The Keys to the Kingdom (17 page)

As Simpson later acknowledged, he was part of a management team that did not make things easy on talent. “Paramount [tried] to make your movie for you,” he said. “When I was in the job, I was not a nice person. I never lied or cheated but I did run roughshod over people.”

And many critics didn't think Simpson's style—which he continued to practice when he and Jerry Bruckheimer became one of Hollywood's most successful producing partnerships—was especially good for the movies. John Gregory Dunne felt that working with Simpson was “simply taking dictation,” transforming the writer into an expensive stenographer. Film
writer Peter Biskind said many other writers thought Simpson's methods “inaugurated an era of decline, when executives would convince themselves that they knew best.” But from the standpoint of commerce, Simpson's methods often worked exceptionally well.

If writers sometimes felt that Simpson was tough on them, executives suffered more. David Kirkpatrick remembers working so hard at one point that he hadn't returned home in three days. “I complained to Don Simpson and said, ‘I haven't showered, I haven't slept.' I broke into tears in Don's office and he said, ‘Go home. We'll work it out.' Monday I came in and my office had been moved. There was a note saying where to find the new office. I went in and they had put in a foldout bed and a shower so I could take care of my necessities right there.”

Simpson worked hard, too, but his habits became increasingly erratic. One Paramount executive at the time remembers him showing up at a company retreat late, wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the words “Maui Wowie,” cheeseburger in hand. “Sorry,” he apologized. “I got pulled over doing a hundred and twenty in my Porsche.”

Another junior executive at the time remembers that Simpson regularly showed up for work at eleven in the morning—more than four full hours after Katzenberg pulled in—and would leave at four in the afternoon. At one point, he says, he didn't see Simpson at all for a couple of weeks. “Don's style was different,” that executive says. “He'd work all weekend, stay up all night, call us at four-thirty
A.M
. with script notes. Jeffrey was in at six-thirty
A.M
., and he would go for [a working] dinner at eight.”

One member of a producing team that worked with Paramount remembers getting involved in a project in which a writer turned in a dark, unworkable script. To the producers' surprise, however, Simpson declared with glittering eyes that he loved the material. They were panicked at the prospect of trying to make the film. But the next day, Eisner called them to a meeting in his office along with Simpson. “A terrible injustice has been done to you,” he said as Simpson sat with his head hanging down. “I have read this abomination. I want to apologize.”

“He went on and on about how Don fucked up,” one of the producers remembers. “In front of us. This was punishment. As we got up, he walked down to the end of the table, dropped the script in front of Don, and said, ‘We have to talk.'”

By the early eighties, it had become increasingly apparent that Simpson was not keeping up the pace. He had always prided himself on being able
to press his luck in his private life without jeopardizing his work. Even in his high-school yearbook, he had bequeathed to underclassmen “my ability to ‘walk on the wild side' while still maintaining a reputation that's ‘above reproach.'” But at thirty-seven years old, he was losing his ability to sustain the game. His life became a series of peaks and valleys: productive periods where he was fit and coherent followed by protracted binges of mind-boggling drug abuse, weight gain, and professional disintegration.

The summer of 1982 was a deep valley for Simpson and the studio was slumping, too. Paramount's parent, Gulf © Western, had just reported a 53 percent drop in profits for its third quarter, and its Leisure Time Group, which included the studio, was among the operations that were responsible for the decline. There was some hope for one of Bluhdorn's favorite projects,
An Officer and a Gentleman
with Debra Winger and Richard Gere, which was set to open at the end of July. But there was bad buzz about a clutch of other projects in the works, including
White Dog,
Eisner's pet project about a dog trained to hate blacks, as well as a picture named
Young Lust
and
Jekyll and Hyde…Together Again
. Eisner had told Simpson that
An Officer and a Gentleman
was “a little romantic movie [but]
White Dog
is
Jaws
.” He was wrong.
An Officer and a Gentleman
was a smash, netting the studio more than $50 million in profit, but the others, in fact, lost millions.

