Don Simpson: The Rise and Fall of Hollywood’s Most Destructive Producer

Nov 20, 2024
7 min read

Collage of Don Simpson portrait and Tom Cruise in sunglasses raising middle fingers, with title text on top.

Before there was Harvey Weinstein there was Don Simpson and if you were to ask anyone who knew Simpson for his wildest story, you'll get the same response: "There are too many to choose from." That's how journalist Charles Fleming summed it up in High Concept: Don Simpson and the Hollywood Culture of Excess, his 1998 book about the producer's life. "Sexual excess, drug and alcohol excess, ego excess," Fleming said, capturing the essence of a man who wasn't just a Hollywood player but its poster child for hedonism.

Don Simpson wasn't just one of the architects of the high-concept blockbuster; he embodied the extremes of Hollywood in the 1980s and 1990s. Alongside his producing partner Jerry Bruckheimer, Simpson brought the world Top Gun, Beverly Hills Cop, Days of Thunder, and The Rock. But offscreen, his life was a whirlwind of drugs, insecurities, and jaw-dropping antics, some laughably absurd, others painfully dark.

A Straight-A Bible Student from Alaska

Born in Seattle in 1943, Simpson grew up in Anchorage, Alaska, raised by a strict Baptist father who worked as a Boeing mechanic. He attended church four or five times a week and later described himself as a "straight-A Bible student." It's worth dwelling on that for a moment: the man who would eventually keep 2,200 prescription pills in alphabetical order in his Bel Air closet and employ a doctor to manage his addiction, spent his formative years in a cold, remote Alaskan city attending Baptist services multiple times a week. Simpson described his childhood as "a nightmare of repression." Hollywood represented, in his own words, personal freedom, and he embraced it with a vengeance.

He left Alaska for the University of Oregon, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and graduated in 1966 with a degree in English. He worked briefly as a ski instructor in Utah, then moved to San Francisco, where his first industry job was promoting the First International Erotic Film Festival. That gap between the Baptist Sunday school and the erotic film festival might be the most revealing detail in his entire biography.

Two men with matching cars — Jerry and Don with their matching Ferraris

In the 1970s, Simpson started in Warner Bros' marketing department before joining Paramount Pictures in 1976. By 1981, he was President of Production at Paramount, overseeing films like An Officer and a Gentleman. Hollywood insiders were already taking notice. A magazine piece dubbed him one of the "Baby Moguls," predicting he would define the next decade of filmmaking. But Simpson's growing drug use and reckless behaviour, like passing out in his soup at the studio dining room, got him fired in 1983. Not one to be discarded, he was offered a production deal instead. Enter Jerry Bruckheimer.

Blockbuster Success and the High-Concept Formula

For Don Simpson the producer, teaming up with Bruckheimer was career-defining. Their first film, Flashdance (1983), was critically panned but an enormous commercial hit, raking in $201 million worldwide on a $7 million budget. The movie was a perfect example of what would become their formula: visually striking, narratively simple, and backed by hit songs. (Flashdance... What a Feeling won an Oscar and dominated MTV.)

Simpson understood how to hook an audience. Beverly Hills Cop? A streetwise Detroit cop in swanky Los Angeles. Top Gun? Fighter pilots as rock stars. The ideas were snappy, marketable, and built for mass appeal. And they worked. Beverly Hills Cop became the highest-grossing film of 1985, and Top Gun redefined the blockbuster action movie. In 1985 and 1988, Simpson and Bruckheimer were named Producers of the Year by the National Association of Theatre Owners.

A black and white photo of film producers Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer — Don Simpson (L) with his collaboration partner Jerry Bruckheimer

A Life of Excess: Jeans, Fast Cars, and Faster Drugs

Success only fed Simpson's ego and appetites. He wasn't just wealthy; he made sure everyone knew it. He framed million-dollar cheques as wall art, wore black Levi's only once before tossing them, and always booked two hotel rooms, one to sleep in, the other for his designer wardrobe. He once sent an assistant to collect an all-black Ferrari Testarossa off the boat so he could be the first Californian to own one.

But these were the lighter sides of his excess. Behind the bravado, Simpson battled deep insecurities, particularly about his weight and appearance. He underwent at least ten plastic surgeries between 1988 and 1994, including a botched procedure that had to be reversed. He claimed these were all rumours, but friends and his surgeons knew otherwise.

His drug use, which began in the 1970s, escalated alarmingly. By the 1990s, his cocaine habit was an open secret in Hollywood. He spent over $60,000 a month on prescription drugs, using aliases and multiple doctors to build a stockpile so vast it had to be arranged alphabetically. In interviews, he dismissed his addictions, claiming his only vice was food. Few believed him.

The Darker Side: Sex, Violence, and Paranoia

Simpson's personal life was as chaotic as his professional one. Known for his brash, offensive comments, like calling Steven Spielberg "white bread," or telling a 1979 meeting of studio executives that Shelley Duvall shouldn't be cast in Popeye because, as director Robert Altman later recounted: "Well, I wouldn't want to fuck her. And if I don't want to fuck her, she shouldn't be in the movie."

