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Inside the dark and disturbed life of Don Simpson – the egomaniac who made Top Gun fly

What is the greatest Don Simpson story? Answering that question is almost as improbable as one of the producer’s action movies. “There are too many stories to choose from,” says writer and journalist Charles Fleming, whose 1998 book High Concept details the life, times, and career of Don Simpson – and Simpson’s role as a “poster boy” for Hollywood excess. “Sexual excess, drug and alcohol excess, ego excess,” says Fleming.

Don Simpson – along with producing partner Jerry Bruckheimer – was king of the high-concept blockbuster: Top Gun, Beverly Hills Cop, Days of Thunder, Bad Boys, The Rock. Behind the camera, Simpson played the hero – or villain, perhaps – in a multitude of wild tales.

Framing his million-dollar cheques to hang on the wall. Making an assistant fly his favourite Armani jumper to Rome. Wearing black Levi’s just once before throwing them out. Always hiring two hotel rooms – one to sleep in, one to use as a closet for all his designer gear. Cocaine-fuelled, days-long parties. Waving an Uzi at a screenwriter from the roof of his house, because he believed the mafia was after him. Arriving at his school reunion via helicopter, just to stick it to the kids who’d made fun of him. And a painfully botched penis enlargement that had to be reversed.

Charles Fleming cites one favourite story: that when Ferrari released the first all-black Testarossa, Simpson became obsessed with being the person in California to own one – so obsessed that he sent his assistant to collect one of the cars as they were being offloaded from the boat. 

“Even though there were several people who bought them at the same time, and all the cars were delivered at the same time,” laughs Fleming. “But Simpson’s guy got in and started the engine before all the other guys did. That level of obsession, that level of insecurity, that attention to detail – that feels like an especially Don Simpson thing to do.”

Simpson even spun his own origin story. As a young boy, said Don, he saw The Greatest Show on Earth with his mother. When Jimmy Stewart was carted off to face the death penalty, little Don threw a nuclear tantrum and demanded a new ending to the film. It was “my little rosebud moment,” said Don, adding “I had discovered what I wanted to do for a living”.

“Really?!” laughs Charles Fleming. “It’s a very appealing story and I can believe they saw the movie… but it’s hard to believe that Don and his mother went up to the projection booth and demanded a different ending.” 

Simpson’s fellow executives would later reference the “Don Simpson Discount Factor” – the need to subtract a certain amount of waffle and bluster from whatever Don said. As told to Esquire by Jeffrey Katzenberg (a one-time underling of Simpson’s and future boss of Disney): “You would have to make adjustments when he was talking. Say, discount 20 per cent on a good day and 80 per cent when the bulls––t was really flying around.”

Simpson began his Hollywood career in the Warner Bros marketing department. He met Jerry Bruckheimer in 1973 and joined Paramount in 1976. His arrival as a Hollywood player was heralded in magazine article by Maureen Orth, naming Simpson as one of “the Baby Moguls” – a new generation of elite producers and executives. The Baby Moguls, wrote Orth, would “likely set the tone for the movie industry throughout the 1980s”.

By 1981, Simpson was made President of Production at Paramount, overseeing production on films that included An Officer and a Gentleman. By 1983, with drug usage already a problem, the car wrecks piling up, and multiple rehabs under his ever-widening belt, Simpson was fired – or asked to resign – after passing out in his soup in the executive dining room. But he wasn’t ousted. Instead, he was handed a producer’s deal – including offices at Paramount – and formed his partnership with Jerry Bruckheimer.

Their first film was 1983’s Flashdance. It got a critical drubbing but danced all the way to the bank, earning a worldwide box office of $201 million (from a paltry budget of $7 million). Flashdance began a defining trait of Simpson-Bruckheimer productions: heavy on style, thin on substance. Plus, of course, the obligatory hit song. In this case, Irene Cara’s Oscar-winning pop-thumper, Flashdance… What a Feeling. Simpson was among the first filmmakers who was in tune with the zeitgeisty, marketing power of MTV. For Beverly Hills Cop, there was Glenn Frey’s The Heat Is On; for Top Gun, Berlin’s Take My Breath Away. Not just cool, promotional music videos, but songs that captured the spirit and energy of his films in just three minutes.

Snappy, easy-to-understand concepts were indeed the blockbuster trend. Simpson’s rise came at a time when films were sold on the basis of a 30-second pitch. Beverly Hills Cop was a streetwise Detroit cop in swanky Los Angeles; Top Gun was Star Wars on Earth (Bruckheimer’s words); and Days of Thunder – a case of the trend eating itself – was Top Gun on wheels. 

Simpson’s high concept, wrote Charles Fleming, was “the monster that ate Hollywood”. Forty years on, the phenomenon of tentpole blockbusters has taken over, obliterating original ideas and muscling mid-budget movies off the studios’ slates. Concepts are even simpler now: the Avengers… again.

“I think what was distinctive about Simpson was his willingness to tell incredibly simple stories that were implausible or pretty hackneyed,” says Fleming. “But he dressed them up with the right kind of action, the right kind of music, and the right kind of dialogue and casting, making them so appealing that their implausibility was no longer a problem. He made those things so sleek, so shiny, so loud, while keeping the three-act structure so pure and basic and elementary. More people would be carried away by the rush of the story than the people saying, ‘That doesn’t make sense, this is ridiculous!’ The movies may not stand up to critical inspection but they were certainly successful and made a lot of money in their time.”

Beverly Hills Cop, released in December 1984, was a mega hit – the biggest box office film of 1985. Top Gun and Beverly Hills Cop II followed, both massive hits. In 1987, Simpson was asked the secret to their winning formula. “Be absolutely in love with movies and then make what you love,” he told the interviewer. “We make the movies we wanna see. We really, really like the movies we make. We make them because we wanna see them.”

It was Simpson who had the bombastic ideas. He was the salesman. But it was Bruckheimer who did the groundwork of actually making the film, often while Simpson slept off the previous night’s partying or disappeared on a misadventure. Tom Cruise once said that Simpson had spent most of Top Gun in rehab. 

Chip Proser was hired to rewrite Top Gun and witnessed the Simpson-Bruckheimer dynamic firsthand. “Bruckheimer would be the more reasonable guy,” says Proser. “He was Dean Martin to Jerry Lewis. Simpson was incomprehensible – he was so f–––––– high that he didn’t make any sense.”

Proser didn’t like Simpson from day one (“He was just an assh–––!”) and recalls how Simpson and Bruckheimer tried to intimidate him with a macho game of silent treatment. “First time I met them they didn’t say anything for 10 minutes,” he laughs. “First guy who talks loses.” He also recalls Simpson proudly brandishing a $5 million cheque, and a stack of polaroids – nude pictures of wannabe Hollywood starlets. Simpson’s key talents, says Proser, were “intimidation and bulls––t”.

With a director’s strike looming, Proser had just three weeks to do a complete rewrite of Top Gun. Despite being paid $30,000 a week, the first week was spent waiting for Simpson to call with script notes. “We spent a week waiting for him to sober up,” says Proser. 

Proser was told to stay off the phone. If Simpson called and his line was engaged, Simpson would be furious – so Proser had a new line installed, which he called “the Don Simpson line”. Frustrated with Simpson, Proser insisted on visiting him at home. He found Simpson barricaded in a booze and cocaine meltdown, hiding from a supposed mafia hit. Proser had heard rumours: that Simpson had crossed mobsters in Vegas after he assaulted the nieces of a boss.

What Fleming didn’t know until years later was the extremes of Simpson’s sex life. Seemingly incapable of asking women out or maintaining regular relationships (at one point he even placed a personal ad seeking a partner: “NOTHING illegal. Everything ETHICAL. Must be an artist/outlaw at heart”) Simpson approached sex like other powerful Hollywood men. “He preferred to deal with it as a professional matter,” says Fleming. “His sex life was largely confined to profession sex workers.” “You don’t pay them to come,” Simpson once said about using prostitutes. “You pay them to leave.”

Simpson was a client and friend to high-profile Hollywood madams, including Heidi Fleiss. He had an appetite for increasingly violent S&M, paying hookers to be humiliated and take punishment. “I didn’t know how extreme it was,” says Fleming about Simpson’s sex life. “The violence involved, how much damage it did to the women… I didn’t realise that there were all these chums and that he had all these parties, and the sex play became so violent that women ended up in the hospital.”

In 1989, a former assistant filed a civil lawsuit for sexual harassment, alleging that Simpson had watched pornography and used drugs in front of her, and forced her to make arrangements with hookers. Later, Simpson’s sex life was detailed in the book, You’ll Never Make Love in This Town Again, an expose that featured stories from several Hollywood call-girls. “Tiffany” – real name Alex Datig – later said “the time that I spent around him was probably the most insane, wicked, and self-destructive time of my life”.

In 1990, Simpson and Bruckheimer signed a five-year Paramount deal. With a production fund of $300 million, they had – so Don claimed – unprecedented freedom to do whatever they wanted, “from the premise to the premiere”. The deal was celebrated (at Don and Jerry’s insistence) with full page ads in national and trade papers that trumpeted their “Visionary Alliance”.

