Part Two: Don Simpson: The Producer of Top Gun Also Ruined Hollywood

(upbeat music) - Coolzer, media. - Welcome back to Behind the Bastards. This is part two of our episodes on Don Simpson. If you were betting on Polymarket that we would not have a part two, then I guess you've just lost a bunch of money. I don't, why would you bet on that? What a stupid thing to bet on. - I bet on that we would, and boy, I'm just waiting ready to rake it all in. - It's just about a house, yeah. (laughing) - Uh, Soren, my old friend and colleague from our old website, and now current executive producer at American Dad and co-host of Quick Question with Dan and Soren, a podcast with our other friend from Cracked, Dan O'Brien. How are you doing today, buddy? - Great, yeah, feeling good. - It's been like six minutes since the last time we talked. (laughing) - Yeah, I didn't know when I had to pretend that. - Yeah, I didn't have to be like, "Oh, today's going a little better than yesterday." - Yeah, yeah. - Can you believe these fools in Congress? - My God. (laughing) - What's the opposite of progress? Congress, am I right? (laughing) - Yeah, people will never guess that we recorded this seven years ago before you went into a bunker. - Yeah, I know. - Yeah. - Oh, that's not so nice. - Oh, the dream of going into a bunker. - That does sound nice. I mean, every day, every day I have to resist the urge. Speaking of bunkers, you know, that doesn't really have much to do with Hollywood in the 1970s and '80s. - You're talking about Hollywood instead, very little. - I guess like a pile of cocaine, shaped like a bunker, maybe? (laughing) - A little e-glue. - Yeah, little e-glue. - There you go, there you go. - This is an iHeart podcast, guaranteed human. - How do you know that cloud won't become manipulative? - This is a constant worry. - And you can actually catch the model thinking, I think X is actually true, but I'm gonna tell the user why. - I'm Walter Isaacs, I'm my new podcast, The Builders. I'm going inside the minds of the people shaping our future. Listen to The Builders starting October 13th on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. - In October 2021, my brother David was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. A year later, he convinced me to make a podcast with him. This podcast. - My biggest fear is that I am afraid of being forgotten. - My brother David is the story of the last chapter of my brother's life. It's weird and messy and vulnerable, and I'm gonna share all of it with you. - Okay, so here we go. - Listen to my brother David on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. - It's all just a joke. What is the value of these women? - I'm Bridget Armstrong, back with season two of the podcast, Curse of Miss America. We're talking to participants, whistleblowers, and people who say Miss America didn't live up to their promises. - He looks and he goes, "You don't look like you suffered "in the eating disorder." - I never received scholarship. I need to pay for my student loans. - Maybe this is the meta question for the podcast. What is Miss America at this point? - Listen to The Curse of Miss America on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. - There are thousands of podcasts that can tell you how to better yourself. Get worse with Kyle Pru is not one of those podcasts. So if you're interested in getting thinner, going to therapy, starting peptide, setting boundaries, taking supplements, making your better, getting closer, then I would humbly recommend other podcasts. If you're interested in blackmail, love, bomb, and cloning yourself are getting revenge, then we've got a little something, something for a dastardly individual like you. Listen to Get Worse with Kyle Pru on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. (keyboard clicking) - So Paramount's first big hit of the blockbuster era. We ended the last episode talking about how much Jaws changed everything and how Eisner and Dillera are now like, all right, Paramount is a factory to produce potential blockbusters, right? That's their goal, right? - Well, what's a blockbuster? They must be saying. - Yeah, they haven't come up with the name yet, I'm not sure, but the concept exists. And their first big hit of this new era is going to be 1977 Saturday Night Fever. This is the movie that helped make John Travolta a star and it made more than $230 million box office off a budget of three and a half million. Can you like, it's crazy because like the only movie recently that has a similar like crazy low budget to profit ratio is fucking obsession, right? But like that used to be certainly the norm for a hit is that like you'd spend like three to seven million dollars and you'd make a couple hundred million. Like it's a great bet. - That's fascinating that when they guys got together and they said what we're going to do is turn out movies like they do television. And we're going to make something, we're just going to constantly have stuff in the works and we're going to have like this preparatory formula for what works in Hollywood. The first thing they made was this movie about disco where people are getting raped in cars and stuff like that. - They sure are, yes, Saturday Night Fever. - And they were right. - And they were damn right. That's exactly what America wanted. - That is what I wanted to say. Thank you. - There's a Godfather, and that's again, what's worth noting here is that that's about, that's a hit on par with the Godfather. In terms of like how much money it makes at half the budget, right? And obviously, you know, Saturday Night Fever is darker than you'd expect for that movie, but it's not as dark and complex as a movie like the Godfather, right? So one of the lessons studio execs you take and he's like simplify, simplify, right? Like, you don't need to go with that high literary kind of stuff in order to have a huge hit, right? Even Jaws is based off a book, less highly regarded, I think, than the Godfather was. Maybe I'm wrong about that. So from this hit, Dylan Eisner would create what they called the MDE philosophy. This was their guide for success in the motion picture industry. Films should not be over a hundred minutes because attention spans were short. Content should be light and ending should be happy. And Simpson is told like everyone else, this is the playbook, this is what we're gonna try, right? Don Simpson actually hated the script to Saturday Night Fever. He's one of the guys who fights against it at the start. - I liked Don Simpson, I think. - In more recent years, screenwriter Nick Cohn claims that Don had called his screenplay quite likely the worst draft script in movie history. Quote the Alpha and Omega of Turkey's for an idea of the kind of feedback he gets. - I love that. - That's a great line. - He does say all the right things for like a stereo, because the stereotypical producer that like we grew up with like fictionalized images of was based in large part on Don Simpson's. - Yeah. - Mistakes like this are why Dylan saw him as a good but not a great executive, right? Because he doesn't always, he's been wrong about some important stuff, right? So keep that in mind. Eisner tasks Don with overseeing the production of nine pictures that are due to come out from the late '70s to 1981. None of these are good movies. None of these nine movies are movies that Don or anyone else is excited about. - Really, you're gonna get some mums. - Okay. - You're gonna get some mums. These are not movies people remember. One of them is Richard Pryor, some kind of hero. I don't know if that's a good movie or not 'cause I like Richard Pryor and never heard of it, right? Another was I'm dancing as fast as I can. Another was Jekyll and Hyde together again. These are not blockbuster hits in waiting for the most part. (laughs) - That sounds literary. - That sounds literary, yeah. - Highbrow. - Sure, yeah. - Jekyll and Hyde, that's a book. - Did you get a divorce and then they're finally, they've reconciled their difference. - Did the book end up with a divorce? - Yeah, maybe. A must of. The one movie that is on Don Slate, that Michael Eisner is excited about and thinks will be a hit is the film White Dog. White Dog is a movie about an actress who accidentally hits with her car like a dog that she adopts, this like guard dog, only to find that he'd been trained by a racist to attack and kill black people. And so she then has to deal with it. - Like it sounds like a terrible idea for him. - Oh my God. - I was on board for so much of that. - So much better. - Yeah, so much better. - Michael Eisner's like, this is the next jaws. Literally, he's like, this is the next jaws. I think we got it, 'cause all he's seeing is there's jaws in this movie on a dog, but whatever, holy audience wants his jaws. (laughs) To his credit, Simpson is like, this is a terrible idea for him. (laughs) What are you talking about? And when it finally launched in 1982, White Dog grossed $46,000 off a $7 million budget. - Because the happy ending to that film is you have to kill as a dog. - Get the fucking dog in shot probably, right? - Yeah. - I thought you'd teach a dog that racism is wrong and I don't know how you're gonna pull that off. - No. - Like, so Don is upset by the quality of the films that Eisner has saddled him with, but the reason why Eisner wants him to make these nine movies, ASAP, is that there's a strike coming up, right? They know that there's going to be like a big strike happening, that's gonna stop production. And Eisner needs these films, so the studio can then like finish editing and put them out, right, during this dead period they're going to have while the strike is on, right? Because Simpson hated these movies, he convinced Eisner to make a deal. He'll polish these turds, but he also gets to produce a movie he believed in. And the movie that Don Simpson has picked out from like the script pile that he thinks is going to be a hit is a little film you might have heard of called an officer and a gentleman, right? That is his very correct pick for what's going to be like a big hit. So Eisner again, thanks the white dog is the next judge, so Don's got to make that happen, but time will prove Don Simpson correct. When officer came out, it earned $190 million, off a $7 million budget, so it does pretty well. It's not an easy production though. Richard Geer insists, and he's the lead actor. Richard Geer, all he'll say is that Don Simpson forced him to be a leading man. I have not heard more than Dale than that. Okay, I don't want to know what he did to Richard Geer. - He did officer a gentleman under duress. - Under duress, apparently. He may have been like a little bit joking about. He may have just been that Don really insisted he take the role or something, but like that's how it's been described. It's like he made Richard Geer do this. - Holy. - Simpson also clashed with their first casting of the leading lady, Deborah Winger, because he told her there may be somebody else for this part. I need someone fuckable. You're not fuckable enough for this part. - That's very much old. - That's that is exactly how I expect to move the producer to talk. - That's exactly what happened with Goodwill Hunting and the Matt Damon. - No, no, no, not Matt Damon. With Weinstein, Weinstein, with many drivers. She said he literally said she wasn't attractive enough to play the character and he was fucking wrong. - Hey, so you're gonna hear that more than once in this story. - Right. - Yeah, we're, so yeah, this is very, it's gross, but it's very normal for the time and the industry, right? For example, during the making of the film Flash Dance, Michael Eisner had to choose between Demi Moore, Jennifer Beals, or Leslie Wing, to play the leading lady. He ultimately gathered a bunch of like, he gets a bunch of like crew employees together, like the blue collar guys in the set, and he shows them the screen tests of the actresses and he asks which of these girls do you most want to fuck? That's Michael Eisner and they pick Beals. - Yeah, and then he went on to do Disney. - And then he went on to run Disney. He was my dad's boss. So Don had, by this time, developed a habit of taking large amounts of cocaine and then writing down notes and little notebooks. He has dozens, like a whole bookshelf of these notebooks of his film ideas and all these like turn into the movies that we grew up watching in the 80s. Like a lot of these ideas do make it to the screen. During production of Officer in a Gentlemen, he took cocaine and sent notes to the director every single night. The film in script expanded consequently, but his ideas were apparently mostly pretty good 'cause again, the movie winds up being pretty good. It does well. He's just annoying the director 'cause he's like, I just woke up and Don Simpson sent me a bunch of notes stained with like white powder about like what he wants us to shoot today. - His business is way easier to poison people with anthrax back in the way it would've been, man. One anthrax guy could've wiped out Hollywood in a night. Don's biggest miss on an Officer in a Gentlemen was predicting that the songs, they commissioned a song for the movie, right? An original song to be in the movie and that song is love lift us up where we belong. Don is like, it's a dud. It'll never be a hit. And he only agrees to keep it in the movie after he, because like the director is like, no, I think this will work. And he bets the director $100 that no one will like the song. It becomes a number one hit and spends 15 weeks in the top 40. Simpson did pay up, but he argued as he's giving the director $100, he's like, it's a rotten fucking song. It should never have been a hit. - I mean, I'm sympathetic to that. I'm sympathetic to that. - It's not a good song. - I'm like, this is shit. To pulling something out of culture and being like, this is dog shit and I'm so clearly dog shit. And then everyone is still like, no, we love it. We love it. And then you're like, well then I don't know what humanity is. - I don't know what we should belong to. - We should belong to this culture. - That's how I felt after watching Jurassic World and seeing it makes so much money. It's like, well, okay, I'm clearly dropping out of society now. In 1977, Don was promoted to VP of Creative Affairs. In 1978, Don was featured in an article by Marine North of New West magazine as one of four baby moguls who Earth described as Hollywood's new power elite. Her article was partly correct. She identifies it up there. - He's like, he's like, in his 30s? - 30s, he's a baby mogul. - Yeah, baby mogul. 30s pretty young for studio executives in this period of time, I guess. - Yeah, I guess so. - And her, the thrust of her article is that there's this group of like 60s kids with a lot of whom had former radical backgrounds and like radical politics who were now entering the film industry and were going to change things. And that is like, broadly true. That is a lot of what happens in the film industry in this period of time. But she's also number one, the people she picked, she's not entirely, Don's gonna be a big deal but everyone else kind of isn't. And she also, she described, I think because she interviews these baby moguls about like their substance use and they lie, she describes him as being like a new, more disciplined and sober era for Hollywood producers than she writes, they drink periae and do some cocaine on social occasions, but mostly they do business. That is not accurate. - No, that is not, these people are doing every drug that is a nailed down. - If you worked at periae then, you must've been so excited to get named in the same sentence as Coke. - Where you're like, oh, there we go. - Yeah. - That's great for us. - Periae, the drink that goes well with cocaine. Her article quoted Don claiming, from Monday through Friday, no alcohol touches these lips. Then one night a week, I give myself a good time. I go out to dinner with somebody I do business with. That's not accurate at all. Orth repeated a bunch of Don's myths about himself for the first time. She's talking about his hard scrabble background in Alaska, all the little league crimes. It's worth noting of the group of four baby moguls that she picked. Simpson is the only one who goes on to massive success. All four light about their drug use. Two of the four would be dead before age 50 and as a spoiler, Don dies at 52. - So healthy, a new era for Hollywood. - Health nets are running the shop. - By the early 1980s, Don had been promoted to vice president of production for Paramount. As such, he felt it was his duty to take some of what Dylan Reisner had been saying about this new philosophy on filmmaking, how we turn it into an assembly line to make blockbusters and try to make a cohesive playbook for movie production. So this is what he's gonna put together at the start of the late 70s, start of the 80s. I'm gonna quote now from a 1999 Guardian article. According to producer Linda Obst, Simpson and screenwriter Paul Schrader, both admitted Coke freaks, sat up high all through the nights of 1979 talking and Simpson then tape recorded Koki Mimos, which laid out the kind of films he wanted to see and invest in. Obst said, Don created the three acts structure that we all use. Don made up this logo rhythm. There's the hot first act with an exciting incident and the second act with the crisis and the dark bad moments in which our hero is challenged and the third act with the triumphant moment in redemption and the freeze frame ending. And obviously, again, this is why I told you to keep Campbell's here with a thousand faces in mind. Don is cribbing from a lot of the set. When he's, this is what the story is. He's not the only guy thinking of this. One of the things he brings that is unique is the freeze frame ending. Don Simpson is credited for like, he's why that became a huge thing in like 80s movies. Like that's his big deal. But what he's doing is like what a number of other thinkers in Hollywood are doing is he's taking some of the stuff of the hero's journey and he's turning it into a really simplified package, right? And he's modernizing some of this stuff to create a replicable pattern for storytelling. Other people are gonna do similar things later. Don is really ahead of the curb. In the 1980s, a few years after Simpson writes out his blueprint for Paramount, a Disney executive named Christopher Vogler writes the infamous Vogler memo, which he built as a practical guide to the hero with a thousand faces. Vogler's memo was a more detailed summary of Campbell's ideas about the hero's journey where Simpson's blueprint is way less complex and clearly geared towards telling less complicated stories. And I want you to think back to the action movies of the 80s and early 90s. There aren't a lot of like, complicated moral quandaries and top gun, right? He's more like just becoming the top gun. - There's no enemy in top gun. There's a, the enemy is just some other mix that show up at the very end. - We don't even know who they are really at all. - So some journalists I've read suggest Simpson crafted his own life story to fit within this formula, allowing him to create a more satisfying Hollywood-friendly version of his own life. In 1980, he's sent a corporate memo outlining this new philosophy in detail and summarizing his filmmaking ideology. And this is how Dawn summarizes the ideology he has behind like, this is why we make movies. The pursuit of making money is the only reason to make movies. We have no obligation to make history. We have no obligation to make art. Our obligation is to make money and to make money, it may be necessary to make history art or some significant statement. - That's a, Jordan Belford motherfucker. - Oh my God. - Jordan Belford in Hollywood. (laughing) - I'm gonna say later, it'll become clear. Dawn doesn't fully believe this himself, right? 'Cause there's a part of Dawn that wants to be an artist, right? - Badly, like that he was like, he's a situation where like he could, he failed at it and was like, I got as close as he could to it. - Yeah. - With another career path. And he's really good at this, obviously. He's really a structure. But then he understood the three structures in such a way that was like, here's how audiences want to ingest it. Like that's all really smart. Also, he likes movies. He likes movies. (laughing) I think it's someone like David Zazelov today who, I'm not sure he's ever enjoyed a single piece of television or movie, ever in his entire life. That is somebody who genuinely lives by the ethos of, it's just we're just making money here. But you can also see how Dawn, even though he doesn't believe it, saying that and making it policy at Paramount in a lot of ways helps, like that does help to lay the ground for David Zazelov, right? - Yeah, for these MBAs to start taking over instead, yeah. - Yeah, these guy, and one thing we have learned in the last few years is that an MBA is way more harmful for the world than a pile of cocaine. - Oh man, yeah, absolutely. - Give us, it coaked out English grads, right? and next studios again. (laughing) So Don was as good as his word here, though. And it is worth what I tried to point this out to. A lot of quotes will say Don invented the three extractions. That's definitely not true, right? Aristotle. (laughing) He is the guy who like lays out, this is how we're gonna do this in terms of like making the blockbuster movies of the '80s, right? That's what he does come up with, you know? He's right, yeah. Yeah, Don, you know, in the first years of the 1980s, Don Simpson produces a massive hit for Paramount Officer and a gentleman. And he's does his job. He did his job. He's shepherded all those less impressive films through to production as Michael Eisner wanted. So by the start of the '80s, he is a known quantity in Hollywood. And it's kind of a big deal. He's respected as a smart and savvy producer. He attends regular parties where he smokes weed and snorts cocaine. One of his, like there's this house like salon that's run by another producer that he hangs out in. Or like Martin Scorsese will show up too. And like one of the stories about them is that the people who own the house one year have two pounds of cocaine, or two kilograms of cocaine imported by boat to the LA, right? Like these are the kinds of parties he's doing. Jesus Christ. If you're getting coaked out with Scorsese in the '80s, like shit, '70s and '80s, but back at Paramount, Don's bosses are growing sick of him. It wasn't that success had revealed. He had a horrific temper, which it had, because he's super abusive to secretaries and below the line workers and screenwriters who do everyone says this. And that's not an issue. They can deal with that, right? Diller and Eisner are used to that sort of thing. And it wasn't that he used illegal drugs. Everyone does. It was that his drug use was completely out of control. Producer Julia Phillips, his friend at the time, names him in her autobiography as Don Simpson, parentheses, I've got some good blow for you upstairs. - That's pretty loaded, too. - Yeah, that's close. - Pretty loaded. - Julia herself was pretty loaded in this period, also. (laughing) - I'd love to take you to a second location where I have really great drugs. - Where I have a ton of great drugs, yeah. - Yeah. - Look, I would have said yes to Don Simpson. - Man, don't say that. - He also pissed off a bunch of colleagues with his constant lying, even though it was not uncommon for guys at his level to lie, right? Actor Frank Pesky reported, recalled seeing a bunch of expensive golf clubs. The first time he visited Simpson's home and he asked, "Don, do you play?" And Simpson said, "Hell yeah, I shoot in the 70s." And Pesky's like a, he's like a skilled golfer. And he's like, "I know this is a, I've never seen or heard of you playing golf. You would have to be playing every day to be that." You're clearly like, you're just, (laughing) quote, he had to have the most expensive golf clubs in the world and he had to tell you he shot in the 70s. What a fucking liar. - That's his student. (laughing) - This is his friend. (laughing) - Fleming Don's Biographer traces some of this insecurity to his brother Larry. His younger brother is way more handsome and better with women than Don is. And despite Don's success, and the fact that he's usually described as like a decent looking guy. He was a lot of female friends. Don is terrible at actually flirting with women. Especially, I should say, Don is terrible at flirting with women who can say no. And so, as a rich Hollywood producer, he started frequenting brothels in hiring prostitutes. Again, at the start at least, this is at least better than like, you know, some of the other stories we get 'cause at least he's paying, it's not gonna stay good, guys. I'm gonna tell you that right now. One of his former friends later claimed, Simpson told me he hung out with hookers because he couldn't bear to risk rejection. Yeah, and these are his friends saying this stuff about him, which is very sad. - Just so sad. - That's really sad. Alastro Don, he was about to experience rejection in a big way. By 1982, his drug problem had become a work problem. And less than a year, he crashed three cars each