Five years ago, I wrote a feature for The Servant about Brian De Palma’s 1990 adaptation of The Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe’s 1987 magnum opus. Widely considered the best American novel of the 1980s, Bonfire was a zeitgeist hit upon its release and a movie was fast-tracked into production. Many directors, including Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese, turned down the job, but De Palma was committed from the first phone call. He was so confident and thrilled that he visited his friend Julie Salamon, film critic for The Wall Street Journal, in the hospital hours after she had given birth. De Palma proposed that she cover the film in pre-production, during shooting, in post-production, and its release. This was unprecedented access to the making of a major motion picture, and it produced one of the greatest Hollywood books: The Devil’s Candy.
Casting Bonfire didn’t go well. Shooting Bonfire didn’t go well. Editing Bonfire—and reshooting certain sequences—was hellish, up against a near-impossible time crunch. And its release? Well, Brian De Palma’s The Bonfire of the Vanities is considered one of the worst novel adaptations in cinema history, forget the 1990s. The movie hurt just about everyone involved, although its three leads (Tom Hanks, Melanie Griffith, and Bruce Willis) rebounded within a few years; De Palma, on the other hand, went back to blood as Wolfe says, and made Raising Cain and Carlito’s Way, lower-profile movies with more opportunity for personality. De Palma went into Bonfire ready to chop, rearrange, and in the words of critics from 1990 to 2026, “rape” the novel he loved so much so that it could appeal to as many people as possible. As we know, this produces films that appeal to no one, and as far as major motion pictures go, De Palma only had one more undisputed hit: 1996’s Mission: Impossible, which he inexplicably didn’t promote; that was left to Tom Cruise, who couldn’t have been thrilled by the last-minute cancellation of the last director he’d work with before flying to London to make Eyes Wide Shut with Stanley Kubrick for three years.
I wrote a long story defending De Palma’s Bonfire before I read Wolfe’s novel. Having now read it, I can’t bring myself to defend the movie, let alone watch it; however, it’s not irredeemable. It’s a De Palma movie, and his compositional precision and merciless attitude save Bonfire from being a complete waste of time. But God, what a wasted opportunity, with such a great novel and many actors who would’ve been perfect with a different script or playing another character. Hanks got a lot of shit for playing a lame Sherman McCoy, but I think he works, at least in theory—certainly more than Wolfe’s choice, Chevy Chase (!). I don’t think William Hurt, the “obvious choice” mentioned by many in Salamon’s book, would’ve necessarily worked either; Hurt was WASPy and matched Wolfe’s description fairly closely, but he’s not sympathetic enough to play McCoy. Hanks is. People still make a big deal out of how “unlikable” Sherman McCoy is, and while he does begin the novel (and the movie) cheating on his wife (Judy, played by Kim Cattrall in the De Palma film, is perfect casting, and she’s great in what little time she has), by the time the cops and the Bronx Syndicate close in on him, you’re with Sherman all the way.
Think of Fatal Attraction: Sherry Lansing got that movie produced with the star she wanted, never expecting that the audience would forgive Michael Douglas for cheating on his wife so quickly. In fact, Lansing and her associates were so off the mark that they had to reshoot the ending against the vehement protests of Glenn Close. “What would you do if they did this to your character, Michael?” According to his recent memoir, Douglas turned to her and said, “Babe, I’m a whore.” The cast and crew of Fatal Attraction reassembled and the proper ending was shot. If you can believe it, the people who wanted to make Fatal Attraction (Lansing, Douglas, and Stanley Jaffe were turned down by several studios, with “strong passes” from people like Dawn Steel and Judy Davis, who flew halfway around the world on Paramount’s dime just so she could tell Adrian Lyne what a piece of shit it was) didn’t want to film Anne Archer shooting Glenn Close in the bathroom. They were really going to go with the bizarre Glenn Close hara-kiri scene, where she kills herself in a kimono and successfully frames Douglas for her “murder.” What kind of fucking ending is that? Douglas deserves prison because he wouldn’t leave his wife for some violent nutcase? Thank God for test audiences! At least THAT one.
Bruce Willis has a voiceover that's so poorly written it immediately tells you this is a botched job. Willis is the worst choice by a country mile, nothing like the English Peter Fallow of the novel, yet you can still imagine other actors who were in the running pulling it off. William Hurt could've done it: make him American, but keep him sleazy, just like his character in Broadcast News. Willis had already proved that he could defeat a band of international terrorists by himself in Die Hard, but he lacks the gravitas and cosmopolitan sophistication to pull off Fallow, a dysfunctional alcoholic who nonetheless remains a committed and scornful snob. Willis is just too Homer Simpson for the role.
F. Murray Abraham plays DA Abe Weiss in the film, and he’s fine, but he would’ve made a perfect Judge Kovitsky, the star of the novel’s climax. He refused credit when he was denied above the title billing alongside Hanks, Griffith, and Willis (this was half a decade after Amadeus, mind you), so perhaps he was spared some of the pain unleashed on the rest of the cast and crew. It was a massive, miscalculated disaster: not enough time to shoot, too much material to condense, material that wasn’t “politically correct” at the dawn of the 1990s in Hollywood. De Palma was the one who made Kovitsky a black judge! Bob Hoskins had the part (another awful choice), and was paid hundreds of thousands of dollars when he was replaced at the last second by Freeman. What’s astonishing is that De Palma, director of the “Be Black Baby” sequence in Hi, Mom!, did all of this of his own volition. No one was holding a gun to his head forcing him to butcher “the novel he loved so much.” He needed a hit and Wolfe’s masterpiece was destroyed in the process.
Although it’s considered the quintessential 1980s novel even by its critics, the very bad movie did hurt the reputation of the magnificent book—convenient for a media and literary establishment that never knew what to do with conservative writers like Wolfe, Joan Didion, and Bret Easton Ellis, whose talent was undeniable but whose politics were, well, pick your buzzword: “problematic,” “controversial,” “reactionary.” Bonfire, book and movie, came out during the last wave of extreme political correctness, and now that we’ve endured over 12 years of an even worse plague, a quality Bonfire miniseries would really hit the spot. It’s of its time and, unfortunately, ours: media parasites, conmen ripping off black people, wormy white liberals, virulent liberals who fetishize criminal minorities, feckless people of no principle, and the spiritual excavation one undergoes as a public figure.
Update it, keep it in 1980s New York, whatever—just don’t let Ryan Murphy near it. I’ve only seen The Shards, but I wouldn’t trust him with any novel. Ari Aster? He may be the only filmmaker at his level that would even be interested. Expensive limited TV miniseries are essentially of the past, a product of the 2010s briefly hyped as “the new novel,” a form that has thankfully ceded its cultural relevance to feature films. But you can’t make a three-hour movie of Bonfire, it really has to be at least eight hours. Don’t you want to see the beautiful people screech and screen and scorn unabridged? Wolfe would’ve; he never publicly criticized De Palma’s Bonfire, but he was surely aghast, just as happy as he was with Philip Kaufman’s 1983 film of his book The Right Stuff. Wolfe, who died in 2018, won’t see Bonfire properly adapted, but there’s still time for the rest of us.
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter: @NARCFILM