High Concept: Don Simpson and the Hollywood Culture of Excess (Paperback)

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 --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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.

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