Top Gun on Wheels

Don and Tom's "Days of Blunder"... In this episode, we go into what went so right on Don and Tom’s critically panned and vastly under-rated  unofficial sequel to Top Gun, "Days of Thunder"... And we go into what went so terribly, terribly wrong on a production that went so wildly over-budget that Paramount chief Frank Mancuso, in a fitful rage, blew up Don’s 300 million dollar deal like one of his fiery race car crashes... A definitive case of life imitating art. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Episode ten, Don and Tom Days of Blunder, where it
went all wrong for Don and Tom Cruise. In this episode,
we go into what went so right on Don and
Tom's critically panned and vastly underrated unofficial sequel to Top Gun,
and we go into what went so terribly terribly wrong

(00:25):
on a production that went so wildly over budget that
Paramount Chief frank Mancouzo, in a fitful rage, blew up
Don's three hundred million dollar deal like one of his
fiery race car crashes. A definitive case of life imitating
art to be a little whole waves activity to fund

(00:52):
ship my cars, please destroy das of Thunder was notable
for Tom Cruise's transformation into a professional stock race car
driver and for Don's not so amazing transformation into becoming

(01:13):
a movie star. That's right, This is the film where
Dawn makes his big screen studio debut, and, as he
might have guessed, movie stardom would not come easily for
Down January. It was one of those crisp, clear l
a days when locals can't help but feel a little
smug to be living in the California sunshine. Down, a

(01:36):
perpetually smug man was feeling exceedingly so. He had just
gotten a green light and fifty million dollars three times
that of Top Gun to make another movie with Tom Cruise.
No two men in Hollywood were hotter than Don and Tom.
Tom was so invested in the story that he took
a story by credit for the first and only time

(01:58):
in his career. Don was taking on a new hyphen
it as well. Producer slash actor Dawn was starring in
a movie opposite Tom Cruise. I repeat, Don Simpson was
starring in a movie opposite Tom Cruise that was the
talk of the town. Of course, it was Don that

(02:19):
was doing all the talking. His CIA buddies laughed at him,
calling out bullshit, and why wouldn't they. Don had told
some pretty tall tales over the years, but this time
around the agents came to realize that Don was serious.
Send me scripts. Don told them not to produce, but
to star in because after days of thunder, I'm going

(02:39):
to be very, very busy. Don had pretty good reason
to be confident. He had hired the great Robert Town,
screenwriter of Chinatown, to write the script, and apart for
him for down Town, conceived a suave devastatingly handsome Italian
race car driver that would challenge Tom Cruise's character Cole Trickle.

(02:59):
Don was so excited he immediately got to work designing
his race car, a Chevy Lumina number thirty four in
hot pink and bright green and black. If you go online,
you can find toy replicas for sale. Aside from getting
to design his awesome race car, Don also got an
awesome name, Aldo Benedetti. I remember the first time he

(03:21):
told me. I said, Don, that's a movie star name.
With a name like that, you're gonna overshadow Cruise. Dawn laughed,
that's Cruizes problem. There is little known about the backstory
of Aldo Benedetti. We know that most race car drivers
were Southern. Don couldn't do a Southern accent. If Don
was going to be in the movie, he would have

(03:42):
to play an outsider. Now, the only outsider driving a
NASCAR at the time was the great Mario Andretti. It
was a perfect fit. Andretti personified Don's lifestyle of pushing
the envelope. When the racing car is working perfectly, that's
what makes in entire effort worthwhile. Designers and mechanics, everyone

(04:04):
is just trying to get the perfect machine, and it's
so difficult to do that. When you finally have it
in your hands, you cherished that moment so much. I
can express myself with it. I have a tool in
my hands that I can just almost the same way.
It's almost a moment of glory. Now, Don couldn't call
himself Mario. That would be too obvious. But Mario had

(04:28):
a twin brother, Aldo, Aldo Andretti. How about Aldo Benedetti Bingo.
Aldo was more than a name for Don. It was
a reality, a reality that Don had a major role
in a major movie, opposite a major movie star, in
a movie where Don, as producer had complete control. It