He said that "next to eating and having sex, making movies is the best thing in the world." His debauched lifestyle was well known in Hollywood and documented extensively. He was a fixture on the "Hollywood cocaine-party" circuit throughout the 1970s and 80s, and in his later years became known for throwing lavish all-night parties at his mansion. An entire chapter of You'll Never Make Love in This Town Again, a book by four prostitutes about their encounters with Hollywood celebrities, describes his parties and violent sexual preferences. Some of the women who spent time with him left bloodied and bruised; some were hospitalised. He also allegedly auditioned struggling actresses for his movies, convinced them to have sex with him, and secretly filmed the encounters.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8eQIbiwge1M&pp=ygULZG9uIHNpbXBzb24%3D

His behaviour extended into the workplace too. His former secretary Monica Harmon filed a $5 million lawsuit against Simpson and Bruckheimer in 1988, alleging that Simpson screamed at her when she put regular milk in his coffee instead of low-fat, that she was forced to watch him take cocaine, and that he had her schedule his appointments with prostitutes and maintain lists of the women he was seeing. The case was eventually dismissed in court, but people who worked closely with Simpson said Harmon's account was accurate in every detail.

He wasn't just reckless; he was paranoid. During the writing of Top Gun, Simpson barricaded himself in his home, convinced the mafia was after him. He waved an Uzi around while screenwriter Chip Proser tried to coax him out. On another occasion, he waved the same gun at a screenwriter from his roof. These weren't isolated incidents. Simpson's drug-fuelled delusions often left those around him genuinely frightened.

The Breakdown of a Partnership

Despite Simpson's personal chaos, he and Bruckheimer kept delivering hits until the failures started piling up. Days of Thunder (1990), a blatant attempt to recreate the Top Gun magic with Tom Cruise in a race car, bombed critically and financially. Simpson's escalating drug use, mood swings, and outrageous spending strained their partnership. Days of Thunder was partly born out of Simpson's auto-obsession. He wasn't just a car enthusiast but a prolific car-crasher. He once crashed a car into the side of a house, the car left halfway stuck in the wall. He blamed his passenger, former Playboy centrefold Cathy St. George, claiming she'd been driving. But St. George was dating a man with mob connections. Men claiming to be mobsters turned up at Simpson's house and ultimately extorted him for $250,000.

Simpson had been trying to get clean by swapping street drugs for prescription drugs, a transition that required multiple doctors, aliases, and pharmacies to sustain the volume he needed. He met Dr. Steve Ammerman at a Santa Monica gym around 1990. Ammerman was a 44-year-old emergency room physician with a sideline business contracting doctors to Los Angeles hospitals. He was also a recovering addict who'd been clean for five years and an aspiring screenwriter who believed he could help Simpson while pitching himself projects on the side. In the summer of 1995, he moved into Simpson's pool house while recovering from a hair transplant. On the morning of 15 August 1995, one of Simpson's assistants found Ammerman's body in the shower of the pool house. The cause of death was multiple drug intoxication.

"That's not a good sign," said Fleming, "when the guy who's helping you with drug and alcohol issues drops dead of drug and alcohol issues."

By 1995, Bruckheimer had had enough. Simpson's antics were derailing their work, and the producer finally decided to end the partnership. They agreed to finish The Rock, a high-octane action movie set on Alcatraz, before going their separate ways. Simpson's involvement was minimal. He didn't live to see its release.

For men smiling for the camera. All except one are wearing sunglasses — Martin Lawrence, Don Simpson, Jerry Bruckheimer and Will Smith at the Bad Boys premiere

The End of the Road

On 19 January 1996, Simpson was found dead in the bathroom of his Bel Air mansion, a biography of Oliver Stone face-down on the floor beside him. He was 52. The autopsy revealed heart failure brought on by a combination of drugs. Police found 2,200 prescription pills in his closet, neatly organised. He had 21 different substances in his system at the time of death, including cocaine, antidepressants, and morphine. His physician at the time of death was later disciplined by the California Medical Board for prescribing excessive quantities of controlled substances.

Three men posing for the camera, in a black and white photo. Two of them are wearing racing overalls. — On the set of Days Of Thunder. Bruckheimer, Simpson and Tom Cruise

Simpson's Legacy

Simpson's films remain beloved. Top Gun, Beverly Hills Cop, The Rock: they defined a particular kind of 1980s American cinema, loud and visceral and unashamed. But his personal story has become something else entirely, a case study in what happens when a system gives a talented, damaged, self-mythologising man unlimited money and no guardrails.

Charles Fleming called him "a supercharged simple-minded creature, an Aesop's fable on crystal meth." Michael Eisner, Simpson's former boss at Paramount, was blunter: "I have been waiting for this call for 20 years."

Jerry Bruckheimer went on to produce Con Air, Armageddon, the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, and the Top Gun sequel. The partnership that had defined Hollywood for a decade was quietly buried along with Simpson. For a parallel story of Hollywood excess and self-destruction from a different angle, the brief and chaotic marriage of Michelle Phillips and Dennis Hopper tells you something about what that era of Hollywood actually felt like from the inside.