[buttmunch]

February 15, 2006 -- SUPERSTAR Bruce Willis has come out swinging in defense of I-made-it-up "memoirist" James Frey while trashing the celebrity media for good measure.
The Hollywood he-man says he's a big fan of the "A Million Little Pieces" author-turned-literary-pariah, and he's, instead, directing his ire at former Frey booster Oprah Winfrey, the smarmy scribes at Entertainment Weekly and celeb gossip magazines.

"Look at what happened to James Frey in the last two weeks," Willis rants to iFMagazine. "That's a great book and so is the follow-up book ["My Friend Leonard"]. And just because his publisher chose to say that these were memoirs, it took it out of being a work of fiction, a great work of fiction and very well-written, to this guy having to go be sucker-punched on 'Oprah' by one of the most powerful women in television just to grind her own ax about it."

"Hey, Oprah," Willis continues. "You had President Clinton on your show, and if this [bleep] didn't lie about a couple of things, I'm going to set myself on fire right now. James Frey is a writer, OK? He can write whatever he wants. It's fiction, and it's just hard, it's just shameful how he was treated in some of these things."

Willis says Justin Timberlake "was asked to play James Frey in the making of that book, and he waited and waited and listened to everyone and he said - 'Have you heard of this magazine called In Touch magazine or Us Weekly or InStyle or People or any of these magazines? They lie about people and they just make up [bleep] all week long, and you have to sue them to get it changed.'

"This is the world that we live in. That's approved and people go, 'That's OK,' and people go, 'Ooooo, someone is [bleeping] this person over here. Someone did this over here.' And they're all lies and no one is yelling at them. So let's leave James Frey alone."

Without pausing for breath, Willis turned on Entertainment Weekly, which recently wrote that "Die Hard IV" was one sequel they "didn't want to see." EW "hates me," he fumed. "They've hated me since they've been a magazine. F - - - them. And you can go tell them that."

nypost.com