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juliezhou

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[top gun] Don, Jerry, Kelly
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Don Simpson: The Broken King

The producer of the original Top Gun

Trigger Warning: abusive behavior, aggressive language

It was 1983. A blizzard had seized Anchorage, Alaska. Through the glass of the theater, I watched a limousine pull up into the night. In hurtling snow, the driver opened the door. Stepping out of the limo, in a knee-length camel hair coat, in mirrored shades, was the president of production of Paramount Pictures and, one day, the producer of Top Gun, the biggest movie of 1986.

This was Don Simpson. He looked like a Hollywood star arriving at the red carpet. But this was not a premier. This was a preview of a work in progress. Don looked to his right, then his left, searching for the fans. He was confused and high. Anchorage had closed down and there wasn’t a car in sight, let alone a human being.

This cold, god-forsaken city where the sun comes up only six months a year was Don’s hometown. Paramount has spent $137,000. to lug double system projectors so the unfinished film could be viewed for a recruited audience. The prodigal son returned in triumph as Paramount’s head of production. But there were only eight people in the audience to witness his triumph.

Fathers, be good to your sons. When they misbehave, don’t throw them against walls. Don’t beat them with your fists. You might think you are demonstrating discipline. Instead, you are showing your cards. When you use bare-knuckles, your sons can smell the viciousness and disappointment on your breath. When your sons are scared, take their hands, lead them towards an image of the shining hero, the aspiration that may have eluded you, but which is still possible for them.

Over the years as a studio man, Don was obsessed with the foul-mouthed disciplinarian. This was his father. In real or false memory, Don’s father was a tower of abuse. The movies Don made, The Lords of Discipline, An Officer and a Gentleman, and even, to a degree, Top Gun reflected that theme. Don Simpson’s assaults by his father carried a shadow over his life, whether real or imagined. The worst part of it was that Don’s Dad, according to Don, was a fundamentalist who beat him when he faltered on a Bible verse.

Don had an intelligent, mellifluous voice. He held the room when he spoke. What he had to say was insightful. When I first met Don in 1978, he was bright and eager, sitting in front of a collage-print of Andy Warhol’s Mao Tse Tung. I was in his office to interview for the job of Paramount’s story editor. I was a dork, dressed in my chinos and JC Penney’s clip-on tie. I was not handsome or pretty like the others in the waiting room.

“Why should I hire you?”

“I am a big fan of Jungian psychology,” I answered. I was such a dork. “I believe in Carl Jung’s theory of the Collective Unconsciousness — all of humanity dreams the same dream: of kings, and queens, and knights, and fools, and beasts. If you hire me, I will help you make hits because the scripts will reflect those dreams. And when people see those movies, they will feel the deep connection. You see, Don, good movies, I mean really good movies, are not escapism, they are about returning home . . . to ourselves.”

I could talk the **** like Don could talk the ****. He hired me in the room. I was to get with HR about the compensation and terms. As I left his office, he said to me, “One more thing.” I turned to face him.

“What?”

“Learn to be indispensable.”

What he was really saying is he wanted me to be indispensable to him. In his charming, chubby bearded face, I saw the need. Sure, we could talk the **** together. But that one look, I saw him and what he needed most. He was the broken king. I would be the armor that held him up so he would look intact to the world, unwounded by war.

Over the years, I became indispensable to Don. A functioning addict, Don’s dependence on drugs expanded in the 12 years I knew him. Every day around four pm, after his “power-nap” I was called to his office to get the low down. In full blown Henry the VIII fashion, he sat at his desk eating “breakfast” — KFC chicken out of a bucket. If he didn’t like something I said, he would chuck a chicken bone at my chinos. “You owe me $78. 53,” I said handing him a stapled batch of bills. It was the dry-cleaning receipts for the splattered chicken grease. I would make him pay it from his personal checking account as I loomed over him. This was a monthly ritual for several years.

