When the screenplay to “Die Hard” hit Hollywood’s agents and A-listers circuit, the world’s top actors couldn’t dismiss it quickly enough.
“James Caan told me directly, ‘I read the script, and this guy’s running away for the primary twenty-five pages,’” Steve de Souza, the film’s screenwriter, says in the brand new book “The Last Motion Heroes: The Triumphs, Flops, and Feuds of Hollywood’s Kings of Carnage” by Nick de Semlyen (Crown).
“Within the context of those ’roid-rage, superhuman heroes we had on the time, this character appeared like a pu–y.”
The character in query, after all, was John McClane, who transformed Bruce Willis from a wise-cracking, Chandler Bing-esque TV banterer into an motion movie legend with the 1988 now-classic.
Although it almost killed him.
In reality, a scene during which Willis shot through the air by an explosion was scheduled early within the shoot in order that if something had gone fallacious — which it nearly did — they’d have time to recast his role.
As a consequence of the film’s sarcastic humor and McClane starting the film as more of a loser than a hero, a slew of Hollywood’s A-list actors passed on the role, including Clint Eastwood — who didn’t get the character’s humorousness — and Richard Gere, a Buddhist who was in search of more spiritual roles. Burt Reynolds selected to shoot the tv special “A Beverly Hills Christmas” with Jimmy Stewart and Lucille Ball as an alternative.
Other names rumored to have passed include Arnold Schwarzenegger, Charles Bronson, Harrison Ford, Al Pacino and even 72-year-old Frank Sinatra, who supposedly needed to be asked attributable to an odd contractual matter involving a previous film.
Willis, when first approached, passed on the movie attributable to his commitments to the TV hit “Moonlighting.” But that modified when his co-star, Cybill Shepherd, announced her pregnancy, providing Willis an unexpected 11-week hiatus.
Given his nature, Willis might need seemed perfect for the role on paper.
A dedicated delinquent in his younger years, Willis was a fan of “streaking” — running through the streets buck naked save for sunglasses and sneakers, a fad that was popular for a temporary period within the Seventies — and stepping into fights.
But he was actually an unlikely candidate for the role.
A voracious reader — he supposedly read “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy 15 times — Willis was no fan of the motion genre, and had previously passed on playing the lead in “Lethal Weapon.”
His recent foray into movie acting, the 1987 film “Blind Date,” had flopped on the box office, and he was the general public face of a well-liked wine cooler that became informally often called “Bruce Juice.”
Even the director of “Die Hard,” John McTiernan, was initially hesitant to consider that Willis could nail the a part of John McClane after hearing nothing but negativity about Willis’ acting in “Blind Date.”
“Bruce went and did his television character, and on a giant screen it didn’t work,” says McTiernan.
“Once the audience could see Bruce, closely and in higher definition, they didn’t like him. They didn’t just like the smartass thing.”
Willis received the role only after most of the remaining of Hollywood had turned it down.
“They’re going to laugh you off the screen,” “Moonlighting” creator Glenn Gordon Caron told him when he was solid. “That’s a Schwarzenegger movie.”
But to Willis’ great fortune — literally — he filmmakers were desperate and he found himself accountable for the negotiations over the part. His agent asked for a then-unbelievable $5 million, and told the producers that in the event that they didn’t conform to the figure that week, that Willis could be heading off to Japan to star in commercials.
This resulted in a heated meeting between the film’s co-producer Larry Gordon and Fox chairman Barry Diller. “Are you out of your f–king mind?” Diller exclaimed to Gordon, upon hearing the proposed sum.
Still, Diller acquiesced; the movie was the one motion film on the studio’s docket on the time, and it was at risk of collapsing if the deal wasn’t made.
It was a terrific victory for Willis, especially considering that just a couple of years earlier, he couldn’t even secure the lead role in “Police Academy,” which went to Steve Guttenberg as an alternative.
Inspired by the novel “Nothing Lasts Eternally” — which itself was inspired by the film “The Towering Inferno” — the character of John McClane was originally more of a suave, sports coat wearing James Bond type.
