Bruce Willis’ failed Delaware movie: ‘Broadway Brawler’
Bruce Willis filmed a movie in Wilmington for 20 days in 1997. It wasn’t completed and has never been released.
On a springlike February, 28 years ago, Bruce Willis, one of Hollywood’s biggest stars, strode into a Wilmington park and began filming the “Broadway Brawler.”
The $28 million, big-budget romantic comedy about a washed-up professional hockey player who finds love as his career fades was supposed to be the next “Jerry Maguire,” the hit 1996 Tom Cruise sports rom-com.
Hopes were high “Broadway Brawler” would revive Willis’ slumping acting career, boost Wilmington’s economy, and possibly attract producers who would consider tax-free Delaware a desirable film location.
But those heady promises were short-lived. Twenty days later, everything went bust due to clashing egos, creative differences, and even, incredibly, bad hair days.
The “dream” movie became “a nightmare,” a Wilmington-born producer said after he was fired by Willis, who had major clout as the film’s star and a producer.
“Broadway Brawler” was shut down. The unfinished film has never seen the light of day.
The film’s director spent an entire chapter of her 2015 memoir reliving the disastrous experience in Wilmington and wrote about dealing with a moody, insecure and bored Willis.
Yet, in a Hollywood ending that even Hollywood couldn’t dream up, “Broadway Brawler’s” failure would lead to Willis’ casting in two of the biggest box-office roles of his career.
Delaware’s loss became cinematic history’s gain.
Let’s start at the beginning
Excited chatter began in September 1996 that a Hollywood superstar was coming to Wilmington to make a movie. Word was that he would stay in the area for several months.
Wilmington real estate developer Verino Pettinaro spilled the beans to The News Journal that a film producer had rented a warehouse and 28 condo units from him. Pettinaro said he believed the movie star was Bruce Willis.
Whoa. “Die Hard” Bruce Willis? “Pulp Fiction” Bruce Willis? Was this legit?
It turns out it was.
Willis, then 41, was known to visit Vincente’s, a popular Wilmington Italian restaurant that had had a home for years at Fourth and Lincoln streets. Willis loved the food and owner Vincent Mancari’s theatrical tableside Caesar salad presentations.
And the producer Verino Pettinaro was talking about was his childhood friend Joe Fioretti. The pair had grown up together in Wilmington’s Little Italy neighborhood. Fioretti changed his name to Joe Feury when he left Delaware for New York in 1961 to become a dancer and a filmmaker.
When The News Journal contacted him in 1996, Feury wasn’t too happy to share details about his plans. But he confirmed he and his wife, actor Lee Grant, were developing a movie they worked on for two years called the “Broadway Brawler.”
By November 1996, the rumors became reality. Feury traveled from his New York home to Wilmington to tell residents that Willis and a film crew were coming to Delaware in February 1997. Grant would be the director of “Broadway Brawler.”
This would not be a small film. Feury, Willis’ company Flying Heart Production and Cinergi, a Walt Disney Co. entity, were the producers.
Feury and Grant had major Hollywood cred. Grant won an Academy Award for her role in the 1975 movie “Shampoo,” and the pair earned an Oscar for their 1987 documentary “Down and Out in America.”
Willis, known for his smirky charisma, would play Eddy Kapinsky, a down-on-his-luck New York Rangers hockey player who returns to his hometown after a drunken night.
Maura Tierney, then on the sitcom “News Radio,” was his love interest. Daniel Baldwin, brother of Alec Baldwin, best known for starring in the Baltimore-based TV show “Homicide,” would co-star.
Although Wilmington wouldn’t be Wilmington ‒ it would sub as Queens, New York ‒ much of the action would be shot in the city’s Hedgeville neighborhood and other areas.
Bruce Willis and his Delaware connections
Even though Feury was a Wilmington native, he said the decision to film in his hometown wasn’t his own.
“It was Bruce’s idea to do the movie here,” Feury told The News Journal in 1997. “Bruce said, ‘Let’s go to Wilmington.'”
