Keeping It Fresh With a Vengeance

As Bruce Willis and his entourage get set to step from their hotel, one of the crew peers out at the passersby on the street, then calls back, “He’s got a gun!”

There’s some mock ducking, but everyone understands it’s a goof, pure play, throwing out the line that’s so obnoxiously de rigueur in the shoot-’em-ups that earn Willis $20 million a pop, plus juicy percentages, whenever he wants to do ‘em. Lately he hasn’t felt like it, though, and that’s just the point, the rub of the joke.

Willis hasn’t shot a bad guy--or saved the world in some other way--for a full year, not since “Armageddon.” Oh, you can catch him on screen all over the place: as a psychologist trying to help a young boy who sees ghosts in “The Sixth Sense,” as a car dealer going nuts in “Breakfast of Champions,” or--starting this week--as a plain old husband in “The Story of Us.” OK, he’s Michelle Pfeiffer’s husband. But he ain’t shooting nobody.

Ten seconds out the door of the Four Seasons, Willis does allow himself a small heroic gesture, real-world-style. At curbside, he places his modern version of the cloak--his leather jacket--over the shoulders of actress Vicki Lewis (the redheaded secretary of TV’s “NewsRadio”) for the walk across the street to another hotel, where the cast of “Breakfast” is to hold its Toronto Film Festival press conference. Willis is in shades and black baseball cap, pulled down. But two strides into the crosswalk, he’s spotted, and a throng of fans descends.

“Hey, Bruno!” one yells, waving a copy of the blues album Willis recorded more than a decade ago as his musical alter ego, playing the harmonica.

“The kid’s gonna win best supporting actor!” calls out another, a reference to 11-year-old Haley Joel Osment, Willis’ co-star in “The Sixth Sense,” the summer’s surprise blockbuster.

“He’s bull-------’ you, Bruce!” a third says, bringing a wry smile from the actor--the one he’s built his career on--as the entourage reaches a side entrance to the Park Hyatt, and safety.

Minutes later, they emerge on a small stage before an even more pestilent swarm, the media. “Take your hat and shades off!” shouts a photographer.

To which Willis retorts, “Take your pants off!”

Now we’re cookin’. For if he’s a person, and a personality, he’s also a persona. At least a touch of the smirking wise-guy is expected here, along with the stubble of beard that’s hours past a 5 o’clock shadow.

When a questioner offers up that “Breakfast” was “a weird film” Willis asks, “Did you read the novel, sir?”

Well, no--the fellow had not read the 1973 bestseller in which counterculture icon Kurt Vonnegut dumped all the “junk” in his head into a dark satire of a prudish, consumer-crazed America.

“That’s why you don’t understand the film,” Willis lectures.

He gives his audience a touch of acting out, too, to drive home the notion that society now is “even more peculiar” than when Vonnegut was writing. “It’s all about selling,” he announces, hoisting a microphone with a red clip-on “Rogers” sign.

“I don’t know who Mr. Rogers is. That’s the point--they put their name on it, with you people taking pictures.” The 44-year-old actor who has pocketed serious change over the years for being a pitchman, for wine coolers and the like, next lifts a bottle of water and deadpans, “I am Bruce Willis for Evian.” After a comic aside (“I expect a few cases”), he snatches co-star Nick Nolte’s cigarettes. “If you want to die, smoke these babies!”

Then--poof--the attitude vanishes. No more in-your-face lectures. No more performance art.

Maybe he’s tired after flying in from his spread in Idaho. Or maybe he knows he’s outflanked as a bomb-thrower on this panel by Nolte, who plays his sales manager--with a taste for women’s lingerie--in “Breakfast.” Nolte uses his powerful, raspy voice to rant about how director Alan Rudolph could not get mainstream Hollywood backing “because a studio puts out . . . feel-good films!”

Or maybe Willis realizes that there’s a limit to how far he can go with this outsider’s stance when his own mix of movies includes one of those studio feel-gooders--”The Story of Us”--and when the world, as distasteful as it seems, may actually want to . . . give him some credit.

Indeed, he’s quickly asked about “Sixth Sense,” which he agreed to do though it had an unknown twentysomething writer-director and no advance hype. The ghost story with the shocker ending made him look like a genius after the domestic box office alone passed $230 million, as audiences were amazed at the kid’s--and his own--performance, and a script with the rarest of qualities: originality.

“I don’t know,” Willis says in the softest of voices, “we fake you out and a lot of people go back to see how we did it.

“I have no idea why some of my films do so well, and why some of them suck so badly.”

Then he has to endure Rudolph touting how “Breakfast” got made, after 25 years: “Two words: Bruce Willis.”

