Playboy Interview: Jerry Bruckheimer

Jerry Bruckheimer's work is inescapable. Try watching network TV almost any weeknight without catching the lightning-flash logo that reads "Jerry Bruckheimer Television" at the tail end of CSI, CSI: Miami, CSI: NY, Without a Trace and Cold Case--critically acclaimed, top-20 most-watched shows--as well as other favorites such as E-Ring, Close to Home and The Amazing Race. With Bruckheimer as executive producer of seven series currently running on one network alone, no wonder Leslie Moonves, the president and CEO of CBS Corporation, says, "I sometimes think the 'B' in CBS means Bruckheimer." You can hardly ignore the producer's presence on syndicated TV, either, where several seasons' worth of CSI and The Amazing Race play in heavy rerun rotation to big audiences.

On movie screens Bruckheimer's mark is even more indelible. His films have grossed well in excess of $13 billion worldwide, making him the most successful producer in history. This month brings the release of his Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, starring Johnny Depp. It's a sequel to 2003's Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, which grabbed more than $654 million at theaters worldwide and $360 million in DVD sales. Arriving later this year will be the Bruckheimer crime thriller Déjà Vu, starring Denzel Washington and directed by Tony Scott. Those are just the latest in a more than 25-year-long string of Bruckheimer juggernauts that began with the high-concept 1980s smashes Flash-dance, Beverly Hills Cop, Beverly Hills Cop II and Top Gun, and continued with Bad Boys, Crimson Tide and The Rock, all co-produced with brash, hard-partying bad boy Don Simpson, co-founder, in 1982, of Don Simpson/Jerry Bruckheimer Productions.

Simpson's freewheeling and at times self-destructive behavior prompted Bruckheimer to sever their partnership at the end of 1995. Less than a month later Simpson was dead at the age of 52, reportedly from natural causes. Without his more colorful, talented partner Bruckheimer was widely considered over and done with, but he has since flown even higher with hits like Armageddon, Remember the Titans, Black Hawk Down and National Treasure--movies notable for their big budgets, high testosterone counts, explosions, rock anthems and stars such as Tom Cruise, Will Smith and Nicolas Cage. Even disappointments on the big screen (Kangaroo Jack, King Arthur) and the small (Skin, Fearless) haven't dented Bruckheimer's hit rate. With 15 Oscar nominations, two Oscars for best song, four Grammys and three Golden Globes, he ranked higher on Premiere magazine's most recent power list than Cruise, Tom Hanks, George Lucas and Adam Sandler.

Bruckheimer's fingerprints are all over pop culture, but little is known about him personally. Jerome Bruckheimer was born in 1945 in Detroit, Michigan to German immigrant parents; his father was a clothing retailer, his mother a bookkeeper and housewife. An indifferent student, he graduated with a psychology degree from the University of Arizona. Actualizing a lifelong talent for photography, he landed work with a Detroit advertising agency, where he began producing award-winning commercials. A bigger ad agency lured him to New York when he was 23. He produced commercials there for four years before moving to Hollywood, where he scored a stylish hit in 1980 with American Gigolo and again, two years later, with Cat People. But Bruckheimer and Simpson's unlikely pairing defined 1980s Hollywood excess and success. Neither Hollywood nor pop culture has been the same since.

Playboy sent Contributing Editor Stephen Rebello, who most recently interviewed Pierce Brosnan for the magazine, to meet with the producer. "Despite the explosive movies he's best known for," Rebello reports, "Jerry Bruckheimer is smart, restrained, tightly coiled and meticulously groomed and dresses in gray, black and brown--the antithesis of the clichéd, showy Hollywood producer. In the brick-and-exposed-beam office of his Santa Monica--based production company, even the napkins that accompany the glass beverage tumblers--no cans or bottles allowed--are black. He smiles sparingly, speaks so softly you have to lean forward to hear him and can be cagey about divulging personal information. But when he showed scenes from his upcoming Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, he beamed when I laughed out loud at Johnny Depp's performance, as if he were already anticipating the ticket sales."

[Q] Playboy: Audiences and critics describe such movies of yours as Top Gun, Con Air, Bad Boys and Armageddon as adrenaline rushes. When was your last adrenaline rush?

[A] Bruckheimer: Last night when I played hockey. I've been playing here in Los Angeles for 12 years and do so a couple of times a week whenever I'm in town. Hockey is violent, graceful and very trying physically, and it takes enormous coordination to be good at it. There are brilliant athletes in all sports, of course, but hockey players aren't even on their own feet. They're on quarter-inch blades. So for me, seeing someone able to skate and have that energy, high skill and athleticism is phenomenal. When you're not a gifted athlete--which I'm not, but I'm a really good player--and you've got these guys coming at you on the ice who are incredible, you just try to stay out of their way and survive. I can't think about anything else but pure survival and making it off the ice without breaking something or getting killed.

