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By David Ansen
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When Brian De Palma agreed to allow Julie Salamon, The Wall Street Journal's film critic, to chronicle the entire production of "The Bonfire of the Vanities," neither the director nor the journalist could have known she would witness a bona fide Hollywood debacle, a near $50 million. misunderstanding. Warner Bros. had purchased Tom Wolfe's novel for $750,000 with dreams of producing an epic summation of '80s excess and ended up embodying that excess; the studio's and De Palma's misfortune is Salamon's gain. The cloud of impending disaster that hangs over The Devil's Candy (434 pages. Houghton Mifflin. $24.95) gives her book the narrative logic of a morality tale.
That aspect of the book's success is just dumb luck. And it may obscure the author's true intent and accomplishment. As foolish and self-deluded as many of the participants may appear, this isn't a scandalous expose like David McClintick's "Indecent Exposure." Salamon's model is Lillian Ross's "Picture," the blow-by-blow account of the filming of John Huston's "The Red Badge of Courage." In even greater detail, "The Devil's Candy" reveals the nuts and bolts of big-studio movie-making today, from the auditions to the press junkets, from the executive suites where "the suits" make creative decisions with the mind-sets of nervous politicians to the sound studio where a Foley artist clumps coconut halves on the floor to emulate the sounds of horse hooves. It's impossible not to conclude, after reading this superbly reported demonstration of vanity, political turmoil, grace and disgrace under pressure, and sheer hard work, that it is no easier making a bad movie than a good one.
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Even before De Palma came aboard, crucial decisions had been made. Peter Guber, the project's prime mover (before he was hired away by Sony to head Columbia), had already signed on Michael Cristofer to write the script and Tom Hanks to play Sherman McCov. Guber's main concern was that the audience feel sympathy for the hero--the first moral readjustment of Wolfe's deliberately heartless satire. Since everyone at Warners was obsessed with the idea of bringing "empathy" to the movie, it's hard to understand why they were so enthusiastic about De Palma's idea of filming "Bonfire" as a broad satire a la "Dr. Strangelove." Why none could see that these two approaches were fundamentally incompatible (resulting, as Tom Wolfe observes, in a film with-out a coherent point of view) is a mystery. The hyper-enthusiastic Guber seems to have pitched the project on sheer blind faith and delusions of grandeur. Asked by Warners president Terry Semel how he envisions the movie, Guber answers "Great, great, great. That's how we see it. Great." By the end, he had disassociated himself from the movie entirely.
One's heart goes out to De Palma, even if you feel his approach was wrongheaded. Perceived by most of the crew as remote and unreadable (and by himself as merely "focused"), determined not to show weakness in the face of mounting hysteria over the rising budget, De Palma illustrates the plight of the artist caught in a corporate pressure cooker.
Salamon's astute, objective eyes miss little. As attuned to the production assistants as to the stars, her portraits of the players are piercingly accurate. She gets Hanks's curious mixture of affability, professionalism and impersonality just right. We see Bruce Willis alienating the crew by playing arrogant movie star, always surrounded by bodyguards. Melanie Griffith, fragile and demanding, disappears for three weeks and shows up with surgically enhanced breasts, creating a potential continuity problem. Salamon seems especially captivated by De Palma's protege and second unit director Eric Schwab, who moves heaven and earth to produce a spectacular shot of the Concorde landing, only to find that cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond takes credit for it in a magazine article. The most conspicuous gap in Salamon's reporting is the short shrift given to Cristofer's role as screenwriter (presumably he wouldn't play ball). Otherwise "The Devil's Candy" is as close to a definitive portrait of the madness of big-time moviemaking as we're likely to get. Sadly, it's the one good thing to come out of the whole sorry, misbegotten affair.
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