November 3, 2021 • 41 mins
An incident involving an angry Willis and even angrier police officers prompts the star to rethink his life in the spotlight. Just when Willis has had enough, an accident opens the door to a different life in Hailey, Idaho.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
This is an I Heart original. It's Memorial Day weekend.
Seven people all over the country are having big celebrations,
but few are having as big or as loud as
celebration as Bruce Willis. The actor who was experiencing both
(00:29):
newfound fame and newfound wealth after years of trying to
break into the entertainment business, is enjoying the fruits of
his labor. He's making fifty thousand dollars a week on
the hit ABC series Moonlighting. There are TV commercials and movies,
and a script for an action film that's going to
(00:50):
change his life. His house in the Hollywood Hills is
packed to the rafters with friends. His expensive stereo system
is cranked up and playing a bunch of different albums,
including classics from the likes of Diana Ross. It's also
playing tracks from a new Motown Records release titled The
Return of Bruno. The album's most memorable single was under
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the Boardwalk, a cover song featuring Bruno's tenor voice layered
over the deep bass of his backing Bandwalk When the Sun.
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Bruno is Willis's musical alter ego, sort of the way
David Bowie went by Ziggy Stardust or Garth Brooks went
by Chris Gaines. Willis has toured as Bruno, played live
dates as Bruno. When he's Bruno, he somehow possesses even
more swagger than usual. He's uninhibited, and now that he's
(02:01):
got a record, he's going to play it. Hey, it's
a holiday weekend. There's nothing wrong with Bruce Willis playing
his own album at his own house, except it's loud.
Allegedly really loud. That's what Willis's neighbors tell the police
when they phone in a noise complaint, and so at
(02:25):
some point in the evening, Bruce Willis is greeted by
patrol officers who have come to ask him to turn
down the music, to turn down the brunow and appease
his neighbors. But Bruce Willis is not what law enforcement
would describe as cooperative. According to the police report, he
(02:46):
doesn't agree to turn down the music. Instead, he tells
the cops that they aren't invited, they don't have a warrant,
and to get the out of his house. The cops
do not comply. There is more yelling, posturing. Willis's friends
get involved, and then things escalate. What happens next can
(03:13):
best be described as better. More cops show up, allegedly,
so do police helicopters. Willis is handcuffed, arrested, and the party,
at least for the moment, is open. There will be
a number of changes in Bruce Willis's life following this altercation.
(03:37):
The most important is that he'll soon decide life in
the Hollywood Hills. Life in Hollywood might not be for him.
Neither is fame. The arrest makes the tabloids, so does
his new relationship with actress Dummy Moore. Bruce Willis just
wants to be free, to make his music blast, his
(03:58):
music unwind, and to live his life without being put
under a microscope or in the back of a police car.
He was becoming too famous for comfort. And the worst part,
die Hard hadn't even come out yet. For I Heart Radio,
This is Haleywood and I Heart original podcast, I'm your
(04:23):
host Danis Schwartz, and this is episode two, Welcome to
the Party pal. At the beginning of the nine eighties,
Bruce Willis wasn't yet Bruce Willis home wasn't the Hollywood
Hills but a fifth floor walk up in Hell's Kitchen.
(04:44):
He was a struggling actor who had come out of
the working class town of Penn's Grove, New Jersey. While
he was going to auditions, Willis supported himself like most
actors do in the service industry. He worked as a
bartender at Cafe Central, a hip New York City hang
(05:05):
out at the corner of Street and Amsterdam Avenue. For Willis,
it was an opportunity to catch some of New York's
most renowned actors off the clock. Al Pacino, Robert de Niro,
and Danny A. Yello were regulars. So was John Goodman,
who became a close friend of Willis's. But in some respects,
(05:27):
the real attraction of Cafe Central wasn't the opportunity to
catch Pacino or de Niro. It was Willis who applied
his trade as a bartender by effortlessly charming everyone inside
in the bar. He was very cocky, very funny, kind
(05:47):
of allowed. You know, some more tenders want to lend
into the background, as some want to make an impression.
He sort of had even then, this thing that you
couldn't stop looking at him. That's Martha Frankel. You remember
Martha from her ill fated interview with Bruce Willis for
movie line The one where he forced a restaurant to
close so he wouldn't have to deal with the world
(06:09):
at large. But Martha also knew Willis long before then.
I mean, I was starting out as a writer and
a lot of my friends were upcoming actors. You watch,
you know, you see what's going on. She frequently stopped
into Cafe Central in the early nineteen eighties and witnessed
Willis in action, tossing around cocktail shakers and one liners,
(06:32):
a lot of gorgeous young actors and actresses filling those boots,
and Bruce isn't you know, he's not. It's not that
he's such a show stop or physically. When you see
somebody like a young Aidan Quinn, a young Puccino, a
young Robert Duvaal, maybe you wouldn't notice Bruce as much.
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But he had a personality, and he had a big personality.
So when he started making a people remembered him. For
Martha and everyone else in Willis's orbit in those days,
they could tell there was something about this guy. He
was quick, witty, and confident. If you went to Cafe Central,
he stood out. I liked him as a bartender. This
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was somebody who came up in New York and you
know how to work for it. He he was not
handed anything. At the time. Willis went by a nickname. Yeah,
I think they called him Bruno. Bruno was a perfect
name for a charismatic bartender in a New York bar,
(07:37):
a character among characters. I can only imagine that it
was like a roll to him, and he was good
at it. He could like keep five conversations going. Bruss
always remembered your name, he remembered your backstory, he remembered
your friends. And that's you know, you make a lot
(07:58):
of tips when you do that. But I don't think
it was what he was looking to do. You got
the sense, Bruce or Bruno was destined for bigger and
better things. But Willis didn't tend bar as some actors do,
for a few months or even a year. He did
(08:20):
it for at least six years, spending his nights watching
accomplished actors come and go while he auditioned during the day.
While bartending, he nabbed the Verdict and some other bit
and stage parts. The eighties war on. He eventually got
an agent, and that agent eventually sent him to audition
(08:42):
for a movie called Desperately Seeking Susan, which would go
on to star Madonna, but not co star Bruce Willis.
Then Willis landed an audition at ABC, where writer Glenn
Gordon Karen was mounting an hour long comedy titled moon Lighting.
(09:02):
Karen's idea was to take the detective format, which had
been popular on television practically since television was invented, and
turn it into a rapid fire, screwball comedy. His leads,
private detectives David Addison and Mattie Hayes, would be a
combustible pair working cases for their Blue Moon Detective Agency
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while trying to ignore their mutual attraction. The dialogue would
come fast and furious. The pace would be snappy. The
idea was ambitious. At the time, Network TV was home
to the A Team, Who's the Boss, and other formulaic hits.
Moonlighting would be a step away from the usual. Karen
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found his Maddie in Sybil Shepherd, an actress best known
at the time for appearing in The Last Picture Show
in and Taxi Driver in s But despite seeing hundreds
of actors, Karen hadn't yet found his David Addison. Addison
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would have to be confident, brash, kind of cocky but
also funny and charming and gracious. Call it a Bruce
Willis type. The role he was already playing at Cafe Central.