[Q] Playboy: Famous guys have played hockey with you--Kiefer Sutherland, Cuba Gooding Jr. and Tom Cruise, for instance.

[A] Bruckheimer: The guys I play with are all from different parts of Los Angeles. They don't care that I'm a producer. Some are in the music or entertainment business--like Cuba Gooding Jr.--but one guy rents motorcycles, one guy is a club promoter. I want to organize things. I organized a baseball team when I was seven or eight. I was never good enough to play on someone else's team, so I put one together and got to play on it. For the same reason, when I was 11 or 12, I got a bunch of neighborhood kids together to make a hockey team. The wonderful thing about hockey or baseball is the locker room. You talk there; you get to know each other. So over the years I've been playing hockey here, we've all become friends.

[Q] Playboy: Compare your style as a producer with the style of a well-known hockey player.

[A] Bruckheimer: In the old days Alex Delvecchio played for the Detroit Red Wings and was phenomenal, but he was a very quiet, workmanlike, terrific player who didn't beat his chest, and he was in service to Gordie Howe, one of the greatest players ever. That's the analogy.

[Q] Playboy: Do your hockey pals cross the line and try to slip you scripts?

[A] Bruckheimer: My friends, the group we hang with, are fine, but it happens all the time outside of that. I'll be going through the gym and people are waiting to hand me scripts. I was in a restaurant the other day, and a guy said, "I have my script in the car. Can I go get it?" I understand, of course, but I can't accept unsolicited material, because the world is so litigious now.

[Q] Playboy: You're famous around Hollywood for being one of George W. Bush's biggest supporters. Do you ever feel like the odd man out?

[A] Bruckheimer: Look at what Winston Churchill went through, yet he became a hero during World War II and kept his country together. The peaks and valleys are just part of political life. I admire Bush and his administration for sticking to their guns. Anybody else would have run for the hills and Iraq would have turned bad. They went in for obvious reasons, and they're there to do a job. You had a government that kept thumbing its nose at the rest of the world. The UN was a joke and never did anything about it. You and I don't know everything about all the reasons for going into Iraq, but I've talked to individuals in the government who told me they watched through satellites as the Iraqis took weapons out the back door while UN inspectors were coming in. I think the U.S. government knows the weapons were just moved out of the country. So ridding the Middle East of this individual makes us a little safer, I hope.

[Q] Playboy: You were of draft age during the Vietnam war. Were you called for service?

[A] Bruckheimer: I was, but I was 1-Y because a disc in my back is pushed forward, so they didn't take me. It was an unfortunate thing. I could have been a liability to them. They didn't want to have to pay me for the rest of my life. Today when I play hockey I'm just sort of stiff and sore in the morning.

[Q] Playboy: I understand you were invited to the White House to show Bush your movie about the Texas Western basketball team, Glory Road, which, like your inspirational football movie, Remember the Titans, has the cleanest PG-rated language imaginable for a sports film.

[A] Bruckheimer: When we went to the White House a couple of weeks ago and screened it for him, he was very moved by it, especially being a Texan. We wanted to make the language truer to the language of the times in Remember the Titans, which was set in the 1970s, but nobody wanted to make that movie. With both movies, telling that story to the audience that should see it was more important to me than the language.

[Q] Playboy: Is it true that, because you prefer actors with big white smiles, you paid for expensive cosmetic dentistry for the young Tom Cruise and, more recently, Ben Affleck in Pearl Harbor?

[A] Bruckheimer: I'll tell you never with Tom, but I won't comment on Ben. Look, film is a visual medium. Those choices depend on the role, the character, and the request usually comes from the actor, not from me.

[Q] Playboy: The movies you and Cruise have made together--the massive 1986 hit Top Gun and 1990's Days of Thunder--helped create his cocky, macho image. Recently, though, he's become known for bouncing on Oprah Winfrey's couch, declaring his love for Katie Holmes, promoting Scientology and calling psychiatry a pseudoscience on the Today show. Has he damaged his public image?

[A] Bruckheimer: I doubt it. I'll take the grosses of War of the Worlds anytime. Put him in a good movie and people are going to be there. Tom's an enthusiastic guy; you just haven't seen that side of him. I don't think enthusiasm is aberrant behavior. You don't want everybody to be like me--laid-back and easygoing. You want people around you to actually get excited. Tom gets excited.

