Entertainment Weekly, June 14, 1996

Sean Connery and Nicolas Cage are on a roll with `The Rock'--despite the death of the Alcatraz thriller's high-flying producer Don Simpson.

"MR. CONNERY, I've got terrible news for you." * Sean Connery stiffened at the words. * It was late on the afternoon of Friday, Jan. 19, three months into production on the action film The Rock. For days, Connery had been hip deep in water, fighting through a maze of tunnels constructed in the old Esther Williams swim tank on Sony's Stage 30 in Culver City, Calif. Playing a onetime Alcatraz escapee now leading a commando squad (played by actual Navy SEALs) back into the island fortress through its labyrinthine tunnels was proving to be tiring, debilitating work. He hated the smoke machines and the noisy fans used to blow the clouds toward the camera; he hated the fact that all the background din would mean the dialogue would have to be looped in postproduction.

But as soon as the deferential young assistant spoke those words, all that went out of his mind. He immediately feared something had happened either to his wife, Micheline, or his son, Jason.

Instead, the PA continued, "Mr. Simpson's dead."

Don Simpson, 52, producer of Flashdance, Top Gun, and Beverly Hills Cop, had been found hours earlier, slumped on the floor of the upstairs bathroom of his Bel Air home. Though his death was initially attributed to natural causes, an autopsy would later show that he had died of heart failure caused by a lethal combination of cocaine and nearly a dozen different sedatives, antidepressants, and antipsychotics.

"Having only met him briefly"--Simpson had made a rare visit to the set just that week--"I was not completely surprised," Connery recalls. "He did not look well."

Word on the set spread quietly but quickly. Jerry Bruckheimer, 52--Simpson's producing cohort from 1982 until a month earlier, when the breakup of their partnership had been announced--would have been forgiven if he'd called a halt to the day's work. But he soldiered on, trying to keep a lid on the news, ordering that director Michael Bay not be told.

"Someone accidentally told me," remembers Nicolas Cage--cast as the FBI chemical--weapons expert who joins Connery to battle a band of terrorists threatening to launch a lethal gas attack from Alcatraz. "It's difficult to concentrate when one of the conductors dies and you're still doing the piece."

As he tried to guide Cage through the scene, Bay sensed something was wrong. Why's Nick screwing up? he wondered. His energy's missing.

Nick, what's going on?" he asked.

"Oh, I heard some bad news."

"What are you talking about?" Bay asked.

"Don's dead."

I sat down in my chair and freaked out," Bay says. "It was just tragic. We just shot that one shot. And then I went into Jerry's trailer and just sat there for a couple of hours."

IT WASN'T supposed to have ended that way

Though not without the Sturm und Drang that goes into making any high-stakes, high-testosterone summer action movie, The Rock had moved fairly swiftly from initial conception to near completion. Unlike so many other Simpson/Bruckheimer projects that took ages to get off the ground--1995's Bad Boys, for example, had morphed over several years from a cop comedy starring Dana Carvey and Jon Lovitz to an MTV-paced thriller with Will Smith and Martin Lawrence--the $70 million production of The Rock was speeding smoothly toward its June 7 opening.

Two years earlier, screenwriting partners David Weisberg and Douglas S. Cook had noticed a Los Angeles Times article about a female park ranger living alone on one of the Channel Islands off Santa Barbara. What would happen if somebody took over the island? they speculated. Hey, what would happen if somebody took over Alcatraz--the former federal penitentiary off San Francisco that is now run as a tourist attraction? What if it were a military officer gone bad? After a few more what-ifs, they had a finished script that triggered a bidding war in late 1994: Columbia, Universal, and Fox (seeking it as a vehicle for Keanu Reeves) all lost to producer Joe Roth's Caravan Pictures, which grabbed the script for Disney with a $1.2 million bid.

