Bombs Away

Why do I do this? Three reasons. The pay is good, the scenery changes and they let me use explosives."--Rockhound, from Armageddon

It hangs there on a brick wall at the end of the hallway. A framed poster. Four words. Big block letters. A simple message. If you're heading toward Jerry Bruckheimer's office, you can't miss it. Get Ready to Rock, it says.

Makes sense, of course. This is Bruckheimer. He's had 20 years of producing brutal brutally efficient testosterone-fests. He's the man who brought you the screaming jets and washboard abs of Top Gun and the action, exertion and demolition that made blockbusters out of Days of Thunder, The Rock, Con Air and Armageddon. If you add it all up, he's probably the most successful movie producer ever: His films, videos and soundtrack albums have brought in more than $11 billion worldwide, give or take a few million. Lately, he's been producing CSI, the hard-boiled crime show on CBS and the most compelling new drama of the past television season.

"Whether or not you agree with all his movies, he makes movies that make people go to the theater," says actor William Petersen, who stars in CSI. "That's a real talent, and I don't know anybody who does it better."

So that's Bruckheimer. He rocks--at least, some of his movies do. (Not all of them: He'll thank you to remember that he also makes kinder, gentler pictures like Dangerous Minds and Remember the Titans.) As for Jerry himself, if you step past the eight-week-old golden retriever and walk into his office, you'll find the volume turned way down.

The place is slick: a 15-foot desk, lots of black leather and chrome furniture, buttons under his desk to control the door and the big TV and audio system, a sleek black laptop and a phone with dozens of extensions. In the corner is a book of Helmut Newton photographs so massive that it requires its own chrome stand. On the desk, in two decks of polished wooden trays, sit 40 Mont Blanc pens.

At the moment, Jerry is on the phone, speaking quietly. "We had a great meeting with lots of very good ideas," he is saying. "But you should be aware that the price is not acceptable to Disney." He hangs up. "Just dealing with a crisis on Pearl Harbor," he says placidly. "There will be plenty more. Every day there's going to be one." Then he smiles.

That's vintage Jerry Bruckheimer. Even though Disney's famously penurious ways nearly derailed a major motion picture of his, Bruckheimer deals with the penny-pinching calmly. "He is certainly a measured man," says Peter Schneider, chairman of Walt Disney Studios. "You know perfectly well when he's upset with you, but he does not lose his temper. He's a classy guy who's smart and opinionated, but he also listens to people."

"It's the funniest thing I've ever seen: He never raises his voice," says Michael Bay, who has directed Bad Boys, The Rock, Armageddon and now Pearl Harbor for Bruckheimer. "Never, ever. I get very passionate, and I'll yell at him, 'Jerry, you're fucking out of your fucking mind, we can't fucking do this movie for the fucking money!' And there's dead silence on the phone, and then he says, very calmly, 'Don't worry, we're going to get it done.' He makes you want to kill him--but somehow, through his confidence, he instills confidence in you. And he's always got that smile. People see that smile, and they wonder, What is he so happy about?"

Bruckheimer's smile is as well known as his soft-spokenness. Ask him a question, and he'll answer it politely. Then he'll grin, just a little. Bay says he's beginning to figure out the smile, but even if you haven't been working with the guy for a decade--particularly if you're a member of the press, around whom he has reason to be wary--it's pretty easy to get the message. I know lots more, it implies, but I'm not telling.

"Jerry has always been quiet," says Kathy Nelson, president of film music for Universal Pictures and the Universal Music Group. She has worked on soundtracks with Bruckheimer for 17 years. "When Jerry gets really quiet, it scares me. He gets silent and deadly."

"The United States government just asked us to save the world. Anyone want to say no?"--Harry Stamper, from Armageddon

There's another imposing message just (continued on page 154)Jerry Bruckheimer(continued from page 124) outside Bruckheimer's office, but this one isn't emblazoned across a promotional poster. Instead, it's hand-painted on the side of a five-and-a-half-foot bomb casing that dates back to World War II. To: Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, Imperial Japanese Navy, Tokyo. From: The Crew of Battleship Arizona, Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, Air Mail 1942. Special Delivery. This particular message was never dispatched, although plenty of similar ones were. Instead, it sat in the Officers Club on the famed military base, and recently wound up in an auction, where it was bought as a gift by Bruckheimer's wife, the producer, editor and novelist Linda Bruckheimer.