[Q] Playboy: Having retooled the screen image of a number of young actors over the years, turning Nicolas Cage into an action star with The Rock, Con Air and National Treasure and doing the same with Affleck in Armageddon and Pearl Harbor, what would you do with Jennifer Lopez? Brad Pitt? Jennifer Garner? George Clooney? Or to reinvent Affleck?

[A] Bruckheimer: I never want to see an actor acting. The greatest actors are the ones you watch and think you're seeing a real person. Jennifer Lopez is a gifted singer, dancer and comedian. I'd love to make a musical with her. I'd cast Brad Pitt as an architect because he's so passionate about architecture; I'd like to take what he has in real life and put it on the screen. I'd put Jennifer Garner in a very serious role because I don't think she's been asked to show she has that ability. After Syriana, Ocean's Eleven and Good Night, and Good Luck, it's hard to say what to do with George Clooney because he is already doing it all. Ben is very smart, a good actor and a wonderful writer. He's going to come back as big as ever because he's talented. It all comes down to choices in roles and luck, but luck is when opportunity meets preparation. We had Eric Bana--I love this--in Black Hawk Down, but he's a phenomenal comedian who had his own successful comedy show for years in Australia, and I'd love to put him in a real comedy. I've got to stop talking about it, though, because these are good ideas other people are going to steal.

[Q] Playboy: Why didn't Affleck star in Glory Road as real-life coach Don Haskins, who in 1966 led the first college team with an all-black starting lineup to make it to the NCAA tournament?

[A] Bruckheimer: There was a discrepancy between what he felt his fee should be and what Disney felt his fee should be, so it didn't happen.

[Q] Playboy: Why do you think Affleck, Cruise, Cage, Johnny Depp and Will Smith have worked with you repeatedly and harmoniously?

[A] Bruckheimer: I just want to get the most talented people I can get together on the ship, guide them to the shore and make sure the ship is in great shape when we get there. Part of my job is protecting actors from all the outside negativity that comes with the work we do and just allow them to create wonderful films. We treat actors well. We pay them well. If there's a problem, you have to see both sides. There's always a solution.

[Q] Playboy: Are critics accurate when they say the big action movies Cage has done with you have made him more famous and commercially bankable but less respected as a serious actor?

[A] Bruckheimer: I think that criticism is kind of misguided. Nic is a wonderful actor who knows how to balance the commercial movies he does with us with things he has enormous passion for but doesn't get paid much for at all. You've got to commend him for that. I mean, look at Clint Eastwood, who is a prime example--somebody who can go off and do Dirty Harry but can also win Oscars for Million Dollar Baby. I'm sure critics have gone after Eastwood, too, but I don't know and wouldn't say, because I haven't read all his reviews. But he's a revered actor, so I think if he can do it, Cage can do it.

[Q] Playboy: Your new movie is Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest. Have you ever ridden the Pirates of the Caribbean ride in Disneyland?

[A] Bruckheimer: Oh, many times. I love it. For the first movie and this new one, too, we talked about how many little things we could steal from the ride and work into the movie for people who are into the ride. With the first Pirates, the first question everyone asked was, "Jerry, you have all this success. Why would you make a movie out of a Disney ride?"

[Q] Playboy: Didn't you initially resist the idea?

[A] Bruckheimer: Of course I did. Dick Cook, the chairman of Walt Disney Studios, called and said, "We've got this Pirates of the Caribbean project," and the script was by the numbers: a good pirate movie, but that's it. Screenwriters Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio, who did Shrek and are so clever and smart, came to me and said, "What if we turn them into pirates who are trying to return, rather than steal, a treasure and are revealed as skeletons by moonlight?" I love going to movies, and I see myself as just another guy with his hand in the popcorn, so I said, "Now, that's a movie I'd go to see." I called Dick and said, "Here's what we'd like to do with it," and he said, "Go do it."

[Q] Playboy: Is it true Disney would have felt more confident with, say, Jim Carrey or Matthew McConaughey rather than Depp, a great, idiosyncratic actor who hadn't been in huge box-office hits?

[A] Bruckheimer: Disney reached a point where it couldn't make a deal with Johnny--or felt it couldn't--and that's when other names were thrown around. When I said, "I won't make this movie without Johnny," and the director, Gore Verbinski, felt the same way, it kind of forced everybody to make a deal. I went to France a couple of times to try to coerce Johnny into doing it because I just wanted that edge he has.

