DON'S GREATEST HITS AND THE ADDICTIONS THAT KILLED HIM

Season 2 of "The Don" is a twelve episode double-order. We’re going all the way to the end... From Don’s greatest hits- Flashdance, Beverly Hills Cop, Top Gun, Days of Thunder-- to his final days as a recluse hooked on pharmaceuticals holed up in his Bel Air mansion trying to make one last comeback in the film business. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:07):
Season two the Dawn twelve episode double order, We're going
all the way to the end from Dan's greatest hits,
Flash Dance, Beverly Hills, Cop top Gun to his final
days as a recluse, hooked on pharmaceuticals, hold up in
his bell Air mansion, trying to make one last comeback
in the film business. We left off season one with

(00:27):
a bit of a cliffhanger, the arrest of Dan's Madam.
I had wrote more than a block down Stone Canyon
Road when I saw two mustached cops parked outside Madame Corra's.
Then came a parade of law police cars. I noticed
Cora's handyman fleeing over the side yard. He disappeared over

(00:48):
a neighbor's stone wall. It was a bust, plain and simple.
A few minutes later, they took Madame Cora away in handcuffs.
Dan's Adam was one of the most powerful players in Hollywood.
Having access to her girls signified an elite level of
status for the top producers and studio exacts and actors

(01:09):
and senators and congressmen and foreign diplomats, even game show hosts.
If you believe the Toddry Tales, involving Wheel of Fortune
host Vanah White, who was reported to have visited the
Madam looking for girls. Vanna's affairs were reported but never verified,
in the tell all book You'll Never Make Love in
This Town Again, written anonymously by four of the Madam's

(01:29):
former prostitutes. Of all the celebs mentioned, Don got the
most ink, and that was in part because Don was
known to be the Madam's most prolific repeat customer. But
the Madam was also a friend and some would say
the closest person Don had to a therapist for several
years in the late nineteen eighties. She was a big
part of Don's life, and for that reason there was

(01:51):
a cause for concern that her arrest by the l
a p. D. Vice Squad, a sting operation that had
spanned months and involved dozens of detectives and paid informants,
would put some heat on the Madam's top customer. Don
surely must have seen vice squads staked outside her house.
She lived just a few doors down from him on
Stone Canyon Road. It certainly wasn't a secret that Don

(02:13):
was a frequent house guest, and yet there was no
implication of Don in her arrest. According to Pierce Benton,
Don might have been protected. As we had previously mentioned,
Pierce had recounted much of his stories on Don and
the movie business in a series of tapes, tapes that
can shed light on what might have happened during Don's

(02:34):
spiral into a black hole of prescription pills, A black
hole that would lead to Don's doctor's shocking death, A
black hole that would leave Don addicted to a fifty
thousand dollar a month pill regimen, A black hole leaving
Don vulnerable to doctor Field Goods, who would increase his intake,
leaving Don even more addicted, delusional, and painfully alone. Before

(02:54):
Don went down the dark path of black market drug dealers,
Don was arguably the most ex scessful producer on the planet.
He didn't just make great movies, he made great Don
Simpson movies, movies with the signature style that we had
never seen before and we'll never see again. We begin
season two with his time as an execut paramount, where

(03:15):
he made John Travolta a star in Saturday Night Fever
and turned Richard Gear into a sex symbol with officer
and a gentleman and American jigglow. We'll dig into his
clashes with the autour directors like Robert Altman on the
set of Popeye, and his sweet revenge on the art
house critic Pauline Cale, whose career Don helped destroy when
Warren Beatty lured her to Paramount to work for Dawn.

(03:37):
We'll go into Don's failed quest to make Richard Pryor
the studio's first African American movie star, and Don's success
two years later in making Eddie Murphy a cultural icon.
We'll get into how Don lost the top studio job
in town when his partying brought down the Grease franchise,
sending down into Studio Siberia. This was a dark period

(03:57):
before Don would emerge with his first big comeback in
making Flash Dance, a two hundred million dollar hit, to
be followed by a three hundred million dollar hit, the
surprising blockbuster Beverly Hills Cup, to be followed by the
Big One. Don's crowning achievement, Top Gun. Just want to
serve my country. Be the best fire pilot Navy start.

