Hollywood Heat

Melanie Griffith was a child of Hollywood. Her mother, Tippi Hedron, was one of Alfred Hitchcock's blonde leading ladies. She's best known for Hitchcock's thriller, The Bird. They're coming. When Hitchcock discovered Tippy Hedron, she was a fashion model. It was 1961. She was recently divorced with a four-year-old child, a little girl named Melanie Griffith. Hitchcock sawhedron and a commercial for a diet drink called Seago. And he said to his people at Universal, find the girl.

Hitchcock signed Tippy Hedron to a seven year contract. But while filming her second movie with him, she wanted out of her deal. Hitchcock was hitting on her. And really that's putting it politely, sexually harassing her is more accurate. You know what, it it really was so upsetting to me that he would pull that. Card. Hedron struggled to get good parts after refusing to work with Hitchcock. One of the roles she landed came in 1973 in a movie called the Herod Experiment.

Hedron's daughter, Melanie Griffith, was fourteen then. She had a small part in the film. She was an extra. By the time Melanie signed on to Bonfire, she was 33. She'd been in 18 movies and lots of TV. She also had a seven month old baby girl, Dakota Johnson. Dakota Johnson became an actress like her mother and her grandmother. She's best known for Fifty Shades of Grey, a movie about erotic passion. Emphasis on the erotic. I need you to show me What you wanna do to me. Punish me.

Show me how bad it can be. I want you to show me the worst. Tippy Hedron, Melanie Griffith, and Dakota Johnson. For them, Hollywood was a family business in a company town. Not an easy place to work if you're a woman. Not then, and not now. And I really like to work. Mm-hmm. a woman's career lasts, really. Every woman in Hollywood has a story to tell. For Melanie Griffith, it was part of her family album.

I'm Ben Mankowitz and this is season two of the Plot Thickens, a podcast from Turner Classic Movies. Each season we'll bring you an in-depth story about the movies and the people who make them. This season we partnered with Campside Media to bring you The Devil's Candy, the story of a Hollywood fiasco and the director who made it. The movie was the bonfire of the vanities. The director, Brian DePalma.

I'm Julie Salomon. I was there to witness it all. I was the film critic for the Wall Street Journal, but in 1990, I spent a year on the set of Bonfire the Vanities with a notebook and a recorder. barely anyone noticed me. But I This is Episode 5, Hollywood Heat. Two months after shooting first began in New York, the casting crew of the Bonfire of the Vanities reported to work on the Warner Brothers back lock. In some ways, the studio lot was a relic of another age.

The street that led there was literally called Hollywood Way. From a distance, you could see the famous water tower with the Warner Brothers logo. The Hollywood Hills sloped in the background. Compared with the streets of New York, the Warner Brothers lot seemed like a different planet. It felt very safe. So safe that Bruce Willis showed up for work without his bodyguard.

So safe that you could leave your keys in your car all day long and your car would still be there miraculously at the end of the day. I know because I did that, not on purpose, but on the purpose. Hundred and eight degrees today. Then, soon after shooting in LA got started, the weather became a problem. It is a hot, hot summer night. Even with air conditioning, the heat was unbearable.

Especially since they were scheduled to do three days of filming off the Warner Brothers lot at the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History. During that shoot, the temperature hit 112. The hottest the city had ever been.

The scene was the museum bought. A huge gala after a night at the opera. Very fancy, high society kind of stuff. Sherman McCoy, the lead character played by Tom Hanks, finds himself in the tricky position of being at the party with both his wife and his mistress Maria, played by Melanie Griffith. And his wife, Maria. We've met. It had to be clear to the audience in just one look.

that these two women were different. In other words, Maria had to look amazing, which meant Melanie Griffith had to look amazing. Remember, she had to be the devil's candy. And Maria's dress? It had to be wow. Anne Roth was the costume designer. I want something overwhelming, something knock you out, something new. That's her in an interview on CBS decades later, talking about her career. Wow, was Anne Roth's specialty. It's what her work was all about.

Anne and the dressmaker put together this concoction of sparkly fabric for Melanie Griffith to wear. It was form fitting. Very hard to put on and take off. I remember Anne Roth telling the dressmaker, the dress only had to last four days. The guy seemed to love that idea of making a dress that would cost thousands of dollars and then, after four days of shooting, they'd just toss it in the garbage.