I mean, he was so good at when lighting, and
you know, it's really like, wow, that guy is doing that.
(10:28):
He was funny, and he was sort of light on
his feet. There was something kind of shocking about how
great he was in that role. Just like that, Bruno's
bar attending days were over, and so were Willis's days
of blending into the background. It's a romantic comedy. Really
looking forward to working with you, kid. Boom Lighting premiering Sunday,
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March three. Moonlighting premiered in March and was practically an
overnight hit. Critics and audiences fell in love with David
Addison and by extension, with Bruce Willis. Moonlighting didn't take
itself seriously. Sometimes Willis would turn directly to the camera
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and break the fourth wall. You know, That's what I
like about this place. You learned something new every day.
But you get serious. I just had my hand on
your behind. If I get any more serious, we're gonna
moves to cable. A few shows. Few actors could get
away with something so brazen, but viewers were willing to
go with it. It scored multiple Emmy nominations, and by
season three rose as high as number nine in the ratings.
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Moonlighting had a domino effect on Willis's career. During the
first season of Moonlighting, Willis was familiar to just seventeen
percent of the television viewing audience. Call it the oh
that guy factor. By the second season, his familiarity had
shot up to fifty seven percent. One of the people
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getting familiar with Willis was a man named Edgar Bronfman Jr.
Bronfman was high up on the chain of command of Seagrams,
the adult beverage company that was getting ready to launch
a new alcohol brand, Seagram's Golden Wine Cooler. Bronfman needed
a spokesman who was hip, recognizable to audiences, someone you'd
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want to hang out and have a drink with, and
someone manly enough to make the idea of sipping wine
coolers palatable or sexy. Even Moonlighting money was good, Seagram's
money was better. After negotiating with Willis's agent, Arnold Ritkin,
Bronkman agreed to pay Willis between five and seven million
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dollars for appearing in the Wine cooler ads over a
two to three year period. Willis was all too happy
to agree. He had, after all, plenty of experience selling
drinks for a lot less in tips. Oddly enough, it
was Cafe Central's old patron, Martha Frankel, who wound up
writing some of the spots for Ogilvie and Mather, the
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ad agency behind the campaign. Those ads were a big
deal for a while. Oh my god, I forgot about them.
Oh you know, I think I wrote one of them. Yeah,
I think I did. I worked for that company. Oh
my god, I've got about that. Holy Moley. The ads
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featured Willis hanging out with his friends, sipping sea grooms
and naturally playing the harmonica and the slogan this is
where the fund starts. Another spot featured a then unknown
Sharon Stone, and another ad centered around a fictional wedding
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and Willis's somewhat unethical attempts to pick up the bride.
Didn't the toast serious golden to it sious, because that's
the toasts. A commercial willis is now patented blend of humor, sex,
appeal and charm was condensed into a perfect thirty seconds.
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It was a very nineteen eighties idea of what culture
and advertisers believed men should look like and what they
should sound like. Bruce was in control of the room,
just like he'd been the m C of Cafe Central.
The women in the commercials may not have literally swooned,
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but they all seemed charmed by Willis. By his boldness,
sales of Seagram's went up, and people took to calling
it somewhat disturbingly Bruce Juice. Bruce's Brunos harmonica was beginning
to appear in other places. The musical interludes in Moonlighting,
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where Willis even played the harmonica and the pilot, attracted
the attention of Motown Records president Jay Lasker. He invited
Willis out to dinner and asked him a pointed question,
did Willis want to record an album? The result was
the Return of Bruno, a Motown Records album released in
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early seven that featured Willis backed by The Heaters, a
band he had discovered in a North Hollywood bar. It
was accompanied by an HBO special that was part music,
part comedy, and featured Willis slipping into his harmonizing alter ego.
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He even created a fictional backstory celebrities like Michael J.
Fox and Elton John appeared in the special to sing
Bruno's praises. It was kind of like this is spinal
tap for his character a mockumentary. Here's Ringo star delivering
his line deadpan. Well, if it being for Bruno, there
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would have been no Beatles, and if not for Bruce,
there might not have been a Haleywood either. The thing was,
Bruce Willis hadn't exactly fantasized about being the face of
wine coolers or even the face of a television network.
Being seen, recognized, even hunted by photographers was not suited
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to his temperament. Sure, he was a natural on stage,
but that didn't mean the spotlight always had to be
on him, did it. Glenn Gordon Karen, who had launched
Willis's career, once said he felt like he had to
apologize to Willis for the crime, the crime of making
him famous. That's how much Willis resisted being a familiar face,
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and a hint that he would go to some lengths
to avoid it if he could. He can't go back
to bartending, or maybe there's some way he can. Despite
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his discomfort with his growing fame, a lot was going
right for Willis in. For one thing, he never got
charged for his run in with the cops, and for another,
he met Demi Moore. Moore had been working steadily, first
in the soap opera General Hospital, and then in Hollywood
in films like Saying Almost Fire and About Last Night.
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Raised partly in small Pennsylvania towns Cannonsburg and Charleroy before
moving to California at age thirteen. She had a maturity
on screen that seemed counter to her age. She was
in her mid twenties. According to Moore's memoir Inside Out,
she had just split from actor Emilio Estevez when she
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ran into will Us at a party. He was behind
the bar, shaking out cocktails just for fun. He was well.
He was Bruce Willis, charming and at least in this case, deferential.
The more said at that point she hadn't seen Moonlighting,
only his Seagram's commercials. Apparently Seagram's was where the funds started.
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He asked for a number, walked her to her car,
and the two began dating. In November, they decided to
get married. The two became one of Hollywood's power couples,
doubly famous, but there was comfort in the fact that
they each knew the other didn't want status or money,
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because each of them already had plenty of both. They
also had something else in common. They were from small towns.
Neither one had been raised, like Estevez, in a show
biz family, and when talk turned to wanting to raise children,
the idea of doing it among the artificial veneer of
Hollywood seemed counterintuitive. Willis said as much in interview with
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The New York Times, where he described his dislike of
Los Angeles. I don't live in l A because it's
a pretty weird town, and I don't want to raise
my kids here, he said. But if not California, then
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where where could Bruce Willis and Demi Moore retreat to
that would allow them to escape what was becoming an
increasing burden of being known. They soon got their answer,
It just took Willis breaking a bone to realize it.
(19:56):
In March seven, just two months before or Willis would
be shoved into a police car in the Hollywood Hills,
Willis went on vacation in Sun Valley, the posh ski
resort in the Wood River Valley area of Idaho. Thanks
to moonlighting, Willis was now in an exclusive club that
gathered in the area, the club that welcomed successful people
(20:19):
to fraternize in exclusive vacation spots. He tackled Sun Valley's
ski slope with real zeal And on his first trip
down that day, cruising over the immaculate white powder, he
fell and broke his collar bone. While Willis was recovering
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hanging out with little else to do, he was properly
introduced to Wood River Valley to catch him the bustling
and expensive town where Clint Eastwood and Tom Hanks puttered around,
and to a town about fifteen miles down the road, Haley, Idaho. Well,
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the north part around Catchem and Sun Valley. Um, those
are the two uh urban I'll put that in quotes.