Roth, who took over as chairman of Walt Disney Motion Pictures Group in 1994, immediately reached for The Rock when he began planning the 1996 summer schedule, figuring it could duplicate the success of 1995's big Simpson/Bruckheimer military maneuver Crimson Tide. And the team was back on a roll. After a fallow stretch during the first years of their Disney deal when they couldn't get then chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg to greenlight any of their trademark high-tech fantasies, they'd rallied in '95 with a triple-header that also included Bad Boys and Dangerous Minds. Even though Simpson--battling bouts of depression and drugs--was often AWOL for weeks at a time, Roth entrusted The Rock to him and Bruckheimer. "I wasn't privy to any of the problems he was having," Roth admits. "I just didn't see it."

"Joe handed it to us," recalls Bruckheimer. "We said, `Yeah, we like it, but we want to change the script.' " Bay, a commercial director (his credits include the popular "Aaron Burr" milk spot) hot from the success of his first feature, Bad Boys, wasn't entirely keen about it either. Feeling the pressure of choosing a follow-up film--"Your first one's a fluke," he figured; "your second one, you have to prove you're a real director and not a flake"--he was leaning toward a thriller called Desperate Measures (which Reversal of Fortune director Barbet Schroeder subsequently grabbed). "The first time I got [the script for The Rock!, I turned it down," says Bay. But Roth turned on his powers of persuasion, and Bay relented. "I knew Don and Jerry's sensibilities are like mine, that we'd make it real." "F---, I'M SITTING in front of Sean Connery," Bay thought during their first, tense meeting at London's Dorchester hotel. It helped that a flustered waiter was having trouble opening a bottle of wine. Connery grabbed it from him and expertly popped the cork. Mr. Smooth, thought Bay, then blurted out in a mock British accent, "Bond, James Bond." It broke the ice. Still, the 6-foot-2-inch, 32-year-old director, who's got the demeanor of a hyper-enthusiastic surfer dude, admits he approached the prospect of directing a veteran like Connery with trepidation. And for good reason. "I saw his movie, Bad Boys. It wasn't my type of movie," growls Connery. "He's technically very gifted. If he has a weakness, it's in understanding the actor's dramatic line, the pacing and rhythm of a scene. But I figured going in that the combination of himself and myself would be able to keep some sort of balance."

Cage, on the other hand, was eager to join up "even though we all knew," he says, "there was no character on the page at the beginning." Still, he saw Stanley Goodspeed, the slightly geeky FBI agent who has no field experience, "as a different kind of action hero, a reluctant one who's not heroic because he's got a steroid-ripped body or a robot head. I wanted to play an intelligent, decent man who doesn't have any interest in killing, and who doesn't swear." Cage had a prior commitment to star in Savoy Pictures' version of Scott Smith's novel A Simple Plan, but, says Bruckheimer, "we got lucky--[Savoy] went out of [the movie] business."

Neither Connery nor Cage nor their costar, Ed Harris, who plays the aggrieved brigadier general holding San Francisco hostage, was prepared for the rigors of filming on Alcatraz, where a good chunk of the movie was shot. "The interior of the place is sinister," says Connery. "And the weather is quick to change--it can be very cold, very warm. It's rather like Ireland in that you get the four seasons in one day." Cage christened the rusty surroundings "Tetanus World" but adds, "I feel silly complaining about it, because I'm just an actor--there were guys who went through hell there."

And in any event, there were plenty of other things to object to.

I can't wear this--I look like Bubble Man!" Cage protested, modeling the dry suit he donned for the Alcatraz invasion. "Look at Sean--he looks so cool." Bay not only talked him into wearing the suit, but just before the scene was shot, under the guise of adjusting Cage's face mask, he skewed the mask to one side so he'd look even goofier.

"So you're telling me I can burn my face off!" Connery almost exploded as Bay patiently spent two hours cajoling him into agreeing to an underwater stunt, during which the actors would be forced to hold their breath because if they surfaced they'd come into contact with actual fireballs. "I can't believe how much I put him through for his age," Bay laughs in retrospect, adding "I'm the cruelest bastard." Perhaps, but Bay was still no match for his star. Says one Disney insider: "There were a couple of situations where he tried to prove that he was smarter than Sean or knew more than him, but forget it. Sean ate Michael Bay for breakfast."

