What Was Willis Talking About?

    In light of his aphasia diagnosis, it has to be said that actor Bruce Willis was a victim of elder abuse. There. It's out. I said it.

    Here's a guy who was at the pinnacle of movie stardom. With movies like Die Hard, Die Hard II, The Fifth Element and many other box office smashes, Bruce Willis' movies took in an estimated five billion dollars at the box office. He had some stinkers, too. Every actor does. But the enduring success and appeal of 1988's Die Hard, arguably the greatest action move ever made, ensured that Bruce Willis would remain one of Hollywood's most bankable stars for the next 34 years.

    And that's exactly the reason why Bruce Willis, now 67 years-old, kept getting trotted out to more movie sets than Ariflex cameras. Over the last four years alone, Willis was on a total of 22 movie sets, virtually every one of them forgettable pot boilers. On one of those movie sets, Willis asked, "I know why you're here, I know why you're here but what am I doing here?"

    I don't know why Willis made so many movies (Actually, more like an endless series of cameo appearances in which he was often paid $2,000,000 for two days of work and lines of dialogue had to be excised from the script because Willis could no longer remember his lines even with earwigs.). Maybe he was hard up for the money or maybe he just really loved his craft. But Willis was on so many movie sets of late that the Razzies gave him his own category: Worst Performance by Bruce Willis. After arrogantly doubling down yesterday saying they were keeping the category up, despite Willis' abrupt retirement, they then buckled under pressure and decided to rescind it, after all.

    In fact, Willis' prolificity of late was an emerging joke in Hollywood, with some saying it was the next best thing to an old actors' retirement fund. Yeah, they said, making $44,000,000 for 22 cameos is good work, if you can get it.

    Again, most if not all of those 22 stinkers went directly to DVD or streaming services. It seemed as if Willis' turn playing Paul Kersey in the Death Wish retread would be his last visit to a movie theater.

     But people, especially independent studios, kept trotting out this sick old man for movie after movie (eight in one year alone), shamelessly using his fading star power and box office draw even after stories began quietly circulating that Bruce wasn't himself.

     He'd misfire prop guns on the set to the point where one director ensured no one would be in the line of fire whenever Willis had one in his hands. 25 pages of dialogue had to he excised from a script and Willis' involvement was limited to a one day shoot.

     And they still used him.

     Aphasia is a degenerative cognitive disorder that results after a traumatic brain injury or stroke. With Willis' action movie roles, he could've easily taken a shot to the head but he also could've had a stroke. It presents in some ways like dementia or Alzheimer's but it's not the same. It makes communication virtually impossible, which is fatal to the career of a professional thespian.

    I have some direct experience with aphasia. One of my best friends in the 80s and early 90s had it. When he was a teenager, his stepfather literally put his head through a wall. As Bobby told me, half his brain died and he had to learn how to reacquire basic skills such as walking and talking with literally half a brain.

   He never completely succeeded in mastering his old language skills again. He would almost constantly struggle to find the right words and would stare into space and gesture to find that elusive word. Conversation with him was always a frustrating experience. Still, my best friend Katie married him in 1984 and would eventually begin regretting it after a few years. If he went off his medication for even a day or so, he'd go into convulsive seizures. I'd witnessed more than one of them and, believe me, that's something you never want to see.

     Bobby still retained many of the skills and memories of his high school technical education. He was a pretty good mechanic and his true love, electronics, was something that never left him. But his aphasia also left him completely incapable of the rigors of a nine to five job the rest of us can more or less shrug off.

     I'm not in a position to say whether Mr. Willis is presenting these symptoms. But his cognitive impairments had been developing over the past several years to the point where cast members and crew could no longer ignore it. But over the space of 22 movies over 48 months, they used this poor old man to the point where he longer knew why he was on a movie set and they kept using him, anyway, just to make money for their forgettable projects.

     So we can continue arguing back and forth over whether Will Smith should have slapped Chris Rock over that joke about this wife. But, in my humble opinion, the real dialogue we ought to be having about the entertainment business ought to be producers shamelessly exploiting a sick old man plainly in the twilight of his competency just to make a few bucks.