[Q] Playboy: Didn't the first footage of Depp's gold teeth, dreadlocks, eye shadow and flamboyant rock-star moves panic Disney's brass enough for them to consider replacing him?

[A] Bruckheimer: That's true. Dailies are very deceptive because you see little pieces of a performance over and over again. I knew we were in good shape, but a young studio executive looks at that performance and says, "Oh my God. This is too big. It's too crazy." He's scared to death because it's not normal and Johnny isn't a normal performer. Anything outside the norm will worry a young executive because he thinks he's going to lose his job. You have to call the young executive and say, "Look, this is a wonderful character, and when we cut the scene together it's going to be much different. It will be toned down a bit from what you saw in the dailies."

[Q] Playboy: So studio people continue to try to second-guess the most successful producer in the business?

[A] Bruckheimer: Always. You still have to try to sway people. We're standing on a lot of success, and that's a nice way to go into these things, but there's always somebody who knows more than I do or has different taste. When I told them, "I want Nic Cage for The Rock," they looked at me like I was on acid. The Rock was a big hit. They looked at me like I was on acid again when I wanted Nic for National Treasure. Later those same people will say, "Oh yeah, I always loved that performance." Or "It wasn't me who had a problem with it; it was my boss."

[Q] Playboy: You're known for having a keen sense of how to fix an ailing movie. For example, when your 1995 film Dangerous Minds--with Michelle Pfeiffer as an (continued on page 138)Bruckheimer(continued from page 50) ex-Marine and new high school teacher trying to motivate black and Latino students--wasn't previewing well, you added Coolio's "Gangsta's Paradise" to the soundtrack, which made a huge difference in test screenings.

[A] Bruckheimer: When we previewed the movie, maybe three people were left in the theater at the end. I may exaggerate, but there were a lot of walkouts. When you watch a movie with an audience, they tell you what they like and don't like. You feel it, you sense it. When they start twitching, you know something's wrong, but it's usually not wrong at that exact moment. Usually something has already gone wrong. So you have to try to have clarity, to make sure people understand what's going on. The first Pirates of the Caribbean is a good example. We had a shot of a monkey shrieking in one sequence, and everybody said, "You've got to take it out. It'll disturb kids and everybody else." Instead we put it at the end of the movie, and kids kept going back to the theaters just to see the monkey because they missed it the first time.

[Q] Playboy: Did the success of the first Pirates make things any easier for Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest?

[A] Bruckheimer: Quite the opposite. It was difficult. In this one Captain Jack Sparrow owes Davy Jones his soul. They made a deal that if Jack got the ship The Black Pearl, he'd have to pay Jones back, which he doesn't want to do. It's very intricate and unique, and it has an interesting ending that leads to another adventure. It's a big, ambitious movie with a lot of pirates, huge sets, part-human sea creatures and much commotion. The more wheels you have, the more a little spoke can come loose. Also, I approached it as if we were doing a trilogy, making a second and third Pirates together. We've got the majority of the third movie finished--most of the big stuff--and we're going back to complete it in August.

[Q] Playboy: Depp's performance in the first Pirates earned him an Oscar nomination. Is his performance in the new one any different?

[A] Bruckheimer: He's just a great actor and always finds something interesting and different to do. He doesn't deviate from the character you see in the first film, but there's more depth here. You find out more about him. He's placed in more difficult situations than in the first movie, and he has to finesse his way out of them.

[Q] Playboy: What do you make of George Lucas's recent quote that the blockbuster is dead and that the average movie budget will be only $15 million by 2025?

[A] Bruckheimer: It would be great for the studios if that were true. I'm sure they'd love that. Not to disagree with someone as incredibly smart and talented as George, but I think the blockbuster will still be around. After all, with 35,000 screens in North America, you have to fill them with something. Budgets are going up rather than down.

[Q] Playboy: It's become a hot Hollywood trend for producers and others to wager big money in Vegas on how huge an opening weekend their movies will have and how much money they'll eventually gross. Are you betting on Pirates?

[A] Bruckheimer: I don't bet on things. It's boring to me. I have to go to Las Vegas about once a year, but other than that, it's not for me.

[Q] Playboy: Michael Bay, who directed Armageddon and Pearl Harbor, compared your producing style to water torture. Are you a my-way-or-the-highway type?

[A] Bruckheimer: Never, never, never. I'm persistent. With Michael or any director, we sit down and talk about things, and if I can convince him I'm right, I'm fine. But really, the best argument wins.

[Q] Playboy: Will you admit to having any professional regrets or making any miscalculations? Do you have pangs about having passed on producing The Silence of the Lambs, for instance?

