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:
