A Goner from the Git-Go

By RICHARD CORLISS

You loved the book! Now see the movie! That's how Hollywood used to sell films based on best sellers. But if the film is a notorious flop, like Cleopatra or Heaven's Gate or last year's The Bonfire of the Vanities, the pitch is, You hated the movie, now read the book about how this bad movie got made -- and how it got made so bad.

Julie Salamon, film critic of the Wall Street Journal, got to watch the accident in slo-mo close-up. In The Devil's Candy: The Bonfire of the Vanities Goes to Hollywood (Houghton Mifflin; $24.95), she tracks all the bollixed decisions that made the bosses at Warner Bros. wonder why they green-lighted Bonfire and vetoed Home Alone, and director Brian De Palma feel like an Iraqi army general. "He couldn't imagine," Salamon writes, "what it would be like to go through all this for a bad movie."

As it happens, Bonfire was only an ordinarily bad film and an ordinary box- office bomb; Robert Redford's Havana cost as much and earned far less. The reason Bonfire was a goner from the git-go is that it was based on the one '80s novel every media savant had read and, mentally, already filmed. Even a reverent adaptation would have been fitted with an Armani shroud.

But Bonfire had its crape custom tailored. Consider the casting, on both sides of the screen. Producer Peter Guber and screenwriter Michael Cristofer, who had earlier coarsened John Updike's novel The Witches of Eastwick, were the wrong gents to midwife Wolfe's book. So was De Palma, whose vision is all muscle, no finesse. Tom Hanks lacked the slick stature of Wall Street wizard Sherman McCoy (Wolfe wanted Chevy Chase). Melanie Griffith was no slinky Circe (De Palma wanted Uma Thurman), and Bruce Willis was hardly a desiccated Brit (John Cleese said no thanks). Finally, for reasons of ethnic balance, Morgan Freeman replaced Alan Arkin as a righteous judge, who in the book was a Jew. The novel they said couldn't be filmed . . . couldn't. Not by these folks.

The Devil's Candy is full of cruel Hollywood wit, and Griffith is a particular butt of the bitch-and-moan. Looking at screen tests that showed bags under her eyes, co-producer Fred Caruso snapped, "Use Preparation H. That'll shrink 'em." Months later when Griffith appeared on the set seemingly with pontoon implants in her breasts, the team sighed again. No one, evidently, suggested Preparation H.

The book could stand some shrinkage too -- and some expansion at both ends. Because the fatal decisions were made at the hiring stage, Salamon gets the main story secondhand. Nor does she offer a critique of Bonfire. Does she think it deserved its bad rep? Was De Palma a victim? Or are grosses the only reviews that count?

This is an expert coroner's report that could have been a requiem for a bloated industry. But in its malicious detail, the book verifies a Hollywood truism: not that it's a tragedy when a movie goes wrong, but that it's a miracle when anything goes right.