[A] Bruckheimer: Well, when we were offered it, for a moment, but I wasn't eager to live with that story for a year or more. I don't remember what else I made around that time that was very dark, but that film is a very dark tale, and I know what it's like to live that life.

[Q] Playboy: What was it like for you growing up? Was it dark?

[A] Bruckheimer: I lived on the outskirts of Detroit in a nice two-bedroom brick house. If you saw 8 Mile, I lived three blocks from Eight Mile, inside the city. Both my parents were from Germany. There was never a radio on. TV maybe at night. It was very quiet. I was the only child. My mother waited a long time to have a child--she must have been in her 40s--and that decision was based on finances. She was so penurious, she thought they didn't have enough money to have more children. She said my dad never made any money, so she saved every nickel and gave him a dollar a week to buy cigars. My mother, who is still alive, is a great conversationalist. So was my dad. He'd come home and read the newspaper; they'd talk about his day at work, current affairs, politics, family. I would say we were lower-middle-class. My dad for many years was a manager of a very exclusive clothing store in downtown Detroit.

[Q] Playboy: Did your father suit up the notorious killers known as the Purple Gang, who were so tough they basically warned Al Capone, "Hands off Detroit"?

[A] Bruckheimer: They would come into the store, and my father was the salesman who took care of their needs in suits and hats, working with the tailor. It's been written over the years that he was a tailor, but that isn't true. He was fairly well-known by many of the more elegant gentlemen of Detroit. Later he sold more working-class kinds of clothing.

[Q] Playboy: Who were you in school, the brain, the science guy, the all-arounder or a variation?

[A] Bruckheimer: I always had a good clique of friends who used to come to my house and hang out. Though I wasn't a good athlete, I was into athletics, and we'd play basketball or hockey. Reading for me was very difficult because I'm slightly dyslexic. I was always in the slowest reading group. Even in second- or third-grade reading groups, it was very difficult for me. In those days dyslexia was unknown, so teachers just thought I wasn't very bright because I had such a hard time. It was always painful for me to read in public. Reading was never something I gravitated toward until much later.

[Q] Playboy: How did you learn to deal with your dyslexia?

[A] Bruckheimer: The brain overcomes some of its deficiencies. I observed. I was always a good listener. I'm a student of human behavior. I was never very outgoing, never someone who was at ease in conversation--which you're finding out right now. I had an uncle, this wonderful, gruff, tough, take-no-prisoners kind of businessman who was fairly wealthy, and he would give me his hand-me-down cameras from the time I was five or six. I was always taking snapshots, and later, when I was in the ninth or 10th grade, I started printing my own pictures, which I entered into photo shows and won a number of awards from Kodak and National Scholastics. I had a great visual sense. I saw the world differently than other people.

[Q] Playboy: What did your practical-minded parents make of your talent?

[A] Bruckheimer: The way they were brought up, unless you were a doctor or lawyer, a real professional, you were a failure. When I went to Los Angeles to be part of the movie business, they couldn't figure out what I was doing. To them it was a disaster, and not until I was a success did it make an impact on them. My father died before my biggest hits came out.

[Q] Playboy: So your father didn't get to see you become who you are today.

[A] Bruckheimer: I always was who I am today. I just hadn't reached the heights of what little notoriety I now have.

[Q] Playboy: How did your father or mother explain the facts of life to you?

[A] Bruckheimer: My parents? Are you kidding me? Not a chance. Germans? Come on. They were too repressed. I learned through friends. Buddies would talk about it. I mean, you're 13, 12, and you're having a sexual awakening, but I heard about those experiences only through my friends or their brothers or sisters, and of course, they relayed them with embellishments.

[Q] Playboy: You went from being an award-winning high school photographer to graduating from the University of Arizona. Why did you go there?

[A] Bruckheimer: It took me. My grades weren't exactly stellar. I was a C student. You know, I had to be professional, and since I was never going to be a lawyer or doctor, I started in dentistry. My mother would have been thrilled if I'd had a Dr. in front of my name, but then I got into organic chemistry and said, "What am I doing? This doesn't interest me. I'm not good at this." I moved into psychology. I enjoyed learning about myself and other people's behaviors. I felt anytime I can improve myself, I should try to do that. But I didn't want to go beyond that and get a master's or a doctorate.

[Q] Playboy: What was your first job out of college?

