Episode 6: A Bruce Willis Production

It's packed with hopefuls. That's the word of the movie industry likes to use for actors attending open auditions. It's a little more polite than the other phrase, cattle calls. Somewhere in the middle of Idaho is a group of almost three thousand people gathering near a shop Co department store, hoping to snag apart in the next Bruce Willis Blockbuster, which is going to be shooting right here in the Gem State. Suddenly there's even more commotion. Bruce Willis has

materialized out of thin air. He's submitting to the adoration of the people, customers and fans and aspiring actors alike. He's signing autographs and posing for pictures with disposable cameras. Bruce Willis is live in the flesh in the mall, even consent to some interviews with television reporters there to cover the casting call. That probably should have been the first clue that something was a little off. After about

an hour of this, another Willis appears. It's David Willis, the movie stars brother and a producer on his new film. David looks at Bruce, Bruce looks at David. It David realizes that this isn't Bruce Willis. It's a Willis impostor who decided to have some fun with fans and journalists. It took Willis's brother to call him out and have him escorted off the premises. It's a peculiar story, but the people hoping for a chance at stardom, at least

a brush with stardom, aren't really attuned to that. They don't know the real Bruce Willis isn't about to make another die hard. They don't know he's about to embark on what is easily the strangest, riskiest project of his career. But Bruce Willis is so sure he's got a hit on his hands that he's decided to do something virtually unheard of for actors to self financed the project. He's producing it, starring in it, filming it just an hour from his house, and recruiting Idahoans to be a part

to them. If it works, Bruce Willis will not only bring a financial windfall to Idaho, he'll change the way movies are made forever. If it doesn't, well, maybe he can blame it on the impostor for I Heart Radio. This is Haleywood and I Heart original podcast, I'm your host Danis Schwartz and this is episode six a Bruce Willis production. From the public's perspective, there weren't many downsides to being Bruce Willis in the nineties. He was a

bankable star in action movies. He was married to Demi Moore, and he had a getaway in Haley that had been tailored to suit his every whim, from his own movie theater to his own diner. But Willis was getting frustrated. He'd been churning out movies like Mercury Rising, where he protected antistic child who had cracked a top secret government code, and Color of Night, which gave audience as their first

ever glimpse of Bruce Willis's genitals. Audiences would have seen more, but the ratings Board threatened to give the movie an NC seventeen classification. Not long after, Willis announced he was getting bored with action movies, with genre movies, with not being allowed to show his penis for the sake of art. He hadn't been celebrated for his acting prowess since Pulp Fiction, in which he played boxer Butch Coolidge for director Quentin Tarantino.

Willis bristled when people referred to him as an action hero. He'd asked them what they meant by that by action hero. He said it in italics like it was an insult. He said that in action movies he didn't feel like he was doing his best work, so he decided to

take more control. He knew the best place to demonstrate his acting ability was where he had gotten started, on stage before the world was introduced to Bruce Willis in Moonlighting in nineteen eighty five, he had gotten a break that was in many ways just as important, just as big. In nineteen eighty four, he was cast in an off Broadway production, A Fool for Love. Playwright Sam Shepard had debuted it the year prior. It's about two lovers in a desert motel, Eddie and May, who slowly pick away

at one another emotionally. That year it was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama. Didn't win, But in the case of the Pulleitzer, it really is a pretty big deal just to be nominated. Willis knew the plays lead actor will Patton, who suggested Willis be his understudy.

When Patton left the show, Willis stepped in. It was Willis's biggest part yet, but after roughly a hundred performances, the plays producers took Willis aside and told him they needed an actor with more presents, an established star maybe, they said, a movie star. Ouch. They chose Aidan Quinn. That must have stung a little, but good things came out of that short run anyway. It helped land him an agent, which helped land him auditions and eventually led

to moonlighting. So there's no question the stage world was on his mind. When Bruce Willis moved to Hayley. Willis had even made The Mint, his bar and nightclub, available to a local production. I and a friend had written display about our time in New York City, and we offered it to them, saying we would do it um