(04:19):
Don't scool around with me, Maverick. You're a hell of
an instinctive pilot. Maybe too good. Maverick. It was the
nickname Don gave himself. It was the call signed Don
would give Tom Cruise his character. Don wore it on
his sleeve like a vanity plate. Top Gun was the
load star the mountain top Down would climb to become
the king of show business. Top Gun would make Don

(04:42):
the biggest producer on the planet, and it would make
Tom Cruise, at age twenty three, the world's biggest movie star.
Much of Season two will be devoted to Don and Tom,
two men with a need for speed and an insatiable
drive to be the best of the best. Season two Maverick,
Top Gun, Don's greatest hits and the addictions that killed

(05:06):
him begins now. Then at five thirty six, a dozen
miles deep under the mountains north of Prince William Sound,
the earth shivers begins to move. The biggest, big one
of them all, the Good Friday earthquake, a nine point

(05:29):
to Tumbler, the largest earthquake in North American history, strikes
Don's home state of Alaska out in the Gulf of Alaska.
The ocean bottom plunges, then heaves upward a full fifty feet,
and a wave starts raising for shore. The biggest earthquake
in history would trigger the largest tsunami in history, A

(05:51):
two hundred and twenty foot high wrecking ball. Giant sized
Christmas trees rolled down hillsides into the ocean. A two
wave was scary enough, but a two twenty ft wave
wrapped around a massive pine tree barreling down Alaska's shoreline.
This was biblical stuff. For Don, who grew up in
a fundamentalist Christian home, this might have been a sign,

(06:14):
a sign for the prodigal son to leave his god
fearing home and begin his journey to the land of
promise and opportunity Hollywood. Hollywood was a place where dreams
came truth in it and radio landward, where nothing was
common ordinary, and anyone who would have riches and fain.

(06:37):
And so they came from the Midwest, from the South,
from the Bible Belt and the Ivy League, from Baudeville
stages and Carnival midways, be in the by a promise
of sunshine and stardom, duty and romance, the day of
the Locust, Isn't it romantic? That was the fantasy for

(06:58):
many coming to Hollywood. But when they arrived, they inevitably
met a stark reality. A sprawling mass of five hundred
and three square miles, more than double the size of Chicago,
what Dorothy Parker would call the city with seventy two suburbs,
the star of the day of the Locust. Karen Black
speaks for many of us in recounting her arrival in
Los Angeles. We We're going along Sand Sunset Boulevard and

(07:23):
I thought, oh, this is paper mache. I mean, this
was made yesterday. It's also vulgar. It's also there's nothing
quaint about it. There's no age to it, there's no brick,
there's no intelligence brought to the architecture of any kind.
I almost threw up, and then that that was my

(07:44):
first impression of Los Angeles. A city's culture is the
extension of the city. Like the New York Subway, a
cultural landmark, it represents the collective consciousness of New York.
Los Angeles had no such heartbeat. Its culture was not
defined by the city, but rather by the individual freedom
to create culture. Come to Los Angeles and make the

(08:06):
city your own. Here's Pierce in a series of interviews
on eighties Hollywood, speaking with Nat Gorman of w n
c Y Radio. Dawn knew our thing intuitively before he
arrived in Los Angeles that the laid back cool label
was a myth. People come to Los Angeles for one reason,
only to make their dreams come true, and the way

(08:27):
they go about it is with obsessive determination. As we
noted in season one, Don came to l A with
a dream of becoming an actor. He had been in
town for three years and had nothing to show for
it but for a one scene cameo in the movie Cannonball, Sir,
have you seen this? They're doing it again? Well, they're
in for surprise. If they're racing anywhere, they're going to

(08:49):
race to the impound lot. Well. At the time, Don
was terribly distraught, so much so he was on the
verge of packing it up and heading back home to Alaska.
That's when his buddy Steve Tish got Don the job
interview at Paramount. At the time, Tish was producing The
Missing or Deadly starring Leonard Nimoy, about a mentally disabled
boy who steals a lab rat from his father's lab,

(09:10):
only to find out the rat contained a deadly virus
dealing with the disease a fatal Nobody knows how it's transmitted.
It was never even heard until eighteen months ago now
Atlanta managed to isolate a solus before they scrapped the project.
Ambassador's a pretty obscure disease. So we got some projects
here of a higher priority. I want to do some
more work on it. I think it ties in with

