Hopes were not high for the Bruce Willis-starring action classic ahead of its release.
“So they rejiggered it so it’s a big building and Bruce small.”
Not a good omen for the $5 million man.
Bruce Willis in ‘Die Hard’.Twentieth Century Fox
“The newspaper ads didn’t even say his name,” recalls screenwriter de Souza.
“His fans had turned on him because of the feud he was having with his co-star onMoonlighting.
And then at the same time somebody who worked for Bruce, scraping barnacles off his boat, drowned.
Cover art for ‘The Last Action Heroes: The Triumphs, Flops, and Feuds of Hollywood’s Kings of Carnage’.Crown
There was just a lot of bad press.
Still, inside the core group finessingDie Hardinto shape, there was a sense of quiet confidence.
“Everybody was stoked,” de Souza says.
And the first sneak preview for the public, in Mountain View, California, got a standing ovation.
“The helicopter landed on the pad,” says Gordon of that night.
When it started to screen for critics, some were unimpressed.
“Manipulative, cold, sexist, too long and often badly acted,” opined one newspaper review.
And at public screenings people went wild for the wily mouse, screaming, “Bruuuuce!”
as Willis slipped intact from one seemingly fatal scenario after another.
Willis’s regular-Joe appearance intensified the tension considerably.
“Bruce is not imposing.
You don’t meet him and go, ‘Whoo!'”
“It really worked for the film, ‘cause you believe he may not make it.
“Die Hardbecame the biggest action movie of 1988 in the United States.
Rickman’s agent was flooded with offers, beseeching the actor to play more debonair ne’er-do-wells.
“Steven Seagal tried hard to get me to do a movie with him,” the director remembers.
But I just didn’t want to make that Steven Seagal kind of junk, those fascist movies.”
“The ‘66 was the best Corvette made,” he explained.
“The new Corvette is a piece of shit.”
He andDie Harditself had the attention of everyone in Hollywood.
Sylvester Stallone visited both theDie Hardset and the LA premiere, sizing up the competition.
“Know why you’ll never be an action star?”
Schwarzenegger called out to Willis across the room, loud enough that everyone in the restaurant could hear.
“No, Arnold, why?”
Schwarzenegger flexed his biceps.
Then announced in his thick Austrian accent: “Toothpick arms.”
Excerpted from The Last Action Heroes by Nick de Semlyen.
No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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