(Editor’s Note: In 1987, Tom Wolfe published a novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities. In 1990, Brian De Palma directed the film version. In 1991, Julie Salamon published The Devil’s Candy, her chronicle of the making of the film. In 2022, I read her book and wrote this article.)
The Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe’s first novel, was a staggering success, to the extent that was often hailed as the novel of the Eighties, a novel that, when I perused it (lightly) I was inclined to describe as written to allow white people to hate black people with a good conscience. If I had read a little bit more and had known a little bit more about Tom Wolfe than I did, I would have described it as “how the Park Avenue liberals let the blacks ruin New York.”
Tom Wolfe, I eventually discovered, luved the “old New York” that existed before, well, before the liberals and the blacks ruined it. A deeply closeted homosexual from the “old South”, he found a wonderful freedom in observing New York’s infinite variety in the pre-riot 1960s. Bonfire of the Vanities was his revenge on the people who took it away from him.
Bonfire tells the story of self-described “Master of the Universe” Wall Street bond trader Sherman McCoy, whose torrential income is still barely adequate to keep pace with the spending habits of his upper-class, castrating wife Judy, especially considering the expenses he incurs maintaining his slutty hillbilly mistress Maria. The plot for the book is set in motion when Sherman, picking Maria up at the airport, takes a wrong turn while returning to New York, ending up in the South Bronx instead. When Sherman gets out of the car to remove a massive tire blocking the road, he is set upon by a pair of menacing black youths, a panicky Maria gets behind the wheel and backs up over one of the youths. They flee without reporting the accident, and, afterwards, Sherman reluctantly agrees to Maria’s demand that if, somehow, the event is reported, Sherman will say that he was driving.
Well, the story does come out, due very largely to an alcoholic reporter, Peter Fallow, very much in danger of losing his job, who desperately gins up a false story of an exemplary young black man, struck down by an arrogant, privileged white man. Abe Weiss, an unscrupulous white (white and Jewish) district attorney, egged furiously on by Reverend Bacon, an unscrupulous black pastor, and looking for a career boost, seizes on the “case” as a way of advancing his political fortunes. McCoy is indicted, and his world collapses around him as everyone in it—his wife, his employer, his “friends”—treat him like a leper, and a poor leper at that.
It is “interesting” that the basic “take” in the press on Bonfire when it first came out pictured the book as the definitive depiction/evisceration of Eighties Wall Street greed, when hard-working, $50,000 a year reporters were more than a little pissed at the sight of such things as Michael Milken taking home a then-staggering $1 billion over a four-year period, though Wall Street greed is really not the focus of the book, but rather ridiculing Upper West Side mores and sneering at the depravity of New York’s black folks. Why exactly “the media” didn’t notice this I don’t know, though perhaps they were just too busy giggling at all of Wolfe’s endless, unfunny jokes about high end fashion and furniture and other assorted Manhattan status symbols/gewgaws.
Because Bonfire was such a huge success, it was naturally destined for the silver screen, but it encountered a problem along the way. Directors can read—most of them—and they knew that Bonfire, with its hustling Jews and animalistic blacks, was a long way from Hollywood’s preferred brand of universal brotherhood. It appears that the driving force behind the film was producer Peter Gruber, who fell in love with the Sherman McCoy character and was determined to bring him to the screen, to the extent of ultimately giving the film to shock and gore meister Brian De Palma, because no A-lister would touch it. Nevertheless, the news that Bonfire was coming to the screen aroused wild excitement among the Manhattan chattering class—exactly the people Wolfe despised the most in the world—who somehow convinced themselves that De Palma would somehow “take down” Wall Street and, even, perhaps, somehow take down the great, grinning gargoyle/prince of eighties evil himself, Ronald Reagan.
I’m so old that I’d seen this movie/movie before, first with Mike Nichols’ 1970 adaption of Joseph Heller’s once-famous sixties novel Catch-22, which was somehow supposed to make Vietnam go away, and then with Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 self-immolation, Apocalypse Now, surely the most apocalyptic flop in the history of cinema, widely expected to “prove” that Vietnam was a bad idea. The (to me) bizarre notion that Hollywood can make the world a better place simply never dies.
Bonfire bombed as badly as its predecessors, but, owing to its hype, this disaster had a witness and even a biographer, Julie Salamon, who decided that the making of such a widely anticipated film deserved a chronicler. As film critic for the Wall Street Journal, Salamon had already established serious credibility with De Palma, who, it seems, gave her carte blanche to write about what she heard and saw, and encouraged others on the shoot to speak candidly with her as well.
The book is an excellent read and was reissued in 2001 (not sure why), Salamon writing an interesting update on the fortunes of De Palma and others connected with the film. The book was reissued again in 2021, because of a Turner classic movies podcast about the film, again with entertaining new material by Salamon. For whatever reason, Amazon plugged the latest reissue of the book and I bought and read it, because I have a fairly good appetite for reading about film disasters.
As I say, Devil’s Candy is excellent read; the only problem is, it’s not an honest book.
As everyone who has read DC knows, the only person who comes in for real criticism is Bruce Willis, who played the part of Peter Fallow. Willis, hot off the monster success of Die Hard, is artfully depicted by Salamon as untalented, insecure, disruptive, self-indulgent, and, worst of all, bald—or at least getting there—and constantly demanding rewrites of the script to accommodate both his ego and his limited acting chops, turning Wolfe’s utterly despicable British1 prick into a sort of tragic hero, tormented by remorse. Unsurprisingly, she describes Willis in her updates as stupidly vengeful, a typical Hollywood “star” who can’t handle the truth. Well, that’s as may be, but Bruce is not the reason why Bonfire was such a notorious flameout—not entirely, at least.
The film received oceans of bad press on its release, both because no one liked it and because, for the time, it was “staggeringly expensive”—$47 million, or about $153 million in 2022 money. Salamon does in fact describe convincingly (and entertainingly) how and why the film spun slowly but persistently out of control financially, but not “artistically”. She never confronts the “challenges” faced, and “compromises” made, by both De Palma and the studio, in turning Wolfe’s book into a hoped for Hollywood blockbuster.
Today, but not in 1991, it might be possible to make a film as cynical and “dark” as Wolfe’s book, but Wolfe’s particular brand of cynicism—largely racist and misogynist, with just a little anti-Semitism thrown in as well—is, of course, entirely out of season. Salamon never addresses the faults of Wolfe’s book, never notes that the script revised the book considerably to accommodate, in my more than 30 years after the fact opinion, the egos of De Palma and star Tom Hanks, as well as Bruce,2 while leaving its most glaring faults—its glaring racism and misogyny—untouched.
In Wolfe’s book, the lead character Sherman McCoy, played by Hanks in the film, is one of the few characters who isn’t entirely selfish and corrupt: he’s more of a patsy than anything else. He thinks he’s a bad ass on Wall Street, but, as he finds out, Wall Street ain’t the real street, and when he does hit the real street, he soon learns he’s no match for the city of wolves he encounters, betrayed and stripped of his dignity by everyone he meets and everyone he’s trusted, most spectacularly by heartless wife Judy (played by Kim Cattrall) and heartless mistress Maria (Melanie Griffith). By the time the book ends, he’s alone and bankrupt, on the hook for a $12 million civil suit, and, though he’s escaped one felony indictment, facing another. All the truly “bad” characters, the ones who have ruined his life, have profited handsomely for their misdeeds.
I don’t know who—De Palma, the suits, or Hanks—decided that poor Sherman couldn’t end up hapless and defeated. He becomes, if not master of the universe, master of his own fate, getting his indictment quashed through his own shrewd (shrewd and illegal) machinations, and then, in a truly absurd twist, defending the sympathetic judge who let him walk against a screaming, largely black mob, enraged first at being cheated of their blood feast and then by having to suffer a lecture from the judge on how they ought to learn how to behave like decent human beings. The crowd, not at all cowed by the judge’s words, surges forward to attack both McCoy and the judge, but McCoy, thinking quickly, seizes a decorative sword from a statue of “Justice” and beats back the sweating, swinish multitude.
This “story” of this scene, ill conceived from the start, is symptomatic of the failure of the film as a whole. Originally filmed in slow motion—to my mind, a lazy, manipulative technique to begin with3—it found no favor with test audiences, causing De Palma to recut it frequently. When this failed to turn the trick, he had technicians turn the sequence into “regular” motion, which in those technologically limited times meant laboriously cutting out individual frames of the film and then stitching the whole thing back together again, piece by piece. This still didn’t work, so the whole sequence was dropped from the finished film, although one “establishing shot” of the sword still appears early on.
Prior to its climax, De Palma’s take on Wolfe’s book seems to follow Bonfire reasonably well. Despite all his apparent success, Sherman is basically a chump, a klutz, bullied by both his upper-class wife Judy—Kim Cattrall’s one-note performance giving no indication of her formidable comic chops—as well as his trampy, red-neck mistress Maria.
It is “curious”—to me, at least—that the way Salamon pitches Maria’s character has little to do with what we see on the screen. She quotes Jan Gruber, the film’s original producer—there were several, obviously—as follows, taking her title from his words:
“This woman, Maria, she’s the devil’s candy,” he [Gruber] said. “This woman’s the devil’s candy. You know, the apple… in… in… ‘Little Red Riding Hood’! When the guys see her in the audience, the guys have gotta go, ‘Unnnnnnh!’” He made a gesture that approximated the yanking of a gear shift. “‘I think I might risk my career, my business to get into that!’”4
De Palma originally wanted Uma Thurman, then just 19 years old, for the role. Nearly six feet tall, with an American father and a Swedish mother, Thurman would certainly fit my bill for an impossibly exotic, utterly irresistible femme fatale. And Salamon’s almost endless descriptions of the film’s first scene (it was never clear to me why we had to hear so much about it), in which Sherman is so desperate to talk to Maria that he insists on taking the family dachshund for a walk despite a rainstorm, confirmed my impression. I assumed that McCoy had just met Maria for the first time and was incandescent with desire.
But that’s not the way it plays out, either in the book or the movie. Sherman and Maria are already lovers. So why is Sherman so desperate to talk with her? Well, he’s just lonely, it seems. She’s in Italy, and he wants to know when she’s coming home, that’s all. Eventually, she does call, and he picks her up at the airport. There’s not a hint of erotic obsession.
Thurman didn’t get the part, thanks to Tom Hanks. She and Tom rehearsed a scene together in front of De Palma, after which time, Salamon says, Hanks decided Thurman wouldn’t do.
Hanks hadn’t told De Palma what he really thought of Thurman. During the rehearsal he kept waiting for that electric moment, for that crackling of dialogue that meant two actors had really connected. It never happened, in Hanks’s opinion. He left the audition convinced that Thurman was wrong for the part.
Well, that’s what Hanks told Salamon. When it comes to Tom, Salamon never shows the slightest skepticism. Tom is always honest, Tom is always right. Tom would never black ball Uma just because she could look him straight in the eye while wearing flats, just because, as a 19-year-old, 6-foot sex goddess, she might make him look like a callow little boy, in way over his head. Never!
Instead, the part went to Griffith, who was under consideration at the same time as Thurman. The choice of Griffith strikes me as absurd, because she and Cattrall were both 33 at the time, and Griffith clearly looks older than Cattrall. What master of the universe has a mistress older than his wife?
But even if Thurman had gotten the part, she still would have been stuck with the character of “Maria”, who is not a mysterious, enchanting wanton, irresistible yet unpossessable, but a “common” slut, a testimonial to Wolfe’s utter lack of novelistic imagination, the vulgar bimbo of a thousand Broadway plays, trotted out so that audiences can ogle her breasts and snicker at her ignorant, ungrammatical speech.5
But Wolfe’s misogyny, brought faithfully to the screen, pales in comparison with his racism, also brought faithfully to the screen. When Sherman takes his fateful wrong turn into the Bronx, he enters a literal war zone, the streets littered with the burning hulks of cars, the streets crowded with marauding thugs, pimps, and whores. Well, I was never in the Bronx in the eighties, but I did live at 14th and Q Streets, NW in Washington, DC when the intersection of 14th and U was the worst drug market in the city. I only went through it once, on a bus, and it was horrible, but there were no burning cars. Prostitutes worked 14th Street from morning to midnight, but they didn’t look like the “classy” whores you see in the movies, and there were no bad ass pimps, and no beatdowns. Again, it is “curious” that in none of the many putdowns of the released film that Salamon notes is the film faulted for being racist. And Salamon never makes that charge herself.
To a remarkable extent, The Devil’s Candy is the story of a courtroom. Apparently, De Palma saw the courtroom scene in which McCoy finally obtains “justice” as the make or break scene of the film, and he was determined to film it “cinematically”, which seems to mean “in a manner befitting a true genius of the filmic arts, like myself”. Alan Arkin was hired, for $150,000, to play the noble judge who grants McCoy his freedom, and the studio spent $300,000 constructing a set that would allow De Palma to capture his vision. Once all this was set, the suits realized that having a white judge lecture a black crowd on how to behave like human beings might not play so well, so they decided they “had” to have Morgan Freeman. Freeman, or his agent, apparently sensed just how desperate the suits were, so they demanded and got $1 million, and set a tight timeframe for Freeman’s availability (he was scheduled for “Shakespeare in the Park” in the Big Apple) and also demanded that his scenes be shot on the east coast.
Arkin refused to let the studio out of his contract, so the switch cost the studio a total of $1,450,000, considered actual money in those days, and De Palma’s staff spent months desperately searching for a real courtroom on the east coast that was reachable and also worthy of De Palma’s “vision”. Salamon is entirely sympathetic to De Palma’s obsessiveness—he understands the film’s “flow” as mere mortals cannot—yet simply by meticulously recording the endless snafus, dead ends, and disappointments, she unconsciously creates a picture of a man obsessing over the little things because he can’t control the big ones—because he was trying to make a mass market film in 1990 out of material that belonged on HBO circa 1998 (though it still would be terrible).
De Palma added significantly to the film’s woes by either asking for or accepting a grossly “classy” touch—following his indictment, Sherman and wife Judy attend a performance of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, specifically the “damnation” scene, wherein a stone statue comes to life and drags the Don off to Hell—counterpoint, supposedly, to Sherman’s predicament. Well, except that, while Sherman is innocent, the Don is both a murderer and a rapist, and also refuses to declare himself penitent—which would save him from Hell, but not from earthly punishment.
Mozart is classy, for sure, but most Americans don’t know from Giovanni, so, in the cocktail party that improbably follows, De Palma has to drag in a “mad”, AIDS-ridden poet to loudly explain—at length—the plot of Don Giovanni so that it will all make sense to the great unwashed.
The cocktail party, along with the trial scene, appears intended by De Palma to be a great set piece, where all the hypocrisies of the Upper West Side will be hung out to dry. Instead, we get a few gratuitously naughty lines thrown at us, without much purpose or conviction. A book publisher—or maybe an agent—who thinks Sherman’s predicament could be turned into a serious best seller, tells him “I will literally suck your cock if you sign with me.” Later, Maria, demonstrating to Sherman that some fellow doesn’t speak a word of English, asks him “Would you like me to eat your ass?” Nothing of consequence takes place at the party, not even when Judy and Maria meet, because neither gives a damn about Sherman and both have abandoned him since his indictment. If Wolfe had made the women sympathetic characters he could have had a story, but instead they’re mere mannequins of evil.
The plot of Bonfire ultimately turns on a tape surreptitiously made of Sherman and Maria’s conversation immediately after their accident in the Bronx, in which she, of course, “admits” that she was the one driving and persuades Sherman to accept any responsibility for the accident. They are in Maria’s apartment, one that she is subletting from a friend, in violation of her friend’s lease. The landlord has installed taping mechanisms in the building to catch people like Maria’s friend, the problem being that in New York, such tapings are illegal. In particular, for a tape to be admitted as evidence in court, at least one of the taped parties has to have consented to the taping.
In the movie, but not in the book, Peter Fallow/Bruce Willis, now feeling guilty for wrecking Sherman’s life simply in order to save his own career, learns of the tape and conveys it anonymously to Sherman’s lawyer. They can’t use it, of course, but it gives the attorney an idea. Maria, who had shrewdly left the country to avoid any trouble, came back to the U.S. for her husband’s funeral. If Sherman can wear a wire, and get her to admit that she was driving the car, Sherman can walk.
This leads to the one funny scene in the picture. It wasn’t clear to me whether Maria, when she and Sherman meet, comes on to him so that she can check to see if he’s wearing a wire, or whether she’s so inflamed by the thought of having sex at her husband’s funeral that she can’t resist assaulting Sherman, but, either way, it’s funny—remarkably enough, since nothing else in the film is.
As it turns out, she does find the wire without incriminating herself, which seems to leave Sherman back at square one. But at the trial, he has a clever idea. While people are talking, he starts playing the “illegal tape”—which is entirely illegal, of course—and then claims that he made the tape, thus making it admissible as evidence, incriminating Maria and exonerating himself. And Morgan Freeman, earning his $1 mill, lets him walk. Sherman McCoy may be poor, but he’s no longer a boy. Take that, Maria!
I’ve skipped the wrap-around that begins and ends the film, showing Peter/Bruce wracked with guilt over the “irony” of it all, winning a Pulitzer (or something) for his blockbuster book on the whole farce, because it’s not at all interesting.
If you like Hollywood back story, The Devil’s Candy is an excellent read, and it (generally) tells the truth. Just not the whole truth.
1. To everyone’s relief, Willis did not attempt a British accent.
2. Both Hanks and Willis received $5 million for the film, while De Palma only got $2.5 million. De Palma was no one’s first choice for director, while Gruber was convinced that Hanks was perfect for McCoy. Willis seemed to be interested in doing something other than “Die Hard II”, but whatever he was looking for, the role of Peter Fallow wasn’t it.
3. The “worst” slow mo schtick I ever saw occurred in De Palma’s career defining Carrie, when evil queen bee “Chris” (Nancy Allen) works herself into an excruciatingly extended—and excruciatingly explicit—orgasm pulling on the rope that will drench poor Carrie (Sissy Spacek) with pig’s blood.
4. The apple in Little Red Riding Hood? Guess Jan never read the Bible.
5. Wolfe goes to the length of constructing absurd malapropisms for Maria to utter. When Sherman asks her if she’s read the papers, she says “You know I only read the papers spasmodically.” Oh, I get it! She meant “sporadically”! Funny! Except that what uneducated person would use either word? Wouldn’t she be a lot more likely to say “You know I never read the papers”? Salamon laments that most of these losers were cut from the book. Would that all of them were.