(09:31):
your overpopulation pandemic studies. He would go on to produce
films like Risky Business and Forrest Gump. Don was so
broke he had to borrow a sport coat. It was
like Peter Bogdanovitch wearing Jerry Lewis's hand me downs. Peter
Bogdanovich was also dead broke. When he first started out
in Hollywood. He was seen around town wearing these ill
fitting suits. Jerry Lewis didn't believe in dry cleaning his suits,

(09:53):
as he feared the chemicals. Bogdanovitch became the benefactor of
Jerry's aversion to dry cleaning, and the oversized suit became
his signature style. So in walk scruffy, long haired Don
in tissue's oversized suit jacket, walking through the gates of
Paramount to meet Paramount President Richard Salbert. When we return,

(10:13):
we recreate the most important meeting of Don's life. Richard
Silbert was one of the great film production designers. All
the colors in the picture should look like in the interiors,
especially burnt grass, dead leaves, umbers. All the buildings in

(10:39):
the picture should be white. They should be generic, which
means Spanish. And the wideness is heat. You put sunlight
on a white building and you get heat. And heat
is part of the story. His films had won more
than a dozen Oscars, he wouldn't be an easy man
to impress. So Don's interview method was to script the
meeting in advance, right. He would literally script both sides

(11:02):
of the conversation, Nice to meet him, Mr Simpson, and
nice to meet you, Mr Salbert, Thank you for the opportunity,
and so on and so on. He would then rehearse
his part. His story would go something like this, did
you know, Mr Solbert, that when Cecil B. De Mill
shot pick ups for the Greatest Show on Earth, the
monkeys escaped from the lot. Little fuckers ran all the

(11:23):
way down Melrose Avenue to the Hollywood Forever Cemetery. Animal
Control found them knocking over tombstones and stomping on the
graves of Hollywood legends. That's Hollywood. Even when you're dead,
they still find a way to bury you. Before Silber
could pry further into the veracity of the tale, Don
was ready for another anecdote. Then he would go into

(11:45):
the P. T. Barnum mermaid story that he's told me
a million times, Mr Salbert, did you know that P. T.
Barnum made his initial fortune off a mermaid? That's right,
a mermaid had been caught by a fisherman off the
coast of Japan. The mermaid was then mummified and sold

(12:05):
to an American sea captain. The sea captain, realizing he'd
been conned, tried to recoup the purchase price in selling
to Barnum, who was thrilled to take it off his hands.
Now Don's got Salber on the hook, no pun intended,
And then he says, now, Mr Saber, you might ask,

(12:26):
why would P. T. Barnum by a mermaid that was
obviously fake and tell everyone that it was real. Well,
you see the fact that the mermaid was a fake
was of minor importance to Mr Barnum. What was of
importance was the potential that it might not be a fake.

(12:47):
That potential gave it tremendous value. It's here that Don
brilliantly shifts the meaning of the story to the film business.
Then he starts talking about how movies should be about spectacle.
I'll never forget this part, he says. Now, Mr Saber,
the audience is nine sure that the Mermaid isn't real,

(13:10):
just like the audiences know that nine nine percent of
the time there won't be a shark swimming in shallow water.
But that one percent is what the audience wants so
badly to believe. Paramount. Mr Saber must create a spectacle,
a spectacle that audiences can believe in. Call it, call

(13:31):
it belief, call it blind faith. I call it church.
Where the audiences are the parishioners, and we must deliver
the sermons. As long as they believe, we can keep
packing the churches. But they need to believe. And in
looking at this slate, Mr Sarber, I don't see Mickey
and Nicky, or Bob and Carroll and Ted and Alice
getting people on their feet singing Hallelujah. So he delivers

(13:55):
this great speech. Saba is visibly impressed, mission unplished. Don
should know better to quit while he's ahead, but he
can't help himself. He starts going off on the marketing
department and how they should come up with better titles
than naming their movies after lead characters. Peter fark Is Banky,

(14:17):
John Cassavetti's is Nikki, Mikey and Nikki, Richard Silbert's mood
darkins Don had insulted his movie slate. This was a
studio that had made some of the greatest films in history.
Mentorian candidate Chinatown Rosemary's Baby, Who's afraid of Virginia Wolf
the Graduate. So now he's completely undone his amazing interview performance.

(14:40):
Worse than that, he's piste off Richard Salba. It's a
sinking ship. Don's gotta think fast, but he sees in
the back corner of the room what looks like fishing gear.
Don went over and inspected Silbert's fishing gear. Don says,
you have a stone fly hatch, but no mayfly. I
grew up fishing and hunting. I killed my us moose

(15:00):
at age seven. Now he's got Sober's attention again. Dawn
knew that he'd hooked him, and this time he didn't
let go. By the end of the meeting, Don had
more than a job at a studio. He had what
very few people in the industry were able to acquire
a cult of personality. From that day forward, Don would

(15:22):
be known as the tough, talking outsider from Alaska. In
show business, everybody revered the outsider. Don had come full
circle from the spectacle of the Good Friday earthquake. He
had once run away from Alaska, and now Alaska had
saved him. Don had a foot in the door. He
was going to make movies when we return. Don takes

(15:44):
inspiration from King Henry the Eighth to make Saturday Night
Fever into a runaway hit. At Paramount, Don was quickly
put in charge of the film. They had the least
confidence would succeed. We just washed the hair, you know,

(16:04):
I worked on my hair a long time, and you
hit it. He hits my hair in Saturday Night Fever.
Don was desperate to get his first studio film made,
so desperate that he might have ignored the fact that
the movie he was trying to get made was based
on a true story that it wasn't true. I don't
know if Don knew the article wasn't true. The New

(16:25):
York Magazine article that Saturday Night Fever was based on
it was a complete fabrication. He was the very best
dancer in Bay Ridge, He owned fourteen floral shirts, five suits,
eight pairs of shoes, three overcoats, and had appeared on
American Bandstand. My god, it was brilliant. It was a
magazine article, but it read like an excerpt from a novel.

(16:48):
It was daring and vibrant and completely made up. Did
Don know the article was a lie? Well? I think
the better question is would he have cared an underground
disco club where heterosexual working class Italians went to dance
like everybody else? He fell in love with the story.

(17:09):
What Don didn't love was the screenplay adaptation of the story.
Norman Wexler, screenwriter who earned Academy Award nominations for Joe
and Cervico and was remembered for his screenplay of Saturday
Night Fever has died. Screenwriter Norman Wexler was known for
writing uber, authentic street dialogue. One method he used was

(17:31):
to walk through the Bronx shouting racial epithets until he
got the ship kicked out of him. The beating would
be recorded in the tape recorder in his pocket. He
would then transcribe the dialogue into his script. Wexler wasn't
a racist. He was certifiably crazy diagnosed as bipolar. He
had once been arrested on a plane for making death
threats against Richard Nixon. Don sounded the alarm on Wexler's script.

(17:52):
In Wexler's third act, he'd written a gang rape of
John Travolta's girlfriend by Travolta's best friends. And then there's
a storyline where Revolta's buddy tries and fails to convince
his girlfriend to get an abortion. Instead of taking responsibility
for the pregnancy, he jumps off the Arizono Bridge and
kills himself. In Don's opinion, this was the most depressing
screenplay of all time. How is he supposed to market it?

(18:15):
What Dawn Stroke of Genius was marketing? For Saturday Night Fever.
He turned to the painter Hans Holbein. King Henry the
Eighth had commissioned Hans Hobein to help restore his image.
Instead of a traditional portrait, Hobin put the King in
a standing posture, arms on hips, his legs spread wide,
displaying his massive god beace. Don knew this painting quite well.

