The Bonfire of the Vanities (film)
The Bonfire of the Vanities is a 1990 American satirical black comedy film directed and produced by Brian De Palma and starring Tom Hanks, Bruce Willis, Melanie Griffith, Kim Cattrall and Morgan Freeman. The screenplay, written by Michael Cristofer, was adapted from the best-selling 1987 novel of the same name by Tom Wolfe. The film was a critical and commercial flop. The original music score was composed by Dave Grusin. The film was a box office bomb, grossing just $15 million against its $47 million budget. The controversies surrounding the film  were detailed in the 1991 book "The Devil's Candy: The Bonfire of the Vanities Goes to Hollywood", by Julie Salamon. Plot. Sherman McCoy is a Wall Street bond trader who makes millions while enjoying the good life and the sexual favors of Maria Ruskin, a Southern belle gold digger. Sherman and Maria are driving back to Maria's apartment from JFK Airport when they take a wrong turn on the expressway and find themselves in the "war-zone" of the South Bronx. They are approached by two black youths after Sherman gets out of the car to move a  tire out of the road. Sherman jumps back into the car and Maria guns the engine in reverse, running over one of the teenagers. The two drive away. Sherman initially wants to report the incident to the police, but Maria immediately talks him out of it, fearing that their affair would be publicly exposed. Meanwhile, alcoholic journalist Peter Fallow, anxious for a story to make good with his editor, comes upon the hit-and-run case as a rallying point for the black community calling upon Jewish district attorney Abe Weiss, who is the Bronx District Attorney seeking re-election . According to Judge Leonard White, almost all of DA Weiss' prosecutions end up with black and Puerto Rican defendants going to prison and Weiss is seeking a white defendant for purposes of convincing the minority-majority community that he is worth re-electing. Weiss recognizes the press coverage inherent in prosecuting the callow Sherman, who has been discovered as the owner of the car, and therefore presumed to be the hit-and-run driver, in order to cultivate the image as an avenger for the minorities and be propelled to the mayorship of New York City. As Sherman is brought  to his knees, New York City fragments into different factions who use the case to suit their own cynical purposes. Finally, Sherman is left without any allies to support him except for the sympathetic Judge Leonard White and the remorseful Fallow. Fallow gains a tremendous advantage and insight into the case when he is dating a woman who is the sub-letting landlord of Maria's apartment, and knows of secret recordings of conversations in the apartment made by the building owners to prove that the woman is not in fact living in the rent-controlled apartment herself. She discovers  information about the McCoy case (where Maria states she was driving the car), which she gives to Fallow, who in turn covertly supplies it to McCoy's defense attorney. Sherman gets his hands on a tape and plays the recording in court, where it reveals Maria directly contradicting the evidence she has just given, showing she has been perjuring herself and causing her to faint. Sherman plays the tape in a tape recorder inside his briefcase connected to a small loudspeaker that he holds on the desk. When the judge orders that he approach the bench with this evidence, he  asserts that the tape is his (making it admissible evidence), resulting in his acquittal. The people in the court go into an uproar, to which Judge White launches into a tirade that they have no right to act self-righteous and smarmy, or that they are above Sherman, considering Reverend Bacon claims to help disadvantaged New Yorkers but actually engages in race baiting, or that the District Attorney Weiss pushed this case not in the interest of justice but in the interest of appealing to minority voters to further his political career by appealing to their desire to "get even . After the Judge made his point, he begs the people to be decent and change their ways, letting Sherman go. A year later, a large audience is applauding the premiere of Fallow's book. Fallow says that Sherman McCoy has moved away from New York City to an unknown destination, presumably to live in obscurity. Cast. In addition, George Plimpton has a credited cameo appearance, Geraldo Rivera has an uncredited cameo appearance, and Hanks's wife Rita Wilson has a small but intense role as the PR woman at the beginning of the movie. Production. The novel of The Bonfire  of the Vanities" was a bestseller. Warner Bros. bought the rights from author Tom Wolfe for $750,000. The film was plagued by controversy. Among them were the acting choices: The studio made significant changes to the source material, making Sherman McCoy more sympathetic and adding a subplot involving a minor character, Judge Leonard White (eventually played by Freeman). In one notable scene in the film, Maria Ruskin (Melanie Griffith) arrives in New York on an Air France Concorde. The film's Second Unit Director, Eric Schwab, calculated the time and day when a runway at JFK would line up  exactly with the setting sun, to serve as a backdrop, and managed to film in the single 30-second time period when this occurs in any given year, while winning a bet that he could make the scene an essential part of the movie. The 5-camera shot cost $80,000 and lasted just 10 seconds in the final cut. Schwab also directed the opening title shot—an almost equally elaborate and expensive set-up requiring a 24-hour timelapse of Manhattan, from a camera platform beside a gargoyle on top of the Chrysler Building. Several of the sets parodied  the home decorated by Robert Denning and Vincent Fourcade for Carolyne Roehm and Henry Kravis. The cover of Peter Fallow's book in the film has a similar design to the original first edition of Tom Wolfe's novel from 1987. Cristofer's original script ended cynically with the supposed victim of the hit-and-run walking out of the hospital, suggesting that the whole scenario was concocted. That ending did not test well with audiences and was dropped. Locations. Sherman and Judy McCoy's luxury apartment was built on the Warner Bros. stage in Burbank, designed by Richard Sylbert . The Park Avenue exteriors were shot on location late at night, using rain effects and a prop phone booth. The lobby scenes were shot at 77 Park Avenue. The courthouse interior scenes were shot at Queens County Courthouse, at night. Courthouse exteriors were at the Mario Merola Building / Bronx County Courthouse. The subway entrance was fake — there is no subway station there. Another courthouse scene showing a riot in slow-motion had been shot