ABSTRACT
On a bitterly cold winter's night in March 1997, thousands of local Toronto people turned out to celebrate the opening of the city's Planet Hollywood restaurant. At a closed-off intersection at the base of the CN Tower, a makeshift stage was erected, flanked by a set of giant speakers. After dark, Hollywood star Bruce Willis, accompanied by fellow celebrity investors Demi Moore and Sylvester Stallone, took to the stage where he and his rock band, The Accelerators, performed a brief set before retiring inside the restaurant to an inaugural party whose guests included actors Luke Perry and Tom Arnold, blues musician Jeff Healy and a sprinkling of players from the Toronto Raptors basketball team. By nine o'clock the street was quiet and the crowd had begun to wander off. The event lived on, however, in the prominent coverage it received in the local media over the next day, and again when rumors (unfounded) of a marital split between Willis and Moore briefly surfaced. Two weeks later with an estimated 15,000 fans in attendance, Willis and Arnold again, together with celebrity shareholder Arnold Schwarzenegger, movie stars Will Smith and Samuel L. Jackson, and rock musician Jon Bon Jovi, popped up in Vancouver to launch yet another Planet Hollywood restaurant. “We are bringing memorabilia from warehouses in Hollywood, the authentic stuff”, Schwarzenegger said. “And we bring an incredible amount of celebrities” (“Stars draw throng” 1997).