One late Friday night, I pulled up to his house on Cherokee to deliver notes on An Officer and a Gentleman. I saw the red dot of a laser on my tie. I looked for the source of it and saw Don, in boxer shorts on the rooftop with an UZI machine gun aimed at my heart. It took me a half hour to talk him down and convince him that I was his friend. I had not come to kill him but to deliver my story notes. Don must have been somewhat lucid because I got a call later that night from some drug- pusher apologizing for his behavior “on the roof.”

The hardest part of my job as Story Editor were Don’s endless notes. Don’t get me wrong. He had a genius-mind. Is it any wonder that the opening credits of Top Gun Maverick fawn over his name and credit as if he was a god from Valhalla? If it had not been for Don finding the article “Top Guns” in California magazine, there would have been no Top Gun franchise. Indeed, Maverick’s trigger-hot temper, his “need for speed”, and his dark, unresolved relationship with his father, was the character of Don.

BUT when Don allowed the meds, coke, and booze to drown his mind, his story ideas were often damaging. In the winter months, he would go to Palm Springs for the weekend, load up on the latest blend of god-knows-what and talk the **** all day and night into a tape recorder while he lounged by the pool. On Monday, four Paramount transcribers would take the tapes and turn them into written tomes. By the afternoon, I would have to weed through them. Often the notes were longer than the 120 page script they referenced.

Don and I argued over An Officer and a Gentleman. He saw the drill instructor (Lou Gossett) — cadet (Richard Gere) plot as the A story and the romance between the Richard Gere and a townie (Debra Winger) as the B story. “That’s not commercial,” I said. By then, Don was so out of it, he seldom knew what was going on. In plain sight, I disobeyed him and changed his notes to support the romance as the A story. I manipulated dailies so he only got to see tough-guy stuff and nothing romantic except for the raw footage of the Gere and Winger having sex which he enjoyed immensely.

Don Simpson saw the first cut of the Officer and a Gentleman movie with his boss in the Paramount Executive Screening Room His boss was Michael Eisner (president of Paramount). The cut included the crowd-pleasing Gere sweeping Winger out of the factory and into the sunshine. When the screening was over, Don was fuming. He looked at me in ten shades of vengeance and cut his throat with his finger signaling “you’re a dead man.” But Eisner loved the cut and within minutes, Don was praising himself for “finding” the love story of the year and how he pushed for such a unique romance. I was furious but sucked-it up.

Paramount management knew the issues of Don but looked the other way. Like I said, Don was a functioning addict. BUT, he could bring his A game out of his deepest fog. Michael Eisner famously said, “What Don does in his own time is Don’s business, not Paramount’s.” I certainly was not going to ever, ever out him until now, at his prompting. That’s not what guys from Ohio do to guys from Alaska, especially when they make a promise to be indispensable. I lived with every possible humiliation imaginable, most too vivid for this post.



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juliezhou

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Oppressed humans will often develop positive feelings toward their abusers. Stockholm Syndrome is a coping mechanism to deal with abuse. We figure out a way to keep going in dangerous circumstances because we want to survive. In my case, I wanted to learn. Why did it take so long for the Metoo movement to emerge? Stockholm Syndrome.

An Officer and a Gentleman produced for a modest $7.5 million became an international hit. When bonuses came around, I got nothing while other executives bought new houses. “Man, that hurts,” I told Don. I had been at the office for 3 days straight working in my office, sleeping on the floor. I stunk and he had more back-to-business tasks for me from this broken king. “Smell me, you mother****er!” I cried, and I pushed my smelly armpit into his face. “What the **** do you think you are doing to me. I sleep on a ****in floor! I am outta here! I quit.”

That night, I got a call from Don. It was that mellifluous voice again. “Please come back. I am sorry. I need you. I will make it all right with you. A proper contract, a new office. Take the weekend and come back, will you?”