while more intoxicated than the last time, right? Paramount sent him to rehab twice. And Eisner and Diller had decreed that if he fell off the wagon a third time, he was done. So, you can't say Paramount didn't try. - They really gave him a lot of opportunities. - Two times they sent him to rehab. - Don Simpson is familiar with the three strike system. - Yes, he is. - Yeah, from his little league days. Don, as far as I can tell, I don't know if he ever got back on the wagon after either of these rehab trips, it does not seem like it. So, in 1982, Paramount held a corporate retreat in Palm Springs. Now, the event started with Don and his assistant, Jeffrey Katzenberg decided to race their identical black porches to the event. Don has a history again, he's very competitive where cars are concerned. So, he pulls right ahead of Katzenberg, and he drives way too fast, and he gets pulled over. And then so, he's late to the meeting. So, he winds up getting high and delaying things further by getting a burger, even though he's late, he shows up high as shit, wearing a t-shirt with a weed reference on it, and carrying a bag of like fast food. And all his bosses are like, "What the fuck, man? "You're supposed to be here hours ago." Then later that weekend, he pulls his girlfriend's bathing suit down during a group lunch at a swimming pool, which infuriates Diller. - Well, that's, he's not, he's girlfriend. - And he's bad with ladies? There's no way. - Yeah. - No way he's bad with ladies. Diller's hope was that losing his job would be a wake-up call. Again, they're being so nice to Don. They're like, "Look, we're gonna fire him, "but we'll make him a producer "and we'll give him an office on site." So that he's like, he's not like an employee, but he's still like, on contract with us, and he can still make movies for us, right? So this is like the kindest you could let someone off in this situation. - Yeah, right. - What we're gonna do for him is still give a job, but we'll just give him way less structure. - And maybe that will fix his situation. - Yeah, that will fix his situation. - Yeah, that'll help his drug problem. In early 1983, Don is asked to resign. And as a balm, he's given a screenplay for a new movie, along with his new producer deal, that movie was Flash Dance. This film will go on to be one of Don's biggest hits, but he doesn't know that at the time and losing his job again, sends him into a depressed tailspin. His friends have trouble getting him to leave his house for days at a time, but after some period of time, his eyes turn to work again. And he has the idea to reach out to his friend and former roommate, Jerry Brockheimer. The two team up for the movie Flash Dance, and they make a great film, or at least a successful film. I don't know Flash Dance very well, but it does really well, right? - Classic. - People seem to have liked-- - Yeah, it's a classic. - Yeah, it's a classic. One reason why Simpson and Brockheimer work so well together is that both men have complimentary strengths and weaknesses that are mostly covered by the other man's strengths. Simpson hated most screenwriters from what I can tell, but he is a creative and he can talk to and brainstorm with screenwriters as well as come up with original ideas that tend to work. He's actually a good idea guy. Brockheimer, on the other hand, is really good at making-- he's very good at like getting line producers to work with him and getting the big studio producers in line and keeping things running mechanically. Brockheimer does the actual work on the ground, and Simpson is really good at bringing in the high concepts, right? And he's also a pretty good height man, you know? So Brockheimer makes sure they have money and support and make sure things are working, and Simpson has the big ideas. High concept, the biography, includes a paragraph that I think doesn't even better job of contextualizing the relationship between these two titans of the film industry. Simpson and his partner, Brockheimer, were once asked to describe their personal and professional differences. Brockheimer said their differences were most evident in the way we handle situations. If there's a huge blow up, I'll be sent in to tame the lion, whereas Don will come out and shoot him. Although he decided beforehand that the lion should be left alive, Don comes in and there's blood all over the wall. Simpson immediately countered with the typical Simpson provato that was sensitive only to perfecting the pose and sound bite. The lion shouldn't have fucked with us. Oh my God. So that's how these guys get a lot. Yeah, good cup back up. Yeah, you know who else likes to shoot lions? Probably some of the executives that own the companies that advertise on this podcast, statistically, right? I bet they love it. I bet they love it. Some of them. If there's a million times more digital intelligence than there is biological intelligence, it's hard to imagine humans being in control in that scenario. I'm Walter Isaacson, host of the new podcast, The Builders. Right now, we're living through an AI arms race. So I went directly to the people shaping that future. Elon Musk, Derio Aminay, Alex Carth, Fei-Fei Lee, Palmer Lucky, because I wanted to understand what the most consequential builders believe, what they fear, and where they think this is all headed. Silicon Valley is always saying the cliché thing about the way to predict the future is to create it. Well, yeah, it's up to us. But when you say us, who's us? Is it 400 people that you know in Silicon Valley? Is it me down here in New Orleans? They're brilliant, controversial, and they're already shaping the future. The question is, who's imagination do we want to live in? This is going to determine the fate of nations and economies and the future of humanity. Listen to The Builders, on the IHOT Radio app, Apple Podcast, or ever get your podcasts. First thing I hate about Ulysses is they never actually tell turks. I'm Dave, and I've been-- for my life. In October 2021, my brother, David, was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. This podcast. OK, so here we go. We didn't know what we were doing, so we just started recording. We discussed cancer since the radiation had lost about 10 more pounds. We fought. Yeah, pisses me off. And we talked openly about the fact that David was going to die. I am afraid of being forgotten. My brother, Dave. David is the story of the last chapter of my brother's life. - The constant back and forth battle about how do I, how do I not just be alive, but I should live. - Listen to my brother, David, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. - For more than a century, Miss America sold the country of fantasy. - Well, are you ready, ladies? Okay, here we go. - But over the past decade, the crown's been slipping. - They said, "Goodbye to swimsuits." Now, hello to lawsuits. - I'm Bridget Armstrong. Last season, we took you inside the world of America's next top model. Now I'm back with season two of this podcast, Curse of Miss America, investigating the rise, fall, and uncertain future of one of America's most iconic institutions. - The Miss America Patent. - I never received scholarship. - He looks and he goes, "You don't look like you suffered in the eating disorder." - It's great, but looks too ethnic. - It's a story the Miss America organization really doesn't want us to tell. - An exploitation of our Miss America's is treated by the Miss America organization as an attack on Miss America itself. (dramatic music) - Listen to the Curse of Miss America on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. But if you're interested in blackmail, love bombing, cloning yourself, or getting revenge, then we've got a little something, something for a dastardly individual like you. Take a listen to some of the incredible advice we've given so far. Fake a back injury, get the spray tan, up your alcohol consumption. Only women should be allowed to have guns. - Kill 'em. - Kill 'em. - Kill 'em with a gun. - Listen, it's already over. I'm all about lying if it's something that really happened. The next time a bear is running at you, you just calmly stop what you're doing. You look the bear in the eye, and you say this isn't you. - Do not preserve relationships. You don't need them. You only need one thing, and that's the GetWorse podcast. - Listen to GetWorse with Kyle Pru on the IHR Radio app Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. (keyboard clicking) - And we're back. - Sorry, would you ever shoot a lion? - Yeah, I mean, if it was attacking my children or me or I was on safari and I was bored. - Yeah, what if it was like racist? Like, what if the lion said some shit? And he just couldn't let it pass? - Well, it depends on if I'm just out in the Savannah and it's saying it to nobody in particular, then I'm like, this is harmless. - This lion's got a problem, yeah. - If that lion's on gut felt or something like that, then I'm gonna have to kill it. - You're gonna have to take a shot. - It's good to know your lion's on this sort of thing, yeah. - A lion. Simpson described himself as the verbal and Jerry as the look of their relationship, right? And again, like, he Simpson puts together the words and Jerry is a respectable face that people wanna do business with. Don came up with the big ideas, which several Hollywood press guys and now me will note, is the dream job for a cocaine, right? Like if you're someone who just does way too much cocaine and all you have to do is have ideas and Jerry Bruckheimer makes them into movies, you have landed in Clover, man. - That's crazy. - The luckiest man to ever live in some ways. - Okay, so I'm a little bit sympathetic toward Don Simpson here and that no matter where he goes, people are enabling him. - Yeah, he really are, every step of the way. - He is, and like, what a tough, you're never gonna get off drugs that way. - No, never turned. - There's a pile of cocaine just like falling in an avalanche over time. - God is responsible for your addiction at this point. - You really should have stopped him earlier on. 1983's Flash Dance made more than $200 million and again, a $7 million budget. That meant Don had shepherded two big hits in a row and he and Jerry had opened their partnership with again at like a huge success. And the hits keep coming after Flash Dance. I'm gonna quote now from a 1996 article in the Wall Street Journal by Thomas Young and John Lippman. That was followed in 1984 by their biggest hit, the Eddie Murphy Blockbuster Beverly Hills Cop, and then in 1986 by Top Gun, starring Tom Cruise as an F14 Navy pilot. Mr. Simpson himself came up with the idea for Top Gun after reading a magazine article about California's Naval Fighter weapon school while sitting in a dentist's waiting room. I got a call from Don Simpson, who was still at the dentist's office, recalls the California magazine article's author, A Hood Yone. Mr. Simpson didn't waste time. I'm reading your story, he told Mr. Yone, these guys are rockin' rollers and jets. I wanna do this movie. - I fucking was just, so soon as we started talking about Don Simpson, I was like, I know that there's a story about him with Top Gun, where he says, like, I wanna make rockin' roll in the air. And it's like, I'm just looking for that. And I'm like, I was really doing this. I'm like, searching for that quote, 'cause it's so funny. - The dentist's office. (laughing) Dentist's office. - You know he was still high on fuckin' nozzles or somethin' before he came out there. - Mr. Yone. - These guys are fuckin' rockin' rollers and jets. I wanna make this movie. - I wanna make this movie. Beverly Hills Cop made over $300 million. And again, remember, the last hits we've been talking about are all $79 million budgets, right? So I want you to listen to what's happening as I go through these numbers. Beverly Hills Cop makes over $300 million on a $13 million budget. It also makes Eddie Murphy a star. Top Gun makes $360 million on a budget of like 14 million or 15 million. Simpson and Brockheimer. And so first off, what you've seen, these movies are crazy profitable. The budgets have doubled. - Yeah. - That's not a lot by our modern terms, a $13 million movie. - $13 million. - Right, you know that there's a better chance you're gonna get your investment. - But what you are seeing is the start of, well, these movies are making more money and they used to make more money on the same budgets as the old movies we were making. Now we're doubling the budget, right? - Yeah. - And it only takes a few more times before you get to where we are where it's like, well, if you wanna make a big