Paramount had suffered through a string of flops, partly because of Eisner's insistence on rushing seven films into production before an anticipated directors' strike in 1981. “The scripts were ridiculous and Don took the hit for a lot of them,” Steel said later. When
Grease 2
was in the works, Eisner saw a cut and asked for changes. Simpson didn't follow up, and when the film premiered in May 1982 at the Cinerama Dome in Hollywood, Eisner realized that his directions had not been carried out. Simpson, who attended the event with his date—one of Richard Pryor's former wives—and Paramount executive Craig Baumgarten, was boasting that he had single-handedly saved the picture by reworking it. “He said he'd been working around the clock, which was code,” Baumgarten remembers. “He'd been working twenty-four hours, but he'd been getting loaded, too.”

The premiere was a disaster and Eisner was furious that his instructions had been ignored. (The picture was such a flop that Paramount did not exercise an option to make another picture with its female star, a then-unknown Michelle Pfeiffer. “Very few people could figure out that she was going to be a star from that,” Baumgarten says.)

Soon afterward, sources close to the situation say Eisner and Diller took
Simpson to lunch hoping to persuade him to clean up. But Simpson was in terrible shape and Diller and Eisner decided they could do no more. Simpson had to be fired. Eisner's longtime mentor, producer Larry Gordon, pleaded for Simpson to get a face-and possibly life-saving production deal. Eisner agreed. In
Variety,
Simpson's departure was portrayed as a voluntary decision to become a producer and rid himself of “administrative details.” Simpson told the
Los Angeles Herald Examiner
that he had been sick of his job for five years. “Before I'm 40, I want to make pictures of my own—and I want to get rich,” he said. He would do both.

Eisner wasn't sure, at first, who would replace Simpson, but he knew he had to act before Diller got involved. “At that time, Michael didn't like [Katzenberg],” says a source close to Eisner. “Jeffrey was really Barry's guy. He was an arrogant little prick…. He wanted the job desperately, of course.” With Gordon urging him on, Eisner gave the job of production chief to Katzenberg, who may have been Diller's guy but not as much as some other candidates might have been.

 

AND AT AGE
thirty-one, Katzenberg—a married man who boasted that he had never ingested an illegal substance in his life—was essentially the anti-Simpson. “Jeffrey was incredibly disciplined, incredibly driven, very organized and methodical,” says Richard Fischoff, who was hired as a creative executive shortly before Simpson's demise at the studio. In June, Katzenberg was named president of production. “I trained him,” Simpson told the media.

The biggest rap against Katzenberg was that he had never demonstrated any particular brand of taste or creative instinct. “The thing about Jeffrey that plagued him his whole life is that smart as Jeffrey is, Jeffrey isn't a guy who can feel it,” says Baumgarten. “Jeffrey will go to a record store, buy the top-ten albums, and listen to them. But he doesn't love 'em.” Another former colleague puts it more harshly. “Jeffrey was always the plodder,” he says. Yet another remembers urging Katzenberg to hire a bright young animator at Disney named Tim Burton. “Talk to me when he's established,” Katzenberg said.

But Katzenberg tried to tackle the creative part of the process through the combined powers of his will and his brain. And no doubt Eisner saw him as a perfect, relentless “retriever” and planned to supply the “gut” himself when it came to picking movies. Not only would he provide the
gut but—to whatever degree it was needed—the intellect. It didn't help Katzenberg to admit in a meeting that he had never read
The Scarlet Letter
when Eisner mused that he'd like to do a movie version. Katzenberg was unvarnished, all right, but he was willing.

The other widely held criticism of Katzenberg was that he was only too willing—happy to execute Eisner's mandate to control the filmmaking process and keep down costs. When headstrong director John Milius hired a composer without consulting the studio, Katzenberg refused to let the man score the film. Milius vowed never to work with Katzenberg again. “He's a wonderful human being if he agrees with you,” Milius said later, “but he has no ethical conscience and sees that as a virtue.” If Katzenberg was exceptionally aggressive, Eisner undoubtedly admired the quality. He and Katzenberg cheerfully kept up an enemies list; a former Paramount executive remembers Eisner sticking his head in Katzenberg's office occasionally to ask, “So-and-so called. Do we hate him? Is this guy dead to us?”