Ann Roth was a legendary talent. She was extraordinary. She still is. She just made news this year. At age 89, she's the oldest woman to win an Oscar. And the Oscar goes to the For the costumes in Ma Rainey's black bottom. Anne Roth. Myrani's black vibe. Back when I met her, she was fifty-eight. She'd gone back and forth, Broadway to Hollywood, most often with the director Mike Nichols. She'd dressed almost every major star: Meryl Streep, Dustin Hoffman, Jane Fonda.

Roth was a small, brisk woman with short blonde hair. She was always in motion. She reminded me of an elegant bird, a pheasant, on speed. No surprise, she always looked put together. Her style was noticeable on a movie set, where people tended to be a little shlimpy, myself included. Actors respected her and trusted her. They had to, especially the women. They knew they were judged harshly for how they looked.

Anroth's mission was to make them look as good as possible. Melanie Griffith was a fan. But I love her. Yeah. She's great. She doesn't take any shit from anybody. She's real opinionated but she also if you if you have a different opinion and she's wrong, she'll readily admit it, you know. I would say that I am very, very kind and understanding with actors. When they take their clothes off in the fitting room, they are at the most vulnerable. Anybody could possibly be.

Annroth was under enormous pressure because of the museum ball. Clothes were the star of this scene. Roth was in charge of coming up with hundreds of evening dresses and suits for all the actors, 275 of them to be exact, and shoes and accessories. It was a huge job. And there was another problem. The extras who would be wearing these clothes They now had to be cast in California instead of New York.

They didn't look at all like Tom Wolfe's description of society women. They weren't pale, thin, uppercrest ladies. These California women were muscular and tanned. and had supersized breasts that never seemed to droop. Even Amy Morris, the twenty two year old PA, noticed the difference.

I always felt like the odd person out because all of these beautiful women, you know, who could wear spaghetti strap dresses and their boobs stayed up and I couldn't wear them because my boobs were so huge I had to have a big bra on. It felt like the women were always the wrong size. Too small. Too big. Who is this? Truman, is that you? Kim Cotral is playing Judy McCoy, Sherman's anorexic uptight wipe. Today we know her as Samantha on Sex in the City.

Back then, she was a little-known English-born actress, classically trained. Her U.S. movie career was mainly sex kitten roles in dumb comedies. The part of Judy McCoy seemed like a great opportunity. There was just one problem. They wanted her to look be wave-like, which is sort of interesting because, you know, her body type isn't wave-like. So she lost fifteen pounds.

All that to make one line in the script seem authentic. The line that Judy says to Sherman when she realizes he's cheating on her. I'm beautiful. I do not deserve this. But Kim Cotrell figured it was worth it. I remember watching her tell a reporter at the time that she had been waiting a year for a good part when bonfire came along. She said, I feel very validated doing this.

All the actors felt pressure, but the women were placed under harsher scrutiny. It was like all of them felt the clock ticking. They felt like ingenues one day, and obsolete the next. And there was the issue of money, too. The poster Warner Brothers used to advertise bonfire was just a picture of the three stars decked out in formal evening clothes: Tom Hanks, Melanie Griffith, Bruce Willis.

Melanie is wearing her wow dress. It looks like the three of them have equal billing. Yet Hanks and Willis were each paid five million dollars. Griffith was paid one million. On the one hand, it's hard to pity someone for that kind of salary. On the other, it's terrible. These days, disparities in pay are a topic of debate. Back then, it was hardly noticed.

When it was time to shoot the museum scene in Hollywood, no one had seen Melanie Griffith for three weeks. She'd vanished after her last scene in New York. When she showed up on the lot to shoot the gala scene, her first stop was wardrobe. She had to try on that evening gown, the super expensive one that was only meant to last four days before going in the trash. But when she took her clothes off, the costume people got a major surprise. It was her breast. They've gotten a lot bigger.

During Melanie's break in filming, she had gotten plastic surgery. Word spread fast. It was so bizarre. It was so bizarre. to think that you could do that in the middle of a movie and it would go unnoticed. Amy Morris had a lot of compassion and empathy for the actress. She saw the pressure. trying to find some level of approval or you know, if I just do this, then people will like me, or if I just do this, then I'll be pretty. I understand where it came from.

