That time Bruce Willis (apparently) used CGI to fix his hair

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If you’ve seen the film Hudson Hawk that’s not all that big of a surprise because according to the box office, nobody saw that film. Along with bombing harder than a chubby kid with an adamantium skeleton into a swimming pool, the film is infamous for the persistent rumor that Bruce Willis used his creative clout to have someone fix his shitty hairline with CGI. 

The story goes that after filming had wrapped Bruce Willis was sitting in on the editing process and realised that Father Time had run a proverbial lawnmower over his once luxurious head of hair. Willis was apparently so distraught upon seeing his thinning hairline that he demanded something be done about it.

Sadly they only had digital effects artists working on the film and not miracle workers.

This something came in the form of the effects artists working on the film who apparently spent hours pouring through and retouching every frame of the film where you could see how shit Willis’ hair looked.

Now we should note that shortly after this story broke a few insiders who worked on the film categorically denied that Willis did this, mainly citing the sheer cost it would require to pay someone to retouch every single frame of a 90 minute film. Something we’d like to counter by pointing out that the film originally had a budget of about $42 million and somehow went over budget by another $30 million and nobody is really quite sure where all the money went. The leading theory, or at least the funniest one, to explain where the money ended up is that it was used to fix Willis’ hair in post-production and save the actor’s fragile ego.

It’s also worth mentioning that although people who worked on the film have denied that CGI from the time wasn’t good enough to do something as complex as make Bruce Willis look like he had more hair, the film was filmed around the same time as fucking Terminator 2. You know the film that used CGI to turn Robert Patrick into a liquid metal murder-bot.

If you can use CGI to make an entire CGI man, you can use it to make CGI hair.

Also fun fact, Terminator 2’s budget was only $5 million higher than than Hudson Hawk’s and featured an action set piece where Arnold Schwarzenegger fells an endless army of police officers with a mini-gun and another where he punches a metallic time-assassin so hard his head explodes.

“Fuck!”

But yeah, using the same kind of technology to make a balding man look slightly less bald was way too advanced for the time.