(04:51):
was like Clint Eastwood project, where Clint was the director
and the star. This was Don's vanity project. I've never
seen Don in the mirror as much as he did
in preparation for Days of Thunder. There were wall to
wall mirrors in the bathroom, the bedroom, the hallways. Don
knew how cruelly the camera can capture one's floors. The

(05:13):
mirrors were Don's way of making sure he looked good
no matter what the angle, the problem, or should I say,
the challenge Don had him getting in good enough shapeway
he could stand next to the biggest movie star heart
drop in the world in Tom Cruise was that Don
had spent the past decade partying like Keith Richards. He

(05:33):
quickly realized he couldn't party and pumpine. He would have
to get sober. Then he had to lose the weight
and get rid of the wrinkles and the ie bags.
There were knicks and tucks to be done, a brow lift,
cheek implants, a new jaw line, a tummy tucker butt lift,
and that was just the first go around. Over the

(05:56):
next five years, Don would go under the knife many times.
He would disappear for months, only to come back a
whole new Dawn, with a whole new body and a
whole new face. Dawn had access to movie stars and
thus had access to all the best surgeons he knew
who had had good work. A new haddn't He was
a forty five year old with a twenty year substance addiction.

(06:18):
Going under the knife wasn't a last resort. It was
a first resort, and Dawn was thrilled with the results.
All except the well, the peanut implant or enlargement or
whatever you want to call his surgery. How why so

(06:38):
many questions on this one. There were rumors that Don
had flown out to see a doctor in Germany that
had worked on a movie star that Don knew quite well.
This movie star was keen on all sorts of enlargement electives.
He was known to have a penis pump in his
trailer that he would clamp on during downtime on set.
There were p as that attested to hearing the noise

(06:59):
of the pump outside the trailer. All this to say,
getting pumped up, whether in the gym or otherwise, was
not uncommon for certain a list male movie stars in
the late nineteen eighties. Enlargements aside, the most important aspect
of Don's preparation were the surgical procedures. He knew he'd
be wearing a matching racing suit opposite Tom Cruise, and

(07:21):
if you look at the photos of Don and Tom
in production stills from the movie, Don holds his own,
he looks well, kind of like a movie star. Now,
of course, the studio wasn't paying Don millions and upfront
fees along with a future percentage of first dollar box
office gross to be a movie star. They were paying
Don to produce the movie. The fact of the matter

(07:44):
was Tom was doing more than producing than Don was.
Don had always brought the big idea. That's what made
the Don Simpson movie so special, But this time around
it was Tom Cruise's idea. Paul Newman had taken Tom
to the race track, and Tom fell in love with
the sports. Flying in a jet was glorious, But in

(08:04):
a race car it's a battle. You know, during a race,
you're in there, you know every second. I love flying
enough fourteen to find my choice, I'd be racing. Tom
got hooked on driving stock cars in the way that
only Tom Cruise can. He competed in races against real drivers.
And one the green flag is down and Cruise moves
out ahead of the portion number eight in g T two.

(08:26):
Cruise appears to be in full control here, demonstrating the
kind of smoothness and continuity that's been the trademark of
the Newman Sharp racing feme, How does the gearbox fail?
Top Gay Buddy, nice and easy night and smooth knights
and smooth. To convince himself to join Top Gun, Tom

(08:47):
had taken a jet ride with the Blue Angels. Now
it took driving a Nissan stock car a hundred and
seventy five miles per hour around the track for Tom
to be convinced it was Tom and not Dawn who
immersed himself in the research. Tom spent months hanging out
with a NASCAR crowd. Many of the stories Tom hurd
found their way into the movie, like Richard Petty's famously

(09:09):
devastating wreck at the Dayton of five hundred, which left
him temporarily blind coming out of turn. Hear me, where
are your fingers for me to anything? Tell me what's