Neither one are big enough to be urban, but they
are large because of the tourist industry. And then about
eleven miles south of that is where Haley is located.
That's Tom Blanchard, a one time county commissioner and Haley historian.
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And as you move from north to south, you move
from greater wealth to lesser wealth. And so the valley
is structured in tiers in terms of its proximity to
the Sun Valley destination resort, both in terms of wealth
and class amenities, you know, other things that make a
community function and viable. The further you get from the resort,
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the more modest your surroundings. Hailey was and is bordered
by a lot of public land nestled near the Big
Wood River. A simpler life echoed through its modest streets,
where lumber yards once sold groceries, and some small buildings
were erected from mail order kits. During Willis's accidental Hollywood hiatus,
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he probably drove past the Haley Public Library, the J. J.
Tracy drug store, and the J. C. Fox Building, where
a beloved town doctor once made house calls on a snowmobile.
The Liberty Theater movie house, originally the site of an
ice skating rink. Freedman Memorial Airport, helped shuttle the nearby
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movie stars to and from their ski retreats. It was
love at first sight ready in Willis quietly purchased a
twenty acre property on the edge of Haley, in a
housing development known as Flying Heart Ranch. He officially became
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a resident of Haley. Willis and more were serious about
small town ambitions. Hailey seemed custom made for them, especially
for someone with a family. The community was known to
have a very good school system, so that was an
attractive thing right from the goal. At the time they
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moved there, Hailey was home to over three thousand residents,
but at least for a little while, the fact that
Willis was a new resident seemed to escape notice. Why
you know, I'm not even sure when he came here.
I didn't know somehow, remember being in the late eighties,
but probably you know, I'd have to have to say
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some time in the early nineties nineties, when he started
actually buying some Hailey property. It's probably my first awareness
of it. But there was no parade, no newspaper notice,
no grand proclamation that the two had arrived. If there
had been, it probably would have driven Willis right back
(24:06):
out of town. What he wanted was to be unseen,
at least that's what he said he wanted, you know,
the whole thing about he doesn't want to be recognized.
I've been through it Spike Lee a bunch of times,
and he says, you know, you pull down your baseball cap,
you get on the subway, nobody knows who you are.
I've been around de Niro, I've been around people who
are very famous, and they can blend in. Bruce wanted
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to be noticed and left alone. I don't think that's
possible to be noticed and be left alone, a paradox
that would shape Bruce for the rest of his career.
After Willis moved in, he approached his neighbor, a local
lawyer named Ed Lawson. See Willis didn't really want a neighbor,
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any neighbors really. Lawson didn't even live on the lot.
But if WILLI spot Lawson's lot, it would be a
kind of buffer zone to keep out the prying eyes
of the media. Lawson may or may not have hesitated,
but this was the lesson of success. If Bruce Willis
wants something, he can afford to be persistent. Lawson never
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confirmed the story, but the rumor in Haley was that
laws and sold the lot to Willis and made two
hundred thousand dollars in profit for Willis. There was no
such thing as too high a price on privacy. Lawson
actually did business with Willis again. Lawson and his wife
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Julie owned what was known as Freedman Mansion just off
of Main Street in town. It was a grand, old
place which once belonged to the Freedman family, who had
helped shape Haley decades prior. Again, Willis approached Lawson and
made him an offer he couldn't refuse, and he didn't.
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The mansion wasn't really for Bruce, though, it was for Demi.
Before long, the mansion had over two thousand occupants, all
of them were Moore's porcelain dolls. Willis had bought her
a dollhouse, a really fancy dollhouse. This may have been
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the first sign that things in Haley we're going to
start looking and feeling a little different. What Bruce Willis wants,
Lawson said, Bruce Willis gets, and that would be especially
true when John McClain would send Willis into new levels
of wealth and influence, with a desire to escape getting
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even stronger. The time was coming when Willis would have
the means to do a lot more in Haley than
buy a dollhouse. In nine eighty six, Willis was spending
his evenings recording his album The Return of Bruno. During
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the day he was shooting a movie called Blind Date,
his first leading role and the first time audiences would
be tempted by the idea of seeing the star of
moonlighting on the big screen. It turned out not to
be a very compelling offer. Blind Date starred Willis as
Walter Davis, a mild mannered man who gets set up
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with a woman named Nadia played by Kim Bay singer.
Nadia seems shy too, until she starts drinking. At that point,
the movie turns into a mad cap comedy, with Willis
trying frantically to keep up with an escalating series of
events caused by the perpetually intoxicated Nadia. There have been
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high hopes for the movie, which was directed by Blake
Edwards of the Pink Panther fame. Madonna and her then
husband Sean Penn had only been set to star. Try Star,
which was making the movie, was so keen on getting
Willis that they gave the movie a green light without
a completed script. Blind Date actually didn't do too badly.
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It opened in March at number one, knocking Lethal Weapon
off its perch, but it was a busy season at
the movies, with films like Platoon dominating the conversation and
guaranteed hits like Beverly Hill's Cop Two taking over the
summer months. Blind Date did edge out Spaceballs, making around
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thirty nine million dollars, but it couldn't outpace hits like
Dirty Dancing or RoboCop. A second movie with the Edwards
Willis combo, a Western titled Sunset, fared poorly too. It
was released the following year and barely made five million dollars.
At least he got to ride a horse, though maybe
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even got to keep the cowboy outfit for later. But
so far, audiences were uncertain about Willis on the big screen,
and increasingly they were having concerns about Moonlighting two. The
central conceit of the show was the ongoing sexual tension
between David Addison and Maddie Hayes, and the will they
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or won't they conflict that fueled their on screen relationship.
In March, viewers found out they would new Moonlighting, I
feel reckless, and suddenly the air had left the room.
The two were now a couple, an item, and all
of that dramatic tension evaporated. So did ratings for decades afterward,
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Whenever TV producers would talk about unconsummated sexual tension on screen,
they referenced Moonlighting as a kind of cautionary tale. Before
jumping the shark entered the pop culture lexicon, you would
we want to pull a Moonlighting and a racist shows
reason for existing. It wasn't yet time for a sad
(30:08):
Harmonica solo, But this was a turning point in the
career of Bruce Willis. Moonlighting wouldn't be around forever. His
first big screen role hadn't made much of an impression.
Sunset wasn't going to help. Maybe that's why Willis's agent,
Arnold Rifkin decided not to play it cool when twentieth
Century Fox came around wondering if Willis might be interested
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in replacing Frank Sinatra. In ninety eight, Sinatra had starred
in The Detective, an adaptation of a novel by author
Roderick Thorpe. It was a pot boiler about a detective
hot on a murder case while dealing with marital issues
(30:53):
at home. Nothing to groundbreaking, But when Fox acquired the
right to Thorpe's sequel, Nothing Las Forever over ten years later,
they were contractually obliged to offer the lead role to Sinatra,
but Sinatra was roughly seventy at the time, a problem
for what The role would require a lot of action,
(31:15):
a lot of guns, a lot of crawling through air
dunce in the book, Sinatra's character joe Leland, is up
against terrorists who take over a high rise building. So
Fox started looking for other actors. Some of the names
were predictable. Arnold Schwarzenegger, he said, no, Cafe Central customer,
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Al Pacino. No. The list of people who turned the
movie down got longer and longer until Fox began talking
to Arnold Rifkin, who in turn started talking about Bruce Willis.
