Episode 5: Citizen Willis

four thousand dollars over an unpaid invoice. Lovey says that their client, Valley Entertainment, has refused to settle the bill. We were downstairs taking the deposition and Bruce came charging in and like, you know, boy, the lone rangers here. And he sat down and listen for a bit and was, you know, just kind of I don't know, what would you say, puffing and puffing and being a little ledger. According to Lee, Bruce Willis starts making faces and emitting

strange noises. He's like a student acting out in class, like he can't believe Jim Lovey has the audacity to tell his side of the story. Now, to be clear, Lovey is not alleging Bruce Willis owes him money. He's alleging Valley Entertainment owes him money. And Bruce Willis is never a named party in the suit. But Willis does own Valley Entertainment. Who does allegedly, Oh, Lovey the money? And clearly he's taking this a little personally. And he jumped up out of his chair and ran up the

stair He didn't know where it was. I don't think he didn't know the building again, this is a home office. Well, my wife was upstairs in the kitchen cooking, and he ran right into her. She said something like, well, hi, Mr Willis, how are you. He didn't realize it was all I don't know where he thought that stairway went. But boy, if you could hear everything crashing bang as you tried to find the door out and he finally did, it was clear Willis didn't think much of the allegations,

or of any kind of descent in Haley. The fuss over an unpaid bill was a kind of objection. Willis had, after all, employed countless skilled tradespeople for his projects. He had injected millions into Haley's economy, and in doing so, he had become possibly the strongest force in the community. He had what he had long enjoyed in Hollywood, power influence. The days of being a quiet resident were over. There were battles to fight now, legal ones, political ones. Because

Bruce Willis had a platform. Sometimes he'd use it to interrupt a deposition, other times he'd use it on bigger issues. But even movie stars have limits, and while Bruce Willis might have been able to rattle the people of Haley, influencing the entire state of Idaho would be a different story, and quite possibly a disaster of nuclear proportions. For I Heart Radio, This is Hayleywood, an I Heart original podcast. I'm your host Danis Schwartz, and this is episode five.

Citizen Willis. In spending years and millions of dollars in constructing the Mint bar renovating the Liberty, erecting the E. G. Willis Building, and more. Willis had employed dozens, perhaps hundreds of skilled laborers, and the vast majority didn't seem to have any issue. When someone did well. They took his Valley Entertainment to court. While Bruce Willis's deposition interruption may not have been his finest moment. It may have been

born out of real frustration. The lawsuit brought by Jim loves Eagle Company was a result of heating and ventilation work done on the E. G. Willis Building. Jim Lovey and his brother Jack sued for fifty four thousand dollars, then raised that number to one hundred and twenty thousand dollars, But the case had problems. A computer failure had wiped out the company's detailed financial records. The judge ruled that mistakes had been made by Eagle Company during installation. Ultimately,

the court ruled in Willis's favor. By the time everything was accounted for, Eagle Company was ordered to pay a total of fifty nine dollars and seventy four cents. The two story E. G. Willis Building was the source of other issues. It was a symbol of Haley's evolution. Willis had torn down one of the oldest buildings in Haley to build it. Here's former Blaine County Commissioner and Idaho historian Tom Blanchard. When they tore that building down, it turns out the building next door to it had an

incredible mural on it. It was just beautiful. It was an old Henry George cigar advertisement. The cigar was just five cents and according to the ad, just for men. When he tore that down and exposed that mural, he left it up for a couple of weeks just so people could enjoy it. And then eventually that building had to go and he got torn down. Also, Old Haley was slowly disappearing. When Willis put up his new building, he pictured a retail complex, a Haley sized shopping center

with his fifty Styles diner. Shorty is one of the flagship attractions. It was going to be retail. Let's see, you're a jewelist or a flower store owner or a coffee shop guy, and it's like, oh my god, I can get in and be in. You know, Willis's this building and it's like the only building that's going to be like that in town. That's Nancy Romelman. Nancy was a writer for l a weekly who was dispatched to

Haley to see about Bruce Willis's investments. And you know, that's kind of a big deal, and you're gonna get tourists that are gonna want to come in and you know, you're you're writing on the fact that this is a building that Bruce Willis built and built as Fair's grandfather. But Romelman says Willis's plans looked more like an office park. So you sink your money and it's you know, thirty

sixty whatever it is. You build your floors and lighting and you know, plans and insurance, and you do all this stuff and then oh, oh, actually it's not going to be retail. We're just gonna for whatever reason, maybe they couldn't find tenants or they just changed their minds, who knows. But now it's going to be offices. So now you're this lonely dude on the second floor with let's say a jewelry store. You're screwed. You're absolutely screwed.

