When Bruce Willis tried to take over a town in Idaho: “It wasn’t very smart”
To say that A-list movie stars have a bit of spare cash lying around the place is something of an understatement.
For decades, the going rate to hire a leading man or woman for a big-budget film has been anywhere around $15million, meaning eventually they run out of things to spend their money on. Sometimes it’s a plane, other times it’s a sports team, and in the case of Bruce Willis, it’s an entire town.
Back in the first half of the 1990s, Willis was about as famous an actor as you could possibly imagine. Fresh off the enormous success of the original Die Hard movies, he was busy doing stuff like starting the Planet Hollywood chain with fellow megastars Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger, and his relationship with Demi Moore had them on the front of every magazine in the world.
But ironically, it would seem Willis wasn’t a fan of the celeb-packed hills of Hollywood, and instead, in 1994, decided to move his wife and three kids out to a small town called Hailey in the state of Idaho in order to live the quiet life when he wasn’t busy throwing bearded terrorists off the top of very tall buildings at Christmas time.
At first, things went swimmingly; Willis began to invest in the town, albeit initially to improve his privacy, but then put money into local businesses and refurbished the town cinema (which then showed constant Bruce Willis movies). Hailey began to thrive, and there were more jobs to be had, celebs spotted and a buzz around the town. It even became known as ‘Haileywood’.
But then by the end of the 1990s, as Willis’ fortunes began to wane due to a lack of big hits at the cinema and a collapse of his marriage to Moore, so did the town’s. Willis pulled his money out of places like the local diner, and a culture of paranoia took over, with private security acting on behalf of the actor, tailing outsiders they didn’t recognise and taking photos of them.
There was also some consternation about the Hollywood invasion into what had previously been a reserved, peaceful town, with a phalanx of Humvees and private planes appearing at regular intervals and lavish private parties being held. According to Wayne Adair, the news editor of the local paper, who had run a story about properties being leased to celebrities in the area at below market value, including a photo of a cabin belonging to Willis: “He (Willis) came in here enraged, saying we were intruding on his privacy, and cancelled all his advertising.”
Adding, “It wasn’t very smart. The next week, we ran a story about him cancelling his advertising account, and the story was picked up by the national news wires. When our original story ran, there was no way of telling the cabin belonged to Willis unless you knew already. After all the fuss, the whole world found out.”
While they were in the town, it seemed Willis and Moore were increasingly concerned about intrusions into their privacy, often justified, but also heavy-handed, including Moore reportedly asking a mother to remove film from her camera after snapping some photos at a birthday party.
Although Willis’ investments dried up and many people found themselves without a job causing no little resentment, it wasn’t enough for him or his ex-wife to part completely with their 20-acre ranch on the outskirts of Hailey, and it wasn’t until many years later, 2018 in fact, that the property was sold and Willis’ links with the place came to an end.