There is, he knows, a lot riding on Pearl Harbor. Bruckheimer sees the movie as his first attempt at a David Lean--style epic: It has gunfire and romance, heroism and friendship and love and jealousy, turbulent emotions against a backdrop of momentous events. And its development was turbulent, too. The movie's original script budgeted out in excess of $200 million--a figure that former Disney studio chairman Joe Roth might have approved. But others--most notably Roth's boss, Michael Eisner--were not so generous, so Bruckheimer and Bay whittled the budget to about $145 million. They thought they had a green light at that figure, but then Roth left the studio. "When he left," says Schneider, "I had a mandate, which was, 'You can't spend that kind of money.' So Jerry, Michael and I sat down and came to a reasonable solution."

In the end, Bruckheimer and Bay accepted a $135 million budget by dramatically cutting their fees, agreeing to surrender a share of the gross in exchange for a larger share if the box-office take reached a certain point, and personally guaranteeing any cost overruns. "Emotionally, I was the biggest wreck I'd ever been in my life," says Bay. "A movie like this can go $10 million over in a heartbeat, and I was thinking, I'm going to be financing Disney. I can't do this. But Jerry kept me in the game. He's like a pit bull you cannot get rid of. After I quit four times, he was still saying, 'It's too good. You can't let this pass us by.'"

Before he committed to directing the movie, Bay insisted on a test: He shot footage of a real Japanese Zero fighter plane over the Pacific Ocean, gave it to the Industrial Light and Magic special effects firm, and asked it to add two fake Zeros behind the real fighter. "In fact," says Bruckheimer, "the real one looked phonier than the fake ones." In the end, the filmmakers used about a dozen genuine World War II planes, while ILM supplied everything else.

Casting, meanwhile, caused problems of its own. Even though the film was a $100-million-plus epic, Bruckheimer and Bay had to ask actors to cut their fees. "All the money that would have been paid to the actors," Bruckheimer says, "had to go on the screen." Ben Affleck agreed to take one of the lead roles for what the producer says was "virtually nothing, for him"; Josh Hartnett and actress Kate Beckinsale took the other two main roles. Gene Hackman, whose wife is of Japanese ancestry, declined the role of President Roosevelt; it went to Jon Voight instead. Kevin Costner offered to cut his fee to play General James Doolittle--but, in the end, he wasn't willing to cut it enough, so Alec Baldwin stepped in.

"I just believe in the idea, I believe in the script, I believe in the director," says Bruckheimer of his fights to get the movie made. "It's a historic movie about something that should be memorialized. We interviewed about 70 survivors, and they said, 'Make the film quick, because we're dropping like flies.'" He shakes his head. "There's an enormous amount of courage that went into Pearl Harbor, and an enormous amount of death and loss. Yamamoto sent two waves of fighters and was concerned our other carriers might be close by, and that he'd take some losses if he sent in another wave. But had they gone in for a third wave, they would have hit Chicago before we could put an army together. And we'd all be speaking Japanese now."

In the end, Bruckheimer says, filming went smoothly; all the delays wound up giving him and Bay more time to prep. "It was the hardest picture just to green-light," he says. "But once we got that, because we'd been preparing for so long, it was relatively easy to get started. Michael had already shot the movie, in his head." (Bay was, on occasion, forced to be creative: To shoot a graphic hospital scene but also make the PG-13 rating that Disney demanded, he reportedly invented a new type of camera lens that blurred everything around the edges of the frame.)

"As movies go, especially for one this size, it's been terrific," says Bruckheimer. "We had one accident where a plane went down, but fortunately the pilot only broke a finger. And that was pretty much the only tough thing that happened--knock on wood."

But the nearest wood is on his desk, across the room, so Bruckheimer knocks on shiny black plastic instead.

•

Stanley Goodspeed: "I'll do my best."

Mason: "Your best? Losers always whine about their best. Winners go home and fuck the prom queen,"--from The Rock

Through all these years and all those blockbusters, Bruckheimer is only certain about two movies he's made. The first time he saw them, he knew Beverly Hills Cop and Armageddon would be big hits. "Other than that," Bruckheimer says, "they're all shocks to me."