(09:37):
going on? And all the great dialogue that came from
NASCAR owner Rick Hendrick and his buddies, like dropping the hammer,
No you're not, and the famous line from crew chief
Harry Hyde Rubbin Son is racing, Okay, I'm gonna pull

(09:59):
this rookies over the track of a just slapped He
didn't slam it. He didn't bump you, he didn't nudge you.
He rubbed you. And Robin's son is right, and Hendricks line,
we look like a monkey fucking a football. I had

(10:21):
sponsors in the stands, and I'm hugging and holding hands
and kissing him in the year and praying for a
good showing and what do we do? We end up
looking like a monkey fucking a football out there. Robert
Town would be the credited writer on Days of Thunder,
but before bringing in Town, Tom brought in Donald Stewart,

(10:42):
a big auto racing fan who had won an oscar
for the Jack Lemon film missing. Don and Tom weren't
seeing eye to eye, and so they brought back old
pal Warren scaring. Warren had helped to smooth out the
disputes between Don and Tom on Top Gun, but he
couldn't do the same on Thunder. Don wanted to use
the top Gun template a sort of top Gun on wheels,

(11:04):
while Tom wanted a more talkie character driven peace. That
was a very big blow when Warren left the picture.
At that time, Don had already lost his closest allied,
Dawn Steele. Dawn had been with Dawn since the beginning
until ned Tannin fired down while she was giving birth
at Cedar SINAI. I have to tell you that it
was a difficult day, if you will. And after at

(11:27):
seventeen or eighteen hours of labor in an emergency C section,
you know, I I was relieved. I had this healthy
child in my arms. I was healthy. My husband went
out for a minute and came back and his face
was white, and he he was carrying the trade papers Variety,
And on the front page of Variety it basically said
that I had lost my job while I was in labor.
She would go on to become the first female studio

(11:49):
head at Columbia. Without Don Steele in his corner, Don
had nobody to back him up. Robert Town and Tom
Cruise were both at the top of their game. Don
couldn't push those guys around. Not when it came to
the screenplay. Tom and Don and Robert Town didn't agree
on much during the writing phase, but they did have
the Tim Richmond story. Tim was always the inspiration for

(12:12):
Cold Trickle, and I implored Don just just go all
in and tell the Tim Richmond story. You'll win awards.
It was the best story in sport at the time.
When we return, we go into NASCAR's betrayal of the
legendary driver Tim Richmond. Now, Hollywood, Tim Richmond, what are

(12:41):
you trying to prove? I'm prove. I'm trying to prove
that I was put on this earth to have fun,
to succeed at the Fund Department Tim Richmond was not
your typical stock car driver. For one thing, he was
a Yankee, the only one on the circuit. He was
known to wear fur coats and Ferragamo loafers. He kept
an apartment in New York City a party boat in Florida.

(13:03):
He hung out with celebrities and centerfolds. He was the
Joe Namath. The drivers the sport had never seen anyone
like him. Don and I went to Riverside. Tim had
pulled out a twenty five car lead on the back
straight away, with only about three miles to finish before
he'd take the flag. He'd been in his car for
over two hours, and there's no air conditioning in these cars.

(13:24):
The track must have been a hundred and twenty degrees.
Tim told me later he lost six pounds of waterway
just from sweat. Tim had won the race at Riverside,
but the commentator Richard Petty, one of the legends in
the sport, noted Tim had an advantage. He hadn't raced
in six months. He was more arrested, well arrested. That

(13:45):
couldn't have been further from the truth. Nobody knew how
bad it was. He was battling aids the double pneumonia
was just the beginning. Tim was dying. Tim, do you
have a drunk problem? I'm sorry, but that us has
been asked more than once here, more than once by everybody,
and I am not answering that question. I am going

(14:07):
to let the drug test in Daytona answer it, and
NASCAR can answer for y'all. Uh. And if they don't
answer it the right way, then I'll have my little
bottle and there will be another answer there, because I
know I know whether it's dirty or whether it's clean,
and it is clean. Pneumonia. You've said it all along.
The rumor mall as we said has claimed drugs aids.