Willis grew up in Penns Grove, New Jersey, a tiny town on the east bank of the Delaware River with views of Wilmington’s smokestack industries to the west. He was well acquainted with the First State.
Willis had held several jobs in Wilmington between graduating from Penns Grove High School in 1973 and moving to New York City five years later to pursue acting.
He lived in New Castle with his pal Carmine Zozzora and sold memberships to the European Health Spa. Willis also was a bartender and chorus member at the Candlelight Theater in Ardentown, Delaware’s first and now only dinner theater.
Willis’ parents also had ties to Delaware. His mother, Marlene, worked at the Bank of Delaware in Wilmington and later at the Newark Shopping Center. Marlene, a former Newark resident who later moved to California, called The News Journal in 1985 and said, “How would you like to write about somebody from Delaware who’s made it big in Hollywood?”
The proud mother shared that her son, Bruce, then 29, landed the starring role as a detective in a promising new TV show called “Moonlighting” after years of getting bit parts in movies, and television and appearing in theatrical shows.
“He’s just been working very hard at it,” Marlene Willis said, “and we are just very tickled that he finally got a break.”
After the skyrocketing success of “Moonlighting” and a burgeoning film career, Bruce Willis lived in Idaho but returned to the East Coast to see family. Willis’ father David, retired in 1987 as a DuPont Co. millwright and master mechanic and was a lifetime resident of Carney’s Point and Penns Grove.
When visiting, Willis liked dining at Wilmington’s Vincente’s restaurant and sometimes picked up takeout orders to take home to Idaho. Owner Vincent Mancari told The News Journal in 1997 that Willis liked roasted garlic, crab cakes and Caesar salad.
Willis enjoyed the restaurant so much that he flew Mancari and his wife, Louise, to his home in Idaho to chat about opening an Italian restaurant there.
Willis had even more ties to the area. He planned to build a $50 million entertainment and retail complex on a Penns Grove waterfront near his father’s home. The 11-acre site along the Delaware River, purchased in 1995, would include a hotel, nightclub, bars and marina.
Why this movie?
In 1997, Willis was a big star and heavily involved with Planet Hollywood, an international-themed restaurant chain backed by investors that included his then-wife Demi Moore, Sylvester Stallone, and Arnold Schwarzenegger.
But his acting success in “Moonlighting,” “Die Hard” and “Pulp Fiction” was in the rearview mirror.
The actor, smarting from recent flops including the box office bomb “The Color of Night,” needed a hit.
Feury and Grant knew Willis from when he dated Grant’s daughter, actor Dinah Manoff. In 1996, they handed Willis the script for “Broadway Brawler” and he invited the pair to Idaho to discuss the move.
The romance appealed to Willis. The action star saw the movie as a way for the audience to see him in a new light and he agreed to do the film.
Is this the next ‘Dead Poet’s Society’?
Wilmington was abuzz that Hollywood had once again come calling. Delaware hadn’t seen much star power since director Peter Weir shot his 1988 film “Dead Poets Society” starring Robin Williams in Middletown, Old New Castle and areas of Wilmington. (Williams also enjoyed dining at Vincente’s in Wilmington.)
“Broadway Brawler’s” filming was supposed to last around 11 weeks. Feury told The News Journal that Wilmington could earn as much as $3 million through construction materials, location fees, meals, car and apartment rentals, hotels, wage taxes and shopping by the expected 120- to 150-member crew.
Much of the filming zeroed in on Wilmington’s Hedgeville neighborhood, once a predominately Polish neighborhood.
An outdoor ice hockey rink was built in Kosciuszko Park, a 7-acre city of Wilmington public park at Maple and South Broom streets named for Thadeusz Kosciuszko, a Polish patriot who helped win the American Revolution.
A row home at 1201 Maple St. would double as the exterior of Willis’ home, and others on the street would be shown.