You are definitely not going to get you know, the tens of thousands of tourists coming in to walk into an office building and maybe go to your jewelry store. It's it's never going to happen. Romeolman spoke to Francois Parrie, the owner of a furniture store in the building. He insisted on meeting her in front of a hardware store on the outskirts of town as though he were being watched in a car. We sat in the car and yeah,

that was a little strange. But obviously some people in Haley felt like Willis was too powerful to go up against. It made them a little paranoid. I recall him as being definitely still pretty head up about the whole thing. Francois told Rommelman he had moved into the E. G. Willis Building in his business was called primitive design, and he was eager to bask in the sunshine supplied by

a Willis funded enterprise. And it was built as a retail mall, but instead of clothing stores or ice cream parlors, for SUA's neighbors were suits and business casual. The E. G. Willis Building wasn't he felt as advertised? Who wants to go furniture shopping in an office building? Francois suit Willis and Valley Entertainment to get back the thirty thousand dollars he had invested. Willis was off shooting another movie at the time Francois filed his claim, Willis couldn't possibly fail

to show up on set. In order to appear in court. They said it would cost over one hundred and twenty eight thousand dollars in misproduction per day. Willis's attorney then filed a counterclaim. Francois was also told that if he lost the lawsuit, he would be responsible for Willis's travel costs. For Bruce Willis that meant paying the fuel charges for his private airplane. In the end, a jury rejected both claims. Each party would be responsible for their own legal expenses.

So that was one of the guys that tried to get his money back. He didn't want anything else. He just wanted to get what he'd invested in. And Willis's crew fought him to the nail did and win it. And I gotta tell you, you you gotta feel for these people. Now, were they, you know, counting their chickens before they hatched well shore? But that's what you know, hopeful business people do. And they, you know, they didn't count on the fact that Willis could get out of whatever he wanted to

do a lot more easily than they could. He had a lot of options, they had. One Francois declared a personal bankruptcy. Another small business owner, Tony Lanning, told Rammelman that Willis had made her an offer to buy her antique store. Willis wasn't interested in selling antiques. He wanted the land for a planned entertainment complex. A set of blueprints had been going around town detailing the plans, and Landing was surprised to find they showed Willis as the

owner of her store. At the time the plans were made. It was just assumed she would sell. Anything else was unthinkable, but Landing wasn't interested in selling. It was another hiccup in Haley, a sign that not everyone was over the moon about Willis being there, especially if you like to get a good night's sleep. The biggest issue that I had with Willis um was associated with the airport, and

the airport was a problem. The major part of the population is centered around that airport, within three miles of it in the direct flight line. Tom Blanchard again, he was flying a G two and he was m arm and arm with Arnold Fortunegger who was also flying a G two, and the G twos were the noisiest aircraft, large, you know, large private aircraft that you did get other than a layer jet. And he would fly on at two o'clock in the morning with this G two or

Jake off that woke you up in Bellevue. Sometimes it seemed as though Willis didn't know his own strength, what his buying sprey was doing to disrupt the economic ecosystem of Haley, to say nothing of the noise pollution. If Bruce Willis wanted something, no one was going to outbid him for it. If you wanted to develop the town, he expected people would follow along. If you wanted to land a plane in the middle of the night, he was going to land that plane, So what if there

was a little collateral damage. Besides, Willis didn't often have to deal with the consequences of his decisions personally. That job was left up to his Valley Entertainment. The head of Valley was Joe McAllister, a childhood friend from New Jersey who Willis had imported to be his right hand man. McAllister was a big guy, brash, not a bad guy, just assured. Here's Nancy Ramelman, the guy who had been sort of boost his money. Guy was someone that people

were intimidated by. He was apparently like a big dude, and he was still around on the streets of Haley sometimes and people were, I don't think, like physically afraid of the guy, but they were intimidated by him. McAllister had a lot of crap to deal with. Literally. One of the problems facing the E. G. Willis Building was

the town's iron grip on sewer permits. There weren't any to go around with the city's engineers, fearful of the town had reached its capacity city the sewell was discharging too much waste into Bigwood River, and the Environmental Protection Agency was on their back. The following year, the town finally relented, releasing one hundred and ten permits for sewer hookups, but that was for everyone homeowners, business owners, anyone who needed to use a bathroom in a town that was growing.

The E. G. Willis Building wanted ten permits to add a salon, bakery, and other businesses, but the permits were too hard to come by. When the city released them, people grabbed lawn chairs and camped outside of Haley's city hall. McAllister criticized the limits in the local press. He even tried to shame Haley's decision makers by saying that Willis planned to build a six hundred thousand dollar industrial light manufacturing building in nearby Bellevue. Willis would have built it

in Haley. McAllister said if only the business climate had been friendlier. He said Bellevue had a quote cooperative spirit, and he added Bellevue also had a sewer. Haley was being potty shamed. The sewer capacity issue also stopped Demi Moore's plans to turn an old drug store into a fitness center. She also wanted to build a doll museum, relying on her extensive two thousand dollar collection housed at

Freedman Mansion. Haley's gatekeepers wouldn't allow that either. Time and time again, Willis wanted to grow Haley, and he kept running into red tape and lawsuits. It was enough to make some in Bruce's orbit want to get out of Idaho. In McAllister announced he was resigning as president of Valley Entertainment. He was going back to nutr Z. One of Willis's top employees at Valley Entertainment took over, but the regime

change didn't get off to a good start. Just a few months into the new president's tenure, Haley police and state officials executed a search warrant and found fifteen marijuana plants on her private property. According to Idaho law, that was considered manufacturing. She was taken into custody and faced five years in prison or fine a fifteen thousand dollars if convicted. She argued the weed was for her personal use. The charges were eventually dropped, but the feeling that Willis

and his crew were beyond reproach was wearing off. For Willis. It had been a frustrating eighteen months. His main operator, Joe McAllister, had left, only to be replaced with someone upon felony charges. Haley was getting stingy with were hookups cramping his business expansion. His plan to improve the sidewalks outside of the E. G. Willis Building was getting the run around too, As he had with the mint Willis

wanted them. Heated to battle the snow of Haley's harsh winters and keep his patrons from sliding, but first through his front door justice. Haley had counted on him to give their economy a boost and raise their profile. Willis was becoming more and more ensnared in local politics. A man who could command ten to twenty million to do a movie was arguing with a town over where people

could go to take a dome. His political involvement would soon grow into something that concerned the entire state of Idaho, and, unlike Francois Parrie the sewer and the heated sidewalks, if this one didn't go his way, Willis issued a stunning ultimatum. He said he'd leave for good. Bruce Willis became an astronaut. Well, his character became an astronaut. In Armageddon, Willis plays Harry Stamper,

a deep sea oil driller. Stamper gets recruited by NASA to help stop a humanity ending asteroid hurtling toward Earth. The plan is Willis's character lands on the asteroid, drills to its center, and plants a nuclear bomb inside, and then he high tails it off the asteroid and blows it up before it strikes her. Of course, things don't go exactly as planned. The silliness of the plot wasn't

lost on Willis's co stars. Ben Affleck once asked director Michael Bay why NASA couldn't simply train astronauts to become oil drillers, which would probably be easier than doing it the other way around. Michael Bay told Affleck to shut the up. The movie would make half a billion dollars at almost the exact same time Bruce Willis was dealing with a real life nuclear catastrophe. This one was at home. Idaho's Nuclear Engineering and Environmental Laboratory, now known as the

Idaho National Laboratory, opened during World War Two. It generated nuclear power and researched ways to deal with the waste it created, so there was a lot of depleted uranium just sitting around, among other things. It was near the state's largest freshwater aquifer, sure, but at least it was in the middle of nowhere, well sixty miles east of Haley to be exact. In the mid nineties, the state of Idaho made a deal with the Department of Energy.

They'd allow the federal government to dump more than a thousand shipments of new clear waste from out of state. In return, the federal government promised to remove existing nuclear waste from the state over a forty year period. Basically, Idaho would get a lot of dump trucks full of nuclear waste in the short term in exchange for having a lot of it removed in the long term. It

wasn't a great deal, but the alternative was bleak. The government could just dump nuclear waste there anyway, and Idaho could get nothing at all in return. But not all of Idaho's residents trusted the government word. If you had lived in Idaho long enough, you knew the government had first promised to remove the existing waste back in. Some compared the whole situation to Chernobyl. Here's Wendy Jake what, former executive director of the Catchum Sun Valley Chamber of Commerce.

