Tom Cruise could have landed his Top Gun plane on top of it. Nicolas Cage could have driven that yellow Ferrari in The Rock right down it. It might even have contained the ego Eddie Murphy grew after making Beverly Hills Cop. What we're saying, the thing is big. It is The Desk, the 6-m-long, T-shaped mahogany table shared by Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer. From this mammoth slab the two producers launched enough script-to-screen missiles to become Hollywood's premier action faction. Their sweaty, two-hour commercials for American machismo were worldwide hits; they made stars of their young actors and quillions for S. and B. Then, in January, Simpson, the colorful spielmaster, died at 52 of a drug overdose. The industry had to ask: Whither--or wither--Jerry?

And we have to ask: Was there ever a Simpson-Bruckheimer movie in which the protagonist didn't win? The survivor is doing fine, though he still refers to his late partner in the present tense. "Don's a big-picture kind of guy," says Bruckheimer, 52. "I went to the Don school. He is a presence, a force. He's still training me. I sat at that desk next to him and watched him really spin it out there. But I've been doing it now for quite a while." And doing it so smartly that The Rock, a film Bruckheimer oversaw while Simpson was mostly absent, earned a burly $66.3 million its first two weeks. It promises to be an international smash.

The Rock is apt as both a Simpson testament and a Bruckheimer diploma. It is the climax of their obsession--in Top, Cop, Rock, Days of Thunder, Bad Boys, Crimson Tide--with the theme of a hard guy (Don?) and a softer one (Jerry?) on a sweaty, competitive adventure. When the hero is a heroine, like Michelle Pfeiffer in Dangerous Minds, she gets testosterized into a tough Marine fighting to be heard over the blare of Coolio's Gangsta's Paradise. If Madonna hadn't patented the phrase, you could call their films "boy toys," with their Lego-assembly plots, chatty bravado, crashing cars and the near invisibility of the opposite sex.

S. and B.'s workload was uneven. To oversimplify: Don thought stuff up, Jerry worked things out. "Don attended script meetings," says Cruise, "but he wasn't on the set a lot. Jerry was always there when you wanted to get things done." It was Bruckheimer who made Coolio's music the marketing hook for Dangerous Minds; fought fiercely with The Rock's director, Michael Bay, about a single shot of helicopters over Alcatraz (they compromised on a different one); and stuck with Cage through contractual snags before shooting began. "He could have easily gone with another actor," Cage says, "but he didn't bail on me. He has a passion for actors as much as for action."

Bruckheimer also has a yen for auteurs trained in TV commercials (at least four graduates of the 30-sec. film business have directed S.-and-B. movies), perhaps because he did time on Madison Avenue. The son of a German immigrant clothing salesman who outfitted members of Detroit's Mafia-related Purple Gang, Jerry worked on the "Pepsi's Got a Lot to Give" campaign. After selling cola, why not sell movies? Bruckheimer met Simpson, who had been Warner Bros.' "house hippie," promoting films like Woodstock, and the two became instant pals. Their first film together, the no-star Jazzercise tape called Flashdance, took in $95 million at the U.S. box office in 1983 alone, back when that was real money.

B. stood by S. during the drug problems, but relations tensed. The last straw broke after a doctor-screenwriter, ostensibly treating Simpson for substance abuse, died of an overdose in the producer's pool house last year. Shortly after that, the partners split their development projects but vowed to work jointly on a few, including a sequel to Bad Boys.

Some of Bruckheimer's projects veer off-formula and up-market: Witness to the Truth, from a book by ex-FBI agent Paul Lindsay; Custody, about a woman who tries to reclaim her kids from her racist husband; Con Air, a Cage vehicle about an airline that carries convicts. "Jerry's not the least bit fulfilled yet," says DreamWorks' Jeffrey Katzenberg, a longtime business associate. "He feels energized and excited."

And does he also feel entitled to sole possession of The Desk? Actually, it's not even in his new, temporary office. Bruckheimer speaks soberly: "I would feel too weird sitting there by myself."

Not to fret. He could paper The Desk's surface with his grand projects. S. and B. is now Mr. B. for Big. --Reported by Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles