The movie destroyed by Bruce Willis’ ego: “The 800-pound gorilla and he knew it”
The bigger the star, the bigger the ego, and in the 1990s, stars didn’t come much bigger than Bruce Willis. He was an A-lister, an action icon, and one of Hollywood’s highest-paid and most bankable names, rarefied air that not too many actors are ever allowed to enter at the same time.
While he didn’t have a reputation for throwing his weight around too often, although there are several filmmakers who didn’t have the greatest experience working with the Die Hard frontman, there was one movie in which Willis exerted so much control that it backfired spectacularly on everyone and everything involved.
Unlike a lot of the industry’s most prominent names, Willis didn’t produce an awful lot of his own pictures. In fact, apart from a few ceremonial executive producer credits on random film and television projects like The Crocodile Hunter: Collision Course and the TV series Touching Evil, he was only listed as a producer on one of his own pictures.
That didn’t occur until 2005’s forgettable thriller Hostage, but he would have reached that point almost a decade sooner had Broadway Brawler not collapsed under its own weight. The Disney-backed rom-com imploding generated plenty of headlines, but it did at least work out for Willis in the long run.
After spending years in pre-production and almost three weeks in front of cameras, Broadway Brawler was halted. Temporarily, at first. The leading man was equally frustrated and dissatisfied with the cast and crew, several of whom were fired. Director Lee Grant left the film, but despite Willis recruiting future Adam Sandler favourite Dennis Dugan to try and right the ship, the whole thing was ultimately mothballed.
Cinematographer William A Fraker was one of the many who suffered Willis’ wrath, telling the Los Angeles Times that the actor essentially staged a coup. “Bruce was telling other actors how to act,” he said. “It was a great script, and Lee’s vision was a love story about two people with the background of hockey. But Bruce just took over. We all work for the director. The director is the boss. If the actors want to direct, they should go direct.”
Someone close to the production was more forthright in their assessment, though: “Bruce was the 800-pound gorilla getting the movie made, and he knew it,” they suggested. “He was muscling Andy and he could do it because he also happened to be a producer on the film.”
With Willis facing a hefty lawsuit for his role in Broadway Brawler going down in flames, he ended up cutting a deal with Disney and producer Joe Roth, which saw him sign a three-picture contract with the studio at a significantly reduced rate from his usual $20 million salary.
Those three movies were Michael Bay’s Armageddon, the top-earning release of 1998, M Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense, which scored the actor one of the single largest paydays in cinema history, and The Kid, which cleared $100 million at the box office, so the short-term loss yielded some massive long-term gains.