I did come back, only to find my office had been moved to the Dressing Room Building. I opened the office to find a convertible sofa made up as a bed with new white sheets from Bullock Department Store. The office had a shower. I knew the office. It had been Jerry Lewis’ dressing room. In the 1940s and 50s, Lewis had been Paramount’s biggest star. When I learned there was no raise and no contract, I confronted Don one last time.

“You ****ed me over on Officer,” he shouted.

“I made it a hit, you mother****er,” I shouted back.

“You?” he said, laughing. “You did nothing.”

“Nothing? I ****ed you over, you drug-snorting sod!”

I marched in o Michael Eisner’s office and said, “I quit. When you toss Don, give me a call, and I’ll come back. Meanwhile, I will be at the beach.”

Six months later, while I doing odd jobs to survive, Michael Eisner found out that Paramount released Grease II, but that Don, his head of production had never seen the final cut. Michael fired Don. Like all fired movie executives, Don would run out his contract as a Paramount producer.

I came back as a vice president with a contract and a bonus that allowed me to put a down payment on my first house. In an irony that could only be written in the stars, I was to oversee the new producing deal with Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer.

When Don presented me with the California Magazine article, Top Guns, I did everything I could do to develop the project without him. The drug issues had expanded.

Later on when making Beverly Hills Cop II, I found drug-runners had been hired as highly paid “production assistants” and there were a LOT of them. Paramount management would not support my move to fire the runners. So I left the company and took a top job as the head of a rival studio.

Tony Scott, Tom Cruise, and Don Simpson made Days of Thunder without my supervision. They had Robert Towne (Chinatown) writing the script. Don was also going to costar in the movie. In plain sight, he underwent surgery to prepare for the part. He had ribs removed for a new-hour glass figure. They started shooting without a script. Rule #1: Have a script before you start shooting. Robert Towne joined the merry band of lunatics as they shot lots of footage, looking for a story. One night, $140, 000 was spent procuring the proper underwear for Tom for a scene to be shot the next day. Top Gun cost $13.5 million. “Days of Plunder,” cost $170 million and was a colossal bomb.

When I returned to Paramount as President of the Motion Picture Group, the new general counsel presented me with a sheriff’s hat with a nice bright star. “To clean up Dodge?” I asked. He did not need to reply. One of the first calls I got was from Tom Cruise. “It wasn’t my fault. I kept saying, ‘when are we gonna have a script?”

“What do you want to do with these two?” I asked the chairman of the studio, Frank Mancuso.

“You tell me,” Frank replied. “Don just wears you down.”

I never saw “Days of Thunder,” but on my first week on the job, I asked to read the final shooting script for it. One of the greatest screenwriters on the 20th century, Robert Towne, had written godawful drivel. How was that possible? He was working with a coke-head.

This was before the Metoo movement. I looked over the settled abuse cases from Don’s office. Paramount had settled a half a dozen cases of secretarial complaints in Don’s office. On Saturday night Don had “Fellini Nights”. He would play the important Italian director and videocam various hookers playing characters in his stories. The problem was that he would ask his secretaries on Monday to watch the tapes and then file them based on theme and title. The settlement costs were enormous.

Neither Don and Jerry called me and I did not call them. Night after night, I would walk by their offices and glimpsed Don every night looking at catalogues at his big desk made especially for the both of them.

One night, I turned around and walked into Don’s production office. “What are you doing?” I asked, having not talked to him for 4 years.

“Looking for Christmas presents,” he replied.

“When I could barely afford anything for Christmas, your thank you notes were so well written, they made me cry,” I said. “Don, we have been through it all. Let’s quietly send you away. Get off the drugs. No one needs to know.” He said he was not going to get help and he did not have a problem. Many years later, he would escape from the clean-out retreats. “Then I have no other choice then for you to leave the lot. We will draw up a settlement with a million dollar exit bonus and we will give you the rights to all your projects except for sequel and remake rights to Flashdance, Beverly Hills Cop, and Top Gun.”

“You’re firing us?”

“If you won’t promise me to get off the drugs.”