Instead of acknowledging Willis's star might be cooling, Rifkin took
the opposite approach. He demanded Fox pay Willis five millillion
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dollars for the lead role, which was no longer joe Leland,
but John McClain Fox was taken aback. At the time
that kind of money it was virtually unheard of. Sylvester
Stallone had gotten seven million dollars to play Rambo in
the sequel with the laborious title of Rambo Colon First
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Blood Part two, but those kinds of salaries were unusual
except for the biggest of the big screen guys, and
this was the eighties, Television was still seen as the
lesser of the two mediums. Willis was a small screen guy.
Fox countered Rifkin kept shaking his head. It was five
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million dollars or have a nice day. Fox blinked. They
made the deal, and the entire film industry took notice. Sure,
Bruce Willis was popular, had charisma, but five million dollars
for the moonlighting guy. Willis began shooting Nothing Lasts Forever
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under its new title die Hard, Written by Jeb Stewart
and Stephen Ee SUSA and directed by John McTiernan. It
became a lean, taught action thriller about an East Coast
cop up against the droll villain Hans Gruber played by
Alan Rickman. The craftsmanship of the movie, the dialogue, the
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action scenes, the acting was firing on all cylinders. Production
went smoothly, although in one stunt Willis only narrowly avoided
disaster while jumping off a building tied to a fire hose.
It looked goal though Sunset was released while die Hard
(33:52):
was in production and it had bombed. An early trailer
for die Hard was met with a cool reception from audiences.
Was Willis trying to be arnold? The studio kept playing
with Willis's image on the posters, shrinking him down and
making the building bigger, Willis was in danger of being
outshone by a high rise. No one was really sure
(34:16):
what was going to happen. Until die Hard opened in July.
It was possible Fox had made a terrible decision. Instead,
die Hard exploded. It was all here, the everyman appeal,
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the regular body fit but not superhuman, and most of
all of vulnerability. Looking back now, it's easy to see
Willis was a kind of modern progression of male action heroes.
Before him stood men with four percent body fat and
wooden line deliveries. Willis humanized action stars. After John McClean
(35:01):
walked through broken glass on bare feet, you knew you
weren't in the company of a guy with all the answers, John,
John McClean, you're still with us, ye little thing, Vidico,
I'd rather be in Philadelphia. Chalk up two more vague guys.
(35:22):
Well the boys down here'll be glad to hear that.
You know, we've got a pool going on. You what
kind of odds am I getting? You don't want to know?
Pulled me down for I'm good for all the casual
irreverence that actors like Chris Pratt and Ryan Reynolds inject
into movies today. Willis did it first. With the success
(35:50):
of die Hard, came a new level of stardom when
that vastly exceeded what David Addison, Bruno and a wine
cooler had afforded him. In Moonlighting, he played this sort
of romantic league that that wasn't really a romantic league.
But when the die Hard movies came out and he
(36:13):
was huge, and he was you know, he's sort of
like this average guy, average looking guy that all of
a sudden everybody wanted a piece of men wanted to
be friends with him, and women wanted to sleep with him,
which I don't think had been happening for him before that.
Willis obviously enjoyed being a matinee idol. It was what
(36:35):
he wanted. The dough was good too, but he bristled
at the off screen attention. It was like he went
from obscurity. You know, it's one thing to be the
hot blood tender at Cafe Central. It's another for people
to recognize you on the street. You have to either
be very humble, or you have to like it, or
(36:58):
you have to turn it off some now, and you know,
I've been around people who do all those six You know,
some days they're okay with it, and some days now
they want to take their kids to the park if
they don't want to sign autographs for you, And I
understand it. But he was like he was surly before
before being surly was okay. Die Hard became the seventh
(37:20):
highest grossing movie of ahead of Tom Cruise's Cocktail and
even Stallone's more tersely titled Rambo three. It also became
a genre unto itself, with dozens of movies copying it's
contained action premise formula. Speed is die Hard on a
bus under siege? Was die Hard on a boat? Die
(37:43):
Hard to released in? Was die Hard at an airport.
The film didn't just change Hollywood filmmaking or star salaries.
It fundamentally changed the career of Bruce Willis, who now
had the momentum of a massive box office hit behind him.
(38:07):
Moonlighting would last just one more season. There would be
no more commercials, not until Japan came calling with some
lucrative offers anyway, and financially, Bruce Willis had positioned himself
not only to be a well paid actor, but an
incredibly well paid actor, one wealthy enough to buy not
(38:27):
just a nice private property in Haley, but a good
chunk of Haley itself. In effect, Bruce Willis fell in
love twice in seven, once with More and again with Haley, Idaho.
And life was good. Haley was good. But as Willis
(38:47):
grew more and more successful, as more and more studio
paychecks were cashed, his desire to step outside the boundaries
of his home and make his mark, and Haley grew
and it wasn't going to stop with a giant dollhouse.
Haley was, for his purposes, the perfect town, because Haley
(39:09):
had something that made it unique, made it unlike any
other remote part of the country Willis could have retreated to.
It was a place that had an unspoken agreement to
protect the famous, to let them live in relative peace
and quiet, to be noticed and left alone. The question
(39:31):
was would Bruce Willis do the same for them next time?
On Haleywood. It wasn't really very much of a viable town,
and we're empty storefronts in downtown Haley. And then all
of a sudden we got Bruce Willis and somebody came
into my office, you know, to get your camera. Go
(39:54):
out into the alley. Bruce Willis has carried two by
fours over his shoulder that they helped the construction war workers,
and then he built right downtown Haley, and he spent
a couple of million bucks at least on renovating him.
It's stuck out like a sore thumb because it's a
kind of thing you would see in a major city.
Everything else is, you know, almost tie up your horse outside.
(40:21):
Haleywood is hosted by Danish Schwartz. This show is written
by Jake Rosson, Editing, sound design and mixing by me
Josh Fisher, Additional editing by Mary do original music by
Natasha Jacobs, mixing by Jeremy Thal, Research and fact checking
by Jake Rosson, Austin Thompson and Marissa Brown. Show logo
(40:46):
by Lucy Quentinia. Our senior producer is Ryan Murdoch and
our executive producer is Jason English. Special thanks to the
people of Hailey, Idaho and all those who shared their stories.
Haleywood is a production of Heart Radio. Until next Time,
(41:09):
m HM.
This is an I Heart original. It's Memorial Day weekend.
Seven people all over the country are having big celebrations,
but few are having as big or as loud as
celebration as Bruce Willis. The actor who was experiencing both
(00:29):
newfound fame and newfound wealth after years of trying to
break into the entertainment business, is enjoying the fruits of
his labor. He's making fifty thousand dollars a week on
the hit ABC series Moonlighting. There are TV commercials and movies,
and a script for an action film that's going to
(00:50):
change his life. His house in the Hollywood Hills is
packed to the rafters with friends. His expensive stereo system
is cranked up and playing a bunch of different albums,
including classics from the likes of Diana Ross. It's also
playing tracks from a new Motown Records release titled The
Return of Bruno. The album's most memorable single was under
(01:16):
the Boardwalk, a cover song featuring Bruno's tenor voice layered
over the deep bass of his backing Bandwalk When the Sun.
(01:38):
Bruno is Willis's musical alter ego, sort of the way
David Bowie went by Ziggy Stardust or Garth Brooks went
by Chris Gaines. Willis has toured as Bruno, played live
dates as Bruno. When he's Bruno, he somehow possesses even
more swagger than usual. He's uninhibited, and now that he's
(02:01):
got a record, he's going to play it. Hey, it's
a holiday weekend. There's nothing wrong with Bruce Willis playing
his own album at his own house, except it's loud.
Allegedly really loud. That's what Willis's neighbors tell the police
when they phone in a noise complaint, and so at
(02:25):
some point in the evening, Bruce Willis is greeted by
patrol officers who have come to ask him to turn
down the music, to turn down the brunow and appease
his neighbors. But Bruce Willis is not what law enforcement
would describe as cooperative. According to the police report, he
(02:46):
doesn't agree to turn down the music. Instead, he tells
the cops that they aren't invited, they don't have a warrant,
and to get the out of his house. The cops
do not comply. There is more yelling, posturing. Willis's friends
get involved, and then things escalate. What happens next can
(03:13):
best be described as better. More cops show up, allegedly,
so do police helicopters. Willis is handcuffed, arrested, and the party,
at least for the moment, is open. There will be
a number of changes in Bruce Willis's life following this altercation.
(03:37):
The most important is that he'll soon decide life in
the Hollywood Hills. Life in Hollywood might not be for him.
Neither is fame. The arrest makes the tabloids, so does
his new relationship with actress Dummy Moore. Bruce Willis just
wants to be free, to make his music blast, his
(03:58):
music unwind, and to live his life without being put
under a microscope or in the back of a police car.
He was becoming too famous for comfort. And the worst part,
die Hard hadn't even come out yet. For I Heart Radio,
This is Haleywood and I Heart original podcast, I'm your
(04:23):
host Danis Schwartz, and this is episode two, Welcome to
the Party pal. At the beginning of the nine eighties,
Bruce Willis wasn't yet Bruce Willis home wasn't the Hollywood
Hills but a fifth floor walk up in Hell's Kitchen.
(04:44):
He was a struggling actor who had come out of
the working class town of Penn's Grove, New Jersey. While
he was going to auditions, Willis supported himself like most
actors do in the service industry. He worked as a
bartender at Cafe Central, a hip New York City hang
(05:05):
out at the corner of Street and Amsterdam Avenue. For Willis,
it was an opportunity to catch some of New York's
most renowned actors off the clock. Al Pacino, Robert de Niro,
and Danny A. Yello were regulars. So was John Goodman,
who became a close friend of Willis's. But in some respects,
(05:27):
the real attraction of Cafe Central wasn't the opportunity to
catch Pacino or de Niro. It was Willis who applied
his trade as a bartender by effortlessly charming everyone inside
in the bar. He was very cocky, very funny, kind
(05:47):
of allowed. You know, some more tenders want to lend
into the background, as some want to make an impression.
He sort of had even then, this thing that you
couldn't stop looking at him. That's Martha Frankel. You remember
Martha from her ill fated interview with Bruce Willis for
movie line The one where he forced a restaurant to
close so he wouldn't have to deal with the world
(06:09):
at large. But Martha also knew Willis long before then.
I mean, I was starting out as a writer and
a lot of my friends were upcoming actors. You watch,
you know, you see what's going on. She frequently stopped
into Cafe Central in the early nineteen eighties and witnessed
Willis in action, tossing around cocktail shakers and one liners,
(06:32):
a lot of gorgeous young actors and actresses filling those boots,
and Bruce isn't you know, he's not. It's not that
he's such a show stop or physically. When you see
somebody like a young Aidan Quinn, a young Puccino, a
young Robert Duvaal, maybe you wouldn't notice Bruce as much.
(06:54):
But he had a personality, and he had a big personality.
So when he started making a people remembered him. For
Martha and everyone else in Willis's orbit in those days,
they could tell there was something about this guy. He
was quick, witty, and confident. If you went to Cafe Central,
he stood out. I liked him as a bartender. This
(07:17):
was somebody who came up in New York and you
know how to work for it. He he was not
handed anything. At the time. Willis went by a nickname. Yeah,
I think they called him Bruno. Bruno was a perfect
name for a charismatic bartender in a New York bar,
(07:37):
a character among characters. I can only imagine that it
was like a roll to him, and he was good
at it. He could like keep five conversations going. Bruss
always remembered your name, he remembered your backstory, he remembered
your friends. And that's you know, you make a lot
(07:58):
of tips when you do that. But I don't think
it was what he was looking to do. You got
the sense, Bruce or Bruno was destined for bigger and
better things. But Willis didn't tend bar as some actors do,
for a few months or even a year. He did
(08:20):
it for at least six years, spending his nights watching
accomplished actors come and go while he auditioned during the day.
While bartending, he nabbed the Verdict and some other bit
and stage parts. The eighties war on. He eventually got
an agent, and that agent eventually sent him to audition
(08:42):
for a movie called Desperately Seeking Susan, which would go
on to star Madonna, but not co star Bruce Willis.
Then Willis landed an audition at ABC, where writer Glenn
Gordon Karen was mounting an hour long comedy titled moon Lighting.
(09:02):
Karen's idea was to take the detective format, which had
been popular on television practically since television was invented, and
turn it into a rapid fire, screwball comedy. His leads,
private detectives David Addison and Mattie Hayes, would be a
combustible pair working cases for their Blue Moon Detective Agency
(09:24):
while trying to ignore their mutual attraction. The dialogue would
come fast and furious. The pace would be snappy. The
idea was ambitious. At the time, Network TV was home
to the A Team, Who's the Boss, and other formulaic hits.
Moonlighting would be a step away from the usual. Karen
(09:46):
found his Maddie in Sybil Shepherd, an actress best known
at the time for appearing in The Last Picture Show
in and Taxi Driver in s But despite seeing hundreds
of actors, Karen hadn't yet found his David Addison. Addison
(10:06):
would have to be confident, brash, kind of cocky but
also funny and charming and gracious. Call it a Bruce
Willis type. The role he was already playing at Cafe Central.
I mean, he was so good at when lighting, and
you know, it's really like, wow, that guy is doing that.
