Bruce Willis

[dustybooks]

I was actually hit kind of hard by the news about Willis, maybe because I have just been watching Moonlighting on DVD and it's so startling how much vitality he has in the show, which required a mixture of physicality, comic timing and well-expressed pathos from him that I don't think he ever matched even in the best of his film roles. As banal as it sounds, it just feels counterintuitive to see that version of him given these recent developments: how could that guy be struggling with cognitive decline and retiring? I'm reminded of seeing Mister Roberts for the first time a few years ago -- not a film I like much, but Jack Lemmon's unstoppable energy in it really struck me, having grown up with him as a sort of elder statesman celebrity; it really signifies how time is the great equalizer when you see how that indefatigable quality, recorded for us forever on film so that it always seems permanent and present, can be so thoroughly diminished in not so many decades.

On the aforementioned rewatch I'm up to the fourth season of Moonlighting so it's past its peak at this point, but few nights ago I watched an episode in which David Addison is sent to prison and in by far the most memorable scene his narration of his relationship to Maddie to the rest of the inmates in a chain gang sequence suddenly erupts into a Gilbert & Sullivan parody with amusingly over-elaborate choreography and an infectious degree of enthusiasm (and a total willingness to submit to humiliation) on Willis' part. The director of the episode Allan Arkush is on Letterboxd and I asked him about how long it took to prepare and film the scene; he said neither he nor Willis were given blocking of the dance number until the shoot, which was completed in one day! I would've never guessed from how well it plays out. Learning of his retirement just after reading Arkush's comments made it all the more poignant.

[domino harvey]

I’m living for discovering in the midst of this news that Willis, an unknown at the time, ultimately got the Moonlighting gig because hesitant ABC execs were finally convinced when one of the higher ups said she thought “he just looks like a dangerous fuck”

[Finch]

Hope Willis is going to be in as good a condition as the illness will allow. It does put the last few years into perspective. Outside of Moonrise Kingdom though, it felt like he'd been coasting for some time.

On a somewhat related note, Jim Carrey told Access Hollywood this morning that he has pretty much made up his mind about retiring too unless there is a script that resonates enough with him.

[knives]

Honestly the timeline on this is the most distressing part for me. In 2003 he suffers a traumatic brain injury which is probably the cause of this disease.

Within two years he begins to develop this reputation as a difficult actor. In hindsight this is probably the first sign of the severity of the damage at only the age of 50. As far as I can tell Kevin Smith in 2010 is the first to speak about Willis showing signs of aphasia complaining about Willis’ unwillingness to memorize lines and overall aloofness. Perhaps, in hindsight, this is where he should have started receiving treatment?

Still he seems capable and independent enough until 2014 when things do really seem to change leading me to suspect this is when he started getting pulled around by his handlers. He starts to transition to these minor roles, has a strange spat with Stallone over Expendables 3 demanding excessive money, and most notably it’s the last year he acts in a studio film. I really do wonder why the studios seemingly blacklisted him after this? Was it his now difficult reputation or perhaps the inability to remember lines? The worst case scenario is that the studios had a sense of his mental failings and wouldn’t insure him.

Still, things don’t start looking weird till 2018 when Willis amps up his output doing a ridiculous number of these overpaid cameos. It really seems like he had been ready for retirement for four years, but too many people depended on him for their income to let him seek the treatment he needed.

This whole thing smells of a system and individuals not doing enough to help and support one of its biggest members instead throwing him aside to be eaten by wolves when he was no longer financially useful. Between this and the Rust shooting show to me an industry as unwilling to promote safety and long term health care, especially as action films become more essential to the financial model, as football.

[aox]

Hope Willis is going to be in as good a condition as the illness will allow. It does put the last few years into perspective. Outside of Moonrise Kingdom though, it felt like he'd been coasting for some time.

Mostly agreed. However, he was able to pull off two more big budget films though: Glass and Motherless Brooklyn. And they were pretty recent given Knive's timeline above.