The actor had his own company, Rational Packaging, purchase the rights to Vonnegut’s book. Even if the $12-million project was doomed to go down as a failed art-house experiment--it has made only about $100,000--its release while the glow from “Sixth Sense” was still strong seems to have earned Willis the benefit of the doubt. He would get credit for buying himself a chance to work “outside the box.”

That box, of course, is the prototypical Bruce Willis Film. It’s filled with “the three things I’m asked to do,” Willis explains from the stage, “which is to be funny, shoot a lot of people in the first nine minutes”--he pauses--”what’s the third thing?”

Nolte rasps, “You get to screw the girl. . . . Remember that?”

Willis remembers. One reason he backed Rudolph’s crusade to make “Breakfast” was the director’s urging him to break from the formula in 1991’s “Mortal Thoughts,” in which he played a wife-beating bad guy.

“That film released me from something I felt I had to be doing,” he says, “It was such a refreshing thing . . . to work a little acting into my career now and then.”

“Well, it’s very difficult,” interjects Nolte, “when they’re pushing $20 million . . . at you.”

“Thanks,” Willis says, “for bringing that up.”

*

Two hours later later, Willis is back in his suite at the Four Seasons, sprawled on his bed in his bathrobe, hands behind his head, eyes half-open. “This is it. Sexy and yet . . . unposed. Candid,” he says.

His longtime agent-advisor, Arnold Rifkin, has been explaining in the other room how they saw it all falling together: saw the “magic” of “Sixth Sense”; encouraged the studio to move it up from a scheduled fall release to early August, when “The Blair Witch Project” created the right buzz for the supernatural; sandwiched in the art flick; then were ready with some high-profile “counterprogramming,” namely Rob Reiner’s “The Story of Us,” following Willis and Pfeiffer taking the kids off to camp and spending the summer figuring out whether they have a future after 15 years of marriage. All part of a careful strategy, Rifkin says, to ease the actor away from “high-octane” action-adventure without compromising his bankability.

Willis himself shrugs off any notion of a master plan. “I’ve always just chosen from ‘Do I find the story interesting? Do I find the character interesting?’ Sometimes, to my chagrin, other people around me say, ‘I don’t think you should do that.’ And I say, ‘Well, I’m gonna.’ ”

He’s always seen a career as a marathon race, in which the spectators will be throwing rocks at you one mile, applauding you another. He also understands that while some films succeed or fail because of him, it takes a confluence of forces beyond his control, “like trying to align the planets,” to produce a hit.

He admits he wasn’t sure about “Sixth Sense.”

“I didn’t know that we were going to be able to fool people. I was a little more skeptical. . . . An incredible amount of attention was paid to fool you. But I’m so used to people giving away the endings. . . . This kid [writer-director M. Night Shyamalan]--I call him a kid--he’s 29, he kept saying, ‘As long as we don’t talk down to the audience.’ And I’ve always felt this, too.”

He also recognizes that with talk-to-the-dead books regularly making the bestseller lists, a chunk of his audience likely thinks the movie portrays real phenomena. “I believe people believe it,” Willis says with a sense of diplomacy.

But then he’s off, delving into the general notions of higher powers (which he is “prepared to accept”) to more traditional notions of God, which . . . well, that leads to the weather. “Before we knew where weather came from and why the sun went away every day and the moon went up, we needed a way to explain it. So we had to invent gods,” he says. “Once we figured weather out, we didn’t need gods anymore.”

Though Willis seems doomed to be seen as a rock ‘n’ roll dude and cavorter--lately with a Spanish model--this is part of the mix, too, Willis as home-grown philosopher. Talk of the weather leads him into gene splicing and cloning, which he believes may produce “the answers to most of the health issues in the next 25 years. . . . They’ll cure cancer, they’ll cure heart disease, no more Down syndrome.”

No more anything bad--unless government forces muck it up. A blend of ‘60s radical and Jesse Ventura-like conservative populist, Willis is heavily into “revisionist history,” believing we should look back to see what really happened, as opposed to the official version, to spotlight, for example, how the government gave smallpox-infected blankets to the Indians.

He embraces conspiracy theories, from Oliver Stone’s take on the Kennedy assassinations to ominous scenarios for the war in Kosovo and certain sporting events, even. “Some of these things that I know exist in the world . . . I would be whacked out for,” he says.

Although it may seem unfair to share an actor’s musings on God, the Kennedys and CIA secret operations, at some point this overall Weltanschauung does collide with a dilemma central to any art form--whether to present the world as one really sees it, or in the way that generates box office.

At the “Breakfast” press conference, Willis had volunteered that he relished playing car dealer Dwayne Hoover (“someone who’s the most famous guy in town and has a lot of dough and is secretly going crazy”) in part because Vonnegut’s character was doing “the scariest thing that any human being could: . . . take the hard look inside.”