movie, you're spending $300 million, right? You know, like that is where this process starts, though. It starts with Simpson and Brockheimer. And it starts in the 1980s. During these years, Simpson and Brockheimer are the most profitable and highly lauded producers in Hollywood, certainly by the end of 1986. People start calling them Don and Jerry and the trade papers and the two were regularly interviewed about their filmmaking philosophy, which Don really pushed that what he was doing now is the exact opposite of the Auteur era. Quote, we're not only hands on, but feet on. We don't take a passive role in any shape or form. Some directors who shall remain nameless, do regard movies as an extension of their internal emotional landscape. But Jerry and I decide on the movie we wanna make. We then hire an all-star team who can implement the vision. I don't believe in Auteur theory. The movie is the Auteur. It tells us what it needs to be. We're here to serve the movie as a mistress. No one person, director or writer, is above the final result. And the final result is profit, yeah. - All right, you're right. They had the final result is profit. But it's also like that he's got so precious about the film, that the film's its own entity. Like he doesn't believe these things at all, no. - Yeah, he wants that, he's like, no, we all serve, we're all slave to this thing that Liz is like, we're all making this animal together. And you get the best people to make it. And he's right, yeah. And no one would say that if they were also somebody who was like, I'm just, we're gonna make acne for a loss. And then we're gonna shell it. Like it's not, he's not that kind of person. But you see how we get there, right? One of the interesting things is, Don is saying a lot of the same stuff. Those later guys will say, but you can also tell at his heart, as bad a person as he is, Don's also still a big kid inside. The movies he picks shows that, right? - Absolutely, 100%. Like he's inner 13 year old, never gets suppressed, right? That's why he makes bad boys in doubt gun. - It does feel like he's a character. He's like, he's from big. He's talking some big, we're like, yeah. - He's just a kid. All his ideas, all his impulse, poor impulse control, everything, all his stories about his own childhood. - Yeah. He's just a real-- - He's just a child hell, trapped in an adult body. - Yes, someone should check if there was like a circus in Spinar and Alaska that had an abortion telling robot around somewhere around the 50s. Did he get sit forward and die and turn into a 30 year old man? - So, films, and one of the other things people say during this period that Don helps to invent, and it's like the three doesn't invent it. Like he didn't invent the three-act structure, but he popularizes in a lot of ways, our modern concept of studio notes, right? That like someone making a movie will get notes from a producer, right? That pieces of that had happened before, but Don is, again, that's the whole way Don Simpson works, right? And it massively changes the way the industry works, you know? Again, Eisner and Diller are also a part of that change, but Don is the guy who gets a lot of credit. I think just because of a prominent he is. - That's fascinating. I didn't know any of that. I didn't know that that's where that really started. It was that producers really wanted to dance in the pie. Yeah, but I mean, they wanted like, they want their fingerprints on it in the end, to the point where, which is the, in the industry, that's the trouble you run into every single time is that a studio, every single person at the studio who happens to touch your projects wants to leave their mark on it. So if they don't see anything where they can, they're like, Well, let's chip away until we do it. Like let's find a little section where we can notch our own name. Yeah, and it's, again, Don was actually pretty good at that. I mean, there's people who like had issues with it. Not all of his notes are accepted. I mean, definitely he gets, people will argue and fight with them on stuff. But like, he was objectively like successful at a lot of what he did, right? I think he did have an actual creative mind. But what he helps to start certainly leads to too many cooks in the kitchen syndrome, which is another problem in Trump's Hollywood. Um, so film scholars will sometimes note that there was another crucial aspect of Don and Jerry's movies during this period of time that was absolutely critical to their success, but never stated outright. And this critical fact is that their movies were incredibly gay, right? Just super, super homoerotic. That Guardian article brought up the top gun, like there are people joke about like how kind of homoerotic top gun is, right? Of course. Yeah, there, like this is something that film scholars will talk about. That Guardian article I quote from earlier brought up the book Easy Writers Raging Bulls by Peter Biscond. And the authors of that article note that Biscond had argued in the, that Paramount in the 80s was quote, the gayest studio and that Simpson, the viciously hetero quote, took gay culture with its conflation of fashion movies, disco and advertising and used it as a bridge between the naive high concept pictures of Spielberg in the 1970s and highly designed, highly self-conscious pictures like flash dance, Beverly Hills Cop, Top Gun, The Rock, Crimson Tide and Conair, Brookheimer's solo run along Simpson's flight path. Biscond thinks Simpson was to gay culture, what Elvis was to black music, ripping it off and repackaging it for a straight audience. Brookheimer, looking at teens sunbathing near the set for top gun, was asked if he was trying to get into their heads and figure out what they wanted. No said Brookheimer, you've got it backwards. Don and I dictate what they want to see. And that's fascinating. Jesus Christ. That's fucking arrogant. Yeah. I was just, sorry, I'm just thinking that, yeah, Top Gun does seem to, as much as it's a, it's fantasy for young boys to be in the gun, be a maverick and to fly these, these planes. All the scenes were their topless and stuff. It's all like from the female gaze, it seems like it's a lot of those. And what that, what, what, what Biscond's are because it's not from the female gaze, it's kind of more from the gay male gaze as interpreted by a heterosexual man trying to sell that to straight audiences. I guess you're right. Yeah. You're right. That's more accurate. And it's, it's not from the female gaze. It's from the gaze. Yeah. Exactly. And it's, I was, again, I just rewatched Bloodsport and which is made in 88 and definitely influenced by the big hits that Simpson and Brookheimer are having. And also a lot of, a lot of like big muscular men, high-fiving and talking about how much they love each other. Right? Like the love interest is kind of like a side story. Very ancillary. Yeah. Yeah. It is interesting, right? And Don, I don't imagine Don was not consciously doing that. I love the description of him as like the, like Elvis was to black culture and music. Like Don Simpson was to gay culture in the movies. Like that's kind of a really interesting way to put it. But yeah, watch some of those old hits and think about who's, who's supposed to be impressed in each scene. That entire scene where you're like, what are we doing here? Why are they all taught was playing that ball for a long time. They don't. They are. Yeah. There's a lot of Will Smith borderline naked and bad boys. I do wonder how much you can connect this to the modern trend of like, well, everybody who's going to be like having a shirt off has to be on like these incredible programs of like peptides and performance enhancers and like like because they all have to look, be able to do a topless volleyball scene, right? Whereas you look to like a leading man in the 60s and set. It was like a big deal. If you watch the second Indiana Jones movie and listen to like the cut, like Harrison Ford talked about on like the commentary, how hard it was for him to get in that shape and how like it was like kind of an unperturbed, to have like a leading man look like that was really rare that you would have a guy that cut with his shirt off in a movie. Because like, fucking Jimmy Stewart didn't look that way as a leading man, right? You know? Yeah. There's a lot of old movies from the 70s where you're like, Jesus, this was, this was the guy that was a muscle man. Yeah. Yeah. Or you look at like Charles Bronson. Is it? Charles Bronson's great. Yeah. Like you could eat run 40 feet. Yeah. I'm not, not as an insult. But you clearly eat cigarettes. Yeah. You can nothing else. Um, by the mid 1980s, Don Simpson was impossibly rich. One perhaps apocryphal, but semi believable tale is that he kept an uncashed $2 million check from flash dance, which he would take out to people when they're like doing coke at parties and be like, I have so much money, I don't even need to cash this. I just keep an uncashed $2 million around her. It might be of how rich I am. I don't know if this is true, but it's a story people tell about doing drugs with Don Simpson. It's probably true. But despite his outward confidence, Don remained unable to maintain any kind of real romantic relationship, even as his partner, Jerry, became happily married once again. I don't know if Jerry's still in that relationship. I don't know much about Jerry Brachimer, but that's one of the differences between them is that Jerry's clearly happy being in like long term relationships with people. And Don just cannot do that. Don is pulling the swimsuit off of his every single girlfriend he's got. Yeah. Exactly. Why don't you love me? Yeah. Don said of he and Jerry's relationship. Jerry will ask nine women to sleep with him and nine will turn him down in a row. The 10th woman says yes, and he goes home with her. Me, I asked one girl to go out with me and she says no, and I want to put my head in the oven. Right. So he's pretty open about the fact that like he just cannot take rejection. What a label. Yes. As a result. That's pathetic. Third. That's so sad. That Brachimer shit. Strong man. Like he doesn't. Yeah. Strong man. I don't think Jerry did that. I think Jerry was just open to being vulnerable with someone. I think Simpson could not. I think he's just, he has this idea in his head of like, oh, he's a lethario. This is probably what's going on with him. He's have great sex because he just, he'll still, he will, he could take rejection until he gets it. He probably is able to have a conversation with a woman. Are we? So we're in the early 90s now. Is that where we're at? No, we're still in the 80s, we're still in the mid 80s. So this is because Brachimer's first wife was from says from 69 to 74, and then he met the second wife and he married her in 93 and they've been married ever since. Yeah. They get married. But they're, I think they have a long long. Yeah. I don't know how long they're relationship. Like he has long term. Even if he doesn't marry them. Brachimer has relationships. He's still married to that. He's still married to that lady. Oh, there you go. The difference is like Jerry, Jerry is able to like clearly have relationships with women and Don is not, right? Like that's kind of the key difference between them. But he is able to have relationships with Los Angeles County's sex workers. And in fact, he becomes a major employer of prostitutes in the LA area in the 1990s. He's a job creator. He's a job creator. He is a job creator. He is a job creator. He's a job creator. All these movies that he's pumping out, he's making a lot of jobs, creating a lot of, getting drug dealers take, love to write. He loves to write. He loves to write. He loves to write. He loves to write. The work that he did for the sex workers of the LA area. He loves to write. He loves to write. Because of this man in 1985, Don Simpson met Madam X, real name Elizabeth Adams, a top-level Madam to the stars. She sent him three to five girls every week for years. Don himself was quite clear about what he was doing with these women, telling an interviewer, when you meet a lady and she says, "Would you like to make love?" Well, the first thing I like to do is fuck. Not make love. Okay. I might have some issues with your bedside man. This might be part of why you can't have relationships, Don. That's a weird thing to say to someone who wants to sleep with you. Don. Don. Some notes, buddy. Multiple Simpson, Brookheimer employees talk to the press about Don's habit of hiring prostitutes at work, at the office at Paramount where he worked. Quote, "Don was Caligula," an assistant told Fleming, "Everyone knew he used hookers. He had a whole section of his roletex marked girls. They'd come to the office the next day. Monica Harmon, his assistant, would have to pay them. This was common knowledge. His tastes were very special and he was into SNM." We should probably talk about what kind of SNM Don Simpson was into because it is relevant to the story, unfortunately. And we know. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Some of the women who were prostitutes in Hollywood in this era wrote an entire book with a whole chapter on just Don Simpson. So we'll be talking about that. Great. But first, some ads and folks, if we go into ads, let me remind you, leave your life in such a way that a team of prostitutes don't have to include an entire chapter in their book about you and your fucked-up shit. Try to avoid that, maybe. Elon Musk, Derio Amadei, Alex Carp, Thaifei Leap, Omar Lucky, because I wanted to understand what the most consequential builders believe, what they fear, and where they think this is all headed. But when you say us, who's us, is it 400 people that you know in Silicon Valley? The question is, whose imagination do we have? one will live it. Listen to the builders on the IHOT radio app Apple Podcast or ever get your podcasts. First thing I hate about Ulysses is they never actually tell the Turks. I'm Dave and I've been at it for my lunch. In October 2021, my brother David was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. This podcast. Okay, so here we go. We discussed cancer since the radiation I lost about 10 more pounds. We fought. Yeah, pisses me off. My brother David is the story of the last chapter of my brother's life. It's weird and messy and vulnerable and I'm gonna share all of it with you. The constant back and forth battle about how do I, how do I not just be alive, but actually live. Listen to my brother David on the IHOT radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. But more than a century, Miss America sold the country of fantasy. Well, are you ready, ladies? Okay, here we go. But over the past decade, the crown's been slipping. They said, goodbye to swimsuits. Now, hello to lawsuits. I'm Bridget Armstrong. The Miss America Patent. I never received scholarship. He looks at me and goes, you don't look like you suffered an eating disorder. It's great, but looks too ethnic. It's a story the Miss America organization really doesn't want us to tell. An exploitation of our Miss America's is treated by the Miss America organization as an attack on Miss America itself. Listen to the Curse of Miss America on the IHOT radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast. There are thousands of podcasts that can tell you how to better yourself. Get worse with Kyle Prue is not one of those podcasts. So if you're interested in getting thinner, going to therapy, starting peptide, setting boundaries, taking supplements, making your better getting closer, then I would humbly recommend other podcasts. Fake a back injury. Get the spray tan, up your alcohol consumption. Kill 'em. Kill 'em with a gun. Listen, it's already over. The next time a bear is running at you, you just calmly stop what you're doing, you look the bear in the eye, and you say this isn't you. Do not preserve relationships. You don't need them. You only need one thing, and that's the Get Worse podcast. Listen to Get Worse with Kyle Pru on the iHarm Radio app Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. So let's talk about SNM. Obviously there's nothing wrong with consensual SNM, with consensual weird kinky sex of any kind, right? Very pro that. What Don does is pushing boundaries, shall we say, and he is crossing lines within the world of high-priced Hollywood call girls, right? Who I have to assume, and I mean no disrespect here, have seen some shit by the time they meet Don, right? Yeah, those lines in the sand are pretty far out. Like the tides all the way out where those lines are drawn in the sand. To upset these people is not the easiest thing in the world. In 1995, a group of Hollywood sex workers, I guess former Hollywood sex workers published the book, you'll never make love in this town again. It features stories of celebrity sex worker encounters. John Ritter's in there at one point. I don't think in a negative way. And so do a bunch of other famous people, right? Most of these are not like they did a horrible thing. It's like this fun quirky thing that happened, right? Don Simpson gets an entire chapter, and it's not positive. This is written by a woman who was sent to his Bel Air mansion one night, sometime in like the late 1980s. It might have been the start of the 90s. She described Don as handsome and fit, which is why I think it was in the 80s is like he was not so much by the time we get into the 90s. Yeah. Instead, she said that he started the night by talking to her and saying he wanted to get into my brain. She expressed being taken by him. She's like, she finds him initially attractive and interesting. Even though she was aware, quote, there seemed to be a lot of psychological manipulation from Don. After a few hours of conversation, he took her down to his viewing room to see his home movies. No. I'm going to quote from that book. The first tape showed Don interviewing one beautiful actress after another after another with each young actress. He had the same story that he was interviewing them for a part in a movie he was making by the end of each interview. Each actress ended up having sex with him. I'm sure none of the women knew they were being videotaped. It was obvious that these girls were hoping to get a part in his movie. They were in the home of one of the most famous producers of our time and every single one of them thought that she had a chance for her big break. So off came the clothes and each big break was actually Don's. That's, I mean, that's Epstein level shit, right? That's like that's that is what the we think of as the producer like those all right in the archetype. Some Weinstein bullshit. The idea of a casting couch with a producer. Yeah. He's not the only one. He is not the only one. Yeah. He is part of why that's a stereotype, but he's certainly not the only one, right? No, is he the first? I can't imagine. He's the first that would be impossible. Next he shows this woman a tape that he'd made of two sex workers, one of whom was a dominatrix. The woman he'd hired who wrote that chapter describes this video as quote, stuff that should have gotten both of them thrown in prison. This is an illegal sex worker saying they should have gone to prison for the shit I saw in it. Like that's how snuff film. Almost. Yeah. So these are both women who are like professionals, right? But one of them is a dominatrix. And the other woman who's not a dominatrix is tied up and tortured until the dominatrix forces her to stick her head in a toilet and drink while Don Simpson pisses into the toilet. Oh my god. Yeah. It's really bad stuff. Don explained to her that these fantasies were what he called his sexual healing, right? That's the way he's framing it. Is that like I need to this is what I need to do to heal myself. And for a time, this worker says that she fell under his spell. He had me thoroughly convinced that I was participating in his sexual healing by introducing him to girls and participating in the SNM sessions. But Don's behavior soon went well beyond what she could countenance. One night Don hired a new girl and took her upstairs while the author of this chapter and another call girl waited after an hour the new girl ran downstairs in tears. Don paid her a thousand dollars and ordered her out. She left weeping and shaking from the book. After she left, Don had an evil smile on his face. He told us that he had turned her out, beaten her, screwed her and introduced her to acid him for the first time. It gave Don a good deal of pleasure to take a naive young girl and do this to her. So these are not like really consensual in a way that I think matters. Even though these these women are getting paid. Yeah. He wanted to ruin somebody. He wanted to really fuck somebody up. Yeah. That that was his expressed just like goal, right? Yeah. It's it's bad. I mean, I guess it's not maybe not even worth wondering why like you think about the histories of these people where they come from. They came from religion and everything and then you have somebody who ends up like this. Was it a product? Was he always like this? Was it a product of like getting his way so often and then like having so much sex that he's just like I'm bored with this. What what else is there to do? Because he can't have a relationship. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting. Yeah. I wonder how much of this is is that you some people, some people have like actual do have serious problems with porn where they get into stuff that like it makes it hard for them to like enjoy just like normal healthy sexual stuff in their life. And maybe Don just did that with like actual sex with professionals because he has unlimited money and unlimited access to drugs. And he just like slowly. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. I don't know not to generate any sympathy for him, but this is very strange. That chapter concludes with the author claiming the last time she saw Don Simpson. He was talking loudly about hiring someone to murdered Heidi Fleiss in the desert over a contract disagreement. Several people have talked about stuff like this that Don really like talked about. He was going to murder people. He was having like professional disputes with in general. Yeah. That sounds right. In general, the wealthier and more influential Don got the angrier and cooler he became to those around him. This was deeply tied to his ever ballooning cocaine usage. The opening chapter of the book High Concept describes a meeting between Don and a journalist who wanted to watch him at work. This is during the height of his famous producer, right? The reporter was girded for the worst. The charismatic burly Bearded Simpson was already alleged in the making as famous for his snap decisions and his machine gun pattern as he was for his hair trigger temper. The reporter sat nervously for 30 minutes until a secretary let him into Simpson's office. All white with white linen easy chairs and couches. The walls adorned with warhol prints of Chairman Mao Zedong. One wall was lined with framed copies of Simpson's business cards, chronicling his rise from the bottom to the very top of the paramount executive ranks. Simpson emerged presently from a back room. He asked the reporter, "What time is it?" The reporter told him it was four o'clock. Four o'clock, Simpson repeated, "You know what I like to do at four o'clock? I like to pour myself a big drink, lay out a few lines and abuse a screenwriter. Take a seat!" The reporter watched as Simpson poured out four fingers of McCallan Scotch from a cut glass to canter, cut six lines of cocaine onto a glass, covered side table, and serially snorted them into his nose. He took a deep glug of Scotch and dialed the telephone. For the next twenty minutes, the reporter listed as Simpson hurraying the unfortunate, unidentified screenwriter. "You're the stupidest son of a bitch in Hollywood, you asshole!" Simpson shouted between gulps of Scotch. "You're a talentless piece of shit! No one respects you! Everyone knows you're an idiot! You have no fucking future in this business!" When he had exhausted his wrath, Simpson hung up the phone and said to the reporter, "So let's talk about my Slater movies!" "He did that as a bitch! Just a show off!" "What a tiny little man!" And like, again, I know that Tom Cruise was definitely partly channeling Harvey Weinstein, but Don Simpson is one of the people who made Tom Cruise a star. There's no way Tom's character in "Tropic Thunder" wasn't a little bit of Don Simpson. "Yeah, 100%. Jesus Christ!" He is the patron saint of producers who were really mean to their screenwriters. Well Don seemed to be, I do kind of want to see one of those Catholic saint icons around like some modern day producers neck, but it's got Don Simpson's face on it. He was the one that started it all. He is the one who really figured it out. Well Don seemed to be on top of the world. Things inside his head were not good. Which should not surprise anyone this late in the episodes. His drug use had reached an intolerable crescendo by the end of the 1980s, even as he and Jerry continued to churn out hits. I've heard estimates that his daily maintenance use, this is the minimum amount of cocaine he needed to not get sick, was a half of gram of high grade blow