Dishing Out The Devil’s Candy: How "The Bonfire of the Vanities" Became a Big-Screen Flop

One of the biggest questions I had about The Devil’s Candy: The Anatomy of a Hollywood Fiasco wasn’t answered until I got to the final pages of the 2002 re-issue. In reading about the 1990 screen adaptation of Tom Wolfe’s whizbang novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities, I’d learned seemingly everything there was to know on how a potential Hollywood blockbuster was conceived, written, cast, directed, produced, and marketed. No detail seemed too small to escape the notice of journalist Julie Salamon as she chronicled how the film’s budget soared to what was then an unheard-of amount, just shy of $50 million, and how (despite major stars, spectacular sets, an A-list director, and the faith of a legendary studio) public reaction had doomed the picture to be remembered as the Ishtar of its era. How did she know so much?

Since I’m a former filmmaker and an author of several books on the ways of Hollywood, I of course wanted more info about Salamon’s research. It wasn’t until, on p. 433, I arrived at an Author’s Note that I got my answer. Back in 1991, Salamon was a film critic for the Wall Street Journal. After being on the job for more than a a decade, she decided she’d like to follow a big-league Hollywood production from beginning to end. Lillian Ross of The New Yorker had accomplished the same feat on John Huston’s The Red Badge of Courage¸ ultimately publishing a book titled Picture, but that was back in 1952. Salamon was fortunate that Brian De Palma, a director known for his willingness to take risks, accepted her presence on his sets and in his conference rooms without pre-conditions. Armed with notebooks and a tape recorder, she watched everything from opening shot to wrap, and freely conducted interviews with willing members of the cast and crew.

For Salamon as a reporter there were risks and rewards aplenty. She got to know studio execs, and chatted with superstars like Tom Hanks and Melanie Griffith. But in the aftermath of her book’s publication, she was the subject of highly vicious comments by an irascible Bruce Willis, who called her a parasite and much much worse, making crude remarks in a national magazine about her breath and at one point suggesting that she blow her brains out. (A journalist’s lot, then and now, is not a happy one.)

One message of The Devil’s Candy is that Hollywood success is a crap shoot. Though Salamon was well aware of budget overruns, and knew that the Wolfe novel was controversial source material, she never saw herself as chronicling a disaster in the making. One of the most endearing portraits in her book is that of Eric Schwab, a young second unit director committed to dazzling his mentor, De Palma, with a spectacular shot. When the original plan for an electrifying New York City night montage was scrapped, Schwab became determined that his coverage of a Concorde landing at JFK would make it into the film. Calling upon every resource at his disposal, he pulled off a thrilling image of an Air France plane floating out of an orange sky. Yes, it made the final cut, though cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond tried to take credit for Schwab’s achievement. Schwab’s efforts brought him to the attention of some Hollywood honchos, but Salamon’s ten-years-later epilogue tells us that as of 2001 he was still hustling to make movies of his own, falling back on second-unit work on De Palma films like Mission Impossible in order to make ends meet. What price Hollywood, anyway?

Tom Wolfe and Philip Roth: New York Stories

My presence in New York City seems to be hazardous to authors. While I was working in Manhattan recently, the nation and the world lost two of its literary best. Tom Wolfe, the man responsible for what’s been called the New Journalism, died in New York City on May 14, at the age of 88. Eight days later, novelist Philip Roth passed away in Manhattan at age 85. Coincidence? I suppose so.

Tom Wolfe, not to be confused with the Thomas Wolfe who wrote Look Homeward, Angel in 1929, was like him a Southerner by birth. Born in Richmond, Virginia, he gravitated toward the Big Apple, from whence he chronicled social cliques and oddities in such works as Radical Chic and The Kandy-Colored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby. A flamboyant presence in his white suits, he himself became as famous as his writing. He showed up in countless documentaries, and was even featured as a version of himself on an episode of The Cosby Show called “Superstar.” He also dabbled a bit in filmmaking. In 1984 The Right Stuff, the Philip Kaufman film based on Wolfe’s lively non-fiction chronicle of the original Mercury 7 astronauts, won four Oscars and was nominated for four more, including Best Picture.

Alas, Wolfe’s other major Hollywood outing was not so successful. Wolfe published in 1987 The Bonfire of the Vanities, an outrageous satire about greed, racism, politics, and other deadly sins in contemporary New York City. This best-selling novel was purchased by Warner Bros. Then all hell broke loose. The original director, Mike Nichols, was replaced by Brian De Palma. Casting controversies led to key plot changes, with Tom Hanks’ character rendered more sympathetic and Bruce Willis cast in a role that should have gone to an Englishman. A Jewish judge from the novel was turned into Morgan Freeman, as the studio sought to mute any criticism of the film’s racial politics. Bad artistic decisions were rife, and the film became such a critical and financial flop that in 1991 Wall Street Journal film critic Julie Salamon put forth a tell-all book called The Devil’s Candy: The Bonfire of the Vanities Goes to Hollywood.

Philip Roth’s Hollywood career had fewer highs and fewer lows. Roth started out as a chronicler of Jewish life in Newark, penning acerbic tales of suburban culture clashes in a memorable little 1959 collection called Goodbye, Columbus, which won the National Book Award for fiction. A decade later, the title story was made into a popular film, starring Richard Benjamin and a star-in-the-making, Ali MacGraw. Highly popular at the box office, Goodbye, Columbus won a few Golden Globes, and its script was Oscar-nominated. In 1972, Roth became notorious as the author of Portnoy’s Complaint, with its kinky blend of ethnicity and sex (especially masturbation humor). Needless to say, the translation of Roth’s offbeat sensibilities to the screen was a challenge. Richard Benjamin again played the apparent Roth surrogate, with Lee Grant as his monstrous Jewish mother. Both critics and audiences were appalled, and Roth steered clear of Hollywood for some three decades.

Over the years, Roth’s fiction has become more solemn and less sexy. In 2003, his The Human Stain was adapted into a serious film starring Nicole Kidman and Anthony Hopkins. In 2016, actor Ewan McGregor made his directorial debut with Roth’s American Pastoral, a painful tale of family turmoil amid the radical social impulses of the Sixties. As in the case with The Human Stain,  the film version made few ripples. Roth was often mentioned as a candidate for the Nobel Prize for literature. It’s too late for that now.