(18:37):
It had been the inspiration for the Superman posters where
George Reeves and later his son Christopher Reeves are in
a hobin pose. With Saturday Night Fever, Don saw an
opportunity to reinvent the Hobin Dawn added a disco flare,
Travoulter at a side angle, hands on hit, spread legs,
one arm in the air. In Triumph, the post tells

(19:00):
the audience that Travolta is the hero that wins, although
if you actually watch the movie, Travolta is hardly a
hero and he doesn't win. But Don couldn't fix the
ending of the movie, just as he couldn't fix the
ending of the Greatest Show on Earth when he was
a seven year old kid pleading with a theater projectionist.
Don couldn't let the audience experience that same disappointment he

(19:23):
had had as a kid. It was a make or
break moment. He could give the audience Norman Wexler's main streets,
or he could give them a dance musical fantasy any martials,
John John, Sorry, John Travolva. There hasn't been a premier
in this town and this school for this excitement and

(19:44):
many many years. Is it uncomfortable? Is it kind of
hard to handle? Because it it's bigger than life and
everything it is And I saw that the movie for
the first time bigger than life. I mean bigger than
it ever admits. So it was like a fantasy. The
movie gross too hundred million dollars on a six million
dollar budget. Don's first movie was a runaway hit. By

(20:07):
this time, Richard Silbert had left Paramount. Don would now
answer to Barry Diller and Michael Eisner. These guys had
a plan to shake up the old model of making
artists driven films. Diller and Eisner wanted commercial hits, and
they wanted Don to find them. The trio brought on
a fourth member of the team, a young college dropout
they playfully called the Golden Retriever for his ability to

(20:30):
hunt down and deliver a script before anyone else had
a chance to read it. This was Jeffrey Katzenberg. I
will tell you just how demanding it was. Is a
typical week for me when I was at Paramount is
I would actually read ten or twelve screenplays a week.
And I'm not a super fast reader. I'm I'm dyslexic,

(20:52):
and so I actually have to read a little slow,
and so it would take me almost you know, would
take me almost two hours to a screenplay. And I
used to actually come start at six o'clock on Saturday
mornings and read till five six o'clock in the afternoon,
and then come back and probably do about half of
that on a on a Sunday um For years, I

(21:14):
mean years and years and years. I have read thousands
of screenplays literally. Katzenberg would go on to create dream
Works with Steven Spielberg and David Geffen. Last August, he
sold his home in Beverly Hills for one hundred and
twenty five million dollars. But back in seven, Catzenberg was
just another assistant trying to make a name. The four
of them, Diller, Eisner, Don, and Katzenberg became known as

(21:37):
the Killer Dealers. They quickly established a reputation as guys
who would move fast and stay true to their word.
When Eisner said he wanted to make high school comedies,
literary agents sent over thirty high school comedies, knowing Eisner
would be ramping up production. As it turned out, the
Killer Dealers were most aggressive and competitive amongst each other.

(21:57):
There were vicious no holds barred shouting matches, but every
voice was heard and the best idea always one. Don
loved the competitive atmosphere at work, but after work, when
the rest of the team went home, Don went out
all night long. The hardest parties were in Malibu at
Trunkus Beach, where the autour filmmaker crowd of easy riders

(22:19):
and raging bulls hung out. These were the very guys
that Don was trying to phase out of the business.
Don was like a spy that had access to the
party because the party needed drugs and Don was the
guy to bring the blow. They were all paranoid that
the studio would cancel them, but because Don partied with them,
they didn't consider him a threat. By the end of
the seventies, every filmmaker and town was on edge. Heaven's Gate,

(22:43):
the Michael Mino movie was the nail in the coffin.
Chris Christofferson might have said it best when he said,
I didn't realize the extent of it really until ken
when I looked at the newspaper and a thing that
was written by our Breck who was the president of
you They who said that unless control of the money
was taken away from the creative people, that the industry

(23:07):
was headed for disaster. And we ran into each other
in the hallway and the way to this press thing on,
we're all going to be sitting on the stage, and
he and his lawyer were there, and I said, who
are you going to give it to the uncreative people?
And so the uncreated people won. And that's what happened

(23:32):
to the business. The studios feared the filmmakers, and the
filmmakers feared the studios. Somebody was going to lose, and
Don made sure it wouldn't be him. The Down season
two is executive produced by Will McCormick and David Harris Klein.
Klein also wrote and created the series. Mike Jurst's is

(23:52):
the editor, sound designer, and producer of the series. The
podcast is produced and narrated by Malia Rivera. Drew That's Me.
Louis Weymouth voices the character of Pierce and also produces
the series. For more episodes of The Dawn season two,
listen to the series on the I Heart Radio app
or wherever you listen to podcasts.