There was a situation with regard to nuclear waste coming into our state, and there was a campaign, a lot of it was from here against that. The campaign was called Stopped the Shipments, and he was a fender for that group. He saw himself as a Republican, but he was angry at the Republican governor because he felt the governor that was violating the agreement the prior governor had made. He donated ten grand to raise awareness for the cause, a number that eventually grew to over one hundred and

twenty thousand dollars. Even though he hated talking to the press, Willis gritted his teeth and made his way through the interviews to get the message across. And he framed it as a kind of ultimatum. If I know didn't pass the referendum, Willis said he would leave Haley and the state altogether. If everyone votes yeah, we want it, I'll stop, I'll shut up, and I'll start looking for another place to live. He said. To some it was like a Titian was being circulated to run Willis out of town.

After all, if you signed it was a vote for him to stay. If you didn't, it was a vote for him to leave. One newspaper editorial said some residents might just take that deal. Maybe Francois Parrie would have signed it. There was something about the threat that Willis leaving was supposed to rattle the population that came off as self aggrandizing, as if his absence would be a massive blow to the state. Some even seemed to resent

Willis for having an opinion at all. To them, he was an outsider who was positioning himself as an expert on nuclear waste, not normally the purview of actors. Bruce Willis wasn't just deciding what was best for Haley. He was deciding what was best for Idaho. Calls to the governor's office came in, telling him to quote, go back to California, but Willis didn't back down. He doubled own, holding a press conference on the steps of the state capitol to criticize the state for allowing the deal to

go through. We want zero nuclear waste in the state of Idaho, he said, and if Idaho couldn't provide that, then Willis said they needed a new governor. He predicted politicians backing the deal would be working at a seven eleven in the next four years. Still, a lot of people appreciated Willis's activism. It was a demonstration of his commitment to Haley. Someone even came up with a slogan

stick with Bruce Willis for a better Idaho. He cared about the well being of where he lived, and he had the celebrity and money to support a just cause when he saw one. But in the course of the drama, a newspaper columnist named Dan Popkey discovered that Willis, who had rarely been outspoken about local politics in the past, was not registered to vote. He published that fact, much

to Bruce's chagrin. It reinforced the idea of the classic Hollywood stereotype, a strongly opinionated actor who didn't even bother to vote in the nine years he'd been living in Idaho, and because Willis wasn't registered to vote, he wasn't legally able to sign the petition he had been promoting. Willis quickly ran to register. Fifty two thousand people signed the petition. The people Willis, being the most vocal, had spoken and it seemed like victory was in sight, that no mutant

offspring would be arriving in Haley decades from now. But the referendum was defeated by voters. The nuclear waste was allowed in. Willis had failed to stop the asteroid, and unlike the ending of Armageddon, where spoiler alert Willis sacrifices his own life to save the planet, Willis remained in Haley. Maybe the threat to leave was insincere, a bit of showmanship, or maybe Willis was too financially entrenched in Haley to pull out, but either way, his bluff had been called.

At first, Willis was unavailable for comment, with his publicist saying he was busy shooting a movie. Later, Willis insisted he had been misquoted about leaving Idaho, that it was a misunderstanding, that both the question and answer were all tongue in cheek. He also called Dan Popkey an Popkey said the quote was accurate. Bruce Willis reminded himself why

he hated talking to journalists. Even though Willis couldn't influence state policy, he still had a territory of his own to survey Haley, where things could be shaped to his liking. And while some in town thought Willis had too much power, some felt like he was doing the right things with it. The E. G. Willis Building, Francois Parie wasn't happy, but

others were. Well. I started my business in June of and I actually rented a space a retail's face about square feet from the B. G. Willis Building, right next to short E's, a little diner that they started. That's Christopher Roebuck, a jeweler and owner of Christopher and Company, a jewelry store that's still in Haley today. So we had customers like Arnald and Maria and imperson to me, it was a great venue to be in for him.

The E. G. Willis Building represented Willis's commitment to Haley, its ability to piggyback on his fame to raise the profile of Willis's related businesses and the entire town of Hailey. So what if Christopher's retail business was in an office building. Downtown Haley was still the place to be. Definitely, there was a business they were They were investing in the community by rebuilding old buildings and refurbishing the Liberty Theater and the Ment Building and the Willis Building, the E.

