The Bonfire of the Vanities is a 1990 American satirical black comedy film directed and produced by Brian De Palma and starring Tom Hanks, Bruce Willis, Melanie Griffith, Kim Cattrall, and Morgan Freeman. The screenplay, written by Michael Cristofer, was adapted from the bestselling 1987 novel of the same name by Tom Wolfe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bonfire_of_the_Vanities_(film)
There's a book called "The Devil's Candy" about everything that went wrong with this movie. That book has gone through three editions. I think that says a lot. It's not just that this is a bad movie, but that so many talented people managed to make a bad movie, and in an interesting way. Tom Wolfe (who wrote the original novel) only had a couple tricks, but they were good ones: his "gonzo journalist" writing style and his satirical eye. The style would be very difficult to translate so De Palma didn't even try. Losing Wolf's satirical take is what unmoored this completely from the source material. So you're just left with a story about some rich people and a reporter and some activists and a judge and a DA... and, starting from scratch, can you make this more entertaining than your average TV movie?
But it's got Tom Hanks and Bruce Willis and Morgan Freeman and a bunch of others, and the cinematography's impressive here and there. So: free on youtube, it's totally worth watching.
I started to watch this, going in blind, and wondered if this is what the book is like. I remember the book was really popular in the past. Your notes cleared that up, thanks.
Tangerine Flake Streamline Baby, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, and The Right Stuff are all better than Bonfire imo, Wolfe is better as a journalist than a novelist.
He was a reactionary at the core, and it comes out a little too much in his novels for my taste.
Bruce Willis was a terrible casting decision.