*

It’s a natural segue into “The Story of Us,” because the Castle Rock picture about yuppie couple Ben and Katie Jordan (“Can a Marriage Survive 15 Years of Marriage?”) was offered to Willis just about the time his own marriage with Demi Moore was reaching the kaput stage.

In the screen version, viewers will sense from the trailers that everything’s going to turn out OK--there’s no risk of giving away any “Sixth Sense”-like twist. Pfeiffer ain’t leavin’ Willis for no dentist.

Their problems in the Jordan household revolve around the wear and tear from too many diapers and carpools, meddling parents, miserable marriage counselors and personality differences much like those in the Nora Ephron romances: anal everything-in-place woman versus romantic-but-impractical man. There’s no barrier as high as real venality or infidelity--just mistaken suspicion. All it takes for a joyous resolution is for each party, for once, to look at things from the other side.

Which is not to say that many women in the audience--it is a women’s film--won’t cry, on cue.

“Yeah, it’s not real life. It’s a fairy tale,” Willis says flat out, still flat out in his bathrobe.

“I’ve done films about marriages that are more realistic. . . . [For example] ‘Mortal Thoughts,’ where I get killed by my wife’s best friend, because I try to rape her.

“That film,” he adds, “didn’t make any money.”

The problem, as he sees it, is this: “If movies reflected reality more than they do, people would go to movies less. You can watch the news if you’d like, see what life is really like. . . . A film like ‘Story of Us’ is a genre film, around since they began making films. A happy ending. Giving them a reward at the end for sitting there for 90 minutes.”

Understand--he’s not griping, or being snide. He was eager to remind the world that he can play an everyday guy, one who can sit around the table bantering with the wife and kids, saying “pass the ketchup,” and be just as as convincing, as when he saves the world. And be funny without a smirk, all while showing--as in “Sixth Sense”--that he can appeal to more than only the young male wrestling crowd.

To this degree, he admits some overall plan in his new films.

“I did ‘Sixth Sense’ before I saw ‘Story of Us,’ so I knew that I would have two different cards in my hand. I have really missed, for a long time, being able to do comedy.”

“I’m on this gun moratorium right now. No action for a while. . . . I will do it again, but I’m practicing the less-is-more school of acting right now, I guess. I’m seeing how little I can do and still be interesting.”

Those who worry about movie violence will be skeptical that Willis can resist, for long, those $20-million-plus offers to chalk up escapist body counts. But it’s worth noting that, as a father of three--co-raising them with Moore at their remote Hailey, Idaho, ranch--he can decry like any good Republican the trends he sees.

“As horrible as it sounds, they could charge 200 bucks a whack for public executions,” he says. “The guy who abducted Polly Klaas, everybody would have paid 200 bucks a whack to see that, chop his head off, shoot him with bullets, whatever the [expletive] you want to do, hang ‘em. It’s comin’. They’ll be getting all these guys sitting on death row for years and years. ‘Come on!’ ‘Here we go!’ ‘Clean em’ out!’ ”

Just as he’s working himself up, getting back in character, the phone rings in the adjoining room. It’s Walt Disney Studios President Joe Roth. He wants to talk about . . . what’s next.

*

The Bruce Willis “discovery” story has been told often, how the blue-collar Jersey boy swaggered to L.A. in 1985 in his jeans and torn T-shirt, and blew away 3,000 rivals auditioning for the lead in “Moonlighting,” opposite Cybill Shepherd. Looking at the old TV pilot recently, Willis saw “a young kid . . . trying to play a cool character, but who was acting cool, rather than being cool.” What producer Glenn Gordon Caron saw was how, when Willis would walk down the hall, “all the secretaries twitched.”

One of the interesting spectacles in entertainment is to see whether that animal magnetism carries over from the small screen to the big. We love watching TV hotshots try to make it in the movies only to fall flat, and fall back to the tube, because they lack the charisma, the talent or--too often--both.

Willis’ first featured screen roles, courtesy of Blake Edwards, didn’t settle the issue with him. The box-office success ($40 million) of his 1987 “Blind Date,” with Kim Basinger, was followed by the quickly forgotten “Sunset.” Still, Rifkin demanded--and got--a then-record $5 million for him to play the reluctant hero, an off-duty New York detective, in a thriller being shot in an office tower in Century City.

The first posters for “Die Hard” featured the flaming building. A week later, new posters went up--featuring Willis as John McClane.

His public identity has been framed ever since by the “Die Hard”-type role, his whopping contracts--such as the $10 million for doing the kid’s voice-over in “Look Who’s Talking”--and his visible personal life.

