November 10, 2021 • 34 mins
Willis ventured into big business with his gimmicky Planet Hollywood franchise, but after being a quiet Hailey resident for several years, Willis buys and renovates a restaurant and bar, and soon an old movie theater. When blockbuster Hollywood premieres start happening on Hailey's main street, residents soon realize that Willis' persona casts a big shadow.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
This is an I heart original. It's and Tom Blanchard
is sitting down with his wife to eat at a
new restaurant in the sleepy town of Hailey, Idaho. Hailey
is a part of the Wood River Valley where Tom
(00:24):
is a county commissioner, and he's eager to check out
a big attraction in one of the area's smallest towns.
It's packed, and everywhere Tom looks he sees something extravagant,
amazing expensive hardwood furniture tables that have African daisies and
(00:46):
tiger lilies erupting from vases, hand painted ostrojegs that line shelves.
There are even palm trees. In Idaho. Grand openings of anything,
especially a two story restaurant slash bar, are few and
far between. And Haley, it's a former mining community with
(01:09):
the kind of straightforward, no frills attitude that comes along
with it. Some people in Haley aren't even sure a
restaurant this nice belongs here. It's not that they don't
like it, it's just that it's fancy. Locals don't have
a lot of use for fancy. Tom's like that fancy
(01:29):
is okay, but he can do without it. And he's
not phased by much, but even he's surprised by what
happens when he looks up from his menu to see
who's looking back at him. The server is Bruce Willis.
He was our server. Um My wife and I ate
(01:51):
at the mint one night and he was our server
because he he would go down there and he would
end up waiting on tables and you know, talking to
people or you know, serving at the bar. Bruce Willis
smiles as he jots down their order. Well, if you've
seen his movies, you know he doesn't smile so much
as he smirks. That's part of the Bruce Willis image.
(02:14):
Never a complete smile, more of a half grin without
showing many teeth, something that says, you know, I'm charming.
I know I'm charming, and we're both pretty amused by it.
The smirk that's made hundreds of millions of dollars at
the box office in films like Die Hard, Twelve Monkeys,
and Pulp Fiction. He even made that talking baby movie
(02:37):
Look Who's Talking, a success that spawned two sequels, though
Willis sat out the third movie when the dog started talking.
Willis was the voice of Mikey the Baby, a constantly
smirking baby. The point being Bruce Willis in was one
(03:04):
of the biggest movie stars on the planet, an action
hero whose everyman qualities helped balance out these superhuman characters
played by Bazooka tootors like Schwarzenegger and Stallone. An actor
who was highly respected for dramatic turns in movies like
as a tortured Vietnam veteran in In Country and opposite
(03:25):
Paul Newman in Nobody's Fool. A mega watt star, making
tens of millions of dollars almost every time he appeared
on screen. And yet here he is in Haley, serving
Tom Blanchard and several other tables their appetizers. And it's
not because Bruce Willis had fallen on hard times. It's
(03:48):
because Bruce Willis owns the restaurant known as The Mint.
In fact, he now owns several businesses along Haley's main street,
in addition to a private residence just on the edge
of town. That's why residents started calling their home something
besides Haley. They started referring to it as Haleywood. But
(04:12):
some people couldn't shake the feeling Willis didn't want a
town so much as a movie set, one where Willis
was the director. And if Haley was a movie set
and Willis was the director and the star, didn't that
make the locals well? Extras for I Heart Radio This
(04:37):
is Haleywood, and I heart original podcast, I'm Your Host
Danis Schwartz, and this is Episode three Planet Haley Wood.
In the nineties, Bruce Willis wasn't just a movie star.
(04:58):
He was also a businessman involved in one of the
trendiest business moves an actor could pull off, becoming the
face of a slightly corny theme restaurant. It's easy to
see the appeal. Kenny Rogers Roasters, a chicken spot, Michael
Jordan's steakhouse eminem recently opened to storefronts in Detroit named
(05:22):
Mom Spaghetti. And there's Mark Wahlberg's Wallburgers, which he operates
with his brothers. These are kind of self aware in
their kitchen appeal, sometimes earnest, sometimes bombastic. But during the
nineties heyday, the theme restaurant was serious business, and no
(05:44):
theme restaurant was bigger than Planet Hollywood in tourist friendly
cities like New York, Los Angeles at Disney World, even
all the way to Moscow. These monuments to Hollywood glamour
and stardom popped up and enticed patrons with an aesthetic
that worshiped the movies. Picture a t g I Fridays
(06:10):
with movie memorabilia, with movie flair, a place to eat
fried chicken coated and capt'n crunch cereal while seated underneath
Rocky balboas boxing trunks or John mcclean's dirty undershirt. Movies
and movie stars hadn't been shrunk down to streaming services yet.
(06:35):
Movies were still an event, and eating a burger while
staring at a glass case with Jason Vorhees hockey mask
staring down at customers was a draw. But the real
secret sauce was the endorsement from major movie stars who
came out for Planet Hollywood grand openings like they were
(06:56):
movie premiers. Why simple, Plan It Hollywood was a turnkey
operation for celebrities who wanted to flex their business acumen
in exchange for publicity. Stars would get shares in the company,
and the more they promoted, the more money they'd make.
(07:17):
That was the idea anyway. Planet Hollywood was the brainchild
of Brian Kessner and Keith Barrish to film producers who
decided to take the template of hard Rock Cafe and
apply it to movies. They teamed with Robert Earle, who
(07:38):
was then CEO of Hard Rock International and who knew
the novelty eatery business well. They thought about calling it
Cafe Hollywood before settling on Planet Hollywood, and because they
wanted it to be an international brand, they needed actors
who had international appeal. The first two names on a list,
(08:00):
Arnold Schwartzenegger and Bruce Willis Demi Moore joined in, making
Willis and More the power couple of the theme restaurant industry.