"THERE WERE A LOT of cooks in the kitchen," Cage says of the frenzied rewriting that continued throughout filming. "Jerry Bruckheimer is very similar to my uncle Francis [Coppola] in that way. Things are always being changed and tweaked." That may be understating a process that began last fall and ended last month with a contentious Writers Guild arbitration. Even before filming began, Bay clashed with Mark Rosner, the first screenwriter--make that rewriter--brought on board. "I forced him to put in a few scenes, like the big car chase. I figured they were paying me to come up with a lot of action to make it unique. But Rosner had a different take--he was writing a movie I was never going to make." Replies Rosner: "I would say I wrote a man's movie, and Michael always had it in his head to make a boy's movie. And I think he found people to provide him with the appropriately juvenile material."

After Rosner left, Bay met with Jonathan Hensleigh (Die Hard With a Vengeance) over martinis at the Whiskey Bar in Manhattan's Paramount Hotel and drafted him for a tour of duty that kept him rewriting right through principal photography. "I thought the script lacked entertainment and realism," Hensleigh says. "What was meant to be funny was not, what was meant to be dramatic was not, and what was meant to be dangerous was not."

By most accounts, Hensleigh did a major overhaul: He masterminded the transformation of Connery's character from an American con to a top-secret British army intelligence officer who'd been secreted away for more than 30 years because he knew too many of J. Edgar Hoover's secrets. He added a scene duplicating the character's original Alcatraz cell break. And he upgraded the original screenplay's sarin gas to the more lethal VX.

Meanwhile, Connery brought in two writers of his own to anglicize his dialogue. Aaron Sorkin (A Few Good Men) checked in to polish up the men-of-honor showdown between Connery and Harris. Cage improvised some lines and even suggested major quirks like his character's obsession with the Beatles. And Simpson, famous for his script notes, made his contribution via late-night phone conversations with Bay and Hensleigh. "It's sad. He was going through terrible times," Hensleigh says. "He would have moments of extraordinary clarity, and at other times, it was obvious he was chemically altered."

AS JERRY BRUCKHEIMER discusses the making of The Rock two weeks before its opening, he's relaxed and congenial as only a producer who feels he's sitting on top of a hit can be. If Simpson were still around, it would be an occasion for the often profane and boastful hyperbole that the press ate up. Bruckheimer, though, refuses to take the bait. He declines to discuss the relative contributions each made to their final films. But the record speaks for itself. With Simpson a virtual prisoner in his own home, Bruckheimer shouldered the weight on the set of Crimson Tide, saved Dangerous Minds by orchestrating a hit soundtrack, and shepherded The Rock to its conclusion.

For years, the standard industry line had been that Simpson was the spark plug, Bruckheimer merely the nuts-and-bolts guy. Bruckheimer has clearly heard the assessment before but exhibits no burning need to set the record straight. "I went to the Don school and he went to the Jerry school," he tactfully demurs. "Don taught me a lot. And I taught him a lot."

"I'm not going to denigrate the memory of a dead man," says Hensleigh. "But that whole line that Don was the creative genius and Jerry just an auto mechanic--you've got to remember that it was Don who was feeding that to the press." Adds Roth: "Even if that were correct 15 years ago, it certainly isn't correct today. Jerry has really evolved. I don't think there's a better producer in the business right now."

But giving credit where credit is due isn't always so easy. When the Writers Guild issued its ruling on The Rock last month, it awarded screenplay credit only to the original team of Weisberg and Cook along with the first rewriter, Rosner. Jonathan Hensleigh was outraged, and Bruckheimer and Bay backed him up. "Cook and Weisberg had a very cool idea and some cool characters," says Bay. "But I sat across from Jonathan for nine months, and he can tell his grandmother, `I wrote The Rock.' " The original writers, though they would have been willing to share credit with Hensleigh, refuse to be dismissed so lightly. Says Cook: "It remains ours--the characters, the story, the action is the same. For Bay to say it was just a cool idea is an insult."