(14:27):
There were widespread rumors that a NASCAR driver had falsified
his drug tests. NASCAR couldn't prove he had HIV, but
they could ensure he would never race again. Without any
available medical treatments for HIV, Tim would go home to
his parents house in Fort Lauderdale to die. NASCAR had
abandoned him. A racing legend was now a ghost. He

(14:49):
was just thirty four years old when he died. Said
one half Tim's doing He said, there, he's got AIDS,
So no, no, he doesn't dale he's so, I'm telling
you he's he has AIDS. And uh. I picked up
the paper, I believe Monday Morning or something like that,
and this great, big mold headlines Tim Richmond dies of aides.

(15:12):
Picture it Days of Thunder. The Tim Richmond story, a
lone wolf race car driver lives life on the edge,
taking on the good old boys of NASCAR, only to
hide a dark and tragic secret. It would be Tom
Cruise in his Academy Award winning AIDS movie A prelude
to Tom Hanks in Philadelphia. Two years later, they would
make a tear jerker with a social message inside an

(15:35):
action movie with incredible heart pounding driving sequences. Picture Tom
and Don accepting the oscar on the Academy Awards stage
at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. What might have been? Now,
It's not a surprise that Don and his team would
avoid the real story of Tim Richmond. This was the
late nineteen eighties, Reagan was still in office and AIDS

(15:56):
was vilified amongst conservatives. A NASCAR action movie with an
AID storyline. In no way, Don, for all his flaws,
was an open progressive. He hated NASCAR's redneck culture. I
mean You can imagine the NASCAR exects scratching their heads
when Don came into their office and pitched the movie.

(16:17):
You had the cheek implants and the brow lift and
the butt lift. He's not he's not walking so well?
Is face doesn't yet have normal movement? Who is this
Hollywood guy in the cowboy boots and the funny face
that doesn't move? They were all asking, I mean, I
won't sugarcoat it. It wasn't Don's finest hour. Fortunately he

(16:38):
had Tom Cruise with him. Tom makes a big presentation
on how Days of Thunder is going to do for
NASCAR what Top Gun did for the Navy. It must
have helped. Knowing that Tom had dedicated the last year
of his life racing stock cars and could totally speak
their language. They were all in awe of Tom. Don
could feel it in the room. Dave. Wouldn't be another

(17:00):
Don Simpson movie. This was going to be a Tom
Cruise movie. Tom managed to get NASCAR to commit to
something quite extraordinary. They would allow cars built by the
production team to race in Winston Cup races. They could
then use that real racing footage in the movie. Tony
Scott and cinematographer Ward Russell would film the cars using

(17:23):
camera rigs, rigs that would forever change how auto racing
would be filmed, always trying to cover a different aspect
of the race or the stunts. Here we're trying to
get cames inside the car, underneath the cars, so we're
for photographing the stunts in positions and don't think people
done and before you also had stunt guys in real
races and doing actual crashes. A few times I sat

(17:45):
in with Don at meetings with the production keys. They'd
all gather around Tony. He'd have his shirt off, smoking
a cigar. He'd line up matchbot cars on the table
and flip them over, choreographing how many flips and turns
he wanted. He really you was like a little boy.
In order to film realistic crashes, Tony Scott had his

(18:05):
team recreate some of the most violent crashes in racing history.
They'd recked the cars one day, and the next they'd
have the cars in the shop to be repaired, and
then they'd wreck another car. It would cost a millions
of dollars. It was a real matcho thing between Tony
and Don. How many cars could they wreck. For that
big crash where Cole and Rowdy get hurt, Tony had

(18:27):
one car rigged with explosives that would shoot out a
sword off section of telephone pole that would launch the
car into a barrel. Roll mind you, they were stunt
drivers stuck inside These cars would be twisted up in
molten steel with smoke coming out from all sides. I'll
tell you it was pure madness. The mantra in production