Soon Sylvester Stallone joined them. For Stallone, it was an
interesting foreshadowing of movies imitating life. The sixth installment of
(08:22):
the Rocky franchise in two thousand and six featured Stallone's
character opening a restaurant called Adrian's. In the film, Rocky
used his celebrity to draw business, just as Stallone and
the others had done I R L. Back in the nineties.
(08:42):
The first Planet Hollywood opened in Manhattan in serving up,
among other things, mixed drinks named die Harder's. It had
palm trees and plenty of star power, all of the
other franchise openings did too. George Looney, Wesley Snipes, Luke Perry,
(09:02):
Eddie Murphy, a who's who of nineties faces were usually there.
Willis and the others regularly attended, drawing thousands of adoring
fans and tons of media. In some of the high
profile locations, like in Los Angeles, there seemed to be
a vague notion that any regular Joe might walk into
(09:24):
the restaurant and see Arnold or Bruce or Demi sipping
a drink. This rarely happened, but it was part of
the appeal. Willis had to say in the franchises liquor selection,
using his expertise from his bartending days in New York,
while Arnold contributed his mother's strutal recipe Burger's nachos, blaring
(09:52):
music quote before they were stars, high school photos on
the place mats. It was a perfect restaurant for the
celebrity obsessed tabloid culture of the nineties. If a patron
ponied up for a Planet Hollywood Express card, they could
even get some of that special treatment usually afforded to
the Hollywood elite, jumping the lines to be seated more
(10:15):
quickly and those lines could get pretty long. The chain
was serving up seven hundred and fifty thousand people every
year at restaurants in thirty one countries. Planet Hollywood became
a brand advertised in movie theaters. Going to a Planet
Hollywood became a right of vacationers everywhere, a stop you
(10:39):
needed to make to bring home a souvenir for family members,
a denim shirt, a polo shirt, a fossil watch. It
even had a tie in board game. The Bomber Jackets
with the Planet Hollywood logo sported by Willis and the others,
were a kind of uniform, like they were part of
a winning varsity team in the sport of making money.
(11:02):
Customers could buy them too, for three d and twenty
five dollars. But at openings, Willis could contribute something the
others couldn't, a stage presence. Civilians weren't allowed inside the
star studded v I P gatherings, of course, so Willis
(11:23):
would bring the party outside where fans were standing expectantly. Opening.
After opening, Willis and his band the Accelerators would jam,
giving audiences a full course of his charisma. Arnold and
Sly could merely wave and smile Willis's most memorable opening
(11:44):
came at the debut of A Planet Hollywood in San Diego.
On stage with his band, he was joined by Anna
Nicole Smith, the pin up of the moment thanks to
our appearances in Playboy and as a model for guests jeans.
Smith was looking to shock the crowd, and she did
(12:05):
by taking out one of her breasts and waving it
around without any prompting or provocation from Willis. She then
unbuttoned his shirt and either licked his chest or pretended
to lick his chest, depending on which version you'd like
to believe. But here's the problem with being trendy. Trends,
(12:26):
by their nature, don't last very long. While the openings
were splashy and exciting, pretty soon people realized that Arnold
wasn't going to just show up and offered to split
a milkshake. The food was no different than your average Applebee's,
and the struggling aspiring actors working as waiters weren't worth
(12:47):
repeated trips. Planet Hollywood went public in and tried to
keep growing, but the public's appetite for cereal encrusted chicken
fingers and terminator jackets mounted on walls had reached its peak,
(13:09):
celebrities began moving away from the premiers. Locations closed, two
bankruptcies followed. There are still some Planet Hollywood's in business today,
but few movie stars celebrating their grand openings. It was
fun while it lasted, and the experience was invaluable for
(13:30):
Willis and more. It showed them how they could monetize
their celebrity in the service industry. But opening a Planet
Hollywood franchise in Haley was out of the question. It
was too big, too well to Hollywood Haley. It was
supposed to be the escape from all that. As Planet
(13:54):
Hollywood was starting to spin out of orbit, Willis decided
to do his own version of a theme restaurant in Haley.
But it wouldn't be restricted to just one building. It
would be places where, yeah, maybe you would see Bruce
Willis hanging out. Bruce Willis's arrival in Haley solved a
(14:27):
very big problem facing the catch him Sun Valley Chamber
of Commerce. Here's Wendy Jake what I was a director
of the Sun Valley Catching Chamber of Commerce. At that time.
The town was pretty sleepy, storefronts boarded up just in
the main area. Older buildings the hospital was converted to
(14:47):
a city hall and a library. The County building is
a block over. It's an old, wonderful brick building from
the late eighteen hundreds. When the silver mining boom was
taking place, the host mistress and the mayor and other
people and Haley were talking about doing a video to
promote downtown Haley because things had kind of gone awry,
(15:12):
wasn't it wasn't really very much of a viable town
that we're empty storefronts. And then all of a sudden
we got Bruce Willis of redevelopment, and we didn't really
need a video after that. Suddenly there was another boom,
(15:34):
not a silver mining boom, a Bruce Willis boom. There
were jackhammers and forklifts and rubble, the good kind of
rubble that told you something was changing, Something was being
torn down so something better could go up in its place.
A transformation was underway. It was a Tuesday hours on
(15:59):
dead line. I was in a big hurry getting the
paper finished. Wayne and Dair, editor of the Wood River Journal,
and somebody came into my office, you know, to get
your camera and go out into the alley, and Bruce
Willis has carried two by fours over his shoulder. That
to helped the construction workers and h he said, yeah,
(16:26):
you could probably sell a picture like that to the
National Enquirer for our fifty dollars. I mean, I would
like to have fifty dollars as much as anybody. But
becoming a paparazzi was not, uh, in my wheelhouse at all.
But that's sounded exactly like something he would do, just literally,
you know, pitching in and helping to get the job
(16:46):
done and being pretty comfortable doing it. Willis was busy
renovating the Mint as a bar in a former mining town.
It was dilapidated, dark. He tore down an little bar
and built what he called them in and he spent
(17:09):
a couple of million bucks at least on renovating it.