When Willis was solid, McClane was retooled into more of a blue-collar wiseass based on Willis’ own background as a truck driver, a security guard at a nuclear power plant and a Recent York City bartender renowned for a secret-ingredient signature cocktail called “Honey I’m Home.”
One month before filming, Willis began to rework himself. He went to AA, quit drinking and commenced a strict workout regimen.
But despite his efforts, the challenge before him became apparent within the film’s very first shot.
Arriving directly from the set of “Moonlighting,” he was whisked to the highest of a five-story parking garage.
“As he waited, rubbing his hands together and wearing only a pair of black trousers, a white firehose was looped around his bare midriff, a Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine gun hung via a strap from his neck, and a viscous gel slathered over his exposed skin,” writes de Semlyen.
When Willis asked what the gel was for, he was told it might prevent him from catching on fire.
He quickly learned why. For his first shot, he jumped from a ledge onto an airbag below.
“As he did, large plastic bags of gasoline were detonated, unleashing a fireball that blew Willis, he claimed, right to the sting of the bag,” writes de Semlyen.
“After I landed, everyone got here running over to me and I believed they were going to say, ‘Great job! Attaboy!’” Willis later recalled. “And what they were doing is seeing if I’m alive because I almost missed the bag.”
Filming scenes like this for “Die Hard” while also shooting “Moonlighting” got here to seem to be a whirlwind for the actor, with Willis telling Caron at one point that he had “no idea what’s happening.”
He also developed some quick tension with the film’s director, McTiernan, who later said that Willis was sensitive but hard to attach with, and that he looked as if it would have a basic distrust of movie people.
McTiernan saw this early on when Willis, at the top of the primary week of shooting, refused to follow direction for blocking out a sophisticated motion sequence. After an argument that grew increasingly heated, the director finally understood the true motivation behind his star’s reluctance.
Willis, it turned out, was apprehensive in regards to the camera specializing in his thinning hair.
McTiernan assured him, “Bruce, it’s our job to make you look good!”
Because the shoot progressed, Willis grew more comfortable, perhaps assisted partially by his impromptu Las Vegas wedding on the Golden Nugget hotel to his girlfriend, Demi Moore, three weeks into the filming.
He began joking around more with the solid, showcasing his wisecracking “Moonlighting” persona. As McClane crawled through a decent ventilation shaft, his line, “Now I do know what a TV dinner appears like” was made up on the spot by the actor.
Willis also wound up bringing something to the film that motion stars on the time rarely exhibited — a sensitive side.
Noting publicly that the typical viewer couldn’t relate to Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo character, Willis hung out refining his reactions for a scene where he relayed a message to his wife while picking glass out of his feet.
To get to the character’s emotional core, Willis “imagined what he would tell latest wife Demi Moore if he thought he might never see her again,” writes de Semlyen.
While the scene was shot two other ways to provide McTiernan options, in the long run, the take where Willis sobbed was the one used. The actor later said that it was his favorite scene within the movie.
Still, “Die Hard” was unquestionably an motion movie first.
After his presidency, Ronald Reagan took an office in Fox Plaza, the constructing portrayed as Nakatomi Plaza within the film. As his advance team prepared the office, the FBI was called in attributable to the discarded shell casings found throughout the constructing, left over from the “Die Hard” shoot.
But even after filming was complete, faith in Willis’ box office draw was at a low point.
The studio focus-grouped a poster with a big shot of the actor and a smaller shot of the constructing; it had the bottom rating of any poster the studio had ever tested.
They eventually reversed the images, centering the poster around a big constructing and a tiny Bruce Willis.
To make matters worse, Willis had begun a public feud with Shepherd around this time, and, de Semlyen writes, an worker of his had died in an accident while working for him. Reports began to emerge that when the film’s trailer played in movie houses, audiences booed every time Willis appeared on screen.
In the long run, though, none of this mattered — the movie, and Willis’ performance, were just too good.
“Die Hard” became the top-grossing motion film of 1988, turning the actor into a significant motion star.