(10:28):
He was funny, and he was sort of light on
his feet. There was something kind of shocking about how
great he was in that role. Just like that, Bruno's
bar attending days were over, and so were Willis's days
of blending into the background. It's a romantic comedy. Really
looking forward to working with you, kid. Boom Lighting premiering Sunday,
(10:51):
March three. Moonlighting premiered in March and was practically an
overnight hit. Critics and audiences fell in love with David
Addison and by extension, with Bruce Willis. Moonlighting didn't take
itself seriously. Sometimes Willis would turn directly to the camera
(11:12):
and break the fourth wall. You know, That's what I
like about this place. You learned something new every day.
But you get serious. I just had my hand on
your behind. If I get any more serious, we're gonna
moves to cable. A few shows. Few actors could get
away with something so brazen, but viewers were willing to
go with it. It scored multiple Emmy nominations, and by
season three rose as high as number nine in the ratings.
(11:37):
Moonlighting had a domino effect on Willis's career. During the
first season of Moonlighting, Willis was familiar to just seventeen
percent of the television viewing audience. Call it the oh
that guy factor. By the second season, his familiarity had
shot up to fifty seven percent. One of the people
(12:01):
getting familiar with Willis was a man named Edgar Bronfman Jr.
Bronfman was high up on the chain of command of Seagrams,
the adult beverage company that was getting ready to launch
a new alcohol brand, Seagram's Golden Wine Cooler. Bronfman needed
a spokesman who was hip, recognizable to audiences, someone you'd
(12:24):
want to hang out and have a drink with, and
someone manly enough to make the idea of sipping wine
coolers palatable or sexy. Even Moonlighting money was good, Seagram's
money was better. After negotiating with Willis's agent, Arnold Ritkin,
Bronkman agreed to pay Willis between five and seven million
(12:48):
dollars for appearing in the Wine cooler ads over a
two to three year period. Willis was all too happy
to agree. He had, after all, plenty of experience selling
drinks for a lot less in tips. Oddly enough, it
was Cafe Central's old patron, Martha Frankel, who wound up
writing some of the spots for Ogilvie and Mather, the
(13:10):
ad agency behind the campaign. Those ads were a big
deal for a while. Oh my god, I forgot about them.
Oh you know, I think I wrote one of them. Yeah,
I think I did. I worked for that company. Oh
my god, I've got about that. Holy Moley. The ads
(13:30):
featured Willis hanging out with his friends, sipping sea grooms
and naturally playing the harmonica and the slogan this is
where the fund starts. Another spot featured a then unknown
Sharon Stone, and another ad centered around a fictional wedding
(13:54):
and Willis's somewhat unethical attempts to pick up the bride.
Didn't the toast serious golden to it sious, because that's
the toasts. A commercial willis is now patented blend of humor, sex,
appeal and charm was condensed into a perfect thirty seconds.
(14:17):
It was a very nineteen eighties idea of what culture
and advertisers believed men should look like and what they
should sound like. Bruce was in control of the room,
just like he'd been the m C of Cafe Central.
The women in the commercials may not have literally swooned,
(14:38):
but they all seemed charmed by Willis. By his boldness,
sales of Seagram's went up, and people took to calling
it somewhat disturbingly Bruce Juice. Bruce's Brunos harmonica was beginning
to appear in other places. The musical interludes in Moonlighting,
(14:59):
where Willis even played the harmonica and the pilot, attracted
the attention of Motown Records president Jay Lasker. He invited
Willis out to dinner and asked him a pointed question,
did Willis want to record an album? The result was
the Return of Bruno, a Motown Records album released in
(15:20):
early seven that featured Willis backed by The Heaters, a
band he had discovered in a North Hollywood bar. It
was accompanied by an HBO special that was part music,
part comedy, and featured Willis slipping into his harmonizing alter ego.
(15:40):
He even created a fictional backstory celebrities like Michael J.
Fox and Elton John appeared in the special to sing
Bruno's praises. It was kind of like this is spinal
tap for his character a mockumentary. Here's Ringo star delivering
his line deadpan. Well, if it being for Bruno, there
(16:01):
would have been no Beatles, and if not for Bruce,
there might not have been a Haleywood either. The thing was,
Bruce Willis hadn't exactly fantasized about being the face of
wine coolers or even the face of a television network.
Being seen, recognized, even hunted by photographers was not suited
(16:24):
to his temperament. Sure, he was a natural on stage,
but that didn't mean the spotlight always had to be
on him, did it. Glenn Gordon Karen, who had launched
Willis's career, once said he felt like he had to
apologize to Willis for the crime, the crime of making
him famous. That's how much Willis resisted being a familiar face,
(16:49):
and a hint that he would go to some lengths
to avoid it if he could. He can't go back
to bartending, or maybe there's some way he can. Despite
(17:13):
his discomfort with his growing fame, a lot was going
right for Willis in. For one thing, he never got
charged for his run in with the cops, and for another,
he met Demi Moore. Moore had been working steadily, first
in the soap opera General Hospital, and then in Hollywood
in films like Saying Almost Fire and About Last Night.
(17:36):
Raised partly in small Pennsylvania towns Cannonsburg and Charleroy before
moving to California at age thirteen. She had a maturity
on screen that seemed counter to her age. She was
in her mid twenties. According to Moore's memoir Inside Out,
she had just split from actor Emilio Estevez when she
(17:59):
ran into will Us at a party. He was behind
the bar, shaking out cocktails just for fun. He was well.
He was Bruce Willis, charming and at least in this case, deferential.
The more said at that point she hadn't seen Moonlighting,
only his Seagram's commercials. Apparently Seagram's was where the funds started.
(18:25):
He asked for a number, walked her to her car,
and the two began dating. In November, they decided to
get married. The two became one of Hollywood's power couples,
doubly famous, but there was comfort in the fact that
they each knew the other didn't want status or money,
(18:49):
because each of them already had plenty of both. They
also had something else in common. They were from small towns.
Neither one had been raised, like Estevez, in a show
biz family, and when talk turned to wanting to raise children,
the idea of doing it among the artificial veneer of
Hollywood seemed counterintuitive. Willis said as much in interview with
(19:13):
The New York Times, where he described his dislike of
Los Angeles. I don't live in l A because it's
a pretty weird town, and I don't want to raise
my kids here, he said. But if not California, then
(19:36):
where where could Bruce Willis and Demi Moore retreat to
that would allow them to escape what was becoming an
increasing burden of being known. They soon got their answer,
It just took Willis breaking a bone to realize it.
(19:56):
In March seven, just two months before or Willis would
be shoved into a police car in the Hollywood Hills,
Willis went on vacation in Sun Valley, the posh ski
resort in the Wood River Valley area of Idaho. Thanks
to moonlighting, Willis was now in an exclusive club that
gathered in the area, the club that welcomed successful people
(20:19):
to fraternize in exclusive vacation spots. He tackled Sun Valley's
ski slope with real zeal And on his first trip
down that day, cruising over the immaculate white powder, he
fell and broke his collar bone. While Willis was recovering
(20:41):
hanging out with little else to do, he was properly
introduced to Wood River Valley to catch him the bustling
and expensive town where Clint Eastwood and Tom Hanks puttered around,
and to a town about fifteen miles down the road, Haley, Idaho. Well,
(21:03):
the north part around Catchem and Sun Valley. Um, those
are the two uh urban I'll put that in quotes.