Did a beautiful job, made it into a bar and
at a stage that's former Hailey resident and attorney leash Lender.
Of course it was. I mean, it's it's stuck out
like a sore thumb, because it's the kind of thing
you would see in a major city. Everything else is uh,
(17:33):
you know, almost tie up your horse outside. So it
was it was different, that's for sure, but it was
beautifully done, the dark corners were gone, The surly drinkers
were effectively evicted, forced to find another watering hole to Bruton.
(17:55):
Lunch wasn't of the liquid variety, but freshly caught Idaho
trout were burghers. It was affordable to a lunch bill
for two might come to about twenty dollars. Suddenly the
Mint was a shiny new establishment where the slenders and
other locals were sitting down to grab a meal. And
while there wouldn't be memorabilia that was very much a
(18:18):
Planet Hollywood approach, patrons would still know who was bankrolling
the venture. Above the dining area was a giant photo
of Bruce Willis as a baby, not the look Who's
talking baby, his actual baby photo. I think that the
major impression of everybody was that's going to be a
(18:39):
real addition to our little main street, and we welcome
the money. You see when you leave Haley, you go
ten miles north, you get in to catch him in
sun Valley, and it's a working man's town. When you
come south and leave catch him. Hayley was not the
place where the people that had money of it was
(19:01):
purely a working class, working class people. In fact, I
think Bruce was probably one of the first ones of
that type of society that actually built Dollar. There was more,
much more to the Mint, not just a place to eat,
but a place for Bruce Willis to be Bruce Willis
(19:24):
in a way that felt comfortable to him, and we'll
get to that. But he wasn't done with Main Street.
Next came the E. G. Willis Building, named after Willis's grandfather.
It was a combination retail and office space with a
variety of specialty shops like jewelers and furniture stores. We
(19:45):
mentioned this before in relation to Willis's dust up with
the Wood River Journal, but there was more to it.
On the street level of the E. G. Willis Building
was Shorties, a Bruce Willis project that paid homage to
the diners of the nineteen fifties. Willis had named the
joint after his dog, red leather booths, shiny chrome tabletop jukeboxes.
(20:11):
Haley already had a breakfast hang out that the locals liked,
but well, it wasn't exactly what Bruce Willis wanted. It
wasn't open late enough, so he built something he liked better,
a place that served eggs but also served hummus anytime,
day or night. That was kind of what Bruce Willis did.
(20:32):
If he saw something in Haley that he felt could
be approved upon, he'd do it. If he thought it
was missing something, he'd built it. There was a pulse,
a Bruce nous to Haley that was becoming palpable. Here's
Wendy Jake Wet. I think people in Sun Valley and
Catchen looked at this change in Haley as kind of
(20:55):
an opportunity, kind of like a place where it would
be a little bit more authentic. It wouldn't be they
might perceive as as a glitsey resort seeing versus something
that was more authentic. But look at this. It also
had this Bruce Willis amenity to it. The Bruce Willis amenity.
The mint and shorties had his aesthetic, his love of
(21:18):
a bygone era resurrected in the form of pies, under
glass and tabletop jukeboxes. He was having fun sculpting the town.
The same ambition he had demonstrated pursuing an acting career
was making things happen in Haley. Sometimes little things cropped up,
(21:39):
little signs that Bruce might have been getting frustrated with
small town bureaucracy, things like permits and zoning, things that
he never had to deal with that planet Hollywood were
proving to be a nuisance. After all, Haley was flourishing,
and he was investing in it, and someone in that
position might expect a little cooperation. Once Hailey took issue
(22:04):
with the fact that Willis didn't have the required number
of parking spaces for the E. G. Willis Building, he
was ten spaces short. He could have paid a fee
of twenty five thousand dollars to cover the infraction and
kept doing business without the spaces. Instead, Demi Moore bought
a shuttered drug store across the street. It was listed
(22:26):
for six hundred and seventy five dollars. Willis got his parking.
The building itself remained vacant. To some, the town began
taking on the feel of a Hollywood back lot. You
know about back lots. They are built by studios for
shooting movies and have replica storefronts that sometimes lead nowhere.
(22:49):
You just walk through a door and come out the
other side of the unfinished face of the building. After
the Mint Shorties and the G. Willis Building, there was
more Willis zoned in on the one place any movie
star rearranging a small hometown would need. A worn down
(23:10):
building known as the Liberty Theater. It was a place
that once proudly presented movies, not a multiplex, but a
single screen theater open since it was old school, The
original owner was a barber during the day and prospected
for gold on the weekends. Like the Mint, the theater
(23:32):
needed a lot of care, which the current owners couldn't provide.
Willis bought it and restored it to its former Art
Deco glory without stripping it of its small town charms.
He put a lot of money into an old theater.
They're got it out, putting in a new seeding the
new stage. It was first class. Inside. The ornate lobby
(23:56):
was full of gold accents. Bolivian rosewood panels lined the walls.
A huge chandelier loomed overhead. The theater itself had beautiful
gold curtains and brand new chairs that reclined. Even better,
the balcony had love seats that reclined. Tickets were still
four dollars four dollars, and beer was still served in
(24:19):
the balcony. A blazing red marquee lit up Haley's night sky.
Bulbs encircling the titles of the films now playing. For
Willis and for Haley, it was the ideal amalgamation of
the old and the new, a historical landmark in town,
updated with care that preserved Haley's culture. Anyone stepping inside
(24:42):
the Liberty had one word for it, beautiful. I think
that was a huge hit and one of Bruce Willis's dreams.
One he spoke aloud in a rare moment of candor
with the press, was that he could one day host
the premiere of one of his fail elms in a
movie theater he owned. Even though Willis had left a
(25:04):
lot of Planet Hollywood behind, it turned out he wanted
to keep one more element, the sonic boom of a
major celebrity event. In the same year Bruce Willis started
(25:28):
reshaping Haley, he decided he could control just how much
Hollywood he wanted in the town. Willis was set to
star in Twelve Monkeys, a science fiction film directed by
Terry Gilliam of Monty Python fame and co starring a
rapidly ascending actor named Brad Pitt. It was a surreal
(25:51):
story about a man named James Cole played by Willis.