at the Essex County Courthouse in Newark but was omitted from the film following negative reaction from test screenings. The 330-second Steadicam shot of Peter  Fallow arriving at the Palm Court of the Winter Garden was a "tour de force" for operator Larry McConkey. He had to track backwards, get on a golf cart, ride it for , get off it again, track backwards , get into the elevator, get out again, and track for another . The huge party scenes were shot at the L.A. Natural History Museum. Reception. The film itself was a critical and commercial flop when it was released. It cost an estimated US$47 million to make, but initially grossed just over US$15 million at the US box office, making it a  huge box office bomb. Critical reception was largely negative, often fiercely so. The film scores a 16% "Rotten" rating on Rotten Tomatoes, based on 51 reviews. The critical consensus reads: ""The Bonfire of the Vanities" is a vapid adaptation of a thoughtful book, fatally miscast and shorn of the source material's crucial sense of irony. Add it to the pyre of Hollywood's ambitious failures." In Leonard Maltin's annual "Movie Guide" publication, the film was given a "BOMB" rating, and described as an "appallingly heavy-handed 'comedy'". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of  C on an A+ to F scale. In its review, "Variety" magazine stated, "the caricatures are so crude and the 'revelations' so unenlightening of the human condition that the satire is about as socially incisive as an entry in the "Police Academy" series." Vincent Canby in "The New York Times" denounced "Brian De Palma's gross, unfunny movie adaptation." Owen Gleiberman of "Entertainment Weekly" called it, "one of the most indecently bad movies of the year." Rita Kempley, in "The Washington Post", stated "the director has become one with the buffoons Wolfe scored in his bestseller. He has not only  filed Wolfe's teeth but stuck his tail between his legs," and called the film "a calamity of miscasting and commercial concessions". In "Rolling Stone", Peter Travers wrote, "On film, "Bonfire" achieves a consistency of ineptitude rare even in this era of over-inflated cinematic air bags." Gene Siskel, in "The Chicago Tribune", wrote "preview audiences have hooted the film's revisionist ending, which concludes with a sermon. I didn't hoot because I was too sad. I gave up on the movie well before the ending." In her review for the "Los Angeles Times", Sheila Benson called the film , "an overstated, cartooned film for dullards". Steven Rea, in "The Philadelphia Inquirer", wrote "Big books have been bastardized by Hollywood before it's a time-honored tradition that counts Hemingway, Faulkner and the scribes of the Old Testament among its victims but you'd be hard-pressed to find an adaptation that screws up as royally as Brian De Palma's take on "The Bonfire of the Vanities". Miscast, misguided and miserably unfunny, Tom Wolfe's black satire about avarice, prejudice and criminal injustice in the loony-toon town of New York has been raped and stripped of all ambiguity  and dimension", and he ended the review by saying, "What a mess". A less hostile review, 2.5 stars out of a possible 4, came from Roger Ebert of "The Chicago Sun-Times". He felt that viewers who didn't read the novel might be confused by critical parts of the plot, and suggested Griffith and Freeman offered the best performances while Hanks was simply ineffective in his role. The film lacked the psychological depth of Wolfe's novel but "at least it does work well in a certain glossy way." Of the way Wolfe's story was adapted, Brian De  Palma said, "The initial concept of it was incorrect. If you're going to do "The Bonfire of the Vanities", you would have to make it a lot darker and more cynical, but because it was such an expensive movie, we tried to humanize the Sherman McCoy character a very unlikable character, much like the character in "The Magnificent Ambersons". We could have done that if we'd been making a low-budget movie, but this was a studio movie with Tom Hanks in it. We made a couple of choices that, in retrospect, were wrong. I think John Lithgow  would have been a better choice for Sherman McCoy, because he would have got the blue-blood arrogance of the character." However, De Palma has been quick to downplay the notion that the movie suffered because of studio interference: "The initial producers, once we had cast Hanks, moved on and went over to Columbia Pictures, so I was sort of left to my own devices and pursued ways in which I thought I could make this movie more commercial and keep some edge of the book... I thought we were going to get away with it, but we didn't . I knew that the people who read the book were going to be extremely unhappy, and I said, 'Well, this is a movie; it isn't the book.' And I think if you look at the movie now, and you don't know anything about the book, and you get it out of the time that it was released, I think you can see it in a whole different way." Section::::"The Devil's Candy". The controversies surrounding the film were detailed in a book called "The Devil's Candy: The Bonfire of the Vanities Goes to Hollywood" (1991), written by  Julie Salamon, who was the film critic for "The Wall Street Journal" and wanted to write a book about the adaptation of the novel. She was granted much access to the filming of "Bonfire". Among other things, the book describes how De Palma had a difficult relationship with then-rising-star Bruce Willis who, in the words of Salamon, "was generally disliked by most of the cast and crew [due to his ego]." In one instance, during the filming of a scene in which Willis was with Alan King (the scene in which the character played by King dies), Willis  challenged the crew to make the whole scene move along faster, allegedly because it was very hot on the set. Although Willis was called out of the set by De Palma to discuss the event, this particular scene ended up being considerably shorter and simpler than originally intended. De Palma described "The Devil's Candy" as "a very good book. I let Julie Salamon see everything. She portrayed it all very accurately. But I mean, nobody realized it was going wrong when we were making it. We were very enthusiastic about what we were doing." Salamon's book was re -released in 2002 with the revised title "The Devil's Candy: The Anatomy of a Hollywood Fiasco" and additional material by Salamon (in which she describes Bruce Willis's negative reaction to the book). The 2021 second season of the Turner Classic Movies podcast "The Plot Thickens" titled "The Devil's Candy" retold the story of the film. It was based largely around Salamon's book and interviews, and prominently featured Salamon as a narrator and participant.