Moonlighting was one of those shows where the casting and timing was just perfect. Shepherd needed a comeback and Willis was the bartender who came out of nowhere to be a major star. For various reasons the show has not been in syndication so people forget exactly how cutting edge it was. Willis danced and sang his way to stardom in a way that almost nobody else in modern mass entertainment has managed to pull off. This between stints as an action hero in the show. When Diehard came out I wasn't sure that Willis could pull off the main role because my vision of him was as an all-around entertainer and the show was so dark and gritty. In a lot of ways Willis was a throwback to the Rat Pack of Dean Martin and Sammy Davis, Jr.
Sacrilege! It was a conversation with Orson Welles (who was his houseguest at the time) that convinced Bogdanovich to shoot it in black and white, and many critics pointed to it as helping to evoke the mood of "a town with no reason to exist" (as Roger Ebert put it in his review). Just as was true with Bogdanovich's other masterpiece, Paper Moon, black and white was the perfect choice for this film.