[A] Bruckheimer: At 21 I worked in the mail room at an advertising agency in Chicago. Half the kids there had dropped out of high school. When a woman who worked in the television department told me her boss had gone to Hollywood and made a movie, suddenly a lightbulb went on. Remember, I came from a very quiet home. I didn't realize that someone who came from our world, meaning Detroit, could go out and make it in Hollywood. My main purpose was survival--making a living--because I couldn't fall back on a trust fund or money in the bank. I couldn't call home and say, "Look, send me $500." None of those things were there, so I had to sink or swim. The dream of everybody in advertising is to do movies.

[Q] Playboy: How did you survive in L.A. when you went out there to live the dream?

[A] Bruckheimer: I was married to my first wife, and she worked for Columbia Pictures as an assistant, a secretary. I lived in Laurel Canyon, across the street from Alice Cooper. It was the beginning of the 1970s, and there was a lot of denim and long hair in those days, sort of the end of the Haight-Ashbury era, so it was a little psychedelic.

[Q] Playboy: If you wanted to be in then, you probably should have been a little psychedelic yourself.

[A] Bruckheimer: No, no. I wasn't part of that ever.

[Q] Playboy: Come on. You've never even smoked a joint?

[A] Bruckheimer: I wouldn't say that. But I wouldn't say anything on the record. I don't like to lose control. You'll never see me stumbling drunk.

[Q] Playboy: In 1975 you worked your way inside enough to become a producer on Farewell, My Lovely, starring the great tough-guy actor Robert Mitchum. Any tales to tell?

[A] Bruckheimer: God, he was a real character. He told the greatest stories. There was this one about working on a picture with a really tough director. Mitchum was talking on the phone and stayed on the phone even though they kept calling for him to shoot a scene. Finally Mitchum hung up, walked off the stage and didn't come back for two hours. When they asked what was going on and where he'd been, he explained that he had found out on the phone that he had the clap and wanted to see the doctor right away because it was really important to him.

[Q] Playboy:American Gigolo, which you produced in 1980, put you on the map. Despite its hero--an upwardly mobile paid escort to rich older women--it, like most of your movies, isn't very erotic.

[A] Bruckheimer: I haven't done that kind of movie. It's just about choices, and that hasn't presented itself. If Americans want eroticism, they can log on to an adult site on their computer. One click and a credit card number and they can get all the eroticism they want. It's different with feature films. We're doing a picture right now, Déjà Vu, starring Denzel Washington with Tony Scott directing; it's a love story--a partial love story--and there's a very beautiful young woman in it named Paula Patton, who has never been in a big movie before. Tony saw a lot of actresses and narrowed them down to four or five women he thought were right for the part, and I particularly sparked to this one girl for the role. But there's no passionate love scene in the film.

[Q] Playboy: Tell us about meeting your producing partner Don Simpson, who, before his death, in January 1996, was as notorious for his excesses with partying, drugs and women as he was respected for being a shrewd idea man and dealmaker.

[A] Bruckheimer: It was 1973. Don and I met at a screening of The Harder They Come at Warner Bros., where he had been working. When I got divorced and had no place to live, he had a six-bedroom house in Laurel Canyon, and I moved in. We were acquaintances. We liked each other, liked a lot of the same things in movies. With him I didn't have to talk much, which was a good thing. He was just a very entertaining personality--vivacious, funny, a great storyteller.

[Q] Playboy: With his being so out there and your being so quiet, did you ever resent all the energy and attention going his way?

[A] Bruckheimer: That was okay too. I'm comfortable with who I am, what I do, the knowledge I have. In Hollywood there are people who can talk the talk but can't walk the walk. I walk the walk.

[Q] Playboy: You and Simpson hired a publicist in the 1980s to get your names out to the public. Was that wise?

[A] Bruckheimer: Don didn't tell anybody this, but before he became an executive at Paramount, he was a publicist hawking movies in San Francisco and then was hired by the Warner Bros, publicity department. Later, as an executive at Paramount, he heard things like, "We don't want the filmmakers getting credit for what they do, because they'll become famous and demand more money. Paramount makes those movies, they don't." Don said to me, "If I'm going to win, I'm going to let people know who's doing the work. And we're going to be doing the work." When we had a new movie, we would force the studio to take us on tour with the actors. That was unheard of. Producers never went out to publicize their movies.

[Q] Playboy: In the 1980s people wrote constantly about your enormous ego. How intense is your need for attention and acclaim?

[A] Bruckheimer: Do I come across like that?

[Q] Playboy: Not really. But shrinking violets don't usually build movie-and-TV empires and make a reported $5 million a movie as you do. Is it true that today, contractually, your name must be mentioned a specific number of times in TV commercials for your products?

[A] Bruckheimer: Yeah, sure. We did the work; we want to have the imprint of our company on that work. Sometimes it's not appropriate, and my name is not there. It's about the work.

[Q] Playboy: The media flayed you and Simpson for having a massive custom-made desk at which you both sat, for living in matching architecturally edgy houses, for driving twin sports cars and wearing Armani clothes, not to mention Simpson's habit of throwing away his jeans as soon as they needed laundering. Or was that you?

[A] Bruckheimer: That was Don. I'm a poor kid from Detroit. I never throw anything away. My wife says, "You've got to clean out your closet. You've got stuff jammed back here from the 1980s." Journalists would tell us they were writing a story about these yuppies who had made it, and we believed them. We were naive. The press's agenda was "Kill these guys," not "Make them look good." We were eviscerated.

[Q] Playboy: Even today, stories about you persist. Some say you have a special arrangement that gives you access anywhere in the world to a Range Rover, the engine of which must be running 24--7.

[A] Bruckheimer: Not true. They rented a Range Rover for me when I was in Ireland, doing either Veronica Guerin or King Arthur, but that's really it. I don't have one wherever I go.

[Q] Playboy: But you have a pool table covered in Armani-esque gray felt?

[A] Bruckheimer: That's true. No Range Rover, but the pool table, that's true.

[Q] Playboy: You had severed your business partnership with Don Simpson less than a month before he died. Any feelings about that 10 years later?

[A] Bruckheimer: It's the same as it was then. It's like losing a brother. Time heals a lot. He'll never get old. He'll always be what he was then. Whatever his last picture was, that's how he'll always be remembered. Many people warned Don about where he was going. I talked with doctors and told him that when this was over, when he got his life back together, we could talk about getting back together. Doctors say that's the best thing you can do. But all of us feel we can live forever. He didn't think he was going to die. I felt I did what I could do. Whether it's Don or my father, I know they're out there somewhere. They're a part of me. There's a spirit out there, an energy. Oh, there's a sense of guilt that you didn't do enough--I'm talking about my father now--because you realize life is finite, that you should do what you can for someone while he's around. I talk with my mother every day, do whatever I can to make her life comfortable. I love to make people feel good. That's what I've always loved about making movies. I go to the theater after our movies are out and watch people react. You'll see me standing by the aisle in the back in the first couple of weeks. I get a glow from it.

[Q] Playboy: Why haven't you directed a movie or TV series?

[A] Bruckheimer: I never say never, but I don't know if I could sit there and watch take after take. I can't survive unless I multitask. When I'm riding the exercise bike in the morning, I'm reading a script or watching one of our TV shows, so I'm always trying to do a couple of things at once. If I directed, the project would have to be something I felt I could do a better job on than somebody else--which is rare, because all the directors I work with are brilliant and see things much differently and better than I do.

[Q] Playboy: Would you like to run a studio or TV network?

[A] Bruckheimer: I've had fliers about movie studios but never a TV network. I wouldn't know what to do. Having been friendly with Don when he ran Paramount, although he wasn't the top guy, I could see it's probably not for me. I'd rather work with talented actors, directors, editors and musicians, be a part of that. It's still a blast.

[Q] Playboy: Recent unrated, extended DVD editions are out for Con Air and Enemy of the State. Do you want to fine-tune your movies once they're in theaters?

[A] Bruckheimer: Always. So much so that, once they're out of release, I don't see them. I can't change them. I can't really change them once they're in theaters, but at least then I can enjoy them. I look at them later and say, "Oh, why did we make that decision?" Silly. People like these DVDs, though, because they're fascinated by things that were cut out of the movie. People at Disney were telling me that in markets where they released the PG-13 version of King Arthur that had run in theaters, the DVDs sat on the shelves. But where they also released an unrated version, that one went through the roof. The public loves it when you let your pants down and show it all.

[Q] Playboy: What aspect of producing grinds you down the most?

[A] Bruckheimer: The deal process. It's so time-consuming and sometimes ridiculous because you know where you're going to end up, you know what the studio's willing to pay and how far you can draw the line. You're fighting over $500 or $1,000 for a hotel room or an airline flight for an assistant. The business in general certainly wears you down. You go through periods of enormous stress. You certainly lose a lot of brain cells when you sit in some of these script meetings, trying to figure out how to make scripts work. If you do make them work, it looks so easy and simple. It's like, "Why couldn't we think of that before?"

[Q] Playboy: How do things work between you and Leslie Moonves, the head of CBS, where you have three CSIs, Without a Trace, Cold Case, Close to Home and The Amazing Race? That's seven hours on just one network.

