June 24, 2026

QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED:

Sometimes they do. Near the end of editing 1990’s The Bonfire of the Vanities, after it had underwhelmed preview audiences, director Brian De Palma went to an industry trade screening of the movie. As Julie Salamon wrote in The Devil’s Candy, her brilliant 1991 inside look at the disastrous production of the film, in a chapter titled, “You’ve Got to Be a Genius to Make a Movie This Bad:”

Two days before the party it had hit De Palma for the first time: he might have directed a disaster. It wasn’t a good sign that the New York Times’s preview piece the day before, on Sunday, didn’t run on the front page of the “Arts & Leisure” section but way back on page 42. But that still left open the possibility that the picture would be considered controversial, that it would probably get mixed reviews. He’d always expected that. On Monday, however, when he read the trades – the industry papers whose reviews measured a film both artistically and by its box office promise – he couldn’t avoid the possibility. “The Bonfire fire of the Vanities” could be a disaster! That thought – disaster – began to sink in faster than the words he was reading.

The daily Variety review began:

NEW YORK – Brian De Palma’s take on Tom Wolfe’s “The Bonfire of the Vanities” is a misfire of a thousand inanities. A strained social farce in which the gap between intent and achievement is yawningly apparent, parent, ultralavish production has the money, cast and bestseller name value to attract a crowd initially, but downbeat reviews and word-of-mouth mouth will surely put a damper on b.o. [box office] prospects of Warner Bros.’ $45 million-plus project.

De Palma had read enough of that one. He turned to the Hollywood Reporter:

Brian De Palma douses Tom Wolfe’s “The Bonfire of the Vanities” with enough incendiary cinematic devices to keep 50 toxic dumps in perpetual petual fiery rage. While De Palma has stoked a broad and billowing comedy – one which coughs up a lot of belly laughs – it’s one that will leave fans of Wolfe’s scathing social satire choking and heaving with disapproval. “Bonfire” will be quickly extinguished at the box office.

And on and on it goes, as the negative reviews thunder in from all sides. A few pages later, Salamon quotes one of Bonfire’s film editors:

The editor David Ray was still in shock from the entire experience a few weeks after the movie opened. He had gotten his first inkling that something terrible was about to happen the night they screened the film for the journalists on the press junket. Afterward he’d heard a woman say,

“Well, that was one big zero.”

“`One big zero’!” Ray said. “I was so upset.”

“`One big zero’!” he repeated sadly.

“Even if you didn’t like the film, it wasn’t one big zero. You couldn’t just write it off like that.”

“It’s very depressing to me,” he said, sitting in the spacious apartment off Central Park West he’d bought just as “Bonfire” started filming. “We tried to make a film about society and where it’s going. I don’t think `Bonfire’ the film attempted that to the extent the novel did, but it was an interesting film and very badly treated.

“The attitude of a lot of reviewers was that we were assholes for making this film.” The thin man in the tortoise-shell glasses sat up and shook his head. “But that’s exactly what we weren’t. We were adventurous. I’m not saying the film wasn’t flawed. It was flawed. But we weren’t assholes.”

Just neutered by political correctness, a Marxist phrase that had then only begun to enter the American vocabulary. As will this latest effort to adopt Wolfe’s decade defining novel: David E. Kelley to Develop Bonfire of the Vanities Series at Apple TV, Matt Reeves to Direct.

In her tenth anniversary reissue of The Devil’s Candy, Salamon added an extra chapter in which she reported on Kirkus running an outlying positive review of Bonfire, yet with an eerily prophetic metaphor:

On September 15, 1991, the first evaluation of The Devil’s Candy appeared in Kirkus Reviews. It was complimentary and concluded with a catchy non sequitur: “Like watching a World Trade Center tower topple ple onto Wall Street.”

That throwaway line would seem absolutely chilling almost exactly ten years later, when the World Trade Center towers were destroyed by terrorists and the world abruptly became a different place. My meeting ing with De Palma took place two weeks after that, as the celebrity “news” that had dominated the culture for years was replaced by reports ports of U.S. military exploits in Afghanistan and domestic fears of bioterrorism. The movie industry was flummoxed, as producers and studio executives tried to imagine what kind of entertainment would sell in this altered atmosphere.

Incidentally, I wonder when this director realized he had a dog on his hands:

 

Posted at 8:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

DEPOPULATION: The World’s Biggest Population Fear Has Flipped – and It Could Change Everything. “Since the 1960s, public debate has often focused on the dangers of overpopulation. Those concerns have not disappeared, especially in discussions linked to immigration, but attention has increasingly turned toward shrinking populations and the economic and national security challenges they may bring.”

Posted at 7:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds

DEI IS MAKE-WORK EMPLOYMENT FOR OTHERWISE UNEMPLOYABLE NEUROTICS AND ANTI-SOCIAL TYPES:

To be fair, she won’t be evaluating any interns this summer.

Update:

If A players hire other A players, and B players hire C and D players, who hired her?