kind of a musical comedy if you will. That's David Blampete, an actor and one time resident of Sun Valley, and we would with his dinner theater, so that would open up his restaurant and give him a chance to show what he was doing there and us a chance to do the show show called two More Laps L A p s E. It was pretty it was. It was amazing little thing to be able to do. But it was Bruce, and you know, they wanted something, and they knew that we were around and been around and were

local talents. So they got a nice audience. We did one show and it was it was a great experience and it went pretty well, except David scared the out of Bruce Willis without meaning to. I remember we were trying to rehearse and set up getting ready, and I needed to ask Bruce if I could use their green room. He called it, which would be for when he has

his big entertainment. When they said, he just left, and I went running out the door and saw him in his truck and water pretty after him, and I'll never forget to look on the space. You would have thought he was being stalked or some was trying to rob him. He was just shook up that someone was chasing him down the street. I apologized and said I just nearly get need to get his permission to use the green room, and he said, of course, um. And that's really how

I remember. He was always pretty much willing to to to give to the community and to people who worked with him and whatever. I mean. They made a big difference to Hayley, Idaho, and to my theater career, if you will. In the valley. David had come to the area from the East coast back in bringing his love of theater with him. That was kind of thinking of going to Seattle and trying my luck there in theater um, and then just decided to know this was a good place.

And so with this these friends of mine formed a company called New Theater Company. The New Theater Company put on local productions, nothing big, but good, solid, well produced plays. What David really wanted to do was one about Ernest Hemingway, the famous writer was also a one time resident of Ketchum, not far from Haley. I was asked because I've been told I looked a lot like a young Hemingway to do something um about Hemingway, And if I found a

show I liked, I thought I might do it. Once David found the right script, he tried to get the show off the ground. I wonder if Bruce or to me might be interested in getting involved, and I remember a very brief conversation and these you know said well not at this time. Uh. Not much later he brought in these old I guess schoolmates that had a theater

company in North Carolina called Company of Fools. And that's when the renovation of the Liberty Theater became clear that he wanted to do live theater, not just a movie theater. And obviously with with Bruce and Demi's name behind it, um yeah they they funding became a little more difficult to get from my company. Um but we we coexisted for a few years. It was hard to compete with a theater company that had Bruce Willis's money to spend.

David would have to hit the streets for fundraising. Willis just wrote a check. But I did pay attention to what they were doing. They were there were some interesting, interesting new stuff and very I mean very innovative for for Haley. They did even they put in an aquatic area around the stage for their production of The Tendest so that they could get in out of water. It was an astounding renovation. I mean, if if you could have seen, it was just a concrete square movie theater.

I mean, there was there was nothing about it that said really welcoming theater um. But they just decided they were going to make it the center of Hailey culture. And they did. They did a very, very very nice job, and I saw many productions there. I even saw while Robin Williams were warming up the act the Liberty decided to make a splash by mounting Fool for Love, a play Willis loved but which hadn't always loved him back.

This time, he was in his early forties, the seasoned movie star, the off Broadway producers had wanted him to be years ago, and he owned the theater. No one could fire him. Movies, Willis said, were take after take after take until everyone was happy. The stage was immediate. You didn't have to wait for test screenings or opening weekend to figure out if something worked, if it was funny, people laughed, if it was sad, people cried more than that.

It was dramatic. Not dramatic because of machine guns, but dramatic because of its emotional heft. Even though Willis had been pigeonholed as an action hero, that wasn't why he got into acting. There was a real performer under the bloodied muscle shirts and one liners, one that increasingly wanted and needed a way to feel that again. If the Mint gave Willis his musical outlet, the Liberty would prove

his dramatic chops. He could have done the play for big money in New York City, but New York City wasn't Hailey, it wasn't home. According to reviewers, Willis was dazzling. His Eddie was pugnacious, desperate, commanding. Willis performed Fool for Love over a dozen times that spring and summer of

ticket sales were always brisk. As reclusive as Willis could be, The Liberty was the ideal place to showcase his craft, not his die hard craft with explosions, but the craft that had made him want to be an actor in the first place. But there had to be a way to marry his dramatic sensibilities with a major feature film right, a movie done on his turns, a movie where he had full creative control, just like he had on stage, where he didn't have to point a gun at anyone.

And that's how Bruce Willis met Kurt Vonnegut. Kurt Vonneguet had probably never seen a die Hard movie, but Willis had read plenty of Vonnegut. His irreverent satires like Slaughterhouse Five combine a droll humor with a keen perception of the human condition. Vonnegut's seventy three novel Breakfast of Champions had been kicking around Hollywood for decades. A dark comedy, it tells the story of a car dealer named Dwyane Hoover who gradually loses his mind after meeting a science

fiction author named Kilgore Trout. If that promise sounds a little hard to grasp, then you know how studio executives felt, like most of Vonnegut's work. Breakfast of Champions was filed away as a project that was virtually unfilmable. It was too insulated, too much of an interior character study to be visualized, But that didn't dissuade director Alan Rudolph from trying Rudolph acquired the rights to Breakfast of Champions and spent years trying to get a feature film. He couldn't

manage it. It was impenetrable. No one wanted to finance a movie about a car dealer who had a breakdown because he met a man named Kilgore Trout. But Rudolph got a break in. He directed a film titled Mortal Thoughts, a thriller about a woman who asked to fight off charges that she killed a friend's abusive husband. The movie starred Bruce Willis's wife, Demi Moore. It also co starred Willis as Jimmy, the man Moore's character is alleged to

have killed. Over the course of filming, Willis became friendly with Rudolph. At some point, Rudolf mentioned he had the rights to Breakfast of Champions. He'd even written a script, which was now over twenty years old. In the throes of his stardom in the nine nineties, It's possible Willis didn't think too much about it at the time, but as the nineties went on and more and more guns were shoved into his hand on movie posters, Willis thought

about alan Rudolph about Kurt Vonnegut and about taking a chance. Well, that's why. That's why I believed it was it was a pet project. It was his to begin with, rather than signing him into it. It was his pet, just something for him to be able to spread his wings as an actor, to producer, to the director. Because Bruce Willis wanted to have considerable influence over the movie, he

decided to ensure he had complete ownership of it. His agents financed it through a complex system of pre selling foreign distribution rights and using that to secure a loan, and when the production still needed money, Willis used his own. This is not something actors do like ever, it must have been a labor of law of you know Kurt Vonnegut novel all that. Yeah, most of them are looking for other people's money, you know, opm. That's Peg Owens,

the one time film commissioner for Idaho. Peg came to the state from California, where she had been a photographer for tourism promotion. I did that and I handled film permits and back then, um, oh gosh, I think the biggest one was I'm sorry, this is quite quite a while ago. Um, a Mel Gibson movie. What was the one where he was the crazy detective lethal Weapon. Yes, the first lethal weapon was filmed in my jurisdiction. I'm sorry, um so I was. I was in Long Beach when

they filmed lethal Weapon. Anyway, So I went from photography to learning how to handle a film production in a jurisdiction, knowing the laws of my jurisdiction and what what they it allow and not allowing where they park and all of that stuff, all of all of the logistics. And so I did that for three and a half years, and then I moved up to Idaho and unbeknounced seen.

At the time, Idaho was creating a film commission job um the title of film Specialist at the Department of Commerce, and I landed that job and held it for twenty six years. So that's how peg Owents found herself amidst a Bruce Willis production in Idaho, one in which he could essentially veto anyone else. Taking the level of control Willis wanted comes with risks, and once you're on top in Hollywood, there's no reason to take those risks yourself.

That's the job of studios and production companies. But Willis wasn't one for conventional wisdom. He formed Flying Heart Films, named after the Flying Heart Ranch housing subdivision where he lived in Haley, and as the uncredited executive of producer, and partial financier of the movie, Willis could determine where it was shot. The story was set in fictional Midland City in all American town Twin Falls, Idaho was the

perfect stand in for Midland City. Willis thought it had beautiful backdrops like Campas Prairie and a little further afield the Craters of the Moon National Monument. Best of all, it was only seventy miles from his house, an easy commute in one of his classic cars. If it worked out, Willis indicated he'd shoot one movie a year right in Idaho.