a day. That's just what he's not doing cocaine. That's just what he does to not get sick. Not even him even. Yeah, like a half gram is his minimum maintenance dose of cocaine. And you have to assume this is the good shit. Don Simpson is not getting stepped on blow. It's getting mailed or is getting shipped to him. Yeah, directly. The CIA is flying it to the paramount offices for Don. Yeah. Hollywood's story in Alan Royal claims that while Don denied having cosmetic surgery of any kind between 1988 and 1994. He subjected himself to at least 10 operations to make himself look more handsome. Again, he still thinks he could be an acting star and he's trying to make that happen as he's like hitting middle aged and has been abusing drugs for the last 15 years. So he really he needs some help, right? Quote, these included liposuction on his belly, a buttock lift, collagen injections in his lips, cheeks and chin, a forehead lift, and an eyebrow restructure. All this idiocy culminated in a series of injections of fat into his penis to make it wider, heavier, and longer. These procedures were an unmitigated disaster when it became infected. An even more painful series of reversal procedures was needed at enormous expense to address the problem. He injected fat into his penis, fat into his dick to make it again. You're not like flirting with anybody that you need to impress. You are paying these people, Doc. Yeah. Also, what are you getting at? That's not what makes, what makes a big dick is not like, oh, there's a lot of fat. I don't know, man. Doc's behavior increasingly caused him and Jerry issues. In 1998, a former Paramount Secretary Monica Harmon, we mentioned her earlier, sued the company and alleged that Simpson had forced her to watch him do illegal drugs on the job to hire prostitutes as part of her job, and that he'd made her watch porn at work. Everyone who was talked candidly about the working environment at Don's office seems to agree that her charges were true, that she was not exaggerating or lying in any way, that he made her do all this stuff. Harmon said Simpson would scream at her for including milk in his coffee when he decided sometimes I'm on an outwardly basis that he was fat and had to lose weight. Otherwise, when she'd bring in black coffee, he would abuse her for not including his creamer in it because he decided his diet was over. Again, this could happen within the same day. He made her clean up cocaine after partying with Jerry and Eddie Murphy's manager and my god, Eddie Murphy's manager must have put that shit away. Right. You're not talking about a simple clean up. Eddie Murphy's manager and Jerry Brookheimer are coming over to do blow. You need a trash bag to clean up for that. She claims that a condition of her employment was to read pornographic material to Simpson daily. His most common names for her were dumb shit, garbage brain and stupid bitch. I'm sure he said worse things to her too. When asked about this by LA Weekly, another former assistant of Don stated there was always one girl in the bathroom crying at the office, right? This is just the working environment. Monica's the one who sued, but a lot of other people experienced it. They're creating. Yeah. This is beautiful little. It's the most hot stuff. Yeah. This glory is habitat of cocaine maniacs who hurt everyone around them. Yeah. I will say I did read that he tried. He's like dabbled in early Scientology and then and then it's like 25 K on it and then decided it was horrible. Yeah. Unfortunately, Sophie. He did that because he was so desperately out of control with his drug use that he thought they could save his life and they couldn't and he was like it didn't work like he tried everything. Yeah. But apparently he did throw David Miscavige off a set and I would have enjoyed seeing that. He sure did. He sure did. Sophie. I would have really enjoyed seeing that part. He is the only one I can imagine standing up in front of like Scientology royalty at this period in Hollywood. I don't care. I am too coked out for consequences. Get out of my set. He's got a. We need a relationship. Yeah. Tom Cruise, right? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Tom Cruise refused to ever work with him again after the Miscavige thing in a shop to know us. Yeah. Days of thunder. What about that? I think it must have been on days of thunder, which we're going to talk about does not go well. Yeah. Simpsons tie raids were inspired by surprisingly small problems. If he was on holiday in Hawaii and woke up hungry in the middle of the night, according to one assistance, he wouldn't call room service. He'd wake up an assistant in LA in New York and make her put in an order for his food. And then if it wasn't, if it showed up late, he'd throw it on the floor outside of his room. As like a protest to I don't know who I like all the wrong way to continue to quote from that article. At the Regency Hotel in New York, Simpson once lambasted an entire housekeeping staff after they had returned a pair of black jeans to his room, pressed and starched, not fluffed and folded. I asked for fluff and fold. How dare you? Fluff and fold. He screamed. On another occasion, when he had charted a jet to take several friends on a fishing expedition, he chewed out the secretary who had booked the flight, because on the return trip, the plane had encountered so much cloud cover that it could not immediately land. He called and screamed at me about cloud cover, the secretary recalls, like I could do anything about that. These are the stories that stick in your memory, man. You got to boss is shouting fluff and fold. He screamed at me for 45 minutes because there were clouds on a flight. It's incredible. To continue, on yet another business trip, he screamed at a secretary because the limousine she'd ordered for a New York outing had a less than pristine interior. He said, you should have checked it out. The recipient of his abuse says, during that same visit to New York and assistant remembers, Simpson got upset because the window in his hotel room didn't open. So he just threw a chair through it. She says he could not open the window, so he just threw a chair through it. We have to check out of his hotels for him because he was too impatient. So we just pay for this stuff. I wonder if ADD, if you could just get somebody on some medication early, if all this stuff could have been solved. I don't know. I have to think there's not cocaine ought to be solving some of these ADD problems if they have stimulants. That's true. We're going to fix it. I don't know if more stimulants would have helped Don Simpson. Just no impulse control whatsoever. I think that's less. I'm whatever. I'm sure he could have been diagnosed with ADHD like a lot of creative people, but that's not the reason he's throwing chairs. He has no sense of, like, he has no barriers at all to his behavior because he's gotten nothing but tens of millions of dollars for, like, engaging in his worst impulses. It's like Trump in a different way, right? Absolutely. What did you say his maintenance dose of cocaine was per day? Half a gram a day to stop from getting the shakes, right? Stop it. That's a crazy amount of cocaine use. Wow. Yeah. Oh, yeah. That makes sense. Yeah. That makes sense. He has not only been enabled, but the most money has been made because he thinks because of who he is. No. The lifestyle he has had and that is what's made him so much money. So why on earth would you stop it? He literally gets fired for being a drug addicted maniac and then handed a script that makes him millions and millions of dollars and sets him up in a business where he makes tens of millions of dollars in the entire world to saying you're the best at this. Yeah. You can't stop thinking. It's just me. Of course. I know. It's great. I don't know that anyone could avoid having a drug problem for a period of time. Like think about Martin Scorsese. He was definitely hit and shit too hard for a while. Clearly he had people in his life and other things he cared about. He did not continue doing drugs like Martin Scorsese in the early 80s, right? But there must have there was a time in which it's just like well everything I've done I've just gotten rewarded for why wouldn't I keep doing more of the stuff that I want to do right? Yeah, like in dawn I think people this happens a lot to in cases of people who get super famous and rich and dawn just does not have Anyone that cares about him in his life other than maybe Jerry and certainly Jerry can't put a leash on dawn That's not their relationship right There are so many more abusive Don Simpson stories that I can include in these episodes I should note that Simpson Brookheimer and Paramount went after Harmon hard when she sues for all of this stuff That's Don's former assistant they hire investigators to assassinate her character They fire a multi-million dollar libel suit against her Simpson personally hires Anthony Pelicano a PI who had worked for John DeLorean To find evidence that Harmon was herself a drug user and had stolen company property She ultimately had her suit dismissed out of court right like this is I don't think they don't follow through on the other stuff once It's dropped, but she has to drop all of this stuff. Even though again, she's definitely in the right right? Yeah So Don seems invulnerable by 1990 but by the start of the 90s the man who had insisted movie should only be about making money was burnt out on Producing movies that only existed to make money Lance Young a senior production and executive at Paramount told L.A. Weekly Don was burned out on making these big movies. He didn't want to make top gun again He wanted to make artistic projects and he wanted to be a director and he wanted to be an actor and he wanted all that to be in the deal Because he's gonna sign a big deal with Paramount one of Simpson's former employees insists that at this time He wanted to make movies like driving to the Miss Daisy rather than more action blockbusters He's like looking at that this very beloved but very simple and kind of more like artistic movie with like really heart and feeling behind it And he's like well, I want to do that instead of making another bad boys movie. I don't think they've done the bad boys movie yet I want to make that instead of making another Beverly Hills cop, right? Yeah Don and Jerry were seen as the guys who had made Hollywood's 1980s and so Paramount was happy at 1990 to sign them to a new and unprecedented deal on February 1st 1990 Paramount agreed to fund three hundred million dollars over five years for Brookheimer and Simpson to make any five pictures they wanted I get three hundred million dollars is a lot of money in Hollywood at this time You can actually make whatever you want five movies on three hundred million dollars in this period of time But the the the kind of deal they have is crazy No scripts would need approval from Paramount budgets would get an automatic rubber stamp and Brookheimer and Simpson had total control right and they bragged about this the pair paid for ads to run in major newspapers Here's an example of one ad I think this ran in the times from the premise to the premiere from the first draft to the last detail from the first shot to the Millions cassette Don Simpson and Jerry Brookheimer are total filmmakers It began with the landmark blockbuster flash dance then came three of the best hits of all time Beverly Hills cop top gun and Beverly Hills cop too And from these two Academy Awards 10 Academy Award nominations 14 top 10 songs for number one soundtrack albums four number one songs Four multi platinum albums and four number one videos Paramount pictures is pleased and proud to announce a new five-year alliance with Don Simpson and Jerry Brookheimer as they enter a new era of producing and directing at the studio. They call home Ask to amplify Simpson boasted. It's simple. They put up the money We put up the talent and we meet at the theater. So how could this go wrong? Lots of lots of lots of lots of cocaine and lots of lots of abuse Paramount has just given him a three hundred million dollar check and said we're not gonna even look in it you guys Yeah, what do you think they're gonna do next now 1990 was a pretty tacky time in American culture, but the fact that they put this up in news articles is seen as Classless and gross by the standards of the day that like that's kind of some that's like Icarus level hubris Yeah, it's got everyone waiting for you to have a fall now, right? So this provokes a fierce bout of desire for shot in Florida among film watchers and industry insiders But