He does not, he insists, know what the people want. "I think it constantly changes," he says. "I mean, I'm a student of that. And I'm interested in the same movies they are. I'm kind of lost in a period when I was in my late teens and early 20s, and that's what I still gravitate toward. You can bet that a huge picture at the box office is also a picture I like a lot."

Growing up in a lower-middle-class family in Detroit, Bruckheimer knew by his early 20s that he'd like to head for Hollywood; director David Lean's epics The Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago influenced him powerfully. First Bruckheimer went into the advertising business, starting in the mailroom but soon producing eye-catching, award-winning spots. After just four years with the high-powered New York agency BBD&O, though, he turned his back on a lucrative Madison Avenue career when he got an offer to work as the associate producer on a small 1972 Western called The Culpepper Cattle Company. Bruckheimer walked away from a $70,000-a-year job ("a lot of money at the time") to take a Hollywood gig that paid ten grand and offered no security. "I wanted to be able to tell stories for longer than 60 seconds," he says.

In Hollywood, he tried to gain notice by working harder than anybody else, and the pictures came steadily enough to keep him in business: He produced Farewell My Lovely in 1975, March or Die two years later. "I always had my eye on the ball," he says. "But I kept my reel of commercials, in case I needed it."

In 1980 he produced Paul Schrader's sleek American Gigolo, one of the first films to use pop music (in this case, the Blondie song Call Me) to sell a picture. Three years later, he made a deal with Don Simpson, a former Paramount production chief. The two men tackled what seemed to be a preposterous project about a woman who works as a Pittsburgh steel welder and does surprisingly elaborate pseudo-stripteases in a weirdly high-tech working-class bar, but she really wants to be a ballet dancer. Lots of people in and outside Paramount hated Flashdance--but by the time Simpson, Bruckheimer and director Adrian Lyne were finished with it, the titillating fairy tale grossed over $100 million and spawned (continued on page 184)Jerry Bruckheimer(continued from page 154) a couple of hit singles in the process.

It also made powerhouses of its two producers, who followed it with another enormous hit, Beverly Hills Cop, then the juggernaut Top Gun, a film that many see as the ultimate expression of the Simpson--Bruckheimer aesthetic: "men bonding loudly," as one critic put it. The movies were hits, and they were relentlessly promoted by hit songs, using the then-nascent MTV to help establish the product and market the films. "Before Don and Jerry, most of the big soundtracks came from movies about music," says Kathy Nelson, who negotiated a clause in her Universal Pictures deal that allows her to continue working with Bruckheimer. "But Jerry always wanted music to be important in his movies, even if the movies weren't about music. They were huge in making soundtracks the amazing marketing tools that they are now."

Simpson and Bruckheimer had become the power producers of the decade, and they were not shy about flaunting their power. The two men sat at a large U-shaped desk in their office on the Paramount lot, bought identical black Ferraris and black Mustang convertibles and hired a pair of twins as their assistants.

Despite their matching cars and identical twin secretaries, though, the two men were in some ways polar opposites. Simpson threw out ideas and dictated perceptive 40-page script memos during drug-fueled binges; Bruckheimer handled the details his partner couldn't be bothered with. Simpson was the creative whirlwind who caused problems, Bruckheimer the diplomatic organizer who smoothed them over. Simpson was famous for his 4 P.M. scotch, his 5 P.M. cocaine, his S&M dalliances with hookers. Bruckheimer was known to have a lively bachelor pad in Laurel Canyon between the end of his first marriage and the time he began a relationship with his current wife, Linda. But for the most part, he was considered the sane member of the team, the one who held the fort when Simpson's excesses made the producer unreliable or unreachable.

"Don was a hysterical guy, and also very smart, but he was constantly stirring the pot," says Michael Bay, whom Simpson and Bruckheimer hired to direct a music video and later Bad Boys. "Jerry would watch over Don to make sure the pot wouldn't get too stirred."