[A] Bruckheimer: I thrive in environments where I'm surrounded by talented people. I know that adds to my success. It's easy with Les, who is enormously gifted. He used to be an actor, and he's incredible with casting. I'll go to a reading or look at a piece of film and think someone is pretty gifted, but Les will look at actors and have them do something, then say later, "You can see they don't have it." Again, he sees things differently than the rest of the world. He takes those chances. My success at CBS is really due to him, because he is so good at what he does.

[Q] Playboy: What do you make of the FCC slapping a $3.6 million indecency fine on CBS because of a 2004 episode of your missing-persons show, Without a Trace, showing teens in orgy-style high jinks?

[A] Bruckheimer: I hope CBS will fight it and show that it's not any different from a lot of other things on television. We have a conservative administration, which I'm a fan of, and that's just the way the country is leaning. These things come in cycles. We get too liberal, and then we kind of drift the other way. I hope we'll drift into the center.

[Q] Playboy: Are you expressing a personal preference by using cool, sharp, blonde leading ladies like Kathryn Morris on Cold Case, Poppy Montgomery on Without a Trace and Jennifer Finnigan on Close to Home? The Bruckheimer blondes?

[A] Bruckheimer: I love it. I was totally unaware of it until an L.A. journalist put that together. He's right, but it wasn't intentional. Sometimes an actor will come in with red or brown hair and you want to change the look, or some actors just walk in with blonde hair already, or we feel that the mix on the show would be better with a blonde. It just happened.

[Q] Playboy: Your short-lived 2004 series Fearless featured Rachael Leigh Cook as a federal agent born without the fear gene. What frightens you?

[A] Bruckheimer: Failure frightens me. I don't know about everybody else, but it certainly drives me. Failure doesn't feel good. Nobody wants to get up in the morning and say to himself, "Gee, you just failed again." It's like getting an F on your exam at school, which I did. You don't go home and say, "Ma, look at this!" We did a pilot for Fearless and pulled the show off the air because we didn't feel it was up to our expectations, and we told the network we didn't want to produce it. We've done that with a couple of other scripts, too, even though the networks were willing to go ahead and shoot them.

[Q] Playboy: How do you react to the criticism that some of the movies you've made, like Bad Boys, Con Air, Gone in Sixty Seconds and Pearl Harbor, have dumbed down moviemaking?

[A] Bruckheimer: The journalists say that. The millions of people who see the movies don't say that. They pay a lot of money to see our movies, but I think we may offend a few people who have the power of the pen, so that's why that message gets passed along. I don't read reviews. The good ones are never good enough, and the bad ones are too much, so why bother? I made a decision a long time ago to believe not in the reviews but in the box office.

[Q] Playboy: Your wife, Linda--a former Mirabella editor, a best-selling novelist and an antiques dealer, whom you've been with for nearly 30 years--writes some fairly strong letters to critics of your movies.

[A] Bruckheimer: My wife has this theory that a classical-music critic reviews opera, not Eminem, and she feels that if you're a movie critic and you love artistic films, that's what you should review, not big action movies you don't like anyway. She hasn't written any letters like that recently, but she can write a good one, let me tell you.

[Q] Playboy: You're a producer; your wife is a novelist. How well do those two lifestyles mesh?

[A] Bruckheimer: My wife is my best friend, and it's great to have a best friend as part of your life for almost 30 years. She is very committed to her writing. I'll come home at 11, 12 o'clock, and when most wives would be saying, "When can we turn the lights off? I've got to get up in the morning?" she wants to keep writing and asks, "Why are you home so early?" If I had a wife who wanted me home at five and we had to take care of kids, it would be different. But we both love our work.

[Q] Playboy: How do you two relax?

[A] Bruckheimer: We have a farm in Kentucky. I built a little hockey rink there, so I'm happy. I don't ride horses, but we have ATVs, and I have a great time with those. Our daughter is a perfumer, with her own company that's doing very well; all her ingredients are organic, and she's really into that kind of lifestyle. We have five golden retrievers, three here in Los Angeles and two in Kentucky, and a German shepherd here.

[Q] Playboy: You are arguably one of the most successful--and richest--producers in Hollywood history. What would you like the Bruckheimer legacy to be?

[A] Bruckheimer: That we were good entertainers. That our company constantly made entertaining movies and television shows. And that we let the work speak for itself.

The blockbuster will still be around. With 35,000 screens, you have to fill them with something.

I'm slightly dyslexic. Teachers just thought I wasn't very bright because I had such a hard time.