Who travels back in time to stop a deadly virus
from taking the world by storm. When he arrives in
our present or close to it, he sent to a
mental institution. No one believes Cole is from the future
or that he belongs there. He's an odd man out.
(26:20):
Instead of traveling back to Los Angeles for a premiere,
Willis saw no reason why he couldn't spend a lot
of his money and a lot of the studios money,
bringing the premiere to Haley. He flew his co stars
into Haley on a private jet and then shuttled them
to Main Street and limousines. Jean Claude van Dam was there,
(26:43):
and so was hotel mogul Steve Wynn. It had all
the trappings of the glitzy debuts you saw in Los Angeles.
At the premiere, Willis was ecstatic. He welcomed both locals
and big stars at the door, ushering them in, screaming
that all the candy was free, all the baby ruths
(27:03):
you could eat at a Bruce Willis premiere. You didn't
have to pay for concessions. But if the goal of
a movie premiere is to draw attention to your film,
why do it in Idaho, here's leash Slender. You're starting
to get way west. By the time you get to
uh You're not on the edges of Denver or another
(27:28):
metropolitan area. So there wasn't a big area to draw from.
If you put on a premiere or an act of
a certain type, there's only so many people that are
going to come because it's just that remote. Did a
lot of people come from out of town? Do is it? No?
(27:49):
Not at all. In fact, most people didn't even know
whatever happened. And maybe that's just how Willis liked it.
It was more like a private party. It was sort
of Bruce saying, Okay, I'm here, this is me, this
is where I'm from, this is my life, and I've
(28:10):
got this movie. I want you to see about it
because I do a good job in this and from
what I have heard, I haven't seen one of his movies,
but from what I hear, i'm the younger people. They
think he's terrific. Of course, not every movie Bruce Willis
premiered and Haley was a crowd pleaser. The next year,
the gangster drama Last Man Standing got a similar Haley treatment,
(28:34):
but it didn't strike a chord with critics or viewers.
It was a lean, spare movie that shaved off most
of Willis's wise guy charms, which was probably a mistake.
The same year, Willis and Moore opened The Liberty for
the premiere of Strip Tease, an erotic drama in which
(28:55):
More started as a woman who begins stripping to earn
money enough to regain custody of her young daughter. Then
she gets embroiled in a political scandal, as strippers do.
Hollywood saw the movie as having the potential to be
another basic, instinct allured sexy thriller that pushes boundaries without
(29:16):
crossing them. Entertainment Weekly said it would quote reveal more
skin than a year's worth of Victoria's secret catalogs. The
poster was singled out by the Motion Picture Association of
America as being too revealing, with More naked in the
shadow and cross lagged into suggestive oppose, but the role
(29:39):
was important to More. Bruce and Demi's seven year old daughter, Rumor,
even appeared in the film as more as on screen daughter,
and the real headline, more than any erotic imagery, was
that Demi earned a record twelve point five million dollar
salary for an actress. No one, not Julia Roberts, not
(30:00):
harrold Strape, not Sandra Bullock, had ever made as much.
But while Willis and male actors were congratulated for big salaries,
Moore was met with resentment. Some in the press dubbed
her gimme Moore. It was a peculiar double standard. But
(30:20):
aside from the premiere in Haley, Demi wasn't seen as
often as Willis. She kept a much lower profile. She
would rarely, rarely show up anywhere where she could be seen.
Haley provided the same sort of escape from the cloying press,
(30:43):
the double standards, the judgmental public, for more as it
did for Willis. Striptease would be Moore's only film that
premiered in Haley. In his premieres, Willis pulled off what
most act there's only dream of, tight trating the precise
level of celebrity, just enough to enjoy, not so much
(31:09):
as to be overbearing. While his movies didn't premiere in
his literal backyard, it was close, and when his famous
friends left and the carpet was rolled up, Haley could
go back to being the nondescript town Willis had fallen
in love with It was just a brief intermission, just
(31:30):
a little measured dose of fame, a little hit, and
it was all in his control. There were times when
Bruce Willis wanted to be noticed, and there were times
when he didn't. And when he didn't, it wasn't enough
for him. It simply to retreat into the background or
stick close to home. Any uninvited attention was met with, well,
(31:53):
let's call it resistance. Locals would sometimes hear vague warnings
floating through the year. Don't talk about Bruce Willis, don't
photograph Bruce Willis. Just ignore the movie star with the
giant baby photo in the restaurant. If he wanted to,
he could have just become a member of the local community.
And but that wasn't Bruce Willis. And I can understand,
(32:18):
looking at the temperature range that he ran in in
his career, his movies, etcetera. This is high wire stuff.
I don't think he's ready to sit down and uh
do flapjacks at the Alliance Club softball game every summer.
(32:38):
If it worked, if it all worked, Haleywood could become
Bruce Bell a place that had everything arranged in a
way that made it a custom fit a bespoke town,
tailored to order. The pieces were all in place. Now
Haley was going to see what their new benefactor planned
to do with their main street or his new main
(33:02):
street next time on Haleywood, The Mint it wasn't just
a place to eat under the gaze of Willis's baby photo.
It also acts as nightclub, a stage for Bruce Willis's band,
and one of the few places in Haley where you
(33:22):
might just get your ass kicked. It was a group
of them, and I remember going to my car and uh,
and I had my concealed weapons permitting everything Victin and
I just put my pistol in my pants and someone
called the cops. Right. Haleywood is hosted by Dana Schwartz.
This show is written by Jake Rawson, Editing, sound design
(33:43):
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 Rawson, Austin Thompson and
Marissa Brown. Show logo by Lucy Quintinia. Our senior producer
is Ryan Murdoch and our executive producer is Jason English.
(34:07):
Special thanks to the people of Hailey, Idaho and all
those who've shared their stories. Haileywood is a production of
I Heart Radio Until Next Time.
This is an I heart original. It's and Tom Blanchard
is sitting down with his wife to eat at a
new restaurant in the sleepy town of Hailey, Idaho. Hailey
is a part of the Wood River Valley where Tom
(00:24):
is a county commissioner, and he's eager to check out
a big attraction in one of the area's smallest towns.
It's packed, and everywhere Tom looks he sees something extravagant,
amazing expensive hardwood furniture tables that have African daisies and
(00:46):
tiger lilies erupting from vases, hand painted ostrojegs that line shelves.
There are even palm trees. In Idaho. Grand openings of anything,
especially a two story restaurant slash bar, are few and
far between. And Haley, it's a former mining community with
(01:09):
the kind of straightforward, no frills attitude that comes along
with it. Some people in Haley aren't even sure a
restaurant this nice belongs here. It's not that they don't
like it, it's just that it's fancy. Locals don't have
a lot of use for fancy. Tom's like that fancy
(01:29):
is okay, but he can do without it. And he's
not phased by much, but even he's surprised by what
happens when he looks up from his menu to see
who's looking back at him. The server is Bruce Willis.
He was our server. Um My wife and I ate
(01:51):
at the mint one night and he was our server
because he he would go down there and he would
end up waiting on tables and you know, talking to
people or you know, serving at the bar. Bruce Willis
smiles as he jots down their order. Well, if you've
seen his movies, you know he doesn't smile so much
as he smirks. That's part of the Bruce Willis image.
(02:14):
Never a complete smile, more of a half grin without
showing many teeth, something that says, you know, I'm charming.
I know I'm charming, and we're both pretty amused by it.
The smirk that's made hundreds of millions of dollars at
the box office in films like Die Hard, Twelve Monkeys,
and Pulp Fiction. He even made that talking baby movie
(02:37):
Look Who's Talking, a success that spawned two sequels, though
Willis sat out the third movie when the dog started talking.
Willis was the voice of Mikey the Baby, a constantly
smirking baby. The point being Bruce Willis in was one
(03:04):
of the biggest movie stars on the planet, an action
hero whose everyman qualities helped balance out these superhuman characters
played by Bazooka tootors like Schwarzenegger and Stallone. An actor
who was highly respected for dramatic turns in movies like
as a tortured Vietnam veteran in In Country and opposite
(03:25):
Paul Newman in Nobody's Fool. A mega watt star, making
tens of millions of dollars almost every time he appeared
on screen. And yet here he is in Haley, serving
Tom Blanchard and several other tables their appetizers. And it's
not because Bruce Willis had fallen on hard times. It's
(03:48):
because Bruce Willis owns the restaurant known as The Mint.
In fact, he now owns several businesses along Haley's main street,
in addition to a private residence just on the edge
of town. That's why residents started calling their home something
besides Haley. They started referring to it as Haleywood. But
(04:12):
some people couldn't shake the feeling Willis didn't want a
town so much as a movie set, one where Willis
was the director. And if Haley was a movie set
and Willis was the director and the star, didn't that
make the locals well? Extras for I Heart Radio This
(04:37):
is Haleywood, and I heart original podcast, I'm Your Host
Danis Schwartz, and this is Episode three Planet Haley Wood.
In the nineties, Bruce Willis wasn't just a movie star.
(04:58):
He was also a businessman involved in one of the
trendiest business moves an actor could pull off, becoming the
face of a slightly corny theme restaurant. It's easy to
see the appeal. Kenny Rogers Roasters, a chicken spot, Michael
Jordan's steakhouse eminem recently opened to storefronts in Detroit named
(05:22):
Mom Spaghetti. And there's Mark Wahlberg's Wallburgers, which he operates
with his brothers. These are kind of self aware in
their kitchen appeal, sometimes earnest, sometimes bombastic. But during the
nineties heyday, the theme restaurant was serious business, and no
(05:44):
theme restaurant was bigger than Planet Hollywood in tourist friendly
cities like New York, Los Angeles at Disney World, even
all the way to Moscow. These monuments to Hollywood glamour
and stardom popped up and enticed patrons with an aesthetic
that worshiped the movies. Picture a t g I Fridays
(06:10):
with movie memorabilia, with movie flair, a place to eat
fried chicken coated and capt'n crunch cereal while seated underneath
Rocky balboas boxing trunks or John mcclean's dirty undershirt. Movies
and movie stars hadn't been shrunk down to streaming services yet.
(06:35):
Movies were still an event, and eating a burger while
staring at a glass case with Jason Vorhees hockey mask
staring down at customers was a draw. But the real
secret sauce was the endorsement from major movie stars who
came out for Planet Hollywood grand openings like they were
(06:56):
movie premiers. Why simple, Plan It Hollywood was a turnkey
operation for celebrities who wanted to flex their business acumen
in exchange for publicity. Stars would get shares in the company,
and the more they promoted, the more money they'd make.
(07:17):
That was the idea anyway. Planet Hollywood was the brainchild
of Brian Kessner and Keith Barrish to film producers who
decided to take the template of hard Rock Cafe and
apply it to movies. They teamed with Robert Earle, who
(07:38):
was then CEO of Hard Rock International and who knew
the novelty eatery business well. They thought about calling it
Cafe Hollywood before settling on Planet Hollywood, and because they
wanted it to be an international brand, they needed actors
who had international appeal. The first two names on a list,
(08:00):
Arnold Schwartzenegger and Bruce Willis Demi Moore joined in, making
Willis and More the power couple of the theme restaurant industry.
Soon Sylvester Stallone joined them. For Stallone, it was an
interesting foreshadowing of movies imitating life. The sixth installment of
(08:22):
the Rocky franchise in two thousand and six featured Stallone's
character opening a restaurant called Adrian's. In the film, Rocky
used his celebrity to draw business, just as Stallone and
the others had done I R L. Back in the nineties.