Shooting a movie in the state wasn't unheard of. Michael Chimino shot some of the highly vilified Heaven's Gate there in Napoleon Dynamite would be shot there a few years later in two thousand three, most notably, the volcano disaster movie Dante's Peak was filmed there in a town named Wallace. That production was massive. It had a budget of over ninety million dollars. That was the one that spent the

most money. It was here the longest UM. I only really showed them to locations, and they picked one of those two. Um. It was fascinating to watch what they did to the city of Wallace to make it look like it had been asked by a volcano. They put up frames with like cardboard so they can then spread it was really like newspaper pulp that was then sprayed all over these kind of curved things so that it would look like it was a pile of ash when it was really a wooden frame covered by uh newspaper.

Newspaper pulp was the ash yep nine million dollars. It was really a very pleasant um experience because the production company was great and the town was great as a filming location. Idaho had a lot to offer. From that perspective. Peg wasn't surprised Willis wanted to mount production there. Oh well, I thought it was a wonderful idea. You know, we have had a number of celebrities living here that chose not to work here, and so it was very hopeful at the time that he would not only do that one,

but would bring more. Willis believed shooting in Idaho would bring an economic boost to the local community. Cast and crew were there to spend money at stores, on hotels everywhere. All told, the impact might amount to around two million dollars. I think the difficulty in people like Bruce Willis trying to make films in the place in which they lived is, first of all, I has to match you know, I mean die Hard would not have matched Anhing in Idaho, right, So there has to be a script match. All of

that has to work first. But then you come upon a huge problem, and that is you have to just about flying. Everybody right in any big movie is going to bring all their principles. The cast was full of big names like Willis who would play Dwayne Hoover, and Albert Finney who would play Killgore Trout, as well as Nick Nolty and Owen Wilson, but they also wanted to hire local talent to fill out smaller parts. To do that, Willis and the production put out a casting call. Extras

is different extras you get anywhere. Extras might as well be a lamp post. They're just moving lamp posts, right hey, walk here, walk there. The extras is totally different at the Magic Valley Mall, Once the dust settled on the impostor stunt Idahoan's laid out there credentials. A realtor brought his wedding portrait and his World War Two medal to show casting directors. Another man was a dry waller who

said he had once played Ronald McDonald. One actor who didn't have to go to the mall was David Blampie, the guy who once made Bruce Willis think that he was about to get mumped. I got a call from the casting director who said, and I said, well, why are you calling me? I mean, I'm very pleased and would love the audition. And she said, well, Bruce wanted to have all of his friends the audition. And I thought,

well that's really nice. I didn't think of myself as a personal friend of Bruce, just what I mean, he knew who I was and knew what I was doing, so so I appreciated being included in the audition process. And the couple of roles that I auditioned for and and and they called me back. One I thought was

pretty good. It was a state trooper or whatever. But because whatever the scene was, there was a car that almost knocked the guy off the road, they wanted to get a stunt man instead of using an actor for them their role. I thought, well, I'm disappointed, but well it's that's life. And then they called me and offered me um a role as a police officer who's arresting

m m M names. I hated kill Gore Trout. His first scene, which had him acting opposite Albert Finney, had problems with extras not doing what they were supposed to do. David's head is in the frame, but not his face. He was disappointed, but then he got another call David Blocker. He was the producer of this film, and he introduced us. It's David Blocker, and we noticed you didn't get any on camera time, wondering if you wanted to do another part.

So April one, I was waiting from my April first jokes, I said, who who sent you? Who told you to do this? Who is this? So I didn't believe him. I did not believe him, and he was very gracious and said, I'll have the castarter call you. And at that point I went, oh, okay, yeah, do that. Two minutes later, a very irate casting director you said I have to call you. You You don't believe David Blockers giving you a role in the movie, So I'm sorry, it's April first. What did I know? So I have two

speaking roles in Breakfast Champions. I got to play a prison guard in the next part of the film, and it was on camera, So I owe that. I am sure. To the lovely Albert Finney, who knew I was disappointed and probably sitting in screening, said why don't you call this guy? The production had other issues. At the auto dealer doubling as Dwayne Hoover's dealership in the movie, real life customers looking for a new or used car had

to walk around police barricades. A giant billboard of Bruce Willis in character as Dwayne Hoover was installed overlooking the highway in town. It was for a scene where Hoover has to navigate a massive highway pile up involving fifty five cars to achieve that the crew shut down a major highway artery, diverting traffic through a detour. Locals were not amused, so it was traffic jams, sometimes probably in confusion that the street was closed or whatever. And you know, um,

how do I put it? You know, there's a there's a simplicity to life in in the in Idaho. There was always a sense, even when I first got there, of feeling like I was invading their territory. You know. I guess they've always felt that if somebody was coming in, whether it was the Sun Valley Company or something to build and buy and take up land and and push people socially away, if you will, just that's how they felt.

They felt that, you know, their life was being taken over by these Hollywood stars and people coming into Sun Valley to a ski or whatever. Um So, yeah, Twin Falls. I don't think they were thrilled that that was happening in Twin Falls. What Willis hadn't necessarily realized was that not everyone in Sun Valley and Twin Falls was going to be ecstatic over a movie being shot there. To them,

it wasn't magic. It was a nuisance. Sometimes they just wanted to get to work without a t. J Eckelberg billboard of Bruce Willis hovering over the highway that they couldn't use. Sometimes they just wanted to buy a used midsize sedan in peace. There was even criticism that Breakfast of Champions was obscene, even though it contains only passing references to sex. Newspaper op ed writers fretted that it could open the door to lurid movies being shot in

Idaho on a regular basis. One day it's Vonnegut, the next day it's Caligula. It was a slippery slope. Other locals took it in stride. At the second time. Around Antique Mall in Twin Falls, owners Claudia and Leo Reyes put out a bunch of not very antique Bruce Willis memorabilia, hoping Willis Mania would erupt. Of course, that wasn't quite San Valley's style. Movie stars were no big deal, and Breakfast of Champions didn't quite instill the kind of fervor

of a movie where pierced brasn in fights volcanoes. Twain Hoover Struggle was more installated, more of a man Verse is himself kind of story. But Willis was completely in his element. He didn't have to explain to studio executives what he and Rudolf were going for, which was a very strange, almost psychedelic examination of a car dealer unraveling. The shoot, which lasted a total of six weeks, also

included a cameo by Kurt Vonnegut. Vonnegutt had said he had written the novel as a fiftieth birthday present to himself. Now he played a director of a television commercial. Vonnegutt was never all that bullish on Hollywood adapting his work. He once said that film is quote too clanking ly real, too permanent, too industrial, too inexpensive to be much fun. But here where Willis was spending some of his own money, Vonnegut didn't seem to mind visiting and being in front

of the camera. By late Breakfast of Champions was finished, Alan, Rudolph and the Willis brothers sat down to evaluate what they had When the film looks to their satisfaction, they planned on taking it out and selling it to the highest bidder. And even if the movie wasn't their liking, studios might still snag it up just to endear themselves to Willis to be on his mind when he decided to do another action opus. Hollywood wondered what this new

paradigm might look like. A list actors taking control of their passion projects. Everyone was about to find out. In May, Bruce Willis strolled down the aisle of a movie theater in Seattle, Washington, and introduced his brand new film, Breakfast of Champions. It was a screening for the city's Film festival. Instead of telling audiences how it cited he was, how much he looked forward to them seeing it, he said something pretty peculiar. He said that he would make no

apologies for what they were about to see. That's not quite something you say when you're promoting a movie intended for mass consumption. But once the film began, the crowd understood what willis meant. Breakfast of Champions was a fever dream of a movie, going from one puzzling sequence to another. It's absurdest sense of humor felt off target. It wasn't really funny for a comedy, and it wasn't really serious for a drama. The crowd stumbled away in a bit

of a daze. Even Kurt Vonnegut called it painful to watch, and he got money for it. I don't know much about its distribution plan, but it seems like it took a long time to edit, and then it was screen one or two places, and maybe that didn't go well. That scene repeated itself as more and more people got a glimpse of Breakfast of Champions. Here's David Blampete and when I said, when I saw it, I went, mmmm, interesting, I mean not I wanted to see what I looked

like on the screen. I suppose it just didn't. It wasn't cohesive to me, didn't. It didn't ring the same way reading the you know, the kind of fifties version of it. I think that was a mistake to try to put it more contemporary because the kind of satirical, farcical nature of the piece. I don't know, I don't

think it worked. I mean it seemed to me. The most acclaim the movie got was Nick Noldy and drag Willis had gotten an opportunity to make the movie he wanted to make, one he made no apologies for, but it turned out there was a reason Alan Rudolph had experienced such trouble getting it off the ground, and Shelly, it's a strange story, maybe too strange for mainstream Hollywood at the time. The film sat on the shelf until Buena Vista, which was owned by Disney, agreed to distribute it,

but it planned April release came and went. It wasn't until September that the film got a limited release, so limited that it made just over one hundred and seventy eight thousand dollars in ticket sales. It might be Bruce Willis's least seen film. Okay, where can I watch Breakfast Champions? Oh it's on Amazon Prime? No unavailable? Yeah it's it's listed there, but that's its currently available. Google you lie back. When the movie wrapped, Idahoans were kind of indifferent to

it all. When the company sold off the movies props, people treated it less like a memorabilia sale and more like a garage sale. This wasn't the Planet Hollywood gift shop. It was a big lots people bought things not because they were used in a movie, but because it was stuff that they wanted at a reasonable price, stuff like a leather vest or a briefcase or kitchen items. The unnamed man in charge of the sale was even trying to sell a toilet that he said Bruce Willis had

sat on. It wasn't entirely clear whether he was joking. Willis did his part to promote it locally too, The autographed the backdeck of Pontiac trans am he drove in the movie, which was offered for sale by Gary's Westland Motors. He also premiered the movie locally in Haley at his own Liberty Theater. He did a screening at the Liberty. Probably,

I m it was an interesting time for me. I don't I was probably busy doing something else, either reading or whatever that I never I don't remember going to premiere I I saw the movie, though, But the box office blip of Breakfast of Champions doesn't quite tell the whole story. Thanks to the radical financing deal it more or less broke. Even today, a lot of movies are

financed by selling international rights before a single frame is shot. Now, Bruce Willis didn't invent the strategy, but he might have been slightly ahead of his time, and as poorly as the film did, was on balance one of the best years of Bruce Willis's career. Just a month before Breakfast of Champions was released, Willis starred in The Sixth Sense as a child psychologist trying to counsel a kid who insists that he sees dead people. It made hundreds of

millions of dollars. If it weren't for episode one of Star Wars, The sixth Cents would have been the biggest movie of that year, but that wasn't Willis's personal project is passion project that one filmed in his home state had simply come and gone. Even though Willis didn't lose money on Breakfast of Champions, it was a blow to his ego. He had stuck his neck out and tried something different and didn't get a lot of praise as

a Maverick filmmaker. Around the same time filming on the movie was completed, the people of Haley were growing concerned that Bruce Willis may one day grow tired of being the region's benefactor, that maybe all the money and time and effort he had sunk into it wasn't delivering the reward he expected. It had been years since he had led a Fourth of July parade on horseback. This was concerning.

What few Haley residents knew was that their town wasn't the only one Bruce Willis was trying to reinvigorate In penns Grove. It had been in the decline now for probably thirty five years. And to see stores and businesses and the community go downhill and depressed and have to get transitional aid from the state and no jobs and the people struggling, it was it was deflating. It was depressing. All this time there had been a kind of mistress, a fun house mirror version of Haley that Willis was

looking to spend even more money on to renovate. And he had ideas to bring like a like a restaurant, like a steak house where the bank would be I guess it was something similar like you did out in Haley, Idaho. To find out what would happen to Haley, all people had to do was look at the last town. Bruce Willis tried to save his hometown of penns Grove, New Jersey, and I thought his ideas were brilliant and would would make a big impact in a town. Haleywood is hosted

by Dana Schwartz. This show is written by Jake Rosson, 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 Rosson, 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.