Reagan’s Tavern at 1025 Chestnut St., a neighborhood bar near an exit to I-95 known for its friendly atmosphere and healthy-sized pours, was selected as a setting for the fictional “Quinn’s Bar,” a hangout of Willis’ character. Producers liked its ancient stainless steel bar, glass block windows and sign requesting “casual dress.” (The bar has since closed.)
Other sites include St. Hedwig’s Church and Elementary School, a laundromat, the exterior of the old Johnny’s Market, the courthouse on Rodney Square, and St. Anthony’s Elementary School in Little Italy.
The Spectrum in Philadelphia, a former indoor sports arena, was expected to be used for the professional hockey scenes.
Feury and Grant rented a house in Greenville. Willis, Demi Moore, their children, and a nanny stayed at the Hotel du Pont in downtown Wilmington.
Did Bruce Willis really have a bad hair day?
Filming began in early February, but what happened after less than three weeks in Wilmington remains murky.
Willis wouldn’t talk to the press during the shooting. He was seen on the closed set, but no photos were allowed.
News Journal columnist Gary Mullinax snooped around the set in mid-February and saw child actors posing as hockey players gliding on a temporary ice rink built in Kosciuszko Park just for the movie.
Temperatures were rising and heavy clothing worn by the actors was too warm for the day. Artificial snow dusting the edges of the quickly melting rink turned muddy.
Willis came to the rink for about 10 minutes, took off his shirt, raised his hands in the air for a scene, and then scurried back to a tractor-trailer parked on the street.
There were hints that there was stress on the movie set.
According to News Journal archives, a licensed massage technician, an old friend of Willis’, was called to the Hotel du Pont to treat the actor, who was suffering from tension.
Then, on Friday, Feb. 28, filming abruptly halted.
Filming scheduled that day and over the weekend on Maple Street and at St. Anthony’s Elementary School was canceled.
“We weren’t too happy about that because we moved the kindergarteners to the library Friday so they could prepare the room for filming on Sunday,” St. Anthony’s principal Bernie Fisher told The News Journal in 1997.
Trade publications following the movie began probing into concerns. One reported that Willis was having bad hair days.
“A rumor has Willis unhappy with the way he looked ‒ namely his coiffure,” according to a 1997 article by Variety writer Army Archer. “[Willis] was also reportedly unhappy his hairdresser had to leave the picture for a previous commitment to coif Robert Redford’s hair in ‘The Horse Whisperer.’”
“If this movie lost by a hair it would be the unkindest cut of all,” Archer wrote.
A Willis representative told the New York Post that the bad hair day story was not true.
Director Lee Grant, in her 2015 memoir “I Said Yes to Everything,” however, said otherwise. She devoted an entire chapter to “Broadway Brawler” and its problems.
“He doesn’t like to be asked about his hair,” Grant recalls a hairdresser on the set telling her about Willis.
Grant wrote that there were several camera tests with Willis bald and with a hairpiece, which she said the actor preferred.
“The hairpiece became such a focus. I should have been the first to recognize it,” Grant wrote. “The hairpiece changed slightly every other day.”
Lights out for the ‘Broadway Brawler’
Grant wrote in her book that Willis often came to the set irritated and bored.
“Life for an actor in Wilmington is deadly. It’s not Jersey. It’s not Hollywood, or New York, or Idaho,” Grant wrote.
She said every weekend Willis “took off in his plane, ignoring that we had a professional skater standing by to work with him. One weekend, it was to Bali, where he was opening a Planet Hollywood.”
Grant said Willis also didn’t like his chemistry with Tierney and demanded to see film scenes that were shot and edited. With his agent and his wife, Demi Moore, Willis watched a scene between the actors.
“Do you think it’s sexy?” Grant wrote that Willis asked his wife and agent. “Do you think I’m sexy?”
Grant recalls Demi Moore saying, “No. I don’t.”
“And that, folks, was that,” Grant wrote.