(08:42):
The first Planet Hollywood opened in Manhattan in serving up,
among other things, mixed drinks named die Harder's. It had
palm trees and plenty of star power, all of the
other franchise openings did too. George Looney, Wesley Snipes, Luke Perry,
(09:02):
Eddie Murphy, a who's who of nineties faces were usually there.
Willis and the others regularly attended, drawing thousands of adoring
fans and tons of media. In some of the high
profile locations, like in Los Angeles, there seemed to be
a vague notion that any regular Joe might walk into
(09:24):
the restaurant and see Arnold or Bruce or Demi sipping
a drink. This rarely happened, but it was part of
the appeal. Willis had to say in the franchises liquor selection,
using his expertise from his bartending days in New York,
while Arnold contributed his mother's strutal recipe Burger's nachos, blaring
(09:52):
music quote before they were stars, high school photos on
the place mats. It was a perfect restaurant for the
celebrity obsessed tabloid culture of the nineties. If a patron
ponied up for a Planet Hollywood Express card, they could
even get some of that special treatment usually afforded to
the Hollywood elite, jumping the lines to be seated more
(10:15):
quickly and those lines could get pretty long. The chain
was serving up seven hundred and fifty thousand people every
year at restaurants in thirty one countries. Planet Hollywood became
a brand advertised in movie theaters. Going to a Planet
Hollywood became a right of vacationers everywhere, a stop you
(10:39):
needed to make to bring home a souvenir for family members,
a denim shirt, a polo shirt, a fossil watch. It
even had a tie in board game. The Bomber Jackets
with the Planet Hollywood logo sported by Willis and the others,
were a kind of uniform, like they were part of
a winning varsity team in the sport of making money.
(11:02):
Customers could buy them too, for three d and twenty
five dollars. But at openings, Willis could contribute something the
others couldn't, a stage presence. Civilians weren't allowed inside the
star studded v I P gatherings, of course, so Willis
(11:23):
would bring the party outside where fans were standing expectantly. Opening.
After opening, Willis and his band the Accelerators would jam,
giving audiences a full course of his charisma. Arnold and
Sly could merely wave and smile Willis's most memorable opening
(11:44):
came at the debut of A Planet Hollywood in San Diego.
On stage with his band, he was joined by Anna
Nicole Smith, the pin up of the moment thanks to
our appearances in Playboy and as a model for guests jeans.
Smith was looking to shock the crowd, and she did
(12:05):
by taking out one of her breasts and waving it
around without any prompting or provocation from Willis. She then
unbuttoned his shirt and either licked his chest or pretended
to lick his chest, depending on which version you'd like
to believe. But here's the problem with being trendy. Trends,
(12:26):
by their nature, don't last very long. While the openings
were splashy and exciting, pretty soon people realized that Arnold
wasn't going to just show up and offered to split
a milkshake. The food was no different than your average Applebee's,
and the struggling aspiring actors working as waiters weren't worth
(12:47):
repeated trips. Planet Hollywood went public in and tried to
keep growing, but the public's appetite for cereal encrusted chicken
fingers and terminator jackets mounted on walls had reached its peak,
(13:09):
celebrities began moving away from the premiers. Locations closed, two
bankruptcies followed. There are still some Planet Hollywood's in business today,
but few movie stars celebrating their grand openings. It was
fun while it lasted, and the experience was invaluable for
(13:30):
Willis and more. It showed them how they could monetize
their celebrity in the service industry. But opening a Planet
Hollywood franchise in Haley was out of the question. It
was too big, too well to Hollywood Haley. It was
supposed to be the escape from all that. As Planet
(13:54):
Hollywood was starting to spin out of orbit, Willis decided
to do his own version of a theme restaurant in Haley.
But it wouldn't be restricted to just one building. It
would be places where, yeah, maybe you would see Bruce
Willis hanging out. Bruce Willis's arrival in Haley solved a
(14:27):
very big problem facing the catch him Sun Valley Chamber
of Commerce. Here's Wendy Jake what I was a director
of the Sun Valley Catching Chamber of Commerce. At that time.
The town was pretty sleepy, storefronts boarded up just in
the main area. Older buildings the hospital was converted to
(14:47):
a city hall and a library. The County building is
a block over. It's an old, wonderful brick building from
the late eighteen hundreds. When the silver mining boom was
taking place, the host mistress and the mayor and other
people and Haley were talking about doing a video to
promote downtown Haley because things had kind of gone awry,
(15:12):
wasn't it wasn't really very much of a viable town
that we're empty storefronts. And then all of a sudden
we got Bruce Willis of redevelopment, and we didn't really
need a video after that. Suddenly there was another boom,
(15:34):
not a silver mining boom, a Bruce Willis boom. There
were jackhammers and forklifts and rubble, the good kind of
rubble that told you something was changing, Something was being
torn down so something better could go up in its place.
A transformation was underway. It was a Tuesday hours on
(15:59):
dead line. I was in a big hurry getting the
paper finished. Wayne and Dair, editor of the Wood River Journal,
and somebody came into my office, you know, to get
your camera and go out into the alley, and Bruce
Willis has carried two by fours over his shoulder. That
to helped the construction workers and h he said, yeah,
(16:26):
you could probably sell a picture like that to the
National Enquirer for our fifty dollars. I mean, I would
like to have fifty dollars as much as anybody. But
becoming a paparazzi was not, uh, in my wheelhouse at all.
But that's sounded exactly like something he would do, just literally,
you know, pitching in and helping to get the job
(16:46):
done and being pretty comfortable doing it. Willis was busy
renovating the Mint as a bar in a former mining town.
It was dilapidated, dark. He tore down an little bar
and built what he called them in and he spent
(17:09):
a couple of million bucks at least on renovating it.
Did a beautiful job, made it into a bar and
at a stage that's former Hailey resident and attorney leash Lender.
