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David Poland

By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com

Posted Tuesday, February 14th, 2006 - 3 Comments »
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EW Can Blow Me, and Other Bruce Willis Bons Mots


Considering the record snowfall that smacked New York last weekend, you tell me what you think would have been a more grueling way to spend Sunday: Shoveling out of Reeler HQ all afternoon, or waiting an hour for Bruce Willis to show up at a press conference to discuss his new film 16 Blocks.
It is a closer call than you might imagine, if we are to believe parts of the transcript provided by CHUD’s Devin Faraci:

Q: You are one of the few major Hollywood stars who are proud to be Republican…

Willis: Let me stop you right there. I’m a Republican — and everybody write this down because I’m sick of answering this fucking question.

Q: Can I continue –

Willis: You can continue, but let me answer that part of it. I’m a Republican only as far as I want a smaller government, I want less government intrusion, I want them to stop pissing on my money and your money, the tax dollars that we give 50 per cent of or 40 per cent of every year, and I want them to be fiscally responsible, and I want these goddamn lobbyists out of Washington. Do that and I’ll say I’m a Republican. But other than that … there’s tons, billions and billions of dollars that are just being wasted. Okay? I hate government. I’m apolitical. Write that down. I’m not a Republican.

Q: I thank you for this.

Willis: There you go. Now you can finish your question.

Q: Can I change my question?

Willis: Go ahead. I just need to get that Republican shit out of the way.

The decision gets even tougher after the jump.


Then there is some stuff about the cocaine trade in Colombia, the good and the bad things happening in Iraq, an earnest call to boost cops’ and teachers’ salaries and the requisite Die Hard 4 questions, prefaced by this tender pas de deux:

Q: Entertainment Weekly says…

Willis: Did you just say Entertainment Weekly? Do you work for them?

Q: No but they said one of the films they never want to see is Die Hard 4. Does that surprise you since all the want to see it? And would you still do it?

Willis: Entertainment Weekly hates me. They’ve hated me since they’ve been a magazine. Fuck ‘em. And you can go and tell them that.

Q: Why?

Willis: Because I’m a threat to them. Why does anybody hate anybody? Because they have some beef. Who cares? They can all blow me.

And here they come, down the stretch! It is close, folks–snow shoveling versus Bruce Willis on James Frey:

(James Frey) can write whatever he wants. It’s fiction. It’s just shameful how he was treated. It’s just shameful and it’s just not fair and not right. Justin Timberlake had a really good response when he was asked about that because I think he was asked to play James Frey in the making of that book. And he waited and waited and listened to everybody and said, ‘Have you heard of this magazine called In Touch Magazine? Or Us Weekly? Or People Magazine? Or any of these magazines. They lie about people and they just make up shit all week long.’ And you have to sue ‘em to get it changed. This is the world we live in. That is approved and that is okay and people go, ‘Ooh, ooh. Somebody’s boning this person over here or something, somebody did this over there,’ and they’re all lies and nobody’s yelling at them. So let’s leave James Frey alone, how about it?

I’m pissed off today.

And… scene. Needless to say, my sidewalk has never looked better.

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3 Comments »

3 Responses to “EW Can Blow Me, and Other Bruce Willis Bons Mots”

  1. Rufus Masters says:
    February 15, 2006 at 9:43 am

    I like stars like Willis who say whats on their mind and tell it like it is.
    He has a great point about Frey and lying and other writers/magazines getting away with it.

  2. Ju-osh says:
    February 15, 2006 at 11:29 am

    Here’s my favorite movie star telling-it-like-it-is moment:
    T. Cruise: You’re being glib, Matt, you’re being glib. Did you know Ritalin is a street drug? You haven’t studied psychiatry like I have. It’s a pseudo-science.
    Stars are called stars because they’re so bright and illuminating!

  3. AnonymousChicago says:
    February 16, 2006 at 11:25 pm

    Love Bruce Willis and his comment-tirade…I’m going to see 16 blocks.

Quote Unquotesee all »

It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon