Trivia / The Bonfire of the Vanities

• Actor-Inspired Heroism: The character of Sherman McCoy was made more likable and sympathetic than the book when Tom Hanks was cast (at the time, he hadn't quite broken out as a dramatic actor yet and was known for comedic roles).
• All-Star Cast: In a weird way, this may have actually contributed to the film's failure. The characters in the novel are almost uniformly self-serving, amoral, and unsympathetic. The filmmakers chose to cast actors like Tom Hanks, Morgan Freeman, and Bruce Willis, whom audiences then found some of the most likable actors in Hollywood.
  • Exemplified in Siskel & Ebert's review of the film:
    Roger Ebert: You know, one of the—in a movie that is filled with so many disappointments, the biggest disappointment for me was the Bruce Willis character.
    Gene Siskel: Absolutely!
    Roger Ebert: They really—they really missed a chance here. I mean, why do they get so tied up with the notion that they have to fill up a movie with stars that they don't look at a book and see who this drunken, British, freeloading, little guy was? And why not get somebody who can play that fascinating character instead of having a big lump of-of dead space there, taking up so much screen time?
• Box Office Bomb: Budget, $47 million. Box office, $15 million.
• Creator Backlash:
  • Brian De Palma hated the judge's final Character Filibuster, known as "The Decency Speech," which Tom Wolfe included in the original Rolling Stone serial but deleted from the book version. De Palma found it boring, but everyone including the studio wanted it since without it, the film had no real ending or conclusion. Michael Cristofer had to reincorporate it into his screenplay hastily primarily because the "Sword of Justice" sequence that takes place outside the courtroom after Sherman is freed and takes a sword from the statue and starts swinging it at the reporters was filmed and deleted from the final cut of the film. This scene acted as the resolution and gave Morgan Freeman's role a little more power than what was in Wolfe's novel.
  • Incidentally, Morgan Freeman considers this film the one major nightmare of his career. He recalled that being in the film was like being on an aeroplane that you knew was going to crash.
• Creator Couple: Tom Hanks' wife, Rita Wilson, came to visit him in New York while she was pregnant and spend time with him for a weekend since he was not shooting and he had missed her. Brian De Palma had just reconceived the film's opening sequence which involved a one shot steadycam entrance featuring Peter Fallow and needed an actress to play the role of the woman who Willis meets to bring him into the building after he arrives at the Winter Garden. De Palma really wanted her to play the part and offered it to her on the spot. After thinking about it, she accepted it, to De Palma's delight.
• Creator Killer: Brian De Palma's career never fully recovered from the film's failure; his best-regarded effort since is Carlito's Way while his most commercially successful effort after is Mission: Impossible (1996).
• Deleted Scene:
  • A Sword Fight between Sherman McCoy and Peter Fallow was shot for the end of the film, but unused.
  • A courthouse scene showing a riot in slow-motion had been shot at the Essex County Courthouse in Newark but was omitted from the film following negative reaction from test screenings.
• Dyeing for Your Art: Kim Cattrall dieted for over two months to slim down to a size four to play the emaciated Judy McCoy.
• Executive Meddling: De Palma has actually Jossed this as the main reason for the creative failure of the film:
  "The initial producers, once we had cast [Tom] Hanks, moved on and went over to Columbia Pictures, so I was sort of left to my own devices and pursued ways in which I thought I could make this movie more commercial and keep some edge of the book... I thought we were going to get away with it, but we didn't. I knew that the people who read the book were going to be extremely unhappy, and I said, 'Well, this is a movie; it isn't the book.' And I think if you look at the movie now, and you don't know anything about the book, and you get it out of the time that it was released, I think you can see it in a whole different way."
• Focus Group Ending: The original script ended cynically with the supposed victim of the hit-and-run walking out of the hospital, suggesting that the whole scenario was concocted. That ending did not test well with audiences and was dropped.
• Hostility on the Set:
  • According to the book The Devil's Candy, Bruce Willis was "generally disliked by most of the cast and crew [due to his ego]." On one occasion, Willis, Brian De Palma, and Tom Hanks were going over a scene to view their performances. Willis was bragging about how his work on Moonlighting helped him to adapt on screen to material like this. Hanks, always mild-mannered, looked at the screen and looked at Willis' face on screen and stated "Where's that shit eating grin" and then again stated "There it is, shit eating grin right there on screen". Willis had pretty much alienated his co-stars as well as the cast and crew, working only hanging out with his entourage that consisted of his longtime stylist Josee Norman, his double Randy Bowers and his bodyguards.
  • At one point, De Palma became very irritated with Morgan Freeman and how he was handling his scenes. He felt that Freeman was more concentrated and worried about his upcoming Shakespeare in the Park performance in The Taming of the Shrew rather than reading the script, studying his lines for the big "decency speech" which closed the scene after Sherman McCoy was free to go. He was also not happy that Freeman was not getting enough rest to put his best efforts into his role, which also personally irritated him.
• Hypothetical Casting:
  • Tom Wolfe wanted Chevy Chase to play Sherman McCoy.
  • Following the film's failure, Brian De Palma conceded that John Lithgow would have been a better choice for McCoy, "because he would have got the blue-blood arrogance of the character".
• Life Imitates Art: Many modern readers think the book is a fictionalization of the Crown Heights race riot, but that riot was actually in 1991, four years after the book came out.
• Romance on the Set: Brian De Palma and Beth Broderick briefly dated as a result of making this movie.
• Star-Derailing Role: This nearly was the case for Tom Hanks, so much so that he took a 19-month break from acting in order to re-evaluate his career decisions as well as spend time with his family. It also didn't help that his previous movie had been the similiarly unsuccessful Joe Versus the Volcano. A year and a half later, Hanks returned to acting and redeemed himself with films like A League of Their Own, Philadelphia, and Forrest Gump.^note The latter two earned Hanks two back-to-back Oscars, making him only the second man to win consecutive Oscars for lead performances. Of course, the rest is history.
• Troubled Production: As documented in Julie Salamon's 1991 book The Devil's Candy, it became a cautionary tale on how Executive Meddling and ego clashes can lead to a widely reviled adaptation. It was a filming experience that Morgan Freeman said was like being on a plane that you knew was going to crash.
  • Given the original novel was a dark satire revolving around a racially charged Tabloid Melodrama of intentionally Jerkass characters, the film raised some eyebrows when it was announced as a big-budget drama with an All-Star Cast and Brian De Palma directing. Given the budget and scope of the film, Executive Meddling took hold quickly.
  • When De Palma's choices for the role of Peter Fallow (who was English in the book) turned it down, the studio signed on Bruce Willis solely on his recent star power. The studio also got concerned over the racial politics after Spike Lee publicly denounced the film's planned ending as racist,^note He had to apologize for this publicly, since he effectively spoiled the film before shooting had even began. resulting in Alan Arkin being replaced by Morgan Freeman and several script changes. Sherman McCoy was made more sympathetic when Tom Hanks landed the part.
  • Large sums of money were spent on elaborate cinematography. Second unit director Eric Schwab spent $80,000 on a five-camera shot of an airplane landing in New York City just to capture a once-a-year sunset against a runway at JFK Airport.^note Salamon dedicates an entire chapter in The Devil's Candy to this shot because of how troublesome it was, and Schwab won a bet that the shot ended up in the final film at all. The film's opening title sequence was almost as expensive, to say nothing of the amount of money and effect spent on the nearly five-minute-long tracking shot that opens the film.
  • Willis, fresh from his Star-Making Role on Die Hard, brought an ego to the production that alienated most of the cast and crew. He spent most of his time with his entourage and constantly bragged about his work, causing even the usually mild-mannered Tom Hanks to snap at him. While filming Alan King's death scene, Willis got frustrated over the slow pacing and, without consulting De Palma, took over the scene to film it to his liking. This caused a good deal of tension between Willis and De Palma, even though De Palma eventually agreed with how Willis handled the scene.
  • And there were tensions between Morgan Freeman and De Palma, as De Palma thought he was looking past the film and not putting his best effort in. And Melanie Griffith left the production for two weeks and then came back with a boob job, requiring her already finished scenes to be reshot.
  • Ultimately, the film was a critical and financial failure, making less than $16 million against its $47 million budget as critics took it to task for its heavy-handed satire and miscast actors. It was the beginning of a downturn in De Palma's career. Tom Hanks took a break from acting partially because of this failure, and Morgan Freeman considers it an Old Shame.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Mike Nichols planned to direct the film and he wanted to cast Steve Martin as Sherman McCoy, but the studio felt that Martin was too old. Also considered were Kevin Costner, Tom Cruise, Michael Douglas, Christopher Reeve and Jon Voight.
  • Uma Thurman as Maria Ruskin. Tom Hanks got on well with Thurman in the screen test phase, but privately thought she wasn't ready for a role like this, and she wasn't the name that Melanie Griffith was at the time. Michelle Pfeiffer also turned it down, while Robin Wright tested for it.
  • John Cleese as Peter Fallow. In the novel, Fallow is British.^note In a 2008 interview, Cleese noted that while he thought De Palma was a fine thriller director, he didn't see him as cut out for comedy. Jack Nicholson also passed on it, while Daniel Day-Lewis was considered.
  • Kristin Scott Thomas personally screen-tested for the role of Judy McCoy, but when invited to Los Angeles to test with Hanks, she happened to be on vacation with her children and couldn't make it. De Palma didn't forget her when casting Mission: Impossible (1996).
  • Walter Matthau originally was offered the role of the judge but demanded a fee of $1 million. The producers balked at meeting his price and signed Alan Arkin instead for a modest $150,000. Then complaints about the book negatively stereotyping black people resulted in a Race Lift and recasting. Joel Grey and Edward James Olmos were also considered.
  • Steven Spielberg was briefly considered as a director due to its influence with the studio; according to many insiders and Julie Salamon's book, he always gets the chance to see all the scripts sent at Warner. His personal friend Brian De Palma got the job and Spielberg even visited the set created for the movie in Los Angeles. Adrian Lyne was asked to direct, but declined in favour of Jacob's Ladder.
  • The film's original opening, as conceived by Eric Schwab, was to have been a jewel case made of crystal reflecting against a backdrop that would have faded into a gala at the Metropolitan Museum of Art which would've introduced Peter Fallow as the man of honor. This had to be scrapped when the museum backed out due to the controversy the film had been garnering. Schwab and De Palma had to come up with another solution, which became the film's opening in the final cut. De Palma had set it up as a one-shot deal where a drunken Fallow goes through slapstick-styled follies as he heads to the Winter Garden and his moment of glory.

---