Of course it was. I mean, it's it's stuck out
like a sore thumb, because it's the kind of thing
you would see in a major city. Everything else is uh,
(17:33):
you know, almost tie up your horse outside. So it
was it was different, that's for sure, but it was
beautifully done, the dark corners were gone, The surly drinkers
were effectively evicted, forced to find another watering hole to Bruton.
(17:55):
Lunch wasn't of the liquid variety, but freshly caught Idaho
trout were burghers. It was affordable to a lunch bill
for two might come to about twenty dollars. Suddenly the
Mint was a shiny new establishment where the slenders and
other locals were sitting down to grab a meal. And
while there wouldn't be memorabilia that was very much a
(18:18):
Planet Hollywood approach, patrons would still know who was bankrolling
the venture. Above the dining area was a giant photo
of Bruce Willis as a baby, not the look Who's
talking baby, his actual baby photo. I think that the
major impression of everybody was that's going to be a
(18:39):
real addition to our little main street, and we welcome
the money. You see when you leave Haley, you go
ten miles north, you get in to catch him in
sun Valley, and it's a working man's town. When you
come south and leave catch him. Hayley was not the
place where the people that had money of it was
(19:01):
purely a working class, working class people. In fact, I
think Bruce was probably one of the first ones of
that type of society that actually built Dollar. There was more,
much more to the Mint, not just a place to eat,
but a place for Bruce Willis to be Bruce Willis
(19:24):
in a way that felt comfortable to him, and we'll
get to that. But he wasn't done with Main Street.
Next came the E. G. Willis Building, named after Willis's grandfather.
It was a combination retail and office space with a
variety of specialty shops like jewelers and furniture stores. We
(19:45):
mentioned this before in relation to Willis's dust up with
the Wood River Journal, but there was more to it.
On the street level of the E. G. Willis Building
was Shorties, a Bruce Willis project that paid homage to
the diners of the nineteen fifties. Willis had named the
joint after his dog, red leather booths, shiny chrome tabletop jukeboxes.
(20:11):
Haley already had a breakfast hang out that the locals liked,
but well, it wasn't exactly what Bruce Willis wanted. It
wasn't open late enough, so he built something he liked better,
a place that served eggs but also served hummus anytime,
day or night. That was kind of what Bruce Willis did.
(20:32):
If he saw something in Haley that he felt could
be approved upon, he'd do it. If he thought it
was missing something, he'd built it. There was a pulse,
a Bruce nous to Haley that was becoming palpable. Here's
Wendy Jake Wet. I think people in Sun Valley and
Catchen looked at this change in Haley as kind of
(20:55):
an opportunity, kind of like a place where it would
be a little bit more authentic. It wouldn't be they
might perceive as as a glitsey resort seeing versus something
that was more authentic. But look at this. It also
had this Bruce Willis amenity to it. The Bruce Willis amenity.
The mint and shorties had his aesthetic, his love of
(21:18):
a bygone era resurrected in the form of pies, under
glass and tabletop jukeboxes. He was having fun sculpting the town.
The same ambition he had demonstrated pursuing an acting career
was making things happen in Haley. Sometimes little things cropped up,
(21:39):
little signs that Bruce might have been getting frustrated with
small town bureaucracy, things like permits and zoning, things that
he never had to deal with that planet Hollywood were
proving to be a nuisance. After all, Haley was flourishing,
and he was investing in it, and someone in that
position might expect a little cooperation. Once Hailey took issue
(22:04):
with the fact that Willis didn't have the required number
of parking spaces for the E. G. Willis Building, he
was ten spaces short. He could have paid a fee
of twenty five thousand dollars to cover the infraction and
kept doing business without the spaces. Instead, Demi Moore bought
a shuttered drug store across the street. It was listed
(22:26):
for six hundred and seventy five dollars. Willis got his parking.
The building itself remained vacant. To some, the town began
taking on the feel of a Hollywood back lot. You
know about back lots. They are built by studios for
shooting movies and have replica storefronts that sometimes lead nowhere.
(22:49):
You just walk through a door and come out the
other side of the unfinished face of the building. After
the Mint Shorties and the G. Willis Building, there was
more Willis zoned in on the one place any movie
star rearranging a small hometown would need. A worn down
(23:10):
building known as the Liberty Theater. It was a place
that once proudly presented movies, not a multiplex, but a
single screen theater open since it was old school, The
original owner was a barber during the day and prospected
for gold on the weekends. Like the Mint, the theater
(23:32):
needed a lot of care, which the current owners couldn't provide.
Willis bought it and restored it to its former Art
Deco glory without stripping it of its small town charms.
He put a lot of money into an old theater.
They're got it out, putting in a new seeding the
new stage. It was first class. Inside. The ornate lobby
(23:56):
was full of gold accents. Bolivian rosewood panels lined the walls.
A huge chandelier loomed overhead. The theater itself had beautiful
gold curtains and brand new chairs that reclined. Even better,
the balcony had love seats that reclined. Tickets were still
four dollars four dollars, and beer was still served in
(24:19):
the balcony. A blazing red marquee lit up Haley's night sky.
Bulbs encircling the titles of the films now playing. For
Willis and for Haley, it was the ideal amalgamation of
the old and the new, a historical landmark in town,
updated with care that preserved Haley's culture. Anyone stepping inside
(24:42):
the Liberty had one word for it, beautiful. I think
that was a huge hit and one of Bruce Willis's dreams.
One he spoke aloud in a rare moment of candor
with the press, was that he could one day host
the premiere of one of his fail elms in a
movie theater he owned. Even though Willis had left a
(25:04):
lot of Planet Hollywood behind, it turned out he wanted
to keep one more element, the sonic boom of a
major celebrity event. In the same year Bruce Willis started
(25:28):
reshaping Haley, he decided he could control just how much
Hollywood he wanted in the town. Willis was set to
star in Twelve Monkeys, a science fiction film directed by
Terry Gilliam of Monty Python fame and co starring a
rapidly ascending actor named Brad Pitt. It was a surreal
(25:51):
story about a man named James Cole played by Willis.