Melanie Griffith had a couple of intimate scenes to film in LA. They'd be filmed on the Warner Brothers lot. Hecked. I don't know I still- Don't think so. Just She was conflicted about those lovemaking scenes and told me about it. I mean it would be pretty sad if I kept on doing parts that were like in body devils. You know, or or Or something wild. I mean I'm thirty three now. It's not I'm not twenty seven. I'm not even twenty nine. It's just

It's different. I mean I still mean sex is you know, things sexy things and sex and all that stuff is is still there and important but it's changed. It's like different and so it was Not as easy for me to play Maria as I thought it was gonna be. She was only thirty three years old, but she talked like she was on the verge of being over the hill. Eventually I brought up the subject of her plastic surgery. I saw my opening after gossip about it appeared in a magazine.

I don't know who is more uncomfortable, her or me. Melanie. What is this article on movie line about your new breath? Did you see those? No. Is it really? What does it say? There's a whole article about new breath. Mmurs are there. Oh my god. That just for this movie? No, no comment. I can't comment. Okay, I'm only asking about it because when you showed up in California, you know, this became a major sort of I'll do that. See nobody ever sent anything to me.

Lucy Fisher, the studio executive, was sympathetic. She was five months pregnant and had already had a couple of children. She looks fantastic. She had a baby. I had mixed feelings about including the surgery in my book. It was hard to resist, strictly from a storytelling point of view, but But it also made me squeamish, like even more of a voyeur than I already was. Plus, I knew that if I did write about it, some people would just focus on that. Melanie Griffith had a boob job.

In the end, I thought I had to include it because of how it affected the production. There could be continuity problems, scenes where the beginning was shot in New York with Melanie looking one way and then finished in LA with her looking another way. Many of those New York scenes were already in the can. They just had to hope no one would notice. And the after effects of the surgery were noticeable. There was even some bruising left over. The makeup artist had to cover it up for the scene.

But I also have to say, Melanie was proud of her body. And why shouldn't she be? She was a beautiful woman, in amazing shape. I remember one day on set, Melanie planted herself in front of Brian's director chair and leaned into him. She pressed her new breast against his face. She was giggling. Brian looked pretty uncomfortable. He just said, How are you, Melanie? Amy Morris was standing right there. I remember Melanie was so proud of her booth.

I mean, honestly, they it was beautiful. They were beautiful. I mean, that work on her boobs were quite stunning because I was like, God, that's like the most natural looking things I've seen ever. I get it. Melanie was constantly being scrutinized for how she looked. Maybe for her, the plastic surgery was a preemptive strike. Season two of The Plot Thickens, The Devil's Candy. We'll be back right after this.

On the third day of filming at the museum, the temperature stayed above a hundred degrees. Melanie Griffith looked incredibly glamorous in her sparkly gold gown. But she was not in a good mood. The day before, she had tried to get the screenwriter to change a line of dialogue she didn't like. A crude line written by the screenwriter. It wasn't in the book. Here's the scene.

Malia, Griffith's character, is at the museum ball. She brings Sherman over to introduce him to another guest, a Russian ballet dancer. She wants to prove to Sherman that this dancer, Boris, doesn't understand a word of English. So she smiles at Boris and says something crude. Boys Don, would you like me to eat? Your ass. I'm going to champagne. Horace responds by asking her, in French, if she'd like more champagne. Melanie wanted her crude line cut.

But she lost the battle with the screenwriter. Her line would stay in the scene. But just as the cameras were going to roll, she whispered something to Brian DePama. She wanted everyone who didn't need to be on the set to go away. If they're not on camera then they don't need to be there, you know? I don't know. Oh they can just not stand there and stare.

Unnecessary cast and crew were often asked to leave for sex scenes, but not for something like this. There were hundreds of extras crowded in the museum rotunda. A lot of them were needed for the scene, this big party. It seemed cruel to evict them all. It was so hot outside. But Brian had them leave. His actress was uncomfortable. Monica Goldstein, Brian's assistant, she had watched Brian deal with Melanie's anxieties before. Yeah.

Melanie seemed very needy. She was kind of seemed fragile, very, very needy. Brian was very um aware of how delicate emotionally she could be, but she was also very demanding in at certain times. But Melanie she didn't care if she seemed unreasonable. She noticed people watching, gawking. She couldn't help it. She didn't want them in her sight line if they didn't have to be. I mean I don't mean it in a bad way at all. It's just embarrassing to have people standing there critiquing my work.

Eventually, the extras made their way outside, and Melanie's sight line was clear. It was time to shoot Maria's crude line. When they started filming, you could barely hear Melanie. She said the offending line so quietly. I remember being surprised that she was so squeamish about saying it. I asked her why it bothered her so much. I don't know. I on that day it sounded really gross to me and I mean it is pretty gross. You're not a pr I mean Not exactly a pruder, haven't been Yeah.