Darian Don are confident that their new movie a racing film with Tom Cruise is that lead actor days of thunder is going to be their next Top gun level hit But top gun had cost just 14 to 15 million dollars Days of thunder's budget started at 40 million dollars with just with seven million dollars just for Mr Cruise right, this is it's like a super big news at the time that Tom Cruise gets a seven million dollar paycheck for this movie And again, you see what's happened as we've started at the beginning of the 80s Seven million dollars is a good budget for a film maybe nine if it's big to now We're hoping for a top gun level hit and we're spending 40 million dollars at the start, right? We're more than four times the budgets now that we were looking at a decade ago You know, it's getting the consequence if it doesn't succeed as you is disastrous now. Yeah, it's getting closer to being Disastrous right as soon as production began the budget exploded further One of the there's a lot of reasons for this one is that they have to buy like a fleet of stock cars to film races in But the cars keep breaking down and they don't have like mechanics for these cars They have to constantly bring in private mechanics to fix them and these repairs are super expensive and it delays production as you know If you lose a day of filming like there's that you're just light and money on fire like literally like it should Just burning Dawn also insisted to use this movie to make his big acting debut and so he cast himself as an Italian race car driver In this movie. Yeah, fuck yeah, I'm so hell yeah, Don the big full-moon cocaine face. Yeah, baby. Yeah, let's do it His scenes were nearly all cut basically a hundred percent of a scenes are cut some at the direct behest of Tom Cruise because Tom's like these are fucking terrible Like I don't want these in my movie. It's also been theorized that director Tony Scott purposefully shot Dawn scenes badly to ensure that they would be Unvisible because he is like I got to make sure we can't put these in We don't need we don't need lighting Get the boom might guys far away from set as possible get him in a cab driving to the next city Yeah, we're gonna play some Beatles underneath every single one of these things. Yeah, yeah, the white album just constantly playing Next per the LA times by now the budget had ballooned to $70 million but Simpson who had turned Cruise into a bonafide movie star with top gun which had also made his thunder director Tony Scott a Hollywood power seemed Unperturbed the thunder location was a permanent party by day from his suites at the Dayton Beach Marriott Simpson would dispatched two Assistance Dave known as Dave the rave Robertson and Dave known as baby Dave Thorn to area beaches to ask attractive young women If they wanted to attend a party for Tom Cruise by night the women would join Simpson Brookheimer cruise and screenwriter Robert Towne and Scott for dinner and after hours Disco tech dancing one night the crew rented an entire bowling alley and threw a party another night a local Daytona beach Disco tech called the palace was closed down for a party where rapper tone luck performed the booze in the cocaine kept in Study supply by the two Dave's were plentiful one morning I found three bags of cocaine stuck behind a cushion on a sofa one assistant remembers Simpson had been pounding on my door at 4 am yelling at me to come out and party Again, I would have loved to be on that set that would have been a good time It does seem like it's pretty predatory that they're like we've got this young hot guy. I'm just talking about the drugs Not bringing in the beaches. Of course, but that they're like we can get women here because of him We get women because of Tom Cruise, right? That is cruising. We'll be our honey trop. Yeah, and we will we will lure them here And then we get to have sex with them. Yeah, because we're gonna be a pile them with drugs and then we get to do whatever we want And it's like it's really really abusive. That's the whole reason you're making this movie It's for the this this part of it Yeah And and that's clearly what it's become by this point however much making a movie was before now It's about well Paramount's got to pay for me to do all of the drugs and party with beautiful women, right? Yeah, and Tom Cruise is gonna get them in the door, you know This production might represent the actual peak of hedonistic Hollywood excess like the stuff that like store like this I don't know that it's ever been worse than this like there's certainly some productions on this level But like this is about is as hardcore as that kind of stuff got Don kept a production office in the Marriott that was just filled with Donna Karen dresses and different sizes to give to girls that his Assistance picked out and brought to the parties as like a present, right? Another room was devoted just to Don's clothes. He spent $400,000 of Paramount's money turning two suites in the hotel into a private gym Don would sleep all day and by the way the gym was stocked with He had Arnold Schwarzenegger right out all the equipment that he needed to work out and they just bought it Like buddy using the same gear as Arnold is not gonna make you look like Arnold Schwarzenegger Like using the same steroids as Arnold isn't gonna make you look like Arnold Schwarzenegger I love that he's still desperately ashamed of his body It's true at all like really really yeah, it very very clear through line in all of this So during production Don would sleep all day and then he would go work out in the early evening and then at night He would party and brokheimer would spend all day on set trying to actually make the movie Trying to keep shit together being a producer, right? Quote Simpson would work out every day on equipment specially ordered from a list supplied by Arnold Schwarzenegger if work went too late or there was work left to be done at the end of the day Says a thunder source Don would laugh and say Jerry. I can't do that. It's 6.30 I have to clean up and get dressed and I have a date at 7.30. I can't be there You do it and Jerry would always do it. Yeah - You do the work. - Yeah. - I'm the ad member. - Jerry Breckover sounds like a great partner to be honest. - Honestly, yeah, I would love to get hooked up with him. - I would work great with Jerry Breckover kind of work. All I had to do was not work and he just sent me money. That sounds like a really good partnership. - Days of thunder made a profit. It made what should have been a lot of money, $160 million. But the budget had ballooned between like $60 and $70 million and then add costs to a bunch more money, right? They spend a lot of money on ads in part because like he's feuding Don with all of his other friends in the industry, like he's feuding with Jeffrey Katzenberg who has another movie coming out at this point in time. And so you've got to have, we got to put more money behind it. We got to put more money in the ads. And so even though it makes $160 million box office, that's like a minor profit for Paramount because of how big this movie has gotten. So we have turned from when if you make $160 million, 10 years ago in a movie, there's no way you're not in Clover. There's no way the studio is not worshipping you because it's just impossible for a movie to have cost is enough money to not make that profitable. To 10 years later, they made $150 million, $60 million and it's a problem, right? - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - That's how bad things have ballooned this quickly. So the studio considered letting Brookheimer and Simpson go, but given their track records, probably would have let them try again. This isn't like a, they didn't lose money on this, right? And so they probably could have gotten, they could have salvaged something, right? But the failure, the relative failure of Days of Thunder is a catastrophe for Don Psychie. And I've heard it really fucks up Brookheimer too, that like this movie does not make more money and is not as big a success as it needed to be, really fucks with them both, 'cause they haven't dealt with a failure at this kind of level yet. And this is a very public failure, right? They're putting out ads in the paper about how successful their partnership is gonna be and then the movie doesn't quite work out the way they'd expected. One former Paramount executive told LA Weekly, Don and Jerry shut down their communication. They'd come and excited with another project, but they were devastated that Days didn't do as well as everyone hoped. And we saw a period of several years of non-productivity. The relationship had run out of juice, right? So Paramount ultimately drops them after all this and Jerry and Don are free agents again. And again, we had every reason to expect more lucrative success from these guys, right? Because they, they're still Jerry Brookheimer and Don Simpson, right? But after tasting failure, Don Simpson was never the same again. Clearly Brookheimer heals from this and goes on to continue to be Jerry Brookheimer up to the present day. This really seems damaged Don on a fundamental level, perinartical in the independent by David Thompson. After Days of Thunder, Don stopped. He started taking a lot of prescription drugs and he depressed the uppersand downers. His weight began to shoot up, although some thought this was because of new untested growth hormones he was taking. Their alleged function was to improve sexual potency as the natural effects of age set in. But they also left him bulkier, bloated and ashamed of himself. So he is number one, he's injecting early versions of HGH to try to get buff. And I think part of what's having a problem, it's not just age, it's that like when you do a shit load of coke, your dick doesn't work normally, right? You know, when your whole body starts to shut down. You're big, it's horrible for you. You're big fat, dick isn't working? You're big fat, injected, coke filled penis. There's no longer working. You know that, but surgically better take other drugs. Yeah. Yeah. So he is not doing okay, right? Jerry Brookheimer is also in deep distress because of this. He loves Don. Some said he was the closest Don ever came to having a wife, albeit an abused one, and their business is starting to fail, right? Jerry puts Don in detox clinics like Jerry now is helping to get his friend to rehab. And it doesn't work, right? In 1994 or '95, Brookheimer is back on the saddle. He's working on some new pictures. He's working with Don on these pictures. And these are some of the big movies that you know from this decade. Bad boys, dangerous minds, Crimson Tide, and The Rock. Simpson is to some extent involved with all of them, but not much, right? He's certainly not on set. He's a lot of it is like Brookheimer kind of maybe asking for some ideas, but some of it's just his friend clearly helping him out, right? Because he can't, he can't make shit work for himself right now. You know, and to miss out on The Rock, that's just the most Don Simpson movie that he ever wasn't that involved with. I mean, that's tragic. Yeah, to continue with a quote from the independent, Don was seldom there on the set. He was becoming more reclusive. He had stopped returning calls. He was looking for help. One possible source was Dr. Stephen Amerman, who said that he thought he had an answer for Don. Then one night in August of 1995, Amerman called Don and invited himself up to the Simpson House on Stone Canyon Road. Simpson said, come on by, but he was going to sleep. The next morning, Don got up and found Amerman dead by the pool house. There was a syringe nearby. Death was due to an overdose mixture of valium, cocaine and morphine. This is the Dr. Don hires to help him with his drug addiction problems, has now overdosed and died on drugs in his mansion. Oh, like a weird cocktail, a crazy cocktail. That's a lot of, like he had something like four times a fatal dose of morphine in his system. And for an idea, there's just not comparison to how bad this drug problem is when you're rehabbed doctor overdoses at your mansion fence. Again, there's nobody there. There's nobody there. I work at an office that is stocked with candy. This is my only touchstone in all of this. The only way to get a foot hold even on this is not nose candy people. No, I don't want to eat all this candy. There's lots of it here, but it's just under me all the time. It's like under, it's just at every turn, it's there. And so like you can't help yourself. I was like that at our old office with Celsius's, you know, I haven't drank a Celsius since we stopped recording in LA, but I used to drink a shitload of them. And so you're, you're, you're slave to whatever is in front of you and it gives you that little bit of extra, um, and this in Don's case, a lot of extra, like that little extra kick through your day. And I, I feel a little bad way for him. He can never get out of this. It was, it was self-fulfilling prophecy. This is doomed, right? This is doomed. You know, this man, and this is during the time in which he tries Scientology and he tries it honestly for the only, like one of the most sympathetic reasons, which is he's terrified that he cannot control his substance use. Yeah. And as a spoiler, the Scientologist don't help. Yeah. We're. Yeah. The fact that Don's rehab doctor had died of an overdose on his property is said to be what ultimately and tearfully convinced Jerry Brookheimer to part ways with his old friend and partner. I think he's been pretty clear and I believe this Jerry has that he wanted to work with Don in the future. He expected he'll get his shit together. He'll fix this stuff and we'll be back to working together at some point, right? And I, I think actually Jerry is doing the, the responsible thing. He is the only guy who can put any kind of a leash on Don and so he's like, I can't work with you until you sober up, right? Like I cannot work with you while you, you have this kind of problem, which I do think is actually like the most, the only responsible decision anyone in Jerry and Don Simpson's life is made. Yeah. Unfortunately, it's way too little too late, right? So Don was pushing 50 by this point. He's a little over 50 by this point. And after a lifetime of not just constant hard drug use, but constant cocaine use, he had finally tapered back. He's not doing nearly as much cocaine now. And in order to compensate, he's doing way more of everything else. And he builds around him this coterie of crooked and disgraced doctors who would prescribe him anything he wanted, not just under his own name, but under a mix of assumed names. That's got a credible estimate says in the last, I can't even get my head around this number. During the last years of his life, a credible estimate puts Don Simpson's monthly expenditure on prescription drugs at $60,000. He is doing 60 grand a month prescription drugs. He's doing a really nice car worth of drugs. Yeah. Like a today a nice car worth of drugs in 94. And that's not counting the illegal shit. It's just an average is probably you must feel like you're making progress. You must like be getting off cocaine and you're like things are looking up and barely doing any coke anymore. Somebody send me my, put out a dump truck of money to buy my month's subscription to Valium. Oxy cotton. Xanax. Yeah. As my spine deteriorates at least my septum is fine now at least my septum is fine. And look, would I do $60,000 worth of prescription drugs if they were hand of who wouldn't? That's the problem. Right. It's like so exciting. What an opportunity. What an opportunity. Brachheimer ended their working relationship in December of 1995. In January of 1996, Don Simpson was found dead in his Bel Air home. So again, that's how quickly it takes once Brachheimer actually like cuts loose from this guy. Don had had a badly irregular heartbeat for some time and the sheer quantity of drugs in his system were just too much for him. His autopsy found traces of yes cocaine, along with at least 20 other drugs in his system. Yeah, cocaine was residual. That was a lot over. That was a lot of work. It could have been months ago. A search of his home found 2200 prescriptions from 15 different doctors. He's his. He's his Christ. What? Like holy fuck, Don. Wow. Wow. I'm just impressed. He made it to over 50. Right. It's kind of amazing. He made it to 52. That's a fuck. I love actually I'm pretty happy to hear that he's dead of 52 because because every time that there's a story about somebody who was like on heroin for years and then kicked it and now they're in better shape than me. I'm like, what the fuck? What the fuck? That's the way I waste all this time. Yeah, what do I have to do with two years of not doing heroin waste? Yeah. What is investigations into his death found that over the last three years he'd been prescribed more than 15,000 sedatives, tranquilizers, uppers, antipsychotics, painkillers, and other drugs. Perchuck Phillips writing for the L.A. Times, more than two dozen doctors are under investigation by local, state, and federal authorities on suspicion of prescribing large amounts of drugs to Simpson in recent years. It is unclear how many of them were aware of his problem or were simply duped by an addict adept at making use of his money in celebrity. On Friday, authorities armed with warrants raided the offices of two west side psychiatrists, Robert Hugh Gerner and Nomi J. Frederick, in connection with the probe. Frederick's home was also searched. Gerner, who treated Simpson in 1993 and '94, is on probation for over-prescribing controlled substances to another patient with whom he had sex, according to the California Medical Board. Frederick, according to records obtained by the Times, dispensed large amounts of addictive drugs to Simpson and other wealthy L.A. residents, including a oil-airist Aline Getty, who'd obtained more than 4,000 pills from Frederick over the last year. So he's part of a community of people who are making use of shady doctors. That's important to note, too. Yeah, his death just uncovered this entire network of the worst people in the world, all prescribing drugs in Los Angeles. Yeah, to just rich people in L.A., you know? And that's the Don Simpson story. Wow. You remade Hollywood in his own image and then died of an overdose. Yeah. I mean, very well told first of all. That was wonderful. I mean, you got a real insight into how he became who he was. I think that the epilogue to all of this is he opened the door to what was maybe a worst type of person, even, and that the state of the industry is, in a lot of ways, what he was doing is like, oh, that's how you make movies. That's fine. That's how you should make movies. He made some really good ones. Yeah. Like he did. He opened the door to people who were going to be abusive in that same role as an archetype. And then also for the people who are just like, it's all about the money. It's about the money. And so he was just the starting point. Also, I think another point is that when you do talk about the more abusive aspects of Hollywood in this period leading up to the early 2000s, the people were like, well, that's just how the industry is. Well, Don's part of why that was the stereotype, right? And that also has an impact. Yeah. It doesn't have to be this way. No, that's not the only way to make a movie. Right. It's not like there's no turning back. Yeah. Just like you don't have to snort an entire luxury sedan worth of cocaine every single night with Eddie Murphy's manager in order to make a movie. Yeah. Sadly, no one's ever tried not doing it. So we don't know for sure. That's right. No one's doing it with Eddie Murphy's manager. So we have new data to back this up. Oh, man. What a hoot. I love old Hollywood stories. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's as bad as I thought it would be, you know, with every, oh, obviously worse than a lot of ways that I couldn't even imagine some of the stuff that he's done. But you hear about producers, like the producers from the 80s and you're like, yeah, it's probably a lot of cocaine like prostitutes. It's like, well, you don't know the folks that you're clearly not creative enough to imagine all the things that they could have done. Yeah. Like, horrendous abuses, but also I cannot get the cloud comment out of my head. He was mad at the assistant for the cloud too much to many clouds. I get you. You take a kid who's clearly like pissed for whatever reason, whatever actually happened that he's pissed about in his upbringing. He's like an angry young man who has a very high opinion of his abilities. And then when he's still pretty young, someone says, here's unlimited money for the rest of your life. Yeah. Of course. Of course. Because movies and television are a reflection of the industry itself, the fact that after somebody like him came along, who was abusive to everyone under him, but was a huge success and considered with genius within the industry, that became the archetype that we all flock to and show. That's genius. Yeah. It's like a genius is impossible to deal with. But we love him for it. That's house. Like that's all. Every industry. That's the mentalist like that in every industry. It's going to be some psychopath that you just have to deal with because they're so good at their job. Yeah. It's like, no, it doesn't have to be that way. No, no, it doesn't. That's just how the Hollywood was. And so everyone who was writing at the time thought, yeah, that's how it's got to be. And look, do I find it, you know, would it be nice to be that kind of pre-bidonna to have $60,000 in prescription drugs to get to scream at people when you have bad turbulence on a flight? Of course. That sounds enticing. You know, nobody telling you, nobody ever is saying no, literally ever, until you have caught in yourself in a trap that you cannot escape. Yeah. Yeah. What a, what a, what a story life. He lived. Yeah. Certainly not a boring man. Well, sorry, and you got needing to plug it. Um, yeah, I mean, obviously my book, there are no massive crabs in this novel. If, uh, if you can't find it, that's because Jason's probably got bought by mistake. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Or he's been burning down Borders books again. Do they still have Borders? Does that joke land? Um, yeah, you can follow my podcast though, if you want to, you can go check it out. That's a quick question with Soren and Daniel. We have a lot of fun. It's just two comedy writers in the industry talking to each other, maintaining a friendship across the states. Yep. Yep. And, you know, obviously having stories secretly that will be retold on a podcast and think-- Oh, that's the crazy lives together. That's the dream. That's the dream. Yeah. When the news finally comes out about all the horrendous things Daniel and I have been doing. Immediately from this meeting out to the deck of his yacht where he's going to snipe whales with a cannon. Yeah. It's fun. It's part of his process. American dad cannot get made without that. By-- by Don Simpson Law, I'll be dead in ten years. It's fine. All right, everybody. Good night. Bye. Behind the bastards is a production of Cool Zone media. For more from Cool Zone media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com. Or check us out on the IHurt Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Full video episodes of Behind the Bastards are now streaming on Netflix dropping every Tuesday and Thursday. Hit remind me on Netflix so you don't miss an episode. For clips and our older episode catalog, continue to subscribe to our YouTube channel, youtube.com/at Behind the Bastards. We love about 40% of you, statistically speaking. How do you know that cloud won't become manipulative? This is a constant worry. And you can actually catch the model thinking I think X is actually true, but I'm going to tell the user why. I'm Walter Isaacson. I'm my new podcast, The Builders. Listen to The Builders starting October 13 on the IHurt Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This podcast. My biggest fear is that I am afraid of being forgotten. It's weird and messy and vulnerable, and I'm going to share all of it with you. Okay, so here we go. Listen to my brother David on the IHurt Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's all just a joke. I'm Bridget Armstrong, back with season 2 of the podcast, Curse of Miss America. He looks and he goes, "You don't look like you suffered in the eating disorder." I never received a scholarship and I need to pay for my student loans. Okay, this is the meta question for the podcast. Listen to the Curse of Miss America on the IHurt Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Get worse with Kyle Pru is not one of those podcasts, so if you're interested in getting thinner, going to therapy, starting peptide, setting boundaries, taking supplements, making your better, getting closer, then I would humbly recommend other podcasts. If you're interested in blackmail, love, bomb, and cloning yourself or getting revenge, then we've got a little something, something for a dastardly individual like you. Listen to Get Worse with Kyle Pru on the IHurt Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHurt Podcast. Guaranteed Human.