In 1990 Paramount Pictures signed the pair to an unprecedented and overhyped production deal that gave them $300 million to make five movies over five years--and that's when things went sour. Days of Thunder barely made back its production costs, badly damaging both the Simpson--Bruckheimer aura of invincibility and their relationship with the studio. The five-picture deal that had been heralded as a "visionary alliance" ended four years and four movies prematurely, as Simpson and Bruckheimer left Paramount and signed a smaller, nonexclusive deal with Disney.

But Disney was shying away from big-budget films, and for three years Simpson and Bruckheimer didn't get a single movie into production. "We were hampered by a writers' strike that went on for a long time," Bruckheimer says, referring to the five-month strike in 1988. "So we couldn't get our material going. And we were also negotiating out of Paramount, and we didn't want to put things in development because we knew they would be stuck there." He shrugs. "And the truth is, Don didn't want to work. After we had been at Disney for about a year and a half, I went to him and said, 'Look, I'm going to make movies. You want to be part of it?'"

Simpson said he did, and what followed was an unexpected winning streak: The Michelle Pfeiffer drama Dangerous Minds and Tony Scott's sub adventure, Crimson Tide, were both hits for Disney in 1995, while Bad Boys, with Will Smith and Martin Lawrence, became Columbia Pictures' biggest hit of the year.

Even though Simpson and Bruckheimer had regained their commercial clout, Simpson kept spinning out of control. Falling in and out of rehab and dealing with his physical decline through frequent trips to the plastic surgeon, he left more and more of the business to his partner. By the time The Rock went into production in late 1995, Bruckheimer was reportedly doing all the work. In December of that year, the partnership was officially dissolved--a breakup, says Bruckheimer, largely intended to send a message to Simpson.

"You're dealing with a partner you've had since 1983, somebody who's your best friend, somebody you care about a lot," he says. "But it's somebody who also has a lot of problems. So after talking to a number of doctors--not his doctors, but doctors who deal in the area where he had a problem--they said, 'The only thing you can do to wake him up is take away what he likes the most.' I was hoping that if I dissolved the partnership, he would look in the mirror and say, 'Wait a second, I'm doing the wrong thing.'" He sighs. "It didn't quite work out that way."

In January 1996, a month after the official announcement of the split, Don Simpson died of heart failure brought on by what the Los Angeles county coroner would later call the "combined effects of multiple drug intake." "I don't think anybody could have stopped him," says Bruckheimer. "He certainly had the money and the wherewithal to deal with his problems, and he did it at certain points in his life. But he had gone too far, and he couldn't come back."

Bruckheimer got the news as he was about to leave for a Friday afternoon meeting at Disney. "You think for years you'll be getting that phone call," he says, "but when it happens it's still a big shock. He had survived so many close calls, and we felt he was trying to come back at that point. But his body was too deteriorated. He abused it too much."

•

"I feel the need, the need for speed."--Maverick and Goose, from Top Gun

One of the reasons Bruckheimer has a trademark name in Hollywood is that all of his movies tend to look alike--regardless of whom the actual director is. In fact, a visit to the set of Gone in 60 Seconds makes the pecking order abundantly clear. The director's chair reads: A Jerry Bruckheimer Production. Beneath that: Gone in 60 Seconds. And finally: A Dominic Sena Film.

Sena, a commercial director working on only his second feature (his first having been the unsuccessful Kalifornia), was in many ways a typical Bruckheimer director: Coyote Ugly's David McNally was a first-timer, while Remember the Titans' helmer, Boaz Yakin, had two little-seen features to his credit. On the set, Sena had a hard time sitting still until the first take ended and Bruckheimer began to make quiet suggestions. Then Sena leaned forward as the producer kept talking. "Yeah," Sena said. "Yeah ... right ... yeah.... That would be good, that's a pretty cool way to handle it.... Yeah ... yeah ... that's good...."

Then again, at least Sena had Bruckheimer on hand. One crew member who worked on Coyote Ugly remembers that experience as "the most frustrating set I've ever been on. Every time we finished a take, the director got on the phone to see what Bruckheimer wanted to do next. Usually, you either move on or you do it again--but on that set, we sat around and waited for Jerry to come to the phone."

