mace Newfield of Hunt for Red October fame, and a succession of screenwriters including the venerable William Goldman apparently all took a shot at rewriting the ending of the book and reassigning the guilt for its central crime.

"Over a seven-year period there were a number of writers," admits Newfield. "The problem was who the killer was. There were three scripts with three different culprits. It's typical. If it doesn't happen quickly, they go back into the development process. Sometimes you have to find your way back to the first draft that the first writer did and say, wait a minute."

That was the response of director Simon West, who in his debut, Con Air, demonstrated a knack for taking a generic studio product and tweaking it with quirky wit and black humor. "Did we draw lots to see who would be the killer? No. It's a big movie, we took it seriously, we didn't just draw lots. We flipped a coin. I can't even remember who did it in the original script, there were so many versions. There was a sword fight at the end of one of them.

"So I went back to how the book was, unpicking the seven years of development. I really just edited down the book, I don't know why if you have a decent book everybody has to stick something in. This version was much closer to the book than any other draft ever was."

Well, almost. John Travolta, who plays the military investigator, initially wanted his wife, Kelly Preston, in the role of his love interest, another military investigator assigned to the case. That changed. "We'd booked ourselves in it," he explains, "and then the contract hadn't closed and we found another piece that we felt was better suited for us. That was The Shipping News. Which it looks like we're not going to do now, but at that time we thought that was better for us than this piece. In theory, it was and is, but we'll do something else. She ended up immediately getting cast in Kevin Costner's For the Love of the Game. This was better for Madeleine [Stowe] to do with me, and that was better for her to do with Kevin. It worked out perfectly."

For him, maybe. With Preston out, her part -- filled at the last minute by Stowe -- grew smaller and smaller, to West's dismay. "In one of the drafts they were actually trying to get rid of the Stowe character. I said, you've got to have a woman in the story because it's about women in the military, and the only other woman is dead. So I kind of hung onto that."

Meanwhile, Travolta, who's one of Scientology's most famous followers (Tom Cruise is another), has already moved on to his next big project, an adaptation of Battlefield Earth, the sci-fi bestseller by Scientology founder F. Ron Hubbard. "We are in mid preproduction. We start in July. We've got the co-director of Star Wars, Roger Christian, we've got the cinematographer from Star Wars, we've got the people from Independence Day and Godzilla doing all the creative design, we've got Barry Pepper, Forest Whitaker, and a great cast. We're hoping that it will be a huge success for everyone. I'm playing a 10-foot-tall alien."

Somehow, after The General's Daughter, that makes all the sense in the world.

The General's Daughter opens this Friday, June 18.