“At least you kept your promise to me,” he said, leaning back in his chair. “ Look at you, you prick.” He laughed. “You have become indispensable.”

“Be out of here by Friday. I never want to see you again. I won’t be at your funeral.”

“Fine. But I promise to haunt you every day you remain alive,” he replied.

We both kept our promises. I never went to his funeral. In my dreams, Don haunts me, forever the broken king. But I am happy to report, things turned out okay on the other side. His force in death is as strong as his force was in life, but now he wants his life to be known as a teachable lesson. “It was never about the drugs,” he says in the dream-scape. “It was about the pain.”

I can’t say that Don’s own accounts of his childhood abuse are factual. But, to him, they were real.

35 years after the original Top Gun, Jerry Bruckheimer returned alone to the Paramount Lot to produce Top Gun Maverick under their settlement agreement. The guys could work on the remakes or sequels.

When Simpson died in January of 1996, at the age of 52, the Los Angeles coroner revealed that his corpse was the most toxic in the history of California autopsy with over 22 different pharmaceuticals in his body at the time of death.

Don Simpson’s voice remains mellifluous. “Fathers,” he says, “don’t throw your sons against the walls. Be good to them.”

Note: I am the Paramount executive of the original Top Gun. I worked at Paramount off and on for 18 years. My last job there in the late 1980s and 1900s was president of the Motion Picture Group.

https://thegoodage.medium.com/don-simpson-the-broken-king-9c44ade9ee78



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Tony Scott’s Genius

The visionary director of the original Top Gun

Trigger alert: Aggressive language

Tony Scott (the director of the original Top Gun) was to have directed Maverick Top Gun. Tony had a signed contract with Paramount and was developing the screenplay. But, ten years ago this August, Tony jumped off a San Pedro bridge to his death. I am not certain of the whys behind the suicide, only that it is always a sad event when someone checks out early. It’s especially sad when it is someone as sunny, bull-headed, and easy-to-laugh as Tony. He silently battled cancer for 40 years but kept it quiet. There was no sign of it in the coroner’s report or any other underlying health issues. His brother, Ridley, called his suicide “inexplicable.”

I first met Tony on the screen. He was a lad of 15 years. He starred in his older brother’s first experimental film. It was shot with a Bolex in Hartelpool England. The movie was called Boy & Bicycle — 45 minutes of Ridley Scott doing fancy camera moves while Tony rode around. It was not as powerful as Truffaut’s first film which also tackled the subject matter of bicycles, but it showed the daring and power of the film language that Ridley would later command in movies from Alien to Bladerunner to Gladiator. Tony had a sweet demeanor in that short movie. While he was 8 years older than I, I always treated him like a younger brother. What does that mean? I was kind but firm with him because he could be prone toward mischief and disobedience even whilst smiling and hugging you.

In the flesh, I first met Tony in an interview with Ned Tanen, the head of the studio, at Ned’s house in Malibu on Channel Road. The meeting was to determine if Tony should direct Top Gun. During the high-tension meeting, Tony fell asleep. In mid-sentence. Explaining his vision in Ned’s favorite chair.

35 Hollywood directors had turned down Top Gun. The producers, Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, were anxious to keep the project alive. But NO ONE wanted to get near it. Don and Jerry had a monster hit with Flashdance. BUT when first viewed, Flashdance was a hot mess. After the preview, the theatre was empty. The audience had walked out. It was that bad. Flashdance went through 35 arduous previews until it morphed into an audience-pleasing juggernaut success. Paramount was infamous for previewing until the movie was the best it could be.

After the meeting with Tony Scott, the head of the studio, Ned Tanen, turned to me and said “well, what do you want to do?” Then came the most important prompt of my life. I learned so much through that prompt.

Ned said, “Listen, I hate this ****in project. I hate these ****in looney-tune producers. Everyone in town hates the script. But I believe in you. If you want to make a ****in movie with this Brit who falls asleep in the middle of a job interview, then be my ****ing guest. You make the decision, right or wrong. And when this ****ing movie comes out, you’re going to wear it, for better or worse. You get it? Do you understand me?”

