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July 16, 2006  I've just finished reading the 2002 edition of The Devil's Candy, the amazing 1991 book by Julie Salamon that traced the production of Brian De Palma's The Bonfire of the Vanities from start to painful finish. As one of the biggest Hollywood debacles of all time, Bonfire remains a powerful symbol of what can go wrong with big-budget filmmaking. As a lifelong De Palma disciple, however, the book makes fascinating reading for other reasons; he comes off as an extraordinary, fascinating man who knows exactly what he wants, and can't believe that other people get in the way of his vision. The sad part is that it seems De Palma doesn't get to see the vindication after his movies provoke their initial scorn -- from the left wing for their perceived racism or misogyny, and from the right wing for their violence and sexuality. Of course, Scarface is probably one of the most influential and forward-looking movies ever made, but in the cinema world it still doesn't reside in the category, of, say, Apolcalypse Now or The Godfather. I watched Bonfire again recently, and 15 years out from all the hype and bad reviews, it comes off as a fairly inconsequential film, not as bad as something like Heaven's Gate or Ishtar--the films with which it is always compared--but certainly not a success. First, I'm not exactly sure that a good movie could be made of Bonfire. The book seemed to depend at least in part on the crucial idea that Wall Street trader Sherman McCoy and his mistress, while lost in the Bronx, aren't sure whether the black guys they meet on an abandoned street are trying to help them or mug them. The movie tries also to leave it unclear, with decidedly mixed results. Wouldn't a real mugger make his intentions more clear? And if they accidentally run over someone trying to mug them, wouldn't a really smart person like Sherman McCoy report it? He already reveals his affair to his wife as a joke in the early part of the script; the fact that his mistress is with him at the time of the accident shouldn't make that much of a difference. The movie's biggest problem is casting. Bruce Willis is terrible, his narration is beyond terrible. The book reveals that his narration was recorded twice, both times while he was filming Hudson Hawk (!); considering what made it in the movie, I can't imagine what the first version sounded like. Melanie Griffith, who is supposed to be Hanks' hot mistress, does not seem like much of a vixen and looks nothing like a mistress to a rich New York bond trader. Her performance is also awful. The dialogue, in fact, is generally not very good. The best part--the five-minute-long steadicam shot that starts the movie--was De Palma's idea and wasn't in the script. In any event, the book reveals many tasty details of the filming: Bruce Willis' thinning hair and obnoxious entourage, Melanie Griffith's mid-production breast augmentation, Morgan Freeman's lack of preparation, De Palma's weight struggles and diet shakes, and on and on. One of the more interesting failures of the movie is the casting of Freeman, which was a classic disastrous zero-sum-gain Hollywood maneuver. The Bronx judge is a Jew in the script, but because of the success of Driving Miss Daisy and in an attempt to counter some racial criticism, the production literally almost immolated itself in order to cast Freeman over the already-contracted Alan Arkin, spending millions in additional locations and days. They lost their courthouse location, which was being built in Los Angeles at tremendous cost, because of Freeman's schedule, and ended up shooting the scenes at night in the Queens County courthouse on Sutphin Blvd. De Palma's fights with the studio are also fairly hilarious, as at one point they suggested that he film a bunch of shots of cars driving around and record expository dialogue over them. De Palma's response was not positive. They also tried to make him personally pay for the movie's opera scene because they were worried about overruns. His solution was brilliant; he used a trademark De Palma split diopter shot to put the opera singer's face in focus on one half of the screen, and Tom Hanks' face on the balcony in focus on the other ... so all they had to do was build a tiny opera box in a big room, and the face in the foreground gives this huge impression that they are actually at an opera house, whereas the rest of the room was a soundstage. My final thought was that, because Hollywood's standards are now so astonishingly low, nothing like Bonfire could really happen today. It was attempt to make a movie with limited appeal actually play to everyone, which is sort of impossible. Also, because of the distribution system 15 years ago, $50 million was a huge gamble. But now, with movies opening on 4,000 screens and with $10 ticket prices, the $50 million spent on Bonfire seems quaint in comparison. At least De Palma made it interesting to look at. |