Critics have been suggesting as much for years. The Village Voice has said, "Jerry Bruckheimer ... lords over what is now the most emblematic of Hollywood summer styles: the demolition-derby impressionism associated with blockbusteras-bazookas like The Rock and Armageddon." A Los Angeles Times review of Remember the Titans cited Bruckheimer in the headline and devoted the first three paragraphs to him before its sole parenthetical mention of director Boaz Yakin. The implications are clear: Sena and McNally and Yakin (or even bigger-name Bruckheimer directors like Michael Bay and Tony Scott) may be calling "action" and "cut," but Jerry is calling the shots.

"That's not really true, and it's kind of unfair," says Bruckheimer. "I choose the directors based on a combined vision. It's not my vision over theirs. The reason the pictures have a similar look and feel is the choices we make in putting them together. It's not that we force the director to go a certain way. He's already there. That's the reason we chose him."

Surprisingly, Titans wound up as the biggest of Bruckheimer's three movies last year; Gone in 60 Seconds and Coyote Ugly were viewed in many quarters as box-office disappointments, though Bruckheimer refuses to concede that point. Titans, he says, "is a $100 million movie, did a fortune overseas and is a big success," while the others "were small movies that did over $60 million each--quite an accomplishment for pictures with nobody you'd ever heard of."

He's been known to phone critics who he feels have misread his intentions or impugned his motives. But mostly, he tries to stay above the fray. Sure, he's read the scathing reviews of his work over the years. He knows his films have been called "happy horseshit," "asteroidal asininity," "profound inanity," "generic tough-guy twaddle," "colossal and brain-dead."

"One reviewer called Flashdance a toxic waste dump, then about five or six years later rereviewed the picture and said, 'I missed it,'" Bruckheimer says. "At the time, Beverly Hills Cop didn't get good reviews, Top Gun didn't get good reviews, but when they're referred to later on, they're called 'well reviewed.' It's bizarre. But had I gotten great reviews and nobody showed up, we wouldn't be sitting in this big office. What's important to the people who put up the money for these pictures is, do they perform? So far they've performed. And that allows me to keep making movies."

Which is what he's doing. These days, Bruckheimer Films is rushing to beat possible actors' and writers' strikes by simultaneously shooting three films. The low-budget comedy Down and Under is filming in Australia, director Ridley Scott's true-life military drama Black Hawk Down in Morocco and the Anthony Hopkins--Chris Rock comedy Black Sheep in Prague. "With Pearl Harbor finishing here, we'll be on three continents," he says. "I'll be running around a lot."

Meanwhile, Bruckheimer's television department prepares to launch an around-the-world reality show over the summer, while CSI continues production on the outskirts of Los Angeles County. On that series, which deals with forensic investigators in Las Vegas, star William Petersen insists that Bruckheimer expects good work but doesn't dictate the style or substance of the show.

"Jerry is a reserved, introspective, efficient producer," Petersen says, "and he's staunch in what he believes in. But he loves artists. If a designer or a composer or an actor or a writer comes to him, he doesn't say, 'This is what I want.' He says, 'What can you show me that will make me happy?'"

In his office Bruckheimer reminisces about another recent trip, a USO tour he took over the Christmas holiday to Bosnia, Kosovo, a carrier off the coast of Naples and an Air Force base in Germany. He accompanied John Glenn, Terry Bradshaw, Ernie Banks, Jewel and former U.S. Secretary of Defense William Cohen. During the trip he showed the troops the Pearl Harbor trailer and gave a short speech--and, he says with a larger-than-usual smile, met his public.

"That's where I get my gratification," he says, "from the kids who want you to autograph Top Gun video boxes, or tell you that they watch Armageddon once a month. The people I make movies for love what we do. The critics might not like it, but the public loves it."

And, in the end, Bruckheimer insists with calm certainty that he's still an insecure guy hoping that people like his movies. "That's what drives me to succeed," he says. "Otherwise, I'd be in Hawaii, sipping mai tais. I don't do it for the money anymore. It's the fun of doing it. I love films, I love the process, I love the people I work with, I love the creativity of it. I get real joy and pleasure out of creating these things and watching people being entertained by them. That's my greatest thrill: standing in the back of the theater and watching people being moved by what you've created--by what you've forced through the system."

"Well, I'm one of those fortunate people who like my job, sir. Got my first chemistry set when I was seven, blew my eyebrows off, we never saw the cat again, been into it ever since."--Stanley Goodspeed, from The Rock