In the middle of a meeting

Don Simpson reached San Francisco in the late 1960s, which is about as close to the Baptist hell as anywhere on earth.

He was working for a showbusiness advertising agency and running publicity for the First International Erotic Film Festival. This is important, because – despite the Dostoevsky – Don had a very basic attitude to the movies. It was all about sensation. It was all about speed, violence, nudity, getting the point straightaway, and things the public had never seen or done before.

Don got his Hollywood opportunity thanks to an executive at Warners named Joe Hyams. Joe was know as the “vice- president for Clint” – he was the person at Warners who kept Clint Eastwood happy. Hyams had enormous wit and charm, both of which stem from the way he talked like a supporting character in a Billy Wilder film. He was always on, always sounding like a smart screenplay.

After a while it was no longer an act. It was Hollywood entering the nervous system; it’s the way picture people always seem to be in their own movie.

This made Don. He saw that he could be himself and be fictional at the same time. The role he chose was that of tough, self-destructive candor, the kind of macho boast that is its own mockery. There was no need to be himself, or find himself – he had his act down.

Don was in marketing on youth-exploitation pictures at Warners for several years. Then in 1973 he was stolen by Paramount and bumped up to executive class – these were the last heady days of that studio, when it was run by Robert Evans first, and then by Barry Diller and Michael Eisner and an army of suits.

Don was their prize dog: they loved his flamboyant fierceness; his exuberant routine of looking to lay every woman he met; his confidence that a movie could be expressed and described in a couple of sentences, maximum; and his enormous capacity for fun, money, debauchery and drugs.

More or less, the average Hollywood tycoon prefers to be discreet about that plunder. But Don was an animal, and the suave masters in silk suits were tickled that he was so naked, so acting out with it.

His job as an executive at Paramount Pictures came to an end when he passed out in the middle of a meeting.