Willis Building. It brought people to town and got people excited about going out, even people that were local here. You know, they want to go out and be a part of the community and part of the changes and exciting new things that were happening. That also meant Christopher and other tenants of the E. G. Willis Building could become inadvertent tour guides. There's people that are star struck, really want to see him, get his autograph, and people would come into my business and and say, have you

seen him today? Or is have you seen any of the family, And you know, we we do. But we didn't want to exploit their experience here because they were they wanted to raise a family in a small town. We didn't want to push people toward them that we're gonna pest around like paparazzi. And we had plenty of people that were coming in town with microphones and cameras that wanted to take a picture of their life here, which is invasive for anyone that has any variety in

the world. Haley was still in a Willis boom. The E. G. Willis Building and his other projects were having a domino effect. Even things Willis didn't directly finance were improving. At least sidewalks were widened to accommodate more foot traffic. New street lamps and trees went up. Around the same time as the nuclear disaster, Willis made another major purchase, a ski mountain. It was Soldier Mountain near Fairfield, not far from Hailey.

Here's Tom Blanchard, Okay Mountain. Yeah. And then I don't know what um attracted him to buy that, but he did buy it, and he put some improvements in. And I think that the difficulty was that if you come to Sun Valley, why would you go to Fairfield? Because Fairfield was more rural, more isolated, more provincial. I guess I might be a term more you know, Idaho rural um. Then certainly Haley and there wasn't any attraction that would,

you know, in the sense developed that mountain. When Willis bought the mountain, people in Chamas County, where Fairfield is located, were ambivalent. Would it mean another deluge of Willis owned properties, Would Soldier Mountain become the Haileywood Hills. They didn't need to worry. Willis liked the mountains modesty. It was worlds away from the ritzy Sun Valley ski area. Tickets were

cheap eighteen dollars. Unlike politics, it was just fun and no one was going to dump any nuclear waste there. See what you will about Bruce Willis opining on public policy, but at least he cared about the state and about the people in it. And Christmas, my first Christmas and maybe my second in the building and opening my store. I got to work one morning I found a little

note under the door. It was just a little Christmas card like that, just a little note from to me that said Merry Christmas and dust wishes to you and your family. And and that meant a lot to me because here I've borrowed money from my relatives to start my business and I'm doing it in their building, and here I get a Christmas from to me, personal handwritten note that was heartfelt. So that really meant a lot to me as far as my connection with the family.

France Swap Perrie had one experience, Christopher Roebuck had another. Which side of the Bruce Willis coin you landed on in Haley was hard to predict. The following year, Willis announced plans to join the Twin Falls Area Chamber of Commerce. It was ceremonial in nature. Willis didn't attend any meetings, but it was his way of showing support for the region's business community. He believed business owners should set examples. They should be citizens as well as businessmen, and businessmen

have a certain kind of power right. Trying to branch out and get involved on the state level hadn't worked out for Willis, but that didn't mean he couldn't affect change in other ways. Willis still the de facto ahead of the gazillion dollar movie industry. After all, Willis had been careful to keep his two worlds, Hollywood and Haley separated. One was work and one was home. Then something came along that would convince him to let those worlds collide.

Bruce Willis would make a movie just a few miles from Haley, not a Diehard sequel, not another Army Get In, but in many ways it would be the riskiest movie of his career. Next time, on Haleywood. I got a call from the casting director and I said, well, why are you calling me? She said, well, Bruce wanted to have all of his friends audition. But then you come upon a huge problem, and that is you have to just about flying everybody. Right. Any big movie is going

to bring all their principles. Extras is different X as you get anywhere, extras might as well be a lamp post. They're just moving lamp posts, right, hey, walk here, walk there. I think that was a mistake because the kind of satirical, farcical nature of the piece. I don't know. I don't think it worked. It seems like it took a long time to edit, and then it was screened one or two places, and maybe that didn't go well. Haleywood is

hosted by Danis Schwartz. This show is written by Jake Rawson, editing by Derrick Clements, Mary Do and me Josh Fisher. Sound design and mixing by Jeremy Thal, Derrek Clemens, and me Josh Fisher. Original music by Natasha Jacobs. Research and fact checking by Jake Rawson, Austin Thompson, and Marissa Brown. Show logo 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've

shared their stories. Haileywood is a production of I Heart Radio. Until next Time, h