Posted at 5:11 pm by Stephen Green

CLIMATE ALARMISM AS A RELIGION, EXHIBIT #1,000,006:

Posted at 4:52 pm by Stephen Green

ICYMI: How Government ‘Affordability’ Turns an $18 Antibiotic Into $2,500. “Nothing makes anything less affordable than a government promise to make something more affordable, and a Texas pharmacist revealed this week how an $18 generic antibiotic gets listed for $2,500. But from there, things get so seriously stupid that you just know there must be a government program involved.”

Posted at 4:21 pm by Stephen Green

UNEXPECTED HEADLINES: The Only Thing Better Than Pokemon is Pokemon With Guns. “Palworld” emerged seemingly out of nowhere on Friday, releasing on PC’s Steam shop and Xbox, and has now sold more than 5 million copies in three days. It immediately became the most played video game on the planet, with more than 1.5 million concurrent players on Steam as of Monday morning. It has amassed a larger concurrent audience than every Steam game besides “PUBG: Battlegrounds” and “Counter-Strike 2.” That’s larger than the biggest games of the last two years, “Elden Ring,” “Baldur’s Gate 3” and “Hogwarts Legacy.”

Posted at 3:50 pm by Stephen Green

A VERY PUBLIC EDUCATION: It’s impossible to fail in Philly: It’s too much paperwork. “On paper, Philadelphia students can fail courses, or be retained in a grade, so long as they are offered appropriate interventions and supports,” according to the Inquirer. “But many teachers said that they were discouraged or forbidden by their principals from flunking students, or that they have given out failing grades that were overridden.”

Posted at 2:48 pm by Stephen Green

WHO’S AFRAID OF THE GOOD WAR? The Assault on American Myth:

To help answer this question, we turn again to Obama. In May 2016, almost exactly 10 years ago, he gave a little-remembered speech in Japan.

“Why do we come to this place, to Hiroshima?” Obama posed this question to the world at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial, seemingly conscious of making history as the first sitting U.S. president to visit the city—one of only two ever targeted by U.S. atomic bombs. Obama had already embarked on a much lambasted multiyear “apology tour” to foreign countries, including a 2009 talk before Turkey’s parliament in which he lamented America’s “darker periods” and the ongoing “legacies of slavery and segregation.”

His Hiroshima audience might have expected an address on nuclear nonproliferation, and Obama did deplore the “capacity for unmatched destruction” that nuclear weapons make possible. He also praised the hibakusha—survivors of the 1945 strike—citing a “woman who forgave a pilot who flew the plane that dropped the atomic bomb, because she recognized that what she really hated was war itself.” He offered no corresponding tribute to the American pilots who risked their lives for their country, nor any defense of the American decision to attack Japan; rather, he lamented the human tendency “to justify violence in the name of some higher cause.” He enjoined his listeners “to look directly into the eye of history and ask what we must do differently to curb such suffering.” He came to Hiroshima, he explained, to be reminded of the “ordinary people” who “do not want more war.” He never once sought to legitimate the cause in question or the notion that war is at times justified.

None of this is especially surprising given Obama’s famous insistence on “change.” Around midway through the speech, however, he offered something distinctive. After portraying World War II as having grown out of “the same base instinct for domination or conquest that had caused conflicts among the simplest tribes,” he sketched his view of Hiroshima’s significance:

There are many sites around the world that chronicle this war—memorials that tell stories of courage and heroism; graves and empty camps that echo of unspeakable depravity. Yet in the image of a mushroom cloud that rose into these skies, we are most starkly reminded of humanity’s core contradiction; how the very spark that marks us as a species—our thoughts, our imagination, our language, our tool-making, our ability to set ourselves apart from nature and bend it to our will—those very things also give us the capacity for unmatched destruction.

Here, Obama was engaging in a tentative attempt at mythmaking. The defining image of World War II, in this telling, was not that of soldiers storming the beaches of Normandy or the “Arbeit Macht Frei” sign above Auschwitz. No: It was an image that, in Obama’s words, represented a sinister “material advancement,” employed by America “to oppress and dehumanize those who are different.” American capitalism and American racism thus seem to undergird Obama’s understanding of World War II. He neatly placed the American decision to use the atomic bomb alongside the atrocities committed by Nazi Germany; all of it, he suggests, reminds us of mankind’s aptitude for evil. In this moment, he drew no moral distinctions in his condemnation of the horrors of war. In subtly conflating Nazi evils and the American response, Obama created a permission structure for his ideological partners to do the same thing.

Revisionists on the right, in part by taking refuge within Obama’s permission structure, have furthered this de-mythification project. Instead of castigating America for being racist, however, the right-revisionists rebuke their country as an antireligious tyranny, run by global elites. In this telling, American leadership became drawn into World War II by globalist interests while ignoring the plight of their own countrymen. Other, more extreme voices cast Hitler and Mussolini as heroic for wanting to strengthen their own nations and sense of national identity.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll