The Devil's Candy: The Bonfire of the Vanities Goes to Hollywood Book

A brilliant, exhaustive and totally exhausting account of how a big budget Hollywood movie gets conceived and scripted and cast and filmed without anyone involved having the faintest notion that what they are creating is one of the famous worst movies ever.

Rolling Stone : On film, Bonfire achieves a consistency of ineptitude rare even in this era of over-inflated cinematic air bags

LA Times : Certainly Wolfe's canvas might lend itself to a broad approach, but broad like Dr. Strangelove, not broad like the Three Stooges

Empire : A spectacular misfire from a director who should have known better

JULIE SALAMON IS VICIOUS, I LIKE IT

This was the movie of the best-selling novel, and a lot was riding on it. Average budget of Hollywood movie in 1990 : $26 million. Bonfire of the Vanities budget : $40 million.

Punches are not pulled in this book.

De Palma liked the work Melanie Griffiths had done on that film (Body Double) but he didn't like what it took to get it out of her. She had been a whine and a nag and she liked to get high.

Julie Salamon also likes to explain exactly what people do in the film biz:

The second assistant director made sure everyone got to where the first assistant director wanted them to be, and the second to the second did what the second assistant did when the second assistant couldn't….

And there would be squadrons of people who never moved at all. The latter group had one job only : simply to be there. For example, because Vilmos Zsigmond belonged to the Los Angeles cinematographers' union, a New York cameraman also showed up every day because the New York union rules demanded it. The New York "director of photography" was paid $3,850 a week to sit and watch Zsigmund work.

Ouch ouch ouch.

MAKING NICE

You might think that a big name director like Brian De Palma chooses all his projects, but no, in this case the book rights were bought by studio execs and BDP was then hired by them after going for a job interview.

They had already picked Tom Hanks to be Sherman McCoy, the Wall Street trader whose downfall we enjoy so much in the novel.

Tom Hanks?

So the producers had already made the fundamental mistake which turned the movie into a massive failure. The way they saw it, the book was full of really unlikeable characters

whose sole purpose was to illustrate the greed and ambition that propelled New York through the go-go eighties. It was axiomatic in the film business that unlikable characters were box office poison. Guber (producer) saw Hanks as the perfect solution

So Tom Wolfe's fairly nasty and wholly enjoyable satire had already been to the dentist to have all its teeth removed before there was even a script.

Everything followed from the ridiculous obsession with likability. The role of the sleaze-bag English journalist who transforms Sherman's private agonies into a major series of pieces about The Great White Defendant - perfect for someone like Richard E Grant - was given to of all people Bruce Willis, who could only play Bruce Willis, and then came the other major clanger.
The producers thought about their nicer versions of these two main characters and realized that they had created a new problem.

Now, instead of mimicking the book's modus operandi, which was to insult everyone equally, the script painted an unfriendly portrait of blacks, Jews, and rich women, but begged sympathy for white Wasp men… there wasn't a sympathetic black character. That was the problem.

AND THE CONSEQUENCE WAS

To fix this, they decided to change the alarming but morally forthright Jewish Judge Myron Kovitsky into the black Judge Leonard White. You see how one thing leads to another, but wait… now they need an impressive black actor for this role, and they find Morgan Freeman. Problem is, he has to film all his scenes in New York, because of tight stage commitments (Shakespeare - you cannot disrespect the bard).

The decision to cast Morgan Freeman, coming so late in the game, put the producer in the position of the foreman of a very large automobile factory who'd been given a brand new design for the cars he was manufacturing one week before the plant was scheduled to go into production. Suddenly months of planning were nullified.



So instead of filming the courtroom scenes on a sound stage in Los Angeles they now have to do them in NYC.

The film crew was already in New York and so were the actors… They'd have to begin filming in New York, uproot the entire film crew and move to Los Angeles for two weeks, return to New York, and then fly everyone back out to New York.

So instead of THAT they decide to locate a real courtroom and shoot the crucial scenes there. The search for a suitable courtroom then takes weeks and weeks and weeks, with this or that judge telling them no, or when one does say yes, Brian De Palma then says no. And time is ticking, so this is where the location scouts may wish to have their medication readily available to them at all times.

DOGS

Three dogs had been lined up to fill the role of Sherman McCoy's dog Marshall. Dapper Dan was the lunger and the tugger. A dog named Maggie would play Marshall planting his feet and refusing to walk. Brody would lie on his back while being dragged.

Ah the magic of the movies. When we see this scene, it really does look like ONE DOG.



TOPICAL REFERENCE ON PAGE 63

Even the much-publicized marital problems of billionaire Donald Trump and his wife Ivana were heralded in the tabloids as "Bonfire of the Inanities"