Neither one are big enough to be urban, but they
are large because of the tourist industry. And then about
eleven miles south of that is where Haley is located.
That's Tom Blanchard, a one time county commissioner and Haley historian.
(21:27):
And as you move from north to south, you move
from greater wealth to lesser wealth. And so the valley
is structured in tiers in terms of its proximity to
the Sun Valley destination resort, both in terms of wealth
and class amenities, you know, other things that make a
community function and viable. The further you get from the resort,
(21:50):
the more modest your surroundings. Hailey was and is bordered
by a lot of public land nestled near the Big
Wood River. A simpler life echoed through its modest streets,
where lumber yards once sold groceries, and some small buildings
were erected from mail order kits. During Willis's accidental Hollywood hiatus,
(22:15):
he probably drove past the Haley Public Library, the J. J.
Tracy drug store, and the J. C. Fox Building, where
a beloved town doctor once made house calls on a snowmobile.
The Liberty Theater movie house, originally the site of an
ice skating rink. Freedman Memorial Airport, helped shuttle the nearby
(22:37):
movie stars to and from their ski retreats. It was
love at first sight ready in Willis quietly purchased a
twenty acre property on the edge of Haley, in a
housing development known as Flying Heart Ranch. He officially became
(22:57):
a resident of Haley. Willis and more were serious about
small town ambitions. Hailey seemed custom made for them, especially
for someone with a family. The community was known to
have a very good school system, so that was an
attractive thing right from the goal. At the time they
(23:21):
moved there, Hailey was home to over three thousand residents,
but at least for a little while, the fact that
Willis was a new resident seemed to escape notice. Why
you know, I'm not even sure when he came here.
I didn't know somehow, remember being in the late eighties,
but probably you know, I'd have to have to say
(23:44):
some time in the early nineties nineties, when he started
actually buying some Hailey property. It's probably my first awareness
of it. But there was no parade, no newspaper notice,
no grand proclamation that the two had arrived. If there
had been, it probably would have driven Willis right back
(24:06):
out of town. What he wanted was to be unseen,
at least that's what he said he wanted, you know,
the whole thing about he doesn't want to be recognized.
I've been through it Spike Lee a bunch of times,
and he says, you know, you pull down your baseball cap,
you get on the subway, nobody knows who you are.
I've been around de Niro, I've been around people who
are very famous, and they can blend in. Bruce wanted
(24:30):
to be noticed and left alone. I don't think that's
possible to be noticed and be left alone, a paradox
that would shape Bruce for the rest of his career.
After Willis moved in, he approached his neighbor, a local
lawyer named Ed Lawson. See Willis didn't really want a neighbor,
(24:54):
any neighbors really. Lawson didn't even live on the lot.
But if WILLI spot Lawson's lot, it would be a
kind of buffer zone to keep out the prying eyes
of the media. Lawson may or may not have hesitated,
but this was the lesson of success. If Bruce Willis
wants something, he can afford to be persistent. Lawson never
(25:17):
confirmed the story, but the rumor in Haley was that
laws and sold the lot to Willis and made two
hundred thousand dollars in profit for Willis. There was no
such thing as too high a price on privacy. Lawson
actually did business with Willis again. Lawson and his wife
(25:38):
Julie owned what was known as Freedman Mansion just off
of Main Street in town. It was a grand, old
place which once belonged to the Freedman family, who had
helped shape Haley decades prior. Again, Willis approached Lawson and
made him an offer he couldn't refuse, and he didn't.
(26:02):
The mansion wasn't really for Bruce, though, it was for Demi.
Before long, the mansion had over two thousand occupants, all
of them were Moore's porcelain dolls. Willis had bought her
a dollhouse, a really fancy dollhouse. This may have been
(26:23):
the first sign that things in Haley we're going to
start looking and feeling a little different. What Bruce Willis wants,
Lawson said, Bruce Willis gets, and that would be especially
true when John McClain would send Willis into new levels
of wealth and influence, with a desire to escape getting
(26:46):
even stronger. The time was coming when Willis would have
the means to do a lot more in Haley than
buy a dollhouse. In nine eighty six, Willis was spending
his evenings recording his album The Return of Bruno. During
(27:10):
the day he was shooting a movie called Blind Date,
his first leading role and the first time audiences would
be tempted by the idea of seeing the star of
moonlighting on the big screen. It turned out not to
be a very compelling offer. Blind Date starred Willis as
Walter Davis, a mild mannered man who gets set up
(27:31):
with a woman named Nadia played by Kim Bay singer.
Nadia seems shy too, until she starts drinking. At that point,
the movie turns into a mad cap comedy, with Willis
trying frantically to keep up with an escalating series of
events caused by the perpetually intoxicated Nadia. There have been
(27:51):
high hopes for the movie, which was directed by Blake
Edwards of the Pink Panther fame. Madonna and her then
husband Sean Penn had only been set to star. Try Star,
which was making the movie, was so keen on getting
Willis that they gave the movie a green light without
a completed script. Blind Date actually didn't do too badly.
(28:14):
It opened in March at number one, knocking Lethal Weapon
off its perch, but it was a busy season at
the movies, with films like Platoon dominating the conversation and
guaranteed hits like Beverly Hill's Cop Two taking over the
summer months. Blind Date did edge out Spaceballs, making around
(28:35):
thirty nine million dollars, but it couldn't outpace hits like
Dirty Dancing or RoboCop. A second movie with the Edwards
Willis combo, a Western titled Sunset, fared poorly too. It
was released the following year and barely made five million dollars.
At least he got to ride a horse, though maybe
(28:57):
even got to keep the cowboy outfit for later. But
so far, audiences were uncertain about Willis on the big screen,
and increasingly they were having concerns about Moonlighting two. The
central conceit of the show was the ongoing sexual tension
between David Addison and Maddie Hayes, and the will they
(29:19):
or won't they conflict that fueled their on screen relationship.
In March, viewers found out they would new Moonlighting, I
feel reckless, and suddenly the air had left the room.
The two were now a couple, an item, and all
of that dramatic tension evaporated. So did ratings for decades afterward,
(29:46):
Whenever TV producers would talk about unconsummated sexual tension on screen,
they referenced Moonlighting as a kind of cautionary tale. Before
jumping the shark entered the pop culture lexicon, you would
we want to pull a Moonlighting and a racist shows
reason for existing. It wasn't yet time for a sad
(30:08):
Harmonica solo, But this was a turning point in the
career of Bruce Willis. Moonlighting wouldn't be around forever. His
first big screen role hadn't made much of an impression.
