Company Town : End of an Era’s Quintessential Producer

To those who knew him, watching Don Simpson’s life unfold was a lot like watching one of his movies. It was an edge-of-your-seat experience, with no assurance that the next frames would bring serenity or a brakes-screeching, metal-twisting crash.

The producer, who was found dead in his home Friday afternoon of what police said was an apparent heart attack, had any number of very public excesses involving drugs and sex. And they seemed to have their roots in a devil-may-care, get-out-of-my-way approach that for a few years helped make him one of the most aggressive producers in Hollywood. Always restless and obsessive, Simpson once told an interviewer that he didn’t have a steady girlfriend because he never met anyone he wanted to spend more than one weekend with.

Simpson and producing partner Jerry Bruckheimer will go down in Hollywood history as the quintessential producers of the 1980s, celebrities in their own right who for a brief period, with hits such as “Beverly Hills Cop,” “Flashdance” and “Top Gun,” seemed in complete touch with what a summer audience wanted. They were so involved with every detail of their movies that Simpson once said, “We’re not only hands-on, but feet-on. We don’t take a passive role in any shape or form.”

They were bad boys turned rich boys, conspicuous consumers in the age of Donald Trump. They drove matching black Ferraris and had two publicists and a private chef in their stark black-and-white offices, which they made Paramount Pictures remodel several times. Simpson wore black jeans through two washings before throwing them out because they weren’t black enough anymore. Film critic Paul Attanasio in the Washington Post dubbed them “the twin Midases of Melrose Avenue.”

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The news media loved the anecdotes, many of which came from nonstop talker Simpson, who, despite his wild personal life, was obsessed with his image and the perception of his success. At their peak, the two helped usher in the era of the “super producers,” guys who got as much ink as their stars did and who often were more powerful than the studio executives they supposedly answered to.

“Don was a tough, difficult guy to work with who was quite brilliant and hard to reason with. He had the ability to make studio executives shudder,” said a former Paramount executive who should know.

Simpson made it known he didn’t want Paramount brass dropping by his offices on the lot uninvited. As long as the team was bringing in huge profit for the studio, that was fine. When the two sensed they might not come off looking very good in a British documentary titled “Naked Hollywood,” they pressured Paramount into withholding permission to use clips from their films.

Their movies were usually written and rewritten to death at Simpson’s insistence, and often involved similar themes: mavericks who try to defy the system, get knocked down and triumph in the last few minutes of the film. It’s not exactly a new plot line, but Simpson and Bruckheimer gave it a slick, fast-paced feel with visually dazzling looks and platinum-selling soundtracks. Taking advantage of new sound technology in theaters, the two filled their movies with driving rock songs such as Kenny Loggins’ “Danger Zone” in “Top Gun” and Glenn Frey’s “The Heat Is On” in “Beverly Hills Cop.” More than a few critics said the movies looked like rock videos, sort of MTV meets the feature film.

Critics often hated the movies. They questioned such absurdities as pilot Tom Cruise falling in love with Kelly McGillis’ physicist in “Top Gun,” or Jennifer Beals looking like a model while working as a steelworker in “Flashdance.”

No matter. The box-office grosses overall were well into the billions by the late 1980s. Studio executives fell over themselves to keep Simpson and Bruckheimer happy. Foreign box-office numbers were soaring, video stores were being built on every corner and movie fans were buying lots of merchandise from their favorite films. What enabled studio executives to tap into that revenue stream best were the escapist movies in which the team specialized.

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In early 1990, the two got Paramount to run full-page ads touting a new five-year deal as a “visionary alliance.” Simpson hyped it as “the biggest deal in Hollywood,” with numbers ranging from $300 million to $500 million, depending on whom you believed. In describing how the relationship would work with the studio, Simpson said, “They give us the money, we make the movies and they meet us at the theater.”

When the fall came, it was swift and hard. The Tom Cruise stock car film, “Days of Thunder,” went out of control, going tens of millions over budget. More important, it didn’t perform at the box office, suggesting that the Simpson-Bruckheimer formula was growing old. They soon split prematurely with Paramount and ended up at Walt Disney.

There were more years of frustration. The arrogance they were known for at their peak came back to haunt them, as the news media chronicled how the once-hot producers were stumbling. When they ran into a dry spell--maintaining that they didn’t have the kind of material they liked--Disney started asking what it was getting for its money.

Last year, the two staged a comeback with three solid hits--”Bad Boys” for Columbia and “Crimson Tide” and “Dangerous Minds” for Disney--although none approached the box-office dominance of their earlier films. Still, the partnership ended at the close of the year, with Simpson’s personal problems said to be at the core of the split. In recent weeks, Simpson was planning to set up his own production company.

In a 1990 interview with The Times, Simpson responded to talk of his personal problems and his wild image. His response: “There are two things I have at this point in my life: a couple of bucks and a reputation as a dangerously honest man. A lot of people know the trajectory of my life. . . . I haven’t hidden my light under a bushel. I’m confident about where I am and have no regrets about the past. Zero. It’s all about choices . . . and I don’t play it safe.”