Who travels back in time to stop a deadly virus
from taking the world by storm. When he arrives in
our present or close to it, he sent to a
mental institution. No one believes Cole is from the future
or that he belongs there. He's an odd man out.
(26:20):
Instead of traveling back to Los Angeles for a premiere,
Willis saw no reason why he couldn't spend a lot
of his money and a lot of the studios money,
bringing the premiere to Haley. He flew his co stars
into Haley on a private jet and then shuttled them
to Main Street and limousines. Jean Claude van Dam was there,
(26:43):
and so was hotel mogul Steve Wynn. It had all
the trappings of the glitzy debuts you saw in Los Angeles.
At the premiere, Willis was ecstatic. He welcomed both locals
and big stars at the door, ushering them in, screaming
that all the candy was free, all the baby ruths
(27:03):
you could eat at a Bruce Willis premiere. You didn't
have to pay for concessions. But if the goal of
a movie premiere is to draw attention to your film,
why do it in Idaho, here's leash Slender. You're starting
to get way west. By the time you get to
uh You're not on the edges of Denver or another
(27:28):
metropolitan area. So there wasn't a big area to draw from.
If you put on a premiere or an act of
a certain type, there's only so many people that are
going to come because it's just that remote. Did a
lot of people come from out of town? Do is it? No?
(27:49):
Not at all. In fact, most people didn't even know
whatever happened. And maybe that's just how Willis liked it.
It was more like a private party. It was sort
of Bruce saying, Okay, I'm here, this is me, this
is where I'm from, this is my life, and I've
(28:10):
got this movie. I want you to see about it
because I do a good job in this and from
what I have heard, I haven't seen one of his movies,
but from what I hear, i'm the younger people. They
think he's terrific. Of course, not every movie Bruce Willis
premiered and Haley was a crowd pleaser. The next year,
the gangster drama Last Man Standing got a similar Haley treatment,
(28:34):
but it didn't strike a chord with critics or viewers.
It was a lean, spare movie that shaved off most
of Willis's wise guy charms, which was probably a mistake.
The same year, Willis and Moore opened The Liberty for
the premiere of Strip Tease, an erotic drama in which
(28:55):
More started as a woman who begins stripping to earn
money enough to regain custody of her young daughter. Then
she gets embroiled in a political scandal, as strippers do.
Hollywood saw the movie as having the potential to be
another basic, instinct allured sexy thriller that pushes boundaries without
(29:16):
crossing them. Entertainment Weekly said it would quote reveal more
skin than a year's worth of Victoria's secret catalogs. The
poster was singled out by the Motion Picture Association of
America as being too revealing, with More naked in the
shadow and cross lagged into suggestive oppose, but the role
(29:39):
was important to More. Bruce and Demi's seven year old daughter, Rumor,
even appeared in the film as more as on screen daughter,
and the real headline, more than any erotic imagery, was
that Demi earned a record twelve point five million dollar
salary for an actress. No one, not Julia Roberts, not
(30:00):
harrold Strape, not Sandra Bullock, had ever made as much.
But while Willis and male actors were congratulated for big salaries,
Moore was met with resentment. Some in the press dubbed
her gimme Moore. It was a peculiar double standard. But
(30:20):
aside from the premiere in Haley, Demi wasn't seen as
often as Willis. She kept a much lower profile. She
would rarely, rarely show up anywhere where she could be seen.
Haley provided the same sort of escape from the cloying press,
(30:43):
the double standards, the judgmental public, for more as it
did for Willis. Striptease would be Moore's only film that
premiered in Haley. In his premieres, Willis pulled off what
most act there's only dream of, tight trating the precise
level of celebrity, just enough to enjoy, not so much
(31:09):
as to be overbearing. While his movies didn't premiere in
his literal backyard, it was close, and when his famous
friends left and the carpet was rolled up, Haley could
go back to being the nondescript town Willis had fallen
in love with It was just a brief intermission, just
(31:30):
a little measured dose of fame, a little hit, and
it was all in his control. There were times when
Bruce Willis wanted to be noticed, and there were times
when he didn't. And when he didn't, it wasn't enough
for him. It simply to retreat into the background or
stick close to home. Any uninvited attention was met with, well,
(31:53):
let's call it resistance. Locals would sometimes hear vague warnings
floating through the year. Don't talk about Bruce Willis, don't
photograph Bruce Willis. Just ignore the movie star with the
giant baby photo in the restaurant. If he wanted to,
he could have just become a member of the local community.
And but that wasn't Bruce Willis. And I can understand,
(32:18):
looking at the temperature range that he ran in in
his career, his movies, etcetera. This is high wire stuff.
I don't think he's ready to sit down and uh
do flapjacks at the Alliance Club softball game every summer.
(32:38):
If it worked, if it all worked, Haleywood could become
Bruce Bell a place that had everything arranged in a
way that made it a custom fit a bespoke town,
tailored to order. The pieces were all in place. Now
Haley was going to see what their new benefactor planned
to do with their main street or his new main
(33:02):
street next time on Haleywood, The Mint it wasn't just
a place to eat under the gaze of Willis's baby photo.
It also acts as nightclub, a stage for Bruce Willis's band,
and one of the few places in Haley where you
(33:22):
might just get your ass kicked. It was a group
of them, and I remember going to my car and uh,
and I had my concealed weapons permitting everything Victin and
I just put my pistol in my pants and someone
called the cops. Right. Haleywood is hosted by Dana Schwartz.
This show is written by Jake Rawson, Editing, sound design
(33:43):
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 Rawson, Austin Thompson and
Marissa Brown. Show logo by Lucy Quintinia. Our senior producer
is Ryan Murdoch and our executive producer is Jason English.
(34:07):
Special thanks to the people of Hailey, Idaho and all
those who've shared their stories. Haileywood is a production of
I Heart Radio Until Next Time.
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