Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, July 2, 1990 TAG: 9006300353
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: E-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: KENNETH TURAN
DATELINE: BURBANK, CALIF. LENGTH: Long
A railroad flat where, for $175 a month, he bivouacked as one of New York's small army of aspiring actors, it still remains, and not by accident, in the man's family.
"It's like a Museum of Bruce Willis, the early days," he says, at once wistful and amused.
"It's been only six years since the whole thing really turned around for me, and I like to keep that attitude, to remember what it was like. I like that guy more than all this movie star celebrity malarkey."
Willis is sitting in a tangible reminder of that celebrity, a sleek, gray trailer parked outside the sound stage where he is starring as a boozy, freeloading journalist in one much-talked-about movie, Brian De Palma's "Bonfire of the Vanities," and discussing another one, "Die Hard 2," opening Wednesday on 2,000 screens across the country (including Salem Valley 8 and Valley View 6 in Roanoke and New River Valley Movies in Christiansburg).
Though he is insistent on his privacy, Willis is a man who says what's on his mind, and when he speaks at length the different strands of his personality intertwine. The appealing insouciance of the wisecracking kid from South Jersey who became "Moonlighting's" David Addison alternates with the serious actor who got a major break doing Sam Shepard's "Fool for Love" off-Broadway.
Holding everything together is an insistence on respect, an honest irritation with people who do not understand the code he lives by or who make the mistake of trying to push him in directions not to his liking.
When he gets irritated, he gets wound up, and you are likely to hear about it. Yet more than anything else, Bruce Willis comes across much as he must have when he lived in that Hell's Kitchen apartment.
"When I go home at night," he says, "I don't feel like a big movie star, a big celebrity, a big box-office draw. I feel like just a guy."
In "Die Hard 2," Willis reprises his 1988 role as Detective John McClane, a resilient one-man gang. This time around he reluctantly rescues an entire airport from a nasty bunch of former elite U.S. military troops who use terrorist tactics in an effort to free a Central American strongman being flown to Washington to face drug charges.
The result, co-screenwriter Steven E. de Souza told Willis, "ought to do for airline travel what `Jaws' did for taking a swim in the ocean."
Getting "Die Hard 2" to that point turned out to be a logistical nightmare because snow, an essential element of the script, ended up being maddeningly elusive.
"It turned out to be the worst winter for snow in the past six or seven years," Willis says. "We tried four different locations where there was snow, and within two days it all evaporated."
As a result, "Die Hard 2" was shot even more out of continuity than most films.
"There is a scene where I climb up a ladder, push up a grate and come out on a runway," Willis says. "It lasts a minute and a half on screen, and the audience will think it's all in one place, but it was shot on nine different locations across the United States."
Though his success as McClane made his casting seem a natural, in fact Willis had never done a full-bore action film before the first "Die Hard."
"The role satisfies a lot of male things in me," he says. "As a kid, I used to play Army all the time, running around in the woods and making believe I was in `Combat,' " the 1960s television series that starred Vic Morrow.
He grew up in New Jersey as a strictly blue-collar kid, but, he says, "at a very early age, without any prompting, I found I enjoyed entertaining people. When I was 8 years old, I did an old vaudeville skit at a Cub Scout Jamboree.
"The audience sees me making up a mixture of eggs and water and thinks I'm going to throw it on them, but what I throw turns out to be confetti. I got a big laugh, and I remember thinking: `This is a good thing. This feels good.' "
In the context of organized education, however, this translated into being the class clown and constantly annoying the teachers. "I was perceived as being a troublemaker, but I really see it as the first tendrils of creative energy."
Making things more complicated was the fact that as a youngster Willis had a serious stutter. "That's where I honed my sense of humor. It was: `If I can make you laugh, you won't notice that I stutter.' And I found that I never stuttered when I was on stage. When I was able to be someone else, I didn't have to think about it." Magna cum laude from the college of life
Willis ended up at Montclair State College, a New Jersey school with a fine theater department.