I took up the gauntlet. To be fair, Tony Scott had gotten off a plane from London and was rushed to Ned’s house on Channel Road for the meeting. He was jet-lagged. I felt bad for my younger brother. That night, I booked a projection room on the Paramount lot, ordered some take-out, and watched Tony’s last movie about lesbian vampires entitled , The Hunger. It was beautiful to look at, and it was godawful. Commercial storytelling demands that a director put the energy of the narrative in the right place. It was a bunch of pretty images and nothing more. In The Hunger, Tony was so focused on closeups of high heels and red-painted mouths and endless fluttering curtains, I never had a clue where I was in the story. He never established the geography of the narrative. There were no masters. No exits and entrances of people into rooms. Where the heck were we?

After a sleepless night, I asked to have breakfast with Tony and his manager, Bill Unger. I explained to Tony that we would hire him to direct Top Gun under two conditions: 1) adhere to the budget of 13.5 million and 2) in every scene, shoot a master up front as protection. “We have to know where we are, Tony. You are a brilliant shooter but we have to know where we are. If we are shooting a bar scene, we need to see the bar to establish the scene. That goes for every scene, whether it be an air hanger or a classroom. “I promise, mate,” he said as he smiled and hugged me.



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I went back to Ned Tanen and told him we had found our man. “Congratulations, you may be the first one to hire a director who fell asleep in an interview.” I explained why we were hiring him, what the simple strategy of obtaining master shots in each scene. I told Ned that I had gone over the financials and believed with some certainty, with Tom Cruise’s star power, we could reach , at least, breakeven if the picture did $50 million in US box office. With that box office, we should do at least 3 million units in home video.” “Listen to you, “he laughed. “You’ll have my job in 3 years.”

“I appreciate the responsibility and for your belief in me,” I said. “No one has ever believed in me like that.”

“Get outta here,” he said but he was choked up. Three years later, I took over his job. He was tired of it.

Ned helped me believe in myself. I never worked so effing hard to make Tony work as the director in all my life.

A note about Ned. He had a great take on young people. At Universal he had made Breakfast Club, Animal House, and the Blue Brothers. At Paramount, he was responsible for the John Hughes movies and supported the music-driven movies that had become a part of Paramount brand from Saturday Night Fever, Flashdance, and Footloose. Top Gun was also a young, music-driven picture. Coming off of Risky Business, Tom Cruise was red-hot .Ned agreed to pay him $1 million dollars, unheard of for such a young star. Ned also agreed to pay the same one million to Matthew Broderick to star in “Ferris Buehler’s Day Off.”

Tony Scott was a creative lad. He was headstrong and determined but always charming and positive. When we refused to give him extra money to decorate Kelly McGillis’s porch, he got the owner of a shabby chic-like store in San Diego to open its doors in the middle of the night so he could buy pillows for the day’s shooting. I remember showing up on the location in Miramar. He positioned the pillows on the benches with such love, checking them against the camera frame. By week 4, I fired Tony 2 times. He forgot his promise on the establishing shots and I got tired of it.

When he got to shooting the ****pit-to-****pit shots, we could never see faces, only clouds through the visors. “No one is going to know who the characters are! How are we going to tell Goose from Maverick?” I shouted. “Subtitles,” he replied. “No subtitles in this movie!” I replied. I was so angry at him. He kept shooting visors with clouds in. The 3rd time I fired him, it was by fax — a letter legal had drafted and contained all the DGA protocols. I tipped off the producers and they played along. They had to keep peace on the set. I would be the bully-brother.

