The Bonfire of the Vanities is a 1990 film adaptation of a novel by Tom Wolfe, also called The Bonfire of the Vanities. The film was directed by Brian De Palma and stars Tom Hanks as Sherman McCoy, Bruce Willis as Peter Fallow, Melanie Griffith as Maria Ruskin, and Kim Cattrall as Judy McCoy, Sherman's wife. The screenplay was written by Michael Cristofer, and the original music score was composed by Dave Grusin. The film was marketed with the tagline "An outrageous story of greed, lust and vanity in America."
Plot summary
Sherman McCoy is a Wall Street investor 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 the two find themselves in the "war-zone" of the South Bronx. When they are threatened by two black youths, Maria guns the engine, running over one of the teenagers and putting him in a coma. The two drive away and decide not to report the accident to the police.
Meanwhile, indigent 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 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, the New York community 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 landlady of Maria's apartment, and knows of secret recordings of conversations in the apartment made by the authorities to prove that the woman is not in fact living in the rent-controlled apartment herself. She discovers information about the McCoy case, which she gives to Fallow, who in turn covertly supplies it to Sherman McCoy's defense lawyer. 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 and pretends to be playing it on another tape recorder that he grasps on the table. When the tape recorder that he pretends is playing the tape is taken from him, he admits that the tape is all his (making it admissible evidence and it is technically truthful since it refers only to the dummy tape he was holding and ignores the real tape that is hidden which is not his), 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".
The film ends as it begins, where there is a large audience applauding Peter Fallow's premiere of his book. Fallow says that Sherman McCoy has moved away from New York City to an unknown destination, presumably to live in obscurity.
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.
The Fallow character, who was English in the book but American in the film, narrates in voice-over.
Main cast
++ uncredited
Production details
The film was plagued by controversy: the role of Peter Fallow was offered to both Jack Nicholson and John Cleese (Fallow was English in the novel) by Brian De Palma, but both turned down the role. When De Palma was unable to deliver an actor, the studio forced the director to cast Bruce Willis (who had starred in the successful 1988 film Die Hard) as Fallow instead. Walter Matthau was initially offered the role of the judge, but demanded a fee of $1 million. The producers balked at meeting his price and signed Alan Arkin instead for a modest $150,000. Arkin was replaced by Morgan Freeman when the studio decided to change the judge's ethnicity from Jewish to African-American in order to moderate criticism of the film's racial politics, and dialogue was added to have the judge give the final denouncement towards the manipulative actions of the main characters. Lastly, F. Murray Abraham, who has a significant part in the film, chose to not be credited over a contract dispute.[1]
Also, the studio took liberties with the source material, making Sherman McCoy more sympathetic and adding a subplot involving a minor character, Judge Leonard White. The controversies surrounding the film would be detailed in a book called The Devil's Candy: The Bonfire of the Vanities Goes to Hollywood (1991), written by Julie Salamon. For instance, the book shows that Brian de Palma had a difficult relationship with then-rising-star Bruce Willis who, in the words of Julie Salamon, "was largely disliked by most of the cast and crew [due to his ego]." In one notorious instance, during the filming of one 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. Even though Willis was called out of the set by de Palma to discuss this incident, this particular scene ended up being considerably shorter and simpler than originally intended. Brian 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."[2] Salamon's book was re-released in 2002 with a revised title, The Devil's Candy: The Anatomy of a Hollywood Fiasco, and further material by Salamon (in which she describes Bruce Willis's negative reaction to the book).
In one notable visual 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.[3] The 5-camera shot cost $80,000[4] 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.[5]
The cover of Peter Fallow's book in the film is a reproduction of the original first edition of Tom Wolfe's novel from 1987.
Locations
Sherman and Judy McCoy's luxury apartment was built on the Warner Bros. stage in Burbank, designed by Richard Sylbert.
The exteriors that were supposed to be Park Avenue really were Park Avenue, late at night. The rain and the phone box were fake. The lobby scenes were shot at 77 Park Avenue—De Palma said he hated that lobby, but it was all co-producer Fred Caruso could come up with. "Don't worry," said Caruso. "[Director of Photography] Vilmos Zsigmond said he's going to make it beautiful." "I hate beautiful," retorted the director. But he sucked it up[6].
The courthouse scenes, after a frantic search that drove the executive producers crazy, were finally shot at Queens County Courthouse, at night. The shoot took eight nights[7].
Another courthouse scene was shot at the Essex County Courthouse in Newark. This was a farcical scene depicting Sherman McCoy and the judge battling the protesters, featuring Tom Hanks fighting with the sword from the statue of blind justice. After three separate test audiences said they hated it, the $2 million scene that had taken five nights to shoot was dropped[8].
The five-minute 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 380 ft, get off it again, track backwards 234 ft, get into the elevator, get out again, track for another 250 ft. A camera assistant was injured on the first attempt[9]. The actress playing the P.R. woman who accompanies Bruce Willis during the shot is Rita Wilson, Tom Hanks's real-life wife.
The huge party scenes in Act 3 were shot at the L.A. Natural History Museum.
Courthouse exteriors were at the Mario Merola Building / Bronx County Courthouse. The subway entrance was fake — there is no subway station there.
Reception
The film itself was a critical and commercial flop when it was first released. The film cost an estimated US$47 million to make, but initially grossed just over US$15 million at the U.S. box office.
Many critics complained about the casting, especially the casting of Hanks and Willis as McCoy and Fallow. Others complained that despite opening with a well-executed tracking shot, the first two acts of the film were horribly paced and that too much time was spent making Sherman McCoy a likable character rather than advancing the plot of the story.[citation needed] Of the way Tom 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 unlikeable 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."[10]
De Palma has, however, been quick to downplay the notion that the movie suffered because of studio interference: "The initial producers, once we had cast Tom Hanks, moved on and went over to Columbia, 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."[11]
Overall, the film was nominated for 5 Golden Raspberry Awards, including Worst Picture, Worst Director, Worst Actress (Melanie Griffith), Worst Supporting Actress (Kim Cattrall) and Worst Screenplay, but did not win any of those categories.
References
- ^ The Bonfire of the Vanities (1990) - Trivia
- ^ Brian De Palma interviewed in Empire magazine #93, December 2008, p.94
- ^ 'THE BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES' (1990) | Independent, The (London) | Find Articles at BNET.com
- ^ Salamon, Julie (1991). The Devil's Candy. New York: Dell. p. 243. ISBN 0 385 30824 8.
- ^ "Vincent Fourcade - CELEBRATING THE PLEASURES OF MAGNIFICENT EXCESS", by Mitchell Owens, Architectural Digest, January 2000, v. 57 #1, p. 169 – one of twenty five persons named by the magazine "Interior Design Legends".
- ^ Salamon, p.171
- ^ Salamon, p.200
- ^ Salamon, p.372. The pain of this decision was excruciating. The scene had originally been shot for slow motion. In an attempt to make it more palatable to test audiences, De Palma had his editors change it to real-time action — an incredibly time-consuming and expensive process which essentially consisted of editing out every other frame.
- ^ Salamon, p.223
- ^ Brian De Palma interviewed in Empire magazine #93, December 2008, p.94
- ^ Brian De Palma interviewed in Empire magazine #93, December 2008, p.94
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