"Three weeks into my first semester, I auditioned for a college play and felt, `This is home.' I never took any required courses; I took nothing but theater for two years, cutting classes to go to New York and audition."
In 1977, he got a small part off-Broadway and left school for good.
Bartending, working at health clubs, doing commercials but not being a waiter ("I couldn't stand serving people food"), Willis survived seven years in New York, an experience he considers "the college of life. After that, nothing will ever scare you again."
He couldn't afford regular acting lessons, so he concentrated on learning by doing.
"Every job was a little better part in a little better play," he remembers. "I got a lot of confidence, because I chose to do something against anybody's better judgment and succeeded."
That confidence was a key factor in Willis's beating out 3,000 other actors for the career-making role of David Addison opposite Cybill Shepherd's Maddie Hayes in the cult hit ABC-TV series "Moonlighting."
The show, however, went from triumph to ordeal for Willis over a four-year span that began in 1985, and he views it today with decidedly mixed emotions.
"I was very amazed I survived," he says, weary at even the memory.
"The one-hour weekly two-character show is the hardest format that exists on TV; there's no relief from it. `Moonlighting' gave me the opportunity to work in front of a camera, to learn about what I did well and what I needed to work on, but I also learned about the limits of the media" - in particular, the burden of tight shooting schedules week in, week out.
"My training as an actor had geared me toward service in the performance, but this was all about hurrying up and servicing the page count. If we didn't do 10 pages a day, we got behind. And because of television's time and money constraints, you only really get to the obvious choice, the cliche choice. It doesn't afford you the opportunity to try new things.
"I'd never experienced mental exhaustion before this. After 18-hour days, I'd come home so spaced out, so stressed out from it, I'd be shaking.
"No matter what it is that you do, no matter what it is that you love, if you do it 18 hours a day, five days a week, 12 months of the year, you'll get tired of it. `Moonlighting' came close to grinding my desire to work out of me." Astonished by the jealousy
While other actors have had difficulty making the transition from television to feature films, Willis - who made his first two features, "Blind Date" and "Sunset," while on hiatus from "Moonlighting," and who took on "Die Hard" on fairly short notice during the time Cybill Shepherd was on maternity leave - did it all so simultaneously that he hardly thought about the switch.
What he did think about, what in fact he had a serious amount of trouble becoming used to, was the intense scrutiny focused on his life when he became a celebrity.
He is still somewhat rankled, for instance, at the fuss that was made over the $5 million he earned for the first "Die Hard."
"The jealousy astonished me," he says. "I was raised to believe you don't ask somebody what they make; it's nobody's business."
Being a public figure is clearly something that Bruce Willis is never ever going to be happy about.
"I never thought it was anybody's business how I lived my life. I was just having fun, enjoying myself, and not in any different way than before I became well known. But now people were examining me, saying: `So that's who he is. That's how he lives his life.'
"How can I explain what it feels like?" He allows himself a shrug of helplessness.
"It's all kind of summed up in the removal of your anonymity. Everything that is bothersome about celebrity stems from that.
"All those heads turning when you enter a room, people saying, `It's Bruce Willis; it's Bruce Willis.' It's unnerving. I'm never comfortable in a crowd, and being talked about by complete strangers is not my idea of a good time."
Though he is very much aware that the rest of the world is not necessarily sympathetic to the complaints of movie stars, Willis can't help himself: He is truly bothered by the demands his position places on him.
Take the ever-present paparazzi, for instance. "Someone follows you around all day, taking pictures of your life. It's an invasion. Where is it written that you have to accept the negative stuff?
"I saw one of these guys on TV, talking about how he took a picture of Rock Hudson's corpse. If this is the high point of your career, blow your brains out; get another job."
Helping to give Willis a kind of equilibrium these days is his marriage to the actress Demi Moore.
The couple have a daughter, Rumer Glenn (named after the writer Rumer Godden), and Willis agrees that the onset of family life has been "a stabilizing influence."
by CNB