The Bruce Willis movie everybody in Hollywood wanted to fail: “He was getting pretty smug”
‘The bigger the star, the bigger the ego’ is less of a cliché and more of a fact that’s been proven over and over again in all forms of entertainment, and since he wasted little time in capitalising on his post-Die Hard fame to become one of the biggest stars in Hollywood, Bruce Willis couldn’t avoid the pitfalls.
While he wasn’t universally unpopular, nor was he a rampaging dickhead who made life a misery for everyone he worked with on whatever set he was working on at the time, there’s enough evidence to suggest that Willis could occasionally be a difficult presence, as headstrong as he was bullish.
He was constantly fighting with the writers and producers of the first Die Hard sequel to try and make John McClane less of a quip machine, only for the sneaky post-production crew to use all of the funny lines he’d been coaxed into saying in the final cut, which he obviously wasn’t too happy with.
That was nothing compared to The Last Boy Scout, where everyone was at each other’s throats. There was tension aplenty between Willis, producer Joel Silver, director Tony Scott, co-star Damon Wayans, and screenwriter Shane Black in various combinations, with an assistant director summing it up as “some heated, early ’90s, testosterone-charged personalities” all wanting to get their own way.
We haven’t even reached the end of 1991 yet, which is the point. The Last Boy Scout wasn’t the actor’s only release of the year, far from it, in fact. He also appeared in Mortal Thoughts and Billy Bathgate, but it was his disastrous passion project, Hudson Hawk, that knocked him down a peg or two.
Richard E Grant hated working with Willis so much that he wrote an unproduced screenplay inspired by his experience, and it became the one and only time the leading man took a writing credit for devising the story. He may have thought he was untouchable and everything he touched would turn to box office gold, but he quickly found out that audiences can see right through a shite film.
As was becoming a habit, the budget almost doubled in size due to constant rewrites, production delays, and Willis throwing his weight around to bend the production to his will, with director Michael Lehmann effectively admitting that he’d ghost-directed the picture, and he was only there to execute the star’s vision.
After one too many on-set incidents for everyone’s liking, an unnamed producer tactfully informed Vanity Fair shortly after Hudson Hawk‘s release that everybody in the industry was rooting for it to fail. “He was getting pretty smug,” the anonymous figure suggested. “Hudson Hawk goes to show you can’t let actors take over a production.”
“He took it over, directed it, it was his thing, he was in bed with Joel Silver,” they continued. “Everybody’s happy Hudson Hawk failed. It’ll chasten Bruce.” Did it chasten Bruce? It did to a certain extent, since the next few years passed without incident, but by the end of the 90s, he was back to his usual tricks, running productions into the ground and being threatened with legal action by all-powerful studios.