(18:47):
was authenticity. How far could the guys go to create
the most realistic driving movie ever made. There was this
one scene where Cold Trickle and Rowdy Burns drag race
through the streets. They end up take in the race
onto the beach. Anyway, Tony Scott gets the great idea
to add the effect of live birds scattering away to
show just how fast the guys were driving. The production

(19:10):
assistants would lead the birds with bird seed. After the
first take all of the birds have been run over.
This was the sort of reckless spending and filmmaking that
invoked the ire of Paramount Head Frank Mancuso. There were
screaming matches between Mancuso and Don. It was attention similar
to what Don had experienced on Top Gun and like

(19:32):
top gun. Don reacted to the pressure in the only
way he knew how so much cocaine, Don was out
of control. There was no other word to describe it.
When we return, Don turned spring break into his own
private party and has a falling out with Tom. We

(19:59):
were in Daytona during spring break for the college kids.
Every night there was a big rat party. One night,
Don rents out an entire strip club and to promote
the movie, he uses his special effects team to blow
up a race car in front of the club. The
car is literally on fire, made to look like a
car crash. You would walk into the club and see

(20:21):
a burning race car with nobody doing anything about it.
It was nuts, totally nuts. I remember another time I
was staying at the Hilton. This was in Charlotte. I've
been out late at a club with Don the night before.
I was trying to sleep in when I hear drilling
coming from the floor below. I go down to find

(20:41):
Don overseeing a production crew. They're cutting holes in the
wall of every room on the second floor. I said
to Don, why are your guys drilling holes in the walls?
And Don looks at me and says, so everybody can
go from room to room without having to go out
into the hallway. I mean, who thinks like that to

(21:02):
be so meticulous in planning a party that you reconfigure
an entire floor of a hotel in the middle of
a film production, a production, by the way, that was
already terribly, terribly out of control. It should be noted
that Don, who seldom had girlfriends, had a girlfriend during production,

(21:22):
well at least for the first part of production. Her
name was Donna Wilson. She was an aspiring actress, and
Don made sure she had a small part in the movie.
She played the pit girl, the girlfriend of John c
Riley's character Buck Brotherton. I think Donna was there for
emotional support as much as anything else. Don was so

(21:42):
nervous about his acting and being able to perform that
he made sure production paid Donna to stay on for
the whole shoot. He was just so on edge about
playing Aldo. One night he'd be out till four am
at a club, and the next night he'd be out
jogging in the street with two assistants driving I'd him
flashing their headlights for oncoming traffic. He was like stallone,

(22:04):
playing Rocky, trying to cut weight. Don's relationship with Donna
Wilson would soon fall apart. The cocaine had taken over.
The pressure was just too much, not just for Don,
but for all the key players. Robert Town was trying
to prove he was a commercial screenwriter, Tony Scott was
trying to prove he could top his work, and Top

(22:25):
Gun Tom Cruise was trying to prove that this wasn't
a Top Gun sequel. For years, Don had hired first
time directors and actors that weren't yet movie stars and
screenwriters that he could hire and fire as he pleased.
But Don couldn't push these guys around. When he did
try and assert his cloud, he created a dust up
with Tom Cruise, a big dust up. The dust up

(22:49):
was about Tom's voice. I don't exactly know the details
about the fight between Tom and Don. What I had
heard was that there was a piece of recording equipment
called clear Sound, in vented by the head of Scientology himself,
l Ron Hubbard. L Ron had apparently used the equipment
when he was recording with his band, the Apollo Stars.
That's their concern, if not mine, my friend, they're free dods.