In the middle of the night, Tony appeared at my apartment door in Westwood as I wouldn’t pick up the phone. He promised and pleaded for one last chance. “Okay, okay! I promise! No visors or you can have my balls.” He was crying. I looked at him sternly. I was the only one guy who knew the truth about his health as I had to deal with the reinsurer. “Okay, you can have my one ball.” He had lost the other to the Big C. “You know I’ll take it, if you **** me over on this.” He didn’t. He shot the whole 3 day sequence again without visors. We had an amazing arrangement with the Navy. The Navy gave us everything for free. Everything. I had made Officer and A Gentleman three years earlier without the support of the Navy (they didn’t like the DI swearing so much but the actor who played the character, Lou Gossett, won the Academy Award anyways). BUT when Officer came out in 1982, recruiting went crazy. The Navy cut its marketing budget because the Officer and Gentleman movie was doing all the recruiting for them. So when we planned to make Top Gun, the Navy liason ,John Horton, the unsung hero of Top Gun, rolled out the red carpet. The only thing Paramount had to pay for was the engine fuel for the fighter jets and the air carriers. Tony was a brilliant shooter. Like his older brother, he came from commercials. It was all about lighting for Tony Scott, especially “magic hour” at dawn and dusk whenever grows beautiful in rose or golden light. Like a game of Risk, Tony moved the jets and the carriers around like pawns to capture the right sunsets and sunrises. It became a problem. Since he wouldn’t stop, I charged him for the fuel. He wrote checks every day for the extra fuel. By the time, we were finished shooting, he had written personal checks to the tune of $437,000. His fee was $400,000.

After the picture came out, Paramount returned the money to Tony for the fuel and for the porch pillows. Tony’s first participation check was in the millions. Ned gave me a nice bonus check, too. When I purchased my first house, a box arrived at the door. It was from Tony — the pillows from Charlie’s porch. After Tony’s tragic death, his brother, Ridley dedicated several movies to him. His family created a scholarship with the American Film Institute in his honor, “to help encourage and engage future generations of filmmakers.”

As for his headstrong behavior on Top Gun? Tony Scott was simply being an artist. He was playing the role of “Maverick”, as rebellious as hell, attempting to capture that essence in the film. Maverick Top Gun is dedicated to the memory of Tony Scott. For anyone interested, here’s a clip from Boy & his Bicycle.

https://thegoodage.medium.com/tony-scotts-genius-d49555b3434



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The Forgotten Star of Top Gun

Kelly McGillis chose parenthood over stardom

Kelly McGillis was much too tall for Tom Cruise. She was 5'11". He was 5'7". Besides, she was 27 and he was 24 and the difference was palpable. After I saw them together for a “chemistry meeting” on the Paramount lot, I walked away conclusively uttering, “She looks like his mother.”

Top Gun was a Paramount production in 1984, long before Tom Holland at 5’8 and Zendaya at 5’10” walked blithely down the red carpet for Spiderman No Way Home, breaking “stupid’ (according to Tom Holland) stereotypes of height between guys and gals.

It was fine when Kelly McGillis starred opposite Harrison Ford in Witness (her first movie for Paramount) but Harrison was 6’1”.

Demi Moore was in rehab and the insurance company deemed her (at that time) “uninsurable”. Later, Cruise and Moore were magnetic in the 1992 production of A Few Good Men.

In the old days at Paramount, we made three picture deals with unestablished actors. We guaranteed the first picture but had options for them for two more. If they became a star off a Paramount movie, we had the advantage of two more negotiated deals at a fair price (at least from the studio’s perspective). It was standard practice for Paramount and that’s how it started with Eddie Murphy in 48 Hours and Kelly McGillis in Witness.

We did 10 successful movies back-to-back pictures with Eddie. But during that tenure, Eddie’s fees went from $75k to 10 million plus significant participations in the profit. As a Paramount executive, I oversaw Eddie’s deal as well as Kelly’s deal. Over a period of four years, we made our three pictures with Kelly — Witness, Top Gun, and The Accused. Over her term, her fees went from $125K to $500K.