Sunset wasn't going to help. Maybe that's why Willis's agent,
Arnold Rifkin decided not to play it cool when twentieth
Century Fox came around wondering if Willis might be interested
(30:31):
in replacing Frank Sinatra. In ninety eight, Sinatra had starred
in The Detective, an adaptation of a novel by author
Roderick Thorpe. It was a pot boiler about a detective
hot on a murder case while dealing with marital issues
(30:53):
at home. Nothing to groundbreaking, But when Fox acquired the
right to Thorpe's sequel, Nothing Las Forever over ten years later,
they were contractually obliged to offer the lead role to Sinatra,
but Sinatra was roughly seventy at the time, a problem
for what The role would require a lot of action,
(31:15):
a lot of guns, a lot of crawling through air
dunce in the book, Sinatra's character joe Leland, is up
against terrorists who take over a high rise building. So
Fox started looking for other actors. Some of the names
were predictable. Arnold Schwarzenegger, he said, no, Cafe Central customer,
(31:35):
Al Pacino. No. The list of people who turned the
movie down got longer and longer until Fox began talking
to Arnold Rifkin, who in turn started talking about Bruce Willis.
Instead of acknowledging Willis's star might be cooling, Rifkin took
the opposite approach. He demanded Fox pay Willis five millillion
(32:00):
dollars for the lead role, which was no longer joe Leland,
but John McClain Fox was taken aback. At the time
that kind of money it was virtually unheard of. Sylvester
Stallone had gotten seven million dollars to play Rambo in
the sequel with the laborious title of Rambo Colon First
(32:21):
Blood Part two, but those kinds of salaries were unusual
except for the biggest of the big screen guys, and
this was the eighties, Television was still seen as the
lesser of the two mediums. Willis was a small screen guy.
Fox countered Rifkin kept shaking his head. It was five
(32:43):
million dollars or have a nice day. Fox blinked. They
made the deal, and the entire film industry took notice. Sure,
Bruce Willis was popular, had charisma, but five million dollars
for the moonlighting guy. Willis began shooting Nothing Lasts Forever
(33:04):
under its new title die Hard, Written by Jeb Stewart
and Stephen Ee SUSA and directed by John McTiernan. It
became a lean, taught action thriller about an East Coast
cop up against the droll villain Hans Gruber played by
Alan Rickman. The craftsmanship of the movie, the dialogue, the
(33:27):
action scenes, the acting was firing on all cylinders. Production
went smoothly, although in one stunt Willis only narrowly avoided
disaster while jumping off a building tied to a fire hose.
It looked goal though Sunset was released while die Hard
(33:52):
was in production and it had bombed. An early trailer
for die Hard was met with a cool reception from audiences.
Was Willis trying to be arnold? The studio kept playing
with Willis's image on the posters, shrinking him down and
making the building bigger, Willis was in danger of being
outshone by a high rise. No one was really sure
(34:16):
what was going to happen. Until die Hard opened in July.
It was possible Fox had made a terrible decision. Instead,
die Hard exploded. It was all here, the everyman appeal,
(34:39):
the regular body fit but not superhuman, and most of
all of vulnerability. Looking back now, it's easy to see
Willis was a kind of modern progression of male action heroes.
Before him stood men with four percent body fat and
wooden line deliveries. Willis humanized action stars. After John McClean
(35:01):
walked through broken glass on bare feet, you knew you
weren't in the company of a guy with all the answers, John,
John McClean, you're still with us, ye little thing, Vidico,
I'd rather be in Philadelphia. Chalk up two more vague guys.
(35:22):
Well the boys down here'll be glad to hear that.
You know, we've got a pool going on. You what
kind of odds am I getting? You don't want to know?
Pulled me down for I'm good for all the casual
irreverence that actors like Chris Pratt and Ryan Reynolds inject
into movies today. Willis did it first. With the success
(35:50):
of die Hard, came a new level of stardom when
that vastly exceeded what David Addison, Bruno and a wine
cooler had afforded him. In Moonlighting, he played this sort
of romantic league that that wasn't really a romantic league.
But when the die Hard movies came out and he
(36:13):
was huge, and he was you know, he's sort of
like this average guy, average looking guy that all of
a sudden everybody wanted a piece of men wanted to
be friends with him, and women wanted to sleep with him,
which I don't think had been happening for him before that.
Willis obviously enjoyed being a matinee idol. It was what
(36:35):
he wanted. The dough was good too, but he bristled
at the off screen attention. It was like he went
from obscurity. You know, it's one thing to be the
hot blood tender at Cafe Central. It's another for people
to recognize you on the street. You have to either
be very humble, or you have to like it, or
(36:58):
you have to turn it off some now, and you know,
I've been around people who do all those six You know,
some days they're okay with it, and some days now
they want to take their kids to the park if
they don't want to sign autographs for you, And I
understand it. But he was like he was surly before
before being surly was okay. Die Hard became the seventh
(37:20):
highest grossing movie of ahead of Tom Cruise's Cocktail and
even Stallone's more tersely titled Rambo three. It also became
a genre unto itself, with dozens of movies copying it's
contained action premise formula. Speed is die Hard on a
bus under siege? Was die Hard on a boat? Die
(37:43):
Hard to released in? Was die Hard at an airport.
The film didn't just change Hollywood filmmaking or star salaries.
It fundamentally changed the career of Bruce Willis, who now
had the momentum of a massive box office hit behind him.
(38:07):
Moonlighting would last just one more season. There would be
no more commercials, not until Japan came calling with some
lucrative offers anyway, and financially, Bruce Willis had positioned himself
not only to be a well paid actor, but an
incredibly well paid actor, one wealthy enough to buy not
(38:27):
just a nice private property in Haley, but a good
chunk of Haley itself. In effect, Bruce Willis fell in
love twice in seven, once with More and again with Haley, Idaho.
And life was good. Haley was good. But as Willis
(38:47):
grew more and more successful, as more and more studio
paychecks were cashed, his desire to step outside the boundaries
of his home and make his mark, and Haley grew
and it wasn't going to stop with a giant dollhouse.
Haley was, for his purposes, the perfect town, because Haley
(39:09):
had something that made it unique, made it unlike any
other remote part of the country Willis could have retreated to.
It was a place that had an unspoken agreement to
protect the famous, to let them live in relative peace
and quiet, to be noticed and left alone. The question
(39:31):
was would Bruce Willis do the same for them next time?
On Haleywood. It wasn't really very much of a viable town,
and we're empty storefronts in downtown Haley. And then all
of a sudden we got Bruce Willis and somebody came
into my office, you know, to get your camera. Go
(39:54):
out into the alley. Bruce Willis has carried two by
fours over his shoulder that they helped the construction war workers,
and then he built right downtown Haley, and he spent
a couple of million bucks at least on renovating him.
It's stuck out like a sore thumb because it's a
kind of thing you would see in a major city.
Everything else is, you know, almost tie up your horse outside.
(40:21):
Haleywood is hosted by Danish Schwartz. This show is written
by Jake Rosson, Editing, sound design and mixing by me
Josh Fisher, Additional editing by Mary do original music by
Natasha Jacobs, mixing by Jeremy Thal, Research and fact checking
by Jake Rosson, Austin Thompson and Marissa Brown. Show logo
(40:46):
by Lucy Quentinia. Our senior producer is Ryan Murdoch and
our executive producer is Jason English. Special thanks to the
people of Hailey, Idaho and all those who shared their stories.
Haleywood is a production of Heart Radio. Until next Time,
(41:09):
m HM.
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