(23:18):
According to Hubbard's US patent five seven zero six eight five.
He registered Clear Sound as an apparatus for reducing distortion
during recording in a tape recorder. Scientology found that David
Miscabbage offered the clear sound rag for a hundred thousand dollars.
Don laughed, Was he serious? They had a perfectly good

(23:39):
sound rig for five thousand dollars. The funk did they
need a clear sound rig for? Don? Was piste. He
wasn't going to be pushed into paying a hundred thousand
dollars for a piece of recording equipment he had already
given them twenty five k. Don felt he had already
been burned once and paying out twenty five thou dollars
for Scientology classes. Don would say no to clear Sound,

(24:00):
which meant saying no to Tom Cruise. Incidentally, Tom would
later persuade Ron Howard to use clear sound on their
film Far and Away and on a Few Good Men.
Director Rob Reiner used the clear sound system for Tom
and another system for the rest of the cast. I
think the whole Clear Sound incident carried over into Tom's
annoyance with Don's acting for Tom, who had just come

(24:24):
off color of money working with Paul Newman and Martin
Scorsese and Rainman with Dustin Hoffman. Don's lack of preparation
was frustrating. Don's only preparation for his role was to
be able to fit into a really cool racing suit.
It was about looking the part. He'd lost the weights,

(24:45):
he'd done, the face lifts, he'd had the deep suntan,
The hair was flowing, the teeth were whitened. He looked
like somebody who looked the part of Aldo Benedetti. Unfortunately,
he just couldn't play the part. When Tony Scott saw
On's performance in Daily's, he knew he had a problem.
Somebody had to tell Don Dawn was a sensationalist and

(25:08):
an egomaniac, but when it came to making movies, Don
was also a brutal realist. And when he saw himself
up on the screen opposite Tom Cruise, his heart sank
deep into his chest. He knew, he knew that he
really really sucked. Don knew it, Tony knew it, the
editor Billy Webber knew it, and Tom Cruise he really

(25:32):
knew it. There was no getting around it. Altho Benedetti
needed to be cut from the picture, but Don couldn't
face the music he had lost too much weight and
had too many surgeries to not have at least a
keepsake image of his handsome self on the screen, not
to mention the embarrassment of having to tell his friends

(25:53):
and foe in the business that he had been cut
out of his own movie. In the end, all will
ever hear from Aldo Benedetti was one line of dialogue,
I'm glad he's well enough to come back, and I
hope I beat him. At the same time. That was
it one line in an interview with an ESPN reporter.
Aldo would die in a car crash, a crash that

(26:14):
made absolutely no story sense and would cost production thousands
of dollars, all so that Don could save face. The
long and chaotic production of Days of Thunder would finally
wrap in late May, with just over five weeks for
a post production that normally would last five months. The
composer Hans Zimmer, who had flown out for a job

(26:35):
interview during the film's pre production, had never left and
was said to be hold up in a custom sounds
studio built by Don Hands had to finish the music,
Billy had to finish the edit. They actually had four
edits going on at once, but in the end everybody
just ran out of time. They were locked into that
July four release date. It was a real crusher the

(26:58):
movie suffered for it Days ended up making half of
what Top Gun had made, a hundred and seventy million
dollars or three hundred million dollars when adjusted for today's inflation.
It was a financial success by any standard, but for
Don's and paramounts. Frank Mancuso was so upset over the
production that he terminated Don's three hundred million dollar deal,

(27:19):
and he demanded that Don payback nine million dollars of
his profit earnings for what he perceived as budget overages.
Ironically enough, as grim as things were, it wasn't a
bad time for everybody. Tony and Tom, for instance, both
fell in love on that picture. Don's girlfriend, Donna Wilson.
She would leave Don for Tony Scott, they would marry

(27:41):
and start a family, and Tom Cruise would fall in
love and Mary Nicole Kidman. But for Dawn there was
no love. I've never seen him in a lonelier, darker
place than after Days of Thunder. He failed as an actor,
he failed as a producer. He had hit rock bottom.
I didn't think it could get any worse? Well, of

(28:03):
course did. The Dawn Season two is executive produced by
Will McCormick and David Harris Klein. Klein also wrote and
created the series. Mike Jursits is 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

(28:25):
more episodes of The Dawn season two, listen to the
series on the I Heart Radio app or wherever you
listen to podcasts.