There were those parties in Nichols Canyon, the vodka nights on the town, the bouts playing the tough guy, and the womanizer, then marriage to Moore--all in, what, four years? “He didn’t go from anonymity to visibility,” notes Rifkin. “He went right from anonymity to fame.” All without “time to settle in.”

Willis became classic “fair game,” meaning he’d have to endure reports that his marriage was breaking up right before he and Moore were having the first of three children. In this realm, the idea of balance is having People magazine last year list them as one of Hollywood’s most enduring couples--a month before the announcement that they were in fact splitting.

What was often lost in the spotlight was how, professionally, Willis was experimenting from the start. He was never a one-note tune. His career pre-Hollywood was not only as a harmonica-playing bartender--he studied under Stella Adler and performed Sam Shepard off-Broadway.

Right after “Die Hard” and while still on “Moonlighting,” he worked for scale on Norman Jewison’s “In Country,” winning a Golden Globe nomination for his portrayal of a Vietnam vet.

“The fact that ‘Die Hard’ became the franchise allowed us . . . to mix it up,” Rifkin says.

Their strategy was to alternate the obviously commercial roles--which would keep up his “benchmark” fees--with the labors of love. Yet some folks still acted surprised when he surfaced in Quentin Tarantino’s “Pulp Fiction,” playing the punch-drunk fighter.

It seemed easier to lump him with the action-adventure stars who were not known for their range--Sylvester Stallone, say, or Steven Seagal--rather than the Harrison Ford wing of that high-paid fraternity. “There are about eight other guys,” Willis once noted, “who can save the world as good as me.”

As with other stars whose paychecks stir an undercurrent of resentment, he might have sensed an eagerness to write his professional obituaryafter 1991’s “The Last Boy Scout” and “Hudson Hawk.”The vultures were circling more recently when “The Jackal” and “Mercury Rising” fell flat and Willis began to grumble about being “sick” of action-adventure.

It didn’t help that he’d shut down the 1997 filming of the hockey romance “Broadway Brawler” in a dispute with director Lee Grant and others in the production. Although Willis and Disney--which bought the production company--promised that everyone would be paid, the ill-fated production, a Times account concluded, “in a sense put Willis himself on the line.”

That was because Willis agreed to do three films for Disney, at less than full fee. And, “they were to be three pictures of the genre that is Bruce’s genre,” Rifkin acknowledged.

The first certainly was--”Armageddon,” in which Willis played an oil-field roughneck who leads a team that has to blow up an asteroid headed for Mother Earth. It may not have won critical acclaim, but it topped last summer’s box-office charts on the way to grossing more than $520 million worldwide.

That’s when Team Willis approached Disney president Roth about trying something different for 1999, for the second film in the package. Sure, that “genre” pledge was on the table. But they had this ghost story. . . .

*

So here we are in Toronto, and the actor-who’s-a-genius-again rises from his bed to take the phone call from the studio’s top man.

As they speak, Rifkin confides the next stage of Team Willis’ plan in simple terms: “ ‘Armageddon’ was last summer’s biggest movie. ‘Sixth Sense’ will be this summer’s second biggest, after ‘Star Wars.’ Now the challenge is to find one this fall that can be next summer’s biggest.

“We’d love to find another franchise. I believe ‘Die Hard,’ that whole genre, has played itself out. We’d definitely love to find a buddy picture. . . .”

It remains to be seen, of course, how long Willis can play the Gilligan--the “good buddy”--or whether that $20-million persona will be best served with the smirk back on its face. But for this night, at least, it stays at home.

He’s off first to the film festival’s showing of “Breakfast,” where he stands quietly on stage--looking unmenacingly lean these days and letting director Rudolph take the bows. Afterward, it’s on to the party at Planet Hollywood, the struggling restaurant chain in which Willis owns a stake. He strides up the red carpet, through the throngs, then camps at a corner table for a burger and fries.

The next week, the trades trumpet what Willis and Roth had cooking. For the third year in a row, the Mouse House and Mr. Die Hard will team for a major summer release: “The Kid,” about a successful 40-year-old jerk who gets to spend time with himself as a 10-year-old, and learns how he became what he is. A Disney heart-warmer if there ever was one.

Willis also plans, it was announced, to re-team with “Sixth Sense” creator Shyamalan. No details are given, other than it’s not a sequel, and Samuel L. Jackson has been lined up to co-star. Sounds like a buddy picture.

“Yeah, I’m gonna do another film with the guy who directed ‘Sixth Sense,’ ” Willis says. “He won’t let me see the script until it’s done, but from what he’s hinted about it, it’s got a lot of that power. Furious energy.”

No word on whether he’s got a gun.