"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. 

Review: "The Bonfire of the Vanities" (1990)

This is a bad movie -- a legendarily bad one. I've blogged about it incidently over the years.

But the story behind its creation is fascinating. There's even an entire behind-the-scenes book about it called The Devil's Candy which is way better than the movie. 

"Bonfire" is based on Tom Wolfe's massive 1987 novel of the same name about how greed and, obviously, vanity corrupt not only people but an entire city. A high-living Wall Street trader named Sherman McCoy and his mistress get into a hit-and-run accident with a young black man in the Bronx -- and his life becomes a media storm that inflames the entire city's media, judicial, and political worlds.

Because the book was so successful, a movie version seemed inevitable. And then every decision the producers made was wrong.

Who do you get to play the to-the-manor-born, aristocratic Sherman? Why Mr. Middle America himself, Tom Hanks!

Who do you get to play Peter Farrow, the emaciated British tabloid reporter who turns the hit-and-run into a media sensation? Why Mr. Die Hard action movie hero himself, Bruce Willis!

Who do you get to play the 21-year old Maria, a Southerner, Sherman's mistress? Why thirty-something year old Melanie Griffith!

Who do you get to direct this social satire? Why horror/gangster movie director Brian De Palma!

What do you with material that's been highly acclaimed for its smart humor and biting wit? Why you turn it into a raunchy, gross, Animal House-like romp.

As one reviewer said at the time, "You've got to be a genius to make a movie this bad."

The movie really is a mess. It's not funny, not insightful, and doesn't work. 

But, as an NYC movie, it actually works strangely well. De Palma is a great visual stylist. The movie starts with a stop-motion view from the Chrysler Building, to making JFK Airport look positively cinematic, to making the South Bronx look truly menacing, to making Park Avenue and Wall Street look both properly gorgeous and monstrous at the same time, to all sorts of weird camera angles, it's worth see just for its imagery if for nothing else. 

I remember when this movie came out late in 1990. This is a now legendary movie season where lots of big movies with big stars, like "Bonfire", came out and bombed at the box office. Havana with Robert Redford, The Russia House with Sean Connery, and others just all tanked. The Godfather Part III came out and got a decidely mixed reception. 

No, the winners at the box office that winter were a snotty unknown ten-year old in a silly family comedy called Home Alone and an unknown theater actress named Kathy Bates in a horror movie called Misery (that got her an Oscar). 

Ah, memories ...

Tom Wolfe RIP

Just the other night I was looking over my bookcase and pulled out a book I bought a long time ago called The Devil's Candy, about the making of the disastrous movie version of Tom Wolfe's novel The Bonfire of the Vanities. 

How ironic then, that, very next day, Tom Wolfe died here in NYC, aged 87.

Starting in the 1960s, along with writers like Gay Talese and others, Wolfe was an originator of the "New Journalism", a style of non-fiction where reporters would embed themselves with their subjects and write long, probing articles and books in a highly personal, provocative, almost literary way. Wolfe became the most popular New Journalist of all, writing about the heroes and anti-heroes of American life, from hippies to astronauts like Ken Kesey and the Yippies in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, the Black Panthers in Radical Chic (a term he coined), the Mercury astronauts in The Right Stuff (his most acclaimed work). 

Wolfe's observations were always satirical, never sentimental; always honest, no puffery. He was "politically incorrect" but never offensive -- he held the mirror up to nature, oftentimes brutally, and did so in wild, hyperbolic prose. Wolfe loved periods and italicizes and fast, whirling sentences -- there was a rock'n'roll sensibility to his words, an energy that hit your "solar plexus" (to use a term Wolfe repeated ad nauseum in his writing).

In the 1980s, Wolfe switched from journalism to fiction, publishing his legendary NYC novel The Bonfire of the Vanities in 1987. I've written a lot about this book over the years -- a novel that presents NYC as hellish landscape of greed, crime, and yes, vanity -- so I won't say any more except that it serves both as a piece of great entertainment and a lacerating commentary of this city at that time. Wolfe wrote a few more novels, most notably A Man in Full in 1998, but none equaled Bonfire -- his last few novels received poor reviews and sales -- and he became a relic of the 20th century. But he influenced endures.

Wolfe also became famous for his trademark white suit that he always wore in public. I saw him speak several times over the years and he always donned the suit with complimentary white reading glasses. 

And I ever spoke to him once. 

Once, at a book signing, I mentioned that he had been a big influence to me and that I wanted to write as well. "What kind of things do you like to write?" he asked. I said fiction. He wished me luck -- and, years later, I published my first novel Leaving New York (which you can look to and purchase on the right-hand of this blog). 

Tom Wolfe inspired me to do it and, for that, I thank him  -- and for everything he ever wrote.