Jerry Bruckheimer, the guest on this episode of The Hollywood Reporter’s Awards Chatter podcast, is a producer of film and television who is one of the more fascinating and, to some degree, polarizing figures in Hollywood — and has been for decades.
The Guardian has written, “To those of tender sensibilities he is the devil incarnate, the man who helped destroy the movies, and an architect of our cultural stupidisation; but to those who sit in Hollywood’s counting houses he’s a man with his finger planted squarely on the moviegoing audience’s collective clitoris. He is money.” Indeed, Playboy called him “the most successful producer in history,” Variety submitted that he is “the only man in the business today to become famous strictly as a producer,” and The New York Times said he “could well be the most influential producer working today.”
And with credits including the following films — to say nothing of his many hits on TV — it’s hard to argue: Flashdance (1983), Beverly Hills Cop (1984), Top Gun (1986), Bad Boys (1995), The Rock (1996), Armageddon (1998), Pearl Harbor (2000), Black Hawk Down (2001), the Pirates of the Caribbean and National Treasure franchises and, most recently, a sequel 36 years in the making, one of the first movies since the outbreak of COVID to bring people of all ages back to movie theaters in large numbers, Top Gun: Maverick, which, six months after its release, is still playing in theaters, is 2022’s highest-grossing film by far (with nearly $1.5 billion taken in at box offices around the world), has received rave reviews (it’s at 96 percent on Rotten Tomatoes) and might well garner Bruckheimer his first Oscar nomination, in the category of best picture.
Over the course of our conversation at his Santa Monica office, the 79-year-old and I discussed how advertising led him to producing; his rollercoaster partnership, from 1982 through 1995, on “high concept” films with the late Don Simpson, a pair the New York Times called “the top producers of the 1980s” and the Los Angeles Times described as “the kings of commercial cinema,” making movies in which “style was substance and audiences left the theater buzzing from adrenaline rushes”; what led him to bet, when others wouldn’t, on directors like Paul Schrader, Michael Mann and Michael Bay, and on stars including Johnny Depp, Nicolas Cage and Tom Cruise; plus much more.
