|
Biography - Born 09/21/1945
A former advertising executive who moved into film production in the early 1970s, Jerry Bruckheimer has given audiences movies, videos and soundtracks that have topped $11 billion in grosses to date. Together with the late Don Simpson, with whom he formed Simpson-Bruckheimer Productions in 1983, the producer set the trend for the big-budget, action/adventure films that dominated Hollywood's output throughout the 1980s and 90s. Their joint ventures included "Beverly Hills Cop" (1984) and "Top Gun" (1986), both among the 20 highest-grossing features of all time and both produced via the company's long-term deal with Paramount Pictures. Their pictures were honored with 15 Academy Award nominations, two Oscars for Best Song, four Grammys, and three Golden Globes.
The ending of their deal with Paramount by "mutual agreement" at the end of 1990 was taken by many as the sign of a changing Hollywood mindset, with studios starting to put less emphasis on "blockbuster" productions and more on lower-budget films with "smaller" subjects. Simpson and Bruckheimer signed a non-exclusive, five-year deal with Disney subsidiary Hollywood Pictures in early 1991. The team were known to each other as "Mr. Inside" (Simpson) and "Mr. Outside" (Bruckheimer), the former having worked his way up through the Hollywood corporate structure and the latter drawing on a background of hands-on experience with the nuts and bolts of filmmaking.
Simpson-Bruckheimer seemed to be on a roll in 1995 with three successful films: the cop comedy "Bad Boys" with Will Smith and Martin Lawrence; Tony Scott's thriller "Crimson Tide" which pitted Denzel Washington against Gene Hackman, and "Dangerous Minds", a fact-based drama about an inner-city schoolteacher (Michelle Pfeiffer). Behind the scenes, things were hardly pleasant. Simpson was battling drug addiction and the bulk of the responsibility fell to Bruckheimer. In December 1995, Bruckheimer confirmed the formal dissolution of Simpson-Bruckheimer Productions. Less than a month later, Simpson was found dead of natural causes at his Bel Air mansion. The last movie Bruckheimer produced with Simpson, "The Rock", became the summer blockbuster of 1996, reestablishing Sean Connery as an action star and creating that image for Oscar-winner Nicolas Cage.
On his own in 1997, Bruckheimer produced "Con Air" (1997), another prison blockbuster featuring Cage as a reluctant hero. He followed that up in 1998 with the equally noisy, testosterone-soaked summer flick "Armageddon", which reunited the producer with Bruce Willis, the star of his moderately popular "The Last Boy Scout" (1991). The disaster flick also paired him for the first time with Ben Affleck, the handsome young actor who would star in his $135 million epic "Pearl Harbor" three years later (2001). Bruckheimer also began to venture into TV production, first serving as executive producer of the 1996-97 ABC series based on "Dangerous Minds". "SOF: Special Ops Force/Soldier of Fortune, Inc." (1997-99) was a syndicated action series that followed a group of trained crime fighters. Bruckheimer served as executive producer of the popcorn TV-movie "Max Q: Emergency Landing" (ABC, 1998) involving the space shuttle and then switched gears with the politically-themed "Swing Vote" (ABC, 1999), which focused on a newly appointed Supreme Court justice confronting a controversial decision on abortion. The producer was back to the action genre with his second foray in network series, the 2000 CBS fall drama "C.S.I."
2000 also saw Bruckheimer take on an interesting array of big screen projects, some of which indicated Bruckheimer had an interest in broadening his horizons and taking a vacation from genre fare. In addition to the big-budget action-adventure film "Gone in 60 Seconds", which starred Bruckheimer favorite Cage, the producer worked on the female-driven "Coyote Ugly", a story about a young woman trying to make it as a singer, followed by "Remember the Titans", starring Denzel Washington as a football coach dealing with racial strife. For the latter, the producer actually took a pay cut in order to insure its filming. In 2001, Bruckheimer created the reality show "The Amazing Race" where 11 teams race around the world. The show was a hit and came back as "The Amazing Race 2" in 2002. 2002 also saw Bruckheimer reuniting Will Smith and Martin Lawrence for "Bad Boys 2."
|