I was the executive on Top Gun but the producers, Tom Cruise , the director Tony Scott and the head of the studio, Ned Tanen would not consider screen testing Kelly and Tom to see how they “played” on screen. The screen carried its own mysteries. If the fiction of them as a couple worked on screen, that was the “truth”. Nothing else mattered.

Witness opened the Cannes Film Festival in 1985 to a 7-minute standing ovation and Kelly McGillis became a “star”. But Kelly was her own woman. She was gifted, beautiful, eccentric. In a time when you were closeted, Kelly was openly and refreshingly gay. A graduate of Julliard, she never wanted to be a “movie star”, unlike Tom Cruise who was driven by powerful desire. She wanted to be a working actress. The last time I saw Kelly was when we got together for a late dinner after a performance of Hedda Gabler at the Roundabout Theater in NYC. The year was 1994.

We had been shooting Top Gun for two weeks, when Kelly McGillis appeared on the screen. Top Gun was a troubled production, so the head of the studio wanted to see Kelly’s first day of work. Ned Tanen grabbed his head and shouted, “She looks like his mother!”

What could I do? We rewrote the first flirt scene to accommodate the awareness of the older woman-young man situation between the two leads. Maverick walks into the ladies room at a bar-restaurant and finds Charlie (Kelly).

Maverick: “I came in here to save you from making a big mistake with that older guy.”

Charlie: “Really? So I could go on to a bigger mistake with a young guy like yourself?”

Maverick: “Maybe.”

We used apple boxes and shoe lifts for Tom. In the movie, Charlie always found a way to “slouch” when in the same frame as Maverick (as in the scene above).



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We did our best to make it work. We thought we were making “Flashdance in the Sky” a “Boys with Toys-movie.” In our first preview, the movie tested higher with women than men. The highest testing scene which we were ready to get rid of the Bruce-Weber Volleyball scene. The big complaint? Women wanted more of the romance. We shot new scenes with Kelly and Tom on a three day weekend, including a sex scene. Kelly had cut off her hair so she wore a cap in most of the scenes as the wig that was built proved shoddy.

Per contract, Tom Cruise got top billing and his likeness on the poster art. Because women liked the pic (we were all flabbergasted), we also added Kelly McGillis and her likeness to the one sheet. Tom approved the placement. Kelly slouches for the poster photo.

There’s been a lot of age and fat shaming about Kelly over the last months and the fact she is not in the continuing story. It is unfair. Kelly is her own woman. She made a choice. She wanted to be a sober mother to her two daughters. Stardom “didn’t become a priority; what became the priority was raising my girls and being the best sober parent, I could be.” When she heard of Jennifer Connelly was playing the new romance in Top Gun Maverick, she responded, “I am happy she got the opportunity. She’s a wonderful actress.”

https://thegoodage.medium.com/the-forgotten-star-of-top-gun-11278f1f3089



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1986 The Twin Titans of 'Top Gun

"Mentally, before we had a script, we went down to Miramar and met the pilots," says Simpson. "And they look like Tom Cruise and act like Tom Cruise. They have the same bravado and yet innocence."

So they approached Cruise, a young fellow who virtually glistens with good looks, and guess what? He didn't like the script! So Simpson pitched away all over again, and told him they'd let him participate in rewriting the script, which was very important to Cruise, who wants desperately to be taken seriously.

And they pulled out their ace in the hole.

"He went down to Miramar and we got him in a jet," remembers Simpson. "He still hadn't committed to the picture. We arranged to send him up in an A4.

"He got on the ground, and he committed."

....

"And lo and behold, 'Top Gun.' What is Tom Cruise about? The emotion of triumph."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1986/05/16/the-twin-titans-of-top-gun/db86b5f9-f7ad-4f3e-bd97-81ccf6522c2a/



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don simpson

www.thefreelibrary.com/THE+REAL+BAD+BOY+OF+HOLLYWOOD%3B+GHOST+OF+HELLRAISING+PRODUCER+DON...-a0108502223

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