You’re outta here
Willis, in his role as producer and star, fired Feury and Grant “over creative differences” along with cinematographer William Fraker and wardrobe designer Carol Oditz, the Los Angeles Times reported in 1997.
“He lost faith in me,” Grant wrote in her 2015 book, adding that Willis knew his career was on the line with the success or failure of the Delaware film.
Director Dennis Dugan, whom Willis knew from “Moonlighting,” was brought to Wilmington on Tuesday, March 4.
According to Variety, Dugan said Willis had called him to Delaware because of a “crisis. I still haven’t seen any footage so I don’t know what was wrong. My job was to help my friend Bruce and to see what we could do.”
Dugan lasted only one day. After being told by studio heads the movie was on “indefinite hold,” Dugan and others he was traveling with hopped a train in Wilmington to New York City and then ate caviar and Champagne at Petrossian’s and checked into the Ritz Carlton Hotel, Variety reported.
By March 6, sets in Wilmington were being dismantled. The following day, a film sequence scheduled to be shot at The Spectrum was canceled. Film crew members began removing set dressing from the 1200 block of Maple St. designed to make the row homes resemble the Queens, New York, neighborhood.
“This is so sad,” Dolores Nagowski, a Maple Street neighbor told The News Journal. “Things feel dull again already ‒ the thought of them not coming back.”
Cinergi Productions, which owned the rights to the script, said the filming had ended on the movie. The “Broadway Brawler” was knocked out and declared dead.
“This is one of those unfortunate occasions when it became obvious that the project wasn’t being realized as originally envisioned,” Cinergi head Andy Vajna said.
What happened?
It is rare for a production to be abandoned after weeks of filming and much of the blame for the demise of “Broadway Brawler” rested on Willis, according to key figures on the movie set in Wilmington.
Cinematographer William Fraker told the Los Angeles Times that while director Lee Grant was “doing a great job, Bruce was telling other actors how to act.”
“It was a great script and Lee’s vision was a love story about two people with the background of hockey. But Bruce just took over. I’ve been in this business a long time and I kinda feel that the actors are taking away the director’s job. We all work for the director. The director is the boss. If the actors want to direct, they should go direct,” he said.
Grant told the Los Angeles Times that she and Feury still wanted to do the film.
“It was our project. We went to [Willis] because we knew he would be perfect for it. He was marvelous in it but he was cursed with not being able to see how marvelous he was. The chemistry between him and Maura Tierney was working,” she said. “But Bruce was very compulsive and had his own vision, which was different from mine.”
Wilmington officials in 1997 said the city received about $100,000 in revenue from the movie, far from the $3 million Feury had estimated.
“We thought we were making a beautiful picture, but I guess Bruce felt different. I don’t know what’s going on with Bruce,” Feury told The News Journal on March 7, 1997.
He would further expand on his feelings in a 1997 letter to the editor in The News Journal on March 27. “Doing a picture in my hometown was a dream come true. The way it ended was a nightmare,” Feury wrote.
“We knew we were shooting a wonderful film, but Bruce Willis, the star, wasn’t happy. So the production closed down. The wreckage left after two years of our work is so shocking that, as I write to you, the full impact of it still hasn’t hit.”
Implosions after ‘Broadway Brawler’s’ demise
Three months later, in May 1997, Willis pulled out of the $50 million waterfront deal in Penns Grove. The president of his development company Screwball Inc. said the actor “lost interest” in the project.
Area residents were stunned.
“When Bruce Willis said he was going to do something everybody got all excited,” said Beth Zane of Woodstown, New Jersey. “It’s a shame what’s happened to Penns Grove.”
Willis’ bad behavior on “Broadway Brawler” also left him in a difficult position.
Disney had already spent more than $17 million on the failed movie, according to the publication Deadline, and wanted to be paid back.
To avoid a lawsuit, Willis’ agent worked out a deal with the company. The actor would make three other films at less than his usual salary to offset the loss.
It was a comeback that not even “Rocky” could have imagined.