While Katzenberg was flexing Eisner's muscle, Simpson teamed up with his roommate, Jerry Bruckheimer, to produce
Flashdance
—the picture that Dawn Steel had championed so passionately when Simpson had been head of production.
Flashdance
was an ugly duckling, destined to be a megahit that would spawn epic battles over who deserved the credit. But when
Flashdance
was nearing its opening, the studio failed to realize what it had. There was a small screening with a test audience on the lot, mostly teens, and when it was over, the film executives walked back toward the administration building.

The audience seemed to enjoy the film, but as seasoned executives know, success with a test audience that is invited to see a movie for free does not necessarily translate into filmgoers making the trek to theaters and shelling out their own money for tickets. Nonetheless, one low-level executive thought the picture had really hit home with the audience. “I really loved it,” he ventured. The reaction was icy. “I got, ‘What the fuck do you know?'” he remembers. “Everybody bashed the movie other than Mancuso.”

“To show you just how much Paramount believed in the movie, they sold off 25 percent of it to a private investment firm as a hedge against losses—a few weeks before it opened,” Steel said later. “They wanted to cover themselves in case it bombed.” With a budget of $7 million, it grossed more than $90 million domestically, produced a smash record, and inspired a ripped, off-the-shoulder T-shirt craze that every young woman with aspi
rations to cool would wear that summer. Simpson launched himself into one of the most successful film-producing careers in industry history.

 

ANYONE WHO EXPECTED
life at Paramount to get easier after Simpson left was doomed to bitter disappointment. Katzenberg's work habits became legendary in the community: the Monday-morning calls to dozens of agents, the back-to-back breakfast meetings, the if-you-don't-come-in-Saturday, don't-bother-showing-up-Sunday work ethic that would be emulated by ambitious young suits throughout the industry. Ricardo Mestres took to the routine like a fish to water. “I thought this was what the rest of the industry was like,” he said later. “But the rest of the world was the opposite—they'd wait for the phone to ring and field offers. Jeffrey made everybody nervous. Nobody worked the hours or covered the territory that Jeffrey seemed to.”

David Kirkpatrick remembers “looking out the window and seeing Jeffrey put his hands on our car hoods to see if they were warm or cold at five in the morning…. We worked twenty-hour days, but it was thrilling to be a part of it. You were at the center of it all and the [bosses] didn't mind unmasking their feelings for all to see. That was exciting to a young pisher.”

But there was a downside, too. Kirkpatrick recalls being at the studio on Christmas Eve, trying to recut
It Came from Hollywood
. He complained that it was a holiday. “So we'll order some turkey sandwiches,” Katzenberg replied.

Another executive says Katzenberg taught him to fight for his convictions, to make his deadlines, to impose discipline on himself that was rare in Hollywood. But he also realized his life was being ruined after he told Katzenberg he was going to New York to spend Christmas with his wife's family. Though Katzenberg seemed unperturbed at first, he called the young man into his office a few days later and handed him a stack of scripts. “I want you to go to the Gulf © Western building on Christmas Day and fax me notes on these,” Katzenberg said. He did as he was told and spent several hours in Katzenberg's immaculate white-on-white New York office. He missed Christmas dinner, and when he arrived at his in-laws', he found his wife with tears in her eyes. “If you want to hang on to your marriage,” his brother-in-law admonished, “you'd better get out of Paramount.” It wasn't long before he did exactly that. “I realized I had totally, totally lost my soul to this place,” he said later.

 

WHEN SIMPSON WAS
fired, producer Larry Gordon and his young protégé, Joel Silver, were already working on a Paramount film called
48 Hrs
. The script, which was about a cop who teams up with a con to catch the bad guys, had kicked around Hollywood for a few years under Gordon's wing. Gordon was a salty little man who frequently boasted that he had gotten tough being raised as “the only Jew in Mississippi.” He was also the man who had warned Eisner, years earlier at ABC, that he had incurred Aaron Spelling's displeasure and might lose his job. Since then, he had become Eisner's constant adviser.