Product Description

Using the life and career of Don Simpson as a point of departure, "High Concept" takes readers on a riveting journey inside the Hollywood of the 1980s and 90s. For over two decades, Simpson was Hollywood's reigning bad boy, yet through the same period he and his partner, Jerry Bruckheimer were the most successful independent producers in the Hollywood history. The revelations in "High Concept" are astounding! Through intensive research Fleming has created a dramatic tale of the rise of the key players and how the Don Simpson way became the Hollywood way. Through an interwoven narrative of the decadence and greed, hypocrisy and hysteria, profligacy and moral emptiness of the key power brokers, Fleming returns to the core concept of excess and how it continues to drive Hollywood.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #181964 in Books
• Published on: 1999-03-29
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 304 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Veteran show-biz news hound Charles Fleming argues that the short, insanely foolish life of producer Don Simpson (Flashdance, Top Gun, Bad Boys) stands as a larger indictment of Hollywood, and it's hard to argue with him. For one thing, Simpson helped create Tom Cruise, Richard Gere, Will Smith and Eddie Murphy, and his loud, high-concept, low-IQ school of filmmaking helped launch Arnold Schwarzenegger, Mel Gibson, and Bruce Willis to new heights (or depths). Others may have been responsible for 14 top ten pop tunes and 10 Oscar nominations, but nobody had thought to combine pop music and movies in such a synergistic way.

While Fleming concentrates on Simpson's own antics--car wrecks, career crack-ups, whacked-out drug and sex orgies, whimsical overspending on brain-dead blockbusters--he does make an excellent case that the entertainment industry as a whole is nutty and slutty. Even the more level-headed stars who turn up in High Concept turn out to be appalling: Fleming documents the behaviour that earned Demi Moore the Hollywood nickname "Gimme More".

Despite his $60,000-a-month drug habit, Simpson actually did come up with smart ideas, according to many witnesses, and he was sharp enough to know how dumb so many of his colleagues were. Sylvester Stallone, for instance, almost starred in Beverly Hills Cop, and had he not left the project in favour of his notorious stink bomb, Rhinestone, viewers would have been stuck with Stallone's rewrite of Cop, from which the star had removed every trace of humour--the very concept that made an ordinary action film, in Murphy's talented hands, a smash hit. In his detailed account of Simpson's bizarre life, Fleming demonstrates why modern movies are the way they are.

He also proves what a strangely tiny town Hollywood is. Simpson was mixed up with Heidi Fleiss, whose indicted dad was Madonna's paediatrician; his doctors had treated Kurt Cobain and Margaux Hemingway (and someone who had helped design Miss Piggy); Don Simpson's drug dealer claims he sold drugs to O.J. Simpson the day Nicole Brown Simpson died. The most shocking thing about the book is the Pulp Fiction-like combination of decadent horror and slapstick comedy that constituted everyday life for Don Simpson's cronies. The high life, as described in Fleming's compellingly readable book, exemplifies Carrie Fisher's incisive Hollywood epigram: "Good anecdote--bad reality." --Tim Appelo

About the Author
Charles Fleming has reported exclusively on the business of Hollywood for over ten years, as staff writer for the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, Variety and Newsweek. He is the author of You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again and You'll Never Make Love in This Town Again. He lives in Los Angeles.

Customer Reviews

High Concept! High Class!
Charles Fleming (Author) really did his homework with this one. He examines in detail, and plots out Simpson's rise from young adulthood living in a small US town and takes us on a roller coaster ride to the very height of Simpson's fame and Hollywood success. Addressing on the way all of Simpson's insecurities and demons, and also examining his psyche in order to give us a well rounded view of the man himself.

If you let yourself, it is very easy to be transported to Hollywood in the 1980's and early 1990's for a front row seat on what can only be described as a dream ticket of a life. The realities of this unimaginable existence soon come to light, as does the fact that sooner rather than later Simpson's reckless Hollywood lifestyle will catch up with him.

The greatness of this book comes about because of the effort put in by Fleming to ensure we see the full Don Simpson. The book is often funny, tragic and very shocking in its content One of the great features was that Fleming had no wish to hide any of the more sordid activities which occurred mainly in Simpson's final years and months of life. Giving us what would seem a very accurate and well-written book, which is a joy to read and very difficult to put down.

This comes highly recommended.

If nothing else, it's a very good read
What you get out of High Concept depends on how you approach it. Certainly others chart the late 70s/early 80s at Paramount better, and it's hardly a cutting edge insight into Hollywood. What it is though is a compelling account of the legendary producer, and whilst it occasionally takes the easy way out, it remains an excellent read. Even if it does stop talking about cinema a little too often.

A sloppy rough draft--where was the editor???
HIGH CONCEPT is the perfect example of what's wrong with Hollywood, but it is also a very good example of what's wrong with book publishing. In its rush to get the book out (for who knows what reason--there isn't a pressing news hook that I know of) Doubleday seems to have totally neglected to edit Fleming's hastily cobbled together draft. Stories and details are repeated within pages of each other; characters are introduced and reintroduced; particular phrases crop up again and again; there are huge narrative gaps; digressions are so clearly shoehorned into the narrative that they undermine the point they wish to serve; etc., etc. The best sections of the book are those Fleming lifted, word-for-word, from his magazine stories on Simpson (at least those pieces had an editor!). But even then, major aspects of the story are glossed over. You can see just how cribbed the manuscript is in the way Fleming describes DAY OF THUNDER or TOP GUN--in depth and revealing--versus CRIMSON TIDE (the movie that really "rescued" Simpson-Bruckheimer from oblivion), which is mentioned several times in passing without a real discussion of how much it meant (let alone its production, bar one throwaway comment about casting). That 1995-1996 was in many ways the most successful period of Simpson-Bruckheimer, but Fleming says almost nothing of the films they made then (DANGEROUS MINDS, etc.). I finished this book depressed and amazed at Hollywood's culture of excess, but just as depressed at publishing's culture of editorial laziness. Why did Doubleday feel such a need to crash this book? An editor could have done wonders with just a weekend of work. But it is more than that. Doubleday should have given Fleming another year to actually research the book, instead of forcing him to copy from his own work and such lame sources as YOU'LL NEVER MAKE LOVE IN THIS TOWN AGAIN (which he heavily relies on). Get HIT AND RUN, a great book on Hollywood excess. HIGH CONCEPT is a great subject still in search of a good book.