No, but I feel really different now. It Maria was a it was a lot more difficult than I thought it was gonna be because I I'm married and I have three kids and my life is not of a s it's not the life of a single sexy flamboyant young woman anymore, you know? A young girl anymore. It's it's different. Still, after a few takes, something changed in the way she delivered the line. Brian told her how to say it. Be giddy and giggly, he said.

Pretty soon she started to push the line, and she was grinning. And finally, on the nineteenth take, she nailed it.

There was another embarrassing scene to be dealt with, involving another actress who was playing a character named Caroline. In Bonfire, Caroline is part of the drunken party animal crowd that Peter Fallow, Bruce Willis's character, hangs around with. I wanted to see you alone. The favour. Ryan and the screenwriter created a bizarre scene where Caroline is very drunk. They have Caroline pull off her panties and plop her naked bottom onto a Xerox machine. Uh trusting you.

She takes a photocopy and then hands it to Peter Fallow. Bruce Willis says fallow, he just sits there watching, bemused. Now isn't this a little dangerous? At the very least, unsanitary. The actress playing this part was Beth Broderick. She was slender and seductive, with a deep throaty voice and dark hair. And she was brilliant. She graduated high school at just sixteen. She went to acting school and then set out to fulfill her dream of being an actress, despite the challenges it presented.

She talked about her career recently in an interview with an acting coach. Moved to New York to pursue a career and it was really hard. It was not going very well. I was out there trying to do plays, trying to get agents, trying to make it work. At one point in the 1980s, Beth left acting altogether to help run an AIDS program in New York. Then she was back on the circuit, going to auditions. At one point she had red hair. It worked in her favor.

It's all about being memorable. Like I was the redhead with the low voice. When Beth and I talked on set, she was very direct, very intense. She said that for someone like her, meaning someone who's sexy, built a certain way, that someone was going to be typecast. She told me she had spent most of her film and TV career wearing nothing but a bra and panties and carrying a gun.

She could seem tough, like she didn't care. It resulted from years of sucking it up, doing her job no matter what. But underneath that thick skin, she felt vulnerable, like many of us do. In the Xerox scene, Beth Broderick's naked crotch wouldn't be in the actual movie. But she did have to be naked, at least partially so, to shoot it. He was used to doing more nudity on movie sets than would be used. It was standard practice. But that didn't make it any easier.

For nine hours, she pulled off her panties and hopped up on the Xerox machine. Really, it's like a twelve-year-old boy's idea of isn't that sexy? It was a closed set so I couldn't watch, and for once, I was glad to be excluded. When I asked Beth later how she handled doing something like that, she was honest with me. That vulnerability that she worked so hard to conceal, it just poured out. Goal was Ще the whole time her goal was to kip from crying.

There probably was another reason that Xerox scene was demoralizing for Beth Broderick. She and Brian had started dating. They were adults, both were single, but she didn't tell many people about it. Mr. Bright. Ryan, so what is our take on Mr. Brian? Mr. Brian loves women. What is Brian's thing with the women? Let's get down to tat here, right? Beth and I talked a little about their relationship at the time.

She told me about Brian's reaction when Beth got attention from other men, like at the gym, where men would grab her butt. I mean Brian always says gain fifty pounds, people will leave you alone. Brian joked. Maybe she should gain fifty pounds. Then men would leave her alone. The relationship wasn't a total secret. Amy knew about Beth and Brian too.

Yes, I did. I mean, when I moved to LA, Beth lived downstairs from us in the apartment building. And she actually fell in love with I remember sort of being somewhat enamored with her because I just felt like she was such a a nice woman and she was headstrong and she was. Smart. You know, which I really respected. Amy, she really liked Beth, and she hated that Xerox scene.

It just made me sick to my stomach. It did nothing. It did nothing to propel her character. It did nothing for the story. It had nothing to do with anything. It's just disgusting. It's just misogynistic and it's just Awful and humiliating, you know, as if you were humiliating. Reflecting on all this with Amy, it was telling. She remembered everything so clearly. And I could hear how affected she'd been, not just by bonfire, but by a longer career in film, a business that's often unkind to women.

Amy remembered one recent conversation she'd had with someone who just didn't understand how tough it was for women in Hollywood. And I said, well, let me explain this to you. I went and I studied film and I have a right to go out now and have a career in the film industry. When somebody takes advantage of me. I five. Choose to walk away, I then put my career at risk. If I choose to challenge that person. That is in a much higher position than I am. I put my career at risk.

At the time of bonfire, Amy was a young woman trying to map out her future. It wasn't like there were a lot of potential mentors. She was one of only a few women on the crew. Monica Goldstein, Brian's assistant, was another When I caught up with Monica recently, I asked her what it was like having so few women around. Did that ever like bother you or did you even think about it at the time? Yeah.

really bother me because I've worked on other sets and there wasn't lots of women on a lot of the sets. You know, you know, now there is more and more, but back in the day, it was a man's world there. Monica did whatever she was asked to do, the usual assistant jobs, writing Brian's checks, making reservations at restaurants, stocking his trailer with his special diet drink and Pellegrino mineral water. But she wanted more responsibility.

Ryan letter take on more production tasks. She did research, broke down the script to compare it to the book, did a little location scouting. In other words, Monica did what lots of women did. And still do, she became super competent. Hoping she'd be rewarded. I felt for me, um, as long as I was respected, that's what I wanted out of it. You know, I I wasn't some gopher. But she also wanted more, to move up the ladder, to become associate producer, not just an assistant.

Whether that happened or not, that would be Brian's call. While I was hanging around during filming of the museum scene, I called in to get my phone messages. That's how you did it back then, before cell phones and voicemail. There was a call from Rob Friedman. He was the Warner Brothers executive in charge of worldwide publicity and advertising. He had just discovered my existence, and I think he was freaking out about it. ceases to amaze me that all of this is happening.

reporter on the scene when all this is going on. Once the film moved to Los Angeles, I couldn't hide from the studio executives anymore. They didn't know what to do with me. They knew it was dangerous to just kick me off. I'd already seen too much. But should they cooperate? Try to control my take on the story? Friedman decided to let me stay on the set.

And would even let the executives talk to me. But he wasn't happy about it. He spoke to my agent. He asked her, would you like someone sitting in your office writing down what you do? It was a reasonable question. I don't blame him for being annoyed. Probably in his eyes, I was just a snoop. And I'll be honest, a lot of times when I was on set, I was just trying to take it all in, to write down and record everything I saw that seemed interesting or useful.

It was only later, upon reflection, that certain things sank in, like why Anne Roth got so angry at the cinematographer when he wouldn't stop talking about the lines under Melanie Griffith's eyes when she was tired one day. Or the time he told me he would have to use all kinds of trick lighting to make Melanie look like anything but an old bag. And how he almost quit when he saw these old ladies Brian gave him. He was talking about Melanie and Kim Catrol. These were women in their thirties.

These were the kinds of things the people in charge would prefer when unseen, the things they didn't want heard or discussed. I'm not talking about crimes or even misdemeanors. I'm talking about what was considered acceptable, just business as usual. For women, business as usual could feel pretty demeaning. On the next episode of The Devil's Candy, Brian DePalma is reminded that making the movie is only half the battle. Then you have to sell it.

That job fell to Rob Friedman, a top advertising and publicity executive at Warner Brothers, and he suspected trouble right from the start. At what point did you personally feel that you were gonna have some trouble with I always felt that there was a potential for trouble here. Always from the beaking. The very beginning. When Friedman saw the finished movie, his fears were confirmed.

I stood up and I said to Brian, You son of a bitch, you've made a good movie and it's gonna be impossible to market. Season two of the Plot Thickens was produced by Campside Media in partnership with Turner Classic Movies. It was hosted and written by Julie Solomon. Natalia Winkleman is the producer. Story editors are Joanne Ferrion and Angela Carone, editing by Mike Volgaris and Maya Croth. The associate producer is Julia Pratt.

Fact checking by Callie Hitchcock. Mixing by Tim Pelletier. Production support from Jakov Friedman and Susanna Zapeta. Special thanks to Megan Major, Matthew Ownby, and David Byrne. Thomas Avery of Toon Welders composed our theme music. At Campside Media, the executive producers are Josh Dean, Vanessa Gregoriatis, Adam Hoff, and Matt Scher. TCM's Director of Podcasts is Angela Corone. Charlie Tabish is the executive producer. TCM's general manager is Paula Shagnum.

Check out our website at tcm.com backslash the plot thickens. It has info about each episode and tons of great photos. Again, that's tcm.com backslash the plot thickens. I'm your host, Ben Mankowitz. Thanks for listening. See you next time.