Playing with guns and whores
Glenys Roberts
HIGH CONCEPT: DON SIMPSON AND THE HOLLYWOOD CULTURE OF EXCESS by Charles Fleming Bloomsbury, £16.99, pp. 249 Don Simpson once asked a Hollywood writer what time it was. 'Four o'clock,' came the answer. 'You know what I like to do at four o'clock?' said Simpson. 'I like to pour myself a big drink, lay out a few lines [of cocaine] and abuse a screenwriter.' He proceeded to demonstrate.
Simpson was the Hollywood producer who had a heart attack in his bathroom aged 52 two years ago, his fat little body filled with enough prescription drugs to stock a small hospital — quite apart from the cocaine. Self-abuse is an everyday story among West Coast wannabees, but Simp- son wasn't one of them. He was a raging success by local standards. His first cheque from Paramount Studios was for over $2 million. He had it framed to prove it. Dur- ing the Eighties his films, including Top Gun and Beverley Hills Cop, made super- stars out of Tom Cruise and Eddie Mur- phy. They were nominated for 14 Academy Awards and won two. And he perfected the `high concept', the essence of a film expressed in a couple of emotive words. Alien, for instance, was Jaws in a space- ship.
High was a good description of Simpson. `Don has two speeds, full throttle and crash and burn,' one friend told the author of this book. Brought up in a quiet Alaskan household (hence dubbed the 'Eskimo' by his friend the Hollywood madame, Heidi Fleiss), he reinvented himself to take on the movie industry, boasting a badboy childhood in which he slaughtered caribou with bare hands and walked round with a Bible in one hand and his libido in the other. One minute he invented a jail sen- tence, the next a degree from UCLA whatever it took to get a job. His lack of qualifications was a qualification in itself. Old-timers like Sam Goldwyn who invent- ed Hollywood had only their idiosyncrasies to offer, yet they knew what moved men's hearts and filled cinema seats. The town has always been a triumph of ego over intellect. The author, an LA journalist, understands this, though not completely. Why was Simpson's gargantuan fault-line tolerated, he asks, when in no other indus- try would he have got away with it? He concludes that in Hollywood it wasn't even noticed.
Not quite. In Hollywood faults are actively admired. A gross Jack Nicholson, hair filthy and gut hanging out at a smart party, boasted to me, 'I can behave as badly as I like. They love it.' Simpson's bad behaviour was so excessive you fear you might catch an anti-social disease just read- ing about it. Bored with his 'boobs and Bulgari' approach to women — he bought any girl he fancied a new pair of breasts followed by a piece of jewellery — by the end he was shoving hookers' heads down toilet bowls.
Hollywood is pioneer territory. That's one reason why Simpson wore cowboy boots and played with guns and whores. He also wanted to get movies made in an era when budgets trebled and testosterone levels surged accordingly. To get his hands on mega-money he had to prove he was invincible. To achieve this he had to do more drugs, drink more, have more toys, more girls, take more risks, stay up later and still be ready for the 7 a.m. meeting. `Anything that's worth doing is worth over- doing,' was his motto. He ordered 31 Armani suits at a time and wore his jeans only once before he threw them away. He and his business partner drove matching black Ferraris and hired matching twin sec- retaries. If that's not enough he was the first producer to hire a publicist for him- self.
As the pace of life took its toll he tried to stop the clock with money. At the end he was spending £50,000 a month on prescrip- tion drugs, £10,000 on rehab clinics and remaking himself with plastic surgery and penile augmentation. He planned to star in his next movie with no clothes on.
In Hollywood nothing succeeds like excess. This book is a cautionary tale for today's graduate studio executives who will pore over its detailed film histories in a fruitless attempt to find out how to make a winning film. It can only be done by instinct. But everyone can enjoy the local gossip. Did you know Demi Moore is so greedy she is known as Gimme Moore or that the Disney studio is so unpopular to work in it is called Mauschwitz? But my favourite story is about the writer who got his own back on Simpson by grabbing his favourite laser-sighted Uzi submachine-gun in a script meeting. Simpson backed off in horror. He was seeing the thing he most feared: a screenwriter with a gun.
Its nothing unusual. A lot of newborn babies look like Winston Churchill !'
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