"The Plot Thickens" Podcast: "The Bonfire of the Vanities" and a Look-Back at a Very Different NYC

Last year I blogged about the 1990 movie The Bonfire of the Vanities based on the 1987 bestselling novel of the same name by Tom Wolfe. The book was a big success -- the defining 1980s novel about greed, ego, lust, institutional corruption, etc., every cardinal sin -- but the movie was an historic flop, so historic that a book was even written about it.

The book was called The Devil's Candy, written by journalist Julie Salamon, and this book has now been turned into a mutli-part podcast, hosted by Salamon and produced by Turner Classic Movies, as part of a series called "The Plot Thickens."

While I made clear in my review that the movie is bad -- really bad -- I also indicated that it was worth seeing because, visually, it captured NYC in very original, beautiful ways. And this podcast is very much worth listening to because it not only tells the story of the making of this classic bomb but it also vividly brings back to life what NYC was like 30-odd years ago -- a very different city from today. 

So read the books (both the original novel and the making-of book), listen the podcast, and, if you're brave, watch the movie -- and, while you'll eventually be "Bonfired"-out -- you'll also be brought back to a New York City that is both quite familiar and very distant.