The Unbreakable Trilogy is really the only interesting thing M. Night Shamalyan has produced IMO, so I am happy we got Glass.

[therewillbeblus]

I grew up in a home where Bruce Willis was a God, watching all his movies habitually along with those of Steve Martin, Woody Allen, and Jackie Chan. I’ve always been bothered too about this shift in impressions of him as difficult and mean compared to other earlier words of affirmation and quality of character.

Which is to say that I loved your post, knives. Thanks for sharing that concern, it was very well stated, and I feel your compassion and frustration with the systems at hand.

[domino harvey]

You have to wonder if Willis hadn’t hidden his difficulties, how much easier life would have been for everyone. Maybe he didn’t want the pity party that Reeve received, and I can’t blame him there, but I can’t help but think his well-known reputation as an asshole in the last twenty years could have been avoided

[therewillbeblus]

True, but as you recognize, it's not as simple as that. I've only been acclimating to really comprehending the psychological depths of body-failing recently as my partner has MS (of which aphasia is a symptom more commonly associated with that disease vs separately). She frequently discusses her trauma from it and the intuitive preference of concealing this sense of 'brokenness' from others even at the expense of pushing people away and having a different image, which at least protects you from confronting and internalizing that perceived fatalistic weakness, albeit in a self-destructive way. I dunno, that's a sparknotes version, but I'm still learning about how traumatic and deep this stuff hits, and while we could probably all be open and vulnerable about our darkest core sensitivities and avoid a lot of negative consequences, I doubt most of us have always instinctively gone with that logical option over the emotional one, especially as we ourselves are working through them!

[knives]

You have to wonder if Willis hadn’t hidden his difficulties, how much easier life would have been for everyone. Maybe he didn’t want the pity party that Reeve received, and I can’t blame him there, but I can’t help but think his well-known reputation as an asshole in the last twenty years could have been avoided

I do think privacy is an understandable concept especially about something like this, but I also think that this shows the need for accountability. After the brain trauma Columbia should have had a five year watch on him providing health care and observing if he was showing long term effects of the trauma. That would have allowed him his privacy and also proper care with limited ability for people to take advantage of him in the way it seems he was in these last four or so years.

Another way of saying what I mean is that I feel like Willis had no obligation to announce in a way that I would know about his disease, but there should have been some system set up for the industry to know and be able to take care of him.

[domino harvey]

You're both quite right, it's not so simple and it's easy for me to say what an afflicted person should do in a situation I'm not a part of. And I'm not definitely not saying he had to go public. But I believe Willis' reputation could have been more of "difficult" or "particular" in a Brando or Bale sense versus the "Asshole who'll do anything for a buck" bad joke he's been for a while now if he'd been more open within the industry. Hollywood is very good at shielding their own, and until recently he was a reliable money-getter with audiences, so they would have had the incentive to have his back beyond basic human compassion. And that shielded reputation would have trickled down to us non-industry folks without necessarily being aware of the reasons why

[colinr0380]

Brad Jones has done a piece on 10 underrated Bruce Willis movies after this news. I would definitely want to highlight the two thrillers he mentions in the absolutely bonkers giallo thriller Color of Night (most notorious at the time for having full frontal footage of the star that caused issues with the MPAA) and particularly the twisty Mortal Thoughts which both anticipates the structure of The Usual Suspects and gives Harvey Keitel another chance to do an suspicious police investigator character that is quite similar to the one he played in Bad Timing.

It is nice to be reminded of Striking Distance and Blind Date too, though I remember at the time Blind Date, The Secret of My Success, The Woman In Red and Who's That Girl? blurring together in my mind into one amorphous 1980s styled mega-film of guys getting in over their heads with crazy dames.

[flyonthewall2983]

I liked Striking Distance. The kind of meat-and-potatoes thriller that probably wouldn’t stick out were it not for just the sheer amount of names in it.

[swo17]

First celeb to sell his right to be Deepfaked

[therewillbeblus]

Willis' family shared that his condition has progressed, and he's finally received a more specific diagnosis of frontotemporal dementia