But the first film of their deal – 1990’s Days of Thunder – was a wreck: a troubled production and a blatant attempt to re-do Top Gun, with Tony Scott directing again and Cruise simply switching from fighter jet to race car. Days of Thunder has none of the macho self-awareness that’s so crucial to Top Gun. It’s a droning hunk of testosterone, existing purely for Tom Cruise to be really, really good at driving. “It’s idiotic, it’s so childish!” says Fleming.

Simpson’s brash sense of celebrity had crossed over – he now had ambitions of being a film star himself – and he took a supporting role. The role was mostly scrapped. His acting was too terrible to inflict on audiences. Days of Thunder was partly born out of Simpson’s auto-obsession. Simpson was not just a car enthusiast, but a prolific car-crasher. He once crashed a car into the side of a house, which left the car halfway stuck in the wall. As detailed in Fleming’s book, Simpson blamed his passenger, former Playboy centrefold Cathy St. George, claiming she had been behind the wheel. But St. George was dating a man with mob connections and men claiming to be mobsters turned up at Simpson’s house. They ultimately extorted him for $250,000.

When Days of Thunder’s budget careened out of control and underperformed at the box office, the Visionary Alliance deal crashed. The once successful career of Simpson and Bruckheimer was suddenly on the skids. In 1991, they signed a five-year deal with Disney, but it wasn’t until 1995 that they scored another hit – the Will Smith-starring Bad Boys, perhaps the most vacuous, pumped up of all their work. It’s a lad’s lads’ action film. Later that year they struck again with submarine thriller Crimson Tide and Dangerous Minds, which – like an urban Dead Poets Society – sees Michelle Pfeiffer teach a class of tough, streetwise kids. Her grammar lessons are somehow as ridiculous as Tom Cruise flirting with Val Kilmer at 20,000ft.

Lastly, Simpson and Bruckheimer produced The Rock, which perfectly fit the Simpson formula: Die Hard in Alcatraz with James Bond (well, Sean Connery), Nic Cage, and skin-melting gas. If Beverly Hills Cop holds up best from the duo’s Eighties pomp, largely thanks to the razor-sharp Eddie Murphy, The Rock remains their best film overall. Simpson, however, was largely absent from production. And by the time The Rock hit cinemas, Don Simpson was dead.

Simpson had made some efforts to get clean – by trying to move from street drugs to prescription drugs. He used multiple doctors, aliases, and pharmacies to procure a huge collection of meds – so many that he had to keep them in alphabetical order. Dr. Steve Ammerman, an emergency room specialist and wannabe screenwriter, moved into Simpson’s house to help Simpson with his dodgy prescription rehab. But in August 1995, Ammerman himself died in Simpson’s pool house of “multiple drug intoxication”. 

“That’s not a good sign,” says Fleming, “when the guy who’s helping you with drug and alcohol issues drops dead of drug and alcohol issues.”

In December 1995, Jerry Bruckheimer made the decision to split from Simpson. “He couldn’t carry him anymore,” says Fleming. “Jerry had been cleaning up his messes and making excuses and apologies for him for an awfully long time. It had gotten so dark and Simpson had gotten so weird that Jerry was enough of his own man to say ultimately this isn’t working – this isn’t worth it – maybe I need to be on my own.” 

Simpson maintained some bluster and false bravado. He claimed he would continue making movies. But he was now largely a recluse – obese, out of control, almost unrecognisable. On January 19, 1996, he died on the toilet. Police noted that there were 2,000 pills and capsules in his home. On his answerphone was a message, offering him a producer deal at Universal.

Researching his book in the years after, Charles Fleming knew that the big Hollywood players who’d worked closely with Simpson – the likes of Jerry Bruckheimer, Michael Eisner, Jeffrey Katzenberg – wouldn’t talk to him about Simpson. But he was unprepared for how aggressively some people tried to prevent his research. He recalls finding out old roommates of Don’s, or assistants from his early days, who would agree to talk then suddenly back out. Fleming wanted more people to talk in support of Simpson. “All I was hearing were terrible things,” he says. “I needed more voices on the other side telling me what they loved about Done. Where was he kind and gracious? Where was he generous? Because I know he was.”

Chip Proser is less convinced that Simpson had redeeming features. “Not at all,” he says. “I didn’t want anything to do with him. This guy was just abusive, because he was so intimidated by everyone else… It says something when you can’t find anybody to say something good about him.”

An astute summary came from Michael Eisner, Simpson’s former boss at Paramount and then-head of Disney. Upon being told that Simpson had died, he said: “I have been waiting for this call for 20 years.”

“Simpson had been in so many scrapes, done so many crazy things, survived so many adventures, that of course that’s the way it was going to end,” says Fleming. “There was no other end to the story.”