Julie Salamon - Devils Candy: The Bonfire of the Vanities Goes to Hollywood

Tke Devil's Cand

Books by Julie Salamon

White Lies The Devil's Candy

The

Devil's Candy

The Bonfire of the Vanities Goes to Hollywood

Julie Salamon

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY Boston

Copyright 1991 by Julie Salamon All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Company, 2.15 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

CIP data is available.

ISBN 0-395-56996-6

Printed in the United States of America

bp 10 98765432

To Bill and Roxie

CONTENTS

The Players ix Prologue xi

PART i

Preproduction

The Devil s Candy 3

Great, Great, Great 19

Head Bangers 39

The Magic Hour 64

On Medicis, X-rays, and Bloody Fruit Flies

The War Zone 107

PART 11

The New York Shoot

Forty Million Dollars of Transformation 1

Silly Season in the Bronx 141

Demented Optimism 165

Wire Without a Net 194

PART III

The Los Angeles Shoot

Hollywood Way 229

Leading Ladies 257

Nickel and Diming 289

PART IV Postproduction

This Is the Best Movie We Ever Made

It s in Your Bones 353

Junketeers 375

You ve Got to Be a Genius to Make

a Movie This Bad

Author s Note 421 Index 424

THE PLAYERS

THE CREW

Brian De Palma

Director and Producer

Eric Schwab

Second Unit Director

Fred Caruso

Co-Producer

Richard Sylbert

Production Designer

Ann Roth

Costume Designer

Vilmos Zsigmond

Cinematographer

Monica Goldstein

Associate Producer

Aimee Morris

Production Assistant

Karl Slovin

Production Assistant

Doug Rushkoff

AFI Intern

David Ray

Editor

Bill Pankow

Editor

Lynn Stalmaster

Casting Director

Nancy Hopton

Script Supervisor

Doug Ryan

Camera Operator

Larry McConkey

Steadicam Operator

Chris Soldo

First Assistatit Director

Peter Runfolo

Unit Production Manager, New York

Dave Grusin

Composer

Else Blangsted

Editorial Music Consultant

Elisha Birnbaum

Foley Artist

Maurice Schell

Supervising Sound Editor

Gary Jones

Assistant Costume Designer

Cara Silverman

First Assistant Film Editor

Ray Hubley

First Assistant Film Editor

Bruce Frye

Location Scout

Darren Wiseman

Location Scout

Brett Botula

Location Manager

Randy Bowers Eddie Iacobelli Rob Harris

THE CAST

Tom Hanks Bruce Willis Melanie Griffith Morgan Freeman Beth Broderick Kim Cattrall Alan King Rita Wilson Andre Gregory

THE STUDIO

Lucy Fisher Mark Canton

Rob Friedman

Terry Semel

Robert A. Daly

Bill Young Ron Smith

THE EXTRAS

Peter Guber

Tom Wolfe

Judge Burton Roberts

Michael Cristofer Marty Bauer Steven Spielberg Dawn Steel

Bruce Willis s Stand-in Transportation Coordinator Unit Publicist

Sherman McCoy Peter Fallow Maria Ruskin Judge Leonard White Caroline Heftshank Judy McCoy Arthur Ruskin PR. Lady Aubrey Buffing

Executive Vice President, Production Executive Vice President, Worldwide Motion Picture Production President, Worldwide Theatrical Advertising and Publicity President and Chief Operating Officer, Warner Bros., Inc.

Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Warner Bros., Inc.

Vice President, Production Bonfire Production Executive

Executive Producer Author

Model for Judge Kovitsky, the Model for Judge White Screenwriter Agent

Brian De Palma s Best Friend Former Head of Columbia Pictures

PROLOGUE

A genteel murmur presided in the dining room of the Carlyle Hotel, at Seventy-sixth and Madison Avenue, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. There was, naturally, a certain bustle at breakfast as the well-groomed patrons of this refined enclave made their way to the buffet table. But there was none of the purposeful table-hopping that was so noticeable at Park Avenues Regency Hotel, known for the power breakfasts of its Wall Street and entertainment industry clientele. Discretion ruled the Carlyle, where the bellhops wore white gloves and the opulence was obvious yet understated, and the mood cheery yet subdued.

Dominating the center of the room was a huge Japanese iron vase filled with a luxurious spray of bright flowers. The walls were covered with subtle brown linen velvet and nineteenth-century English hunting prints. For more intimate conversation, one could move into one of the smaller offshoots of the main room into the smoking room, with its fussy, fabric-lined walls and eighteenth- century French redout floral prints, or into the Chinese room, named for its decorative Oriental silk screens. Everything was just so. The china was Villeroy and Boch, the silver was Chambly. The Louis XV furniture completed the sensation that manners as well as money still mattered here.

This stronghold of luxe Victoriana was one of the few places in New York City circa 1990 where Tom Wolfe didn t look like an anachronism. Dressed, distinctively as always, in a three-piece gray-plaid suit, a cream-colored shirt with an old-fashioned highnecked cut, and shoes designed to look as though they sported

spats, he spoke in a mild voice, touched slightly by a Virginia accent. With his soft, pale face and fine, graying hair, the author appeared delicate, slightly otherworldly.

It was difficult to connect this frail, courtly gentleman with the glinting satirical wit that had made him one of the most famous writers in America. Could this meticulous dandy really be the same man who composed the sixth spoken line in the best-selling novel The Bonfire of the Vanities: Heh-heggggggggggggggggghhhhh- hhhhhhhhhh! That was it. The entire thought. Heh-heggggggg - gggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhr And Bonfire was only the latest example of Wolfe s singular style. For twenty-five years as a journalist hed gleefully jabbed at the pretensions of the American middle and upper classes especially the New York intelligentsia. Hed merrily debunked The New Yorker , the Bauhaus movement, liberal chic, and Freud with uniquely rambunctious prose and enthusiastic punctuation.

That morning the slender, contradictory man was eating grain cereal with stewed fruit and speaking in a thoughtful, slightly formal fashion about how the people from Hollywood were progressing with the movie version of The Bonfire of the Vanities. He mentioned diplomatically that they were being attentive to details.

I must confess I get my shoes made at New & Lingwood, Wolfe said, dropping the name of the London fabricator of two- thousand-dollar-a-pair men s shoes with his cultivated mixture of snobbery and modesty. And the salesman was here in New York, and he said that Tom Hanks had arrived and wanted two pairs of shoes for the movie Tom Hanks or whoever was buying shoes for him and asked the salesman what kind should we get? And the salesman says, Well, in the book it says half-brogues, and the movie person says, Okay, give us those. I was rather impressed by that because, unless they make a point of it in the script to have the camera focus on the shoes, who s going to know? You have to have a very picky eye like myself to sit around and figure out where the shoes are from. They seem to be concerned with accuracy in certain respects.

He wasn t willing to criticize the moviemakers just yet. I think it s bad manners in the Southern sense to be sharp and critical of it, he said. I did cash the check. However, with his good Southern manners the author had made it clear to the Hollywood people right after he accepted the $750,000 they paid him for the rights to his book that he didn t want to have anything to do with the making of their movie.