Those three movies, “Armageddon” (1998), “The Sixth Sense” (1999) and “The Kid” (2000), all together would gross a staggering $1.3 billion worldwide.
Willis was especially lauded for his role as a compassionate child psychologist in M. Night Shyamalan’s “The Sixth Sense” shot in nearby Philadelphia. The movie was nominated for six Academy Awards (and would win none), but the actor was back on top.
More ‘Broadway Brawler’ fall-out
A year after he was in Wilmington, Willis separated from Demi Moore. The pair eventually divorced in 2000.
Willis sold the Penns Grove land he wanted to develop in 1999 for $1 million. His father, who still lived in Penns Grove, died in 2009 in a New Jersey hospital.
A brick pathway in Penns Grove known as the River Walk was built in 2008 through land grant money at the site Willis had owned along the Delaware River. The land has gone through several owners through the years and still has not been developed. It is currently for sale.
Shortly after the “Broadway Brawler’s” debuncle, Hollywood came calling to Delaware again. A scant few scenes in September 1997 were filmed in Old New Castle for the Jonathan Demme movie “Beloved” starring Danny Glover and Oprah Winfrey. While Winfrey learned how to cook on a historic stove at Hagley Museum and Library near Greenville for “Beloved,” she didn’t film in Delaware. Only Glover was in Old Castle.
Joe Biden would bring the world to his hometown of Delaware during the eight years of his vice presidency and his four years serving as the 46th president, but there has been scant Hollywood interest in the state since the “Broadway Brawler.”
No deal, Bruce Willis
Willis followed up with Vincente’s restaurant owner Vincent Mancari about running a restaurant in Idaho, his son Tom Mancari recently told Delaware Online/The News Journal.
The actor again flew the family to Sun Valley, the Idaho resort where Willis had lived since 1988. This time, Tom, his brothers Danny and Vinnie and their father, Vincent, made the trip to discuss a restaurant in nearby Hailey.
“Bruce would pay for it all and basically pay us on top of it,” Tom Mancari said of the plans.
The men were picked up at the airport, shown around Hailey, about 12 miles south of Sun Valley, and saw the restaurant’s proposed site, Mancari said.
But he said negotiations took an undesired turn the following day at Willis’ home.
“Bruce changed the deal. He told my father we could buy in 2% at a time and one of his managers from Planet Hollywood, a 28-year-old, would be [the] boss,” Mancari said.
The family said no dice.
“My father never worked for anyone in his life. We didn’t like the deal and turned it down,” said Mancari, who didn’t want to move to the tiny Idaho town.
Willis never came to Vincente’s again, Mancari said. “I guess he didn’t like people saying no to him,” he said.
Vincent Mancari died in 2013 and his namesake restaurant, which moved to its current home at 5914 Kirkwood Highway, near All Saints Cemetery in 2008, is run by his sons and continues to thrive. The tableside Caesar salad that Willis liked so much remains one of its most popular offerings.
Willis began selling restaurants and other businesses he owned in Idaho in 1998, a year after “Broadway Brawler.”
Bruce Willis is no longer brawling on movie sets
Willis’ family announced in 2022 that the actor was retiring due to aphasia, a neurological condition that robs a person of their ability to communicate. A year later, Willis was diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia, a disorder that impairs cognitive function.
His second wife, Emma Hemming Willis, keeps fans updated on Willis through social media. In January during the California wildfires, she posted a video on Instagram of Willis shaking handshakes with a first responder.
Will “Broadway Brawler” ever be released? Most likely not.
“Bruce insisted that every piece of film be given to him, never to be seen,” Grant wrote in her book.
It remains a footnote in Delaware history.
“Do you remember?” is an occasional News Journal/Delaware Online feature that looks at the history behind long-gone Delaware buildings, objects, businesses, and places.
Patricia Talorico writes Delaware history and other things Delaware-related. You can find her on Instagram, X and Facebook. Email ptalorico@delawareonline.com. Sign up for her Delaware Eats newsletter.
