Lighting the Fire

In the summer of 1989, Brian De Palma was feeling defeated in every way. The woman he was in love with broke up with him. He'd sprained his ankle at a film festival in France, and the movie he'd dreamt of making for ten years, a war epic set in Vietnam, had flopped. Then on Labor Day, DePalma flew to New York. It was a week before he turned forty nine. His agent called and told him to get back to work. He'd been offered the project of a lifetime, a film adaptation of Bonfire of the Vanities.

Since it appeared in 1987, Tom Wolfe's New York novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities, has become not only a major bestseller, but also a work symbolizing the end of a decade. You can't exaggerate what a big deal bonfire was when published in nineteen eighty seven. The lacerating satire of money, power, and New York life in the eighties.

The book wasn't just a massive hit. It became a metaphor for everything that was wrong with New York in the decade it was written. Greed, racial politics, the criminal justice system. It was an instant sensation in a way that's hard to imagine a book becoming today. You Wolf Book is both a cultural and social event. Its author Tom Wolf was one of the most famous writers in America. One reviewer said of him, he understands the human animal like no one else.

Bonfire was 659 pages long, a social satire with multiple layers, a complicated plot line. It follows an investment banker on Wall Street, a guy at the top of the world, with a long way to fall. It seemed like there was no way a book like that could be made into a movie. But some temptations, they're just too juicy to resist. Especially in Hollywood. I'm Ben Mankowitz, and this is season two of The Plot Thickens, the podcast from Turner Classic Movies.

Each season will 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 Bonfire of the Vanities. Mm-hmm. The director, Brian DePalma. Here to tell the story is Julie Salomon. In 1990, she spent a year on the set of bonfire of the vanities.

At the time, she was a film critic at the Wall Street Journal. She planned to write a book about the production, a chronicle of modern movie making. It was the reporting chance of a lifetime. Solomon, a Wall Street Journal film critic, was given total access to director Brian De Palma. About a movie production that was doomed from the start. I knew.

What could go wrong with it? And the irony is it's still bombed. I made a lot of compromises and it was disaster. And Julie Solomon wrote every move. This is the same thing. Candy Episode one Lighting the I'm Julie Salomon. I was there and witnessed it all. Journalists like me, we're usually on the outside looking in. For the first time, I was gonna be inside, seeing what actually happened.

It wasn't exactly undercover. It was just easy to fit in. Another person in a hoodie carrying around a notebook. Barely anyone noticed me, but I noticed just about everything. Every day I showed up to set. I wandered around taking it all in. And when they'd let me I'd stop people and ask them questions. No, the question is how much more accurate ultimately is this? Sometimes I scribbled in my notebook. Sometimes I'd hold up my recorder and tape them on mini cassettes. No, I it's working.

The tapes, they'd been sitting in a box in my storage unit. I didn't even know they were there. They'd been there thirty years. Just falling apart, gathering dust. Until now. I dug them out and was amazed to hear how many of those voices from the past had survived, some better than others. People want to make a Just tell me what the fuck is going on. Don't make me come here and get made up and sit in my goddamn wardrobe for six hours. What does Brian sing with a woman?

Wait a minute, wait a minute. I think we have to go off the record again.

Okay. Let me start at the beginning. November 30th, 1989. The day I gave birth to my first child, Roxanne. I was in my hospital bed, holding that cute little stranger in my arms, feeling happy and a bit dazed. I looked up to find Brian DePama standing there. Bonfire of the Vanities is starting in six weeks, he told me. Get ready to start reporting.

The hospital thing wasn't as weird as it sounds. I knew Brian. We had some history. I'd just started working as a film critic when Brian's movie Scarface came out. No. This was nineteen eighty. Субтитры сделал DimaTorzok There was a big controversy over whether the movie should get an X rating for violence. I submitted it three times and it kept on getting X's and then I said absolutely I'm not changing it anymore and everybody was very unhappy with me.

I did an article about it. I didn't know Brian at all, but I was fascinated by his movies. I figured the person who made them must be terrifying, maybe a little crazy. Then about a year after Scarface, his PR woman called up. She said, Oh, I want you to meet Brian DePalma. He has a new thriller coming out, a film called Body Double. I'm sorry, I can't hear you. Can you see?

I'd already seen Body Double. Let's just say it was not my favorite Brian DePama movie. In one scene, a man literally drills through a woman's nearly naked body with a very big drill. I told the PR woman that I'd rather meet Brian some other time to talk about a movie I liked. But the PR woman was the notorious Peggy Siegel. Peggy was a woman who simply did not process the word no. So I said, Okay, I'd see him for a quick coffee. Mm-hmm.

We met at a restaurant near Washington Square Park. I got there early. I sat there feeling annoyed at myself for letting Peggy talk me into this. And I was nervous. Brian made really scary movies. He showed up right on time. a large man, imposing, had a bald spot and a short graying beard. He was wearing a safari jacket. At first he was terse. He stared at me like he was thinking, why do I have to do this? Probably as annoyed as I was to be there.

We chatted politely. Then he just looked at me and said, why are you doing this? And I said, What do you mean? He said, Why are you interviewing celebrities? I'd interviewed a lot of famous people by that point. Not a single one of them had ever asked me a question. I was so taken aback that I just told him the truth, that I really wanted to write a book one day. It sort of broke the ice.

After that, whenever he was in town, we'd meet for lunch or breakfast at this neighborhood restaurant called The Elephant in the Castle. He'd pester me about writing that book. He started calling me to talk about Bonfire the Vanities when I was seven or eight months pregnant. He said it was going to be big, a good movie production to write about. While I listened to him talk, I was staring at one.

Expect when you're expecting. I had the book propped up on my belly. What was he talking about? I was about to have a baby.

Plus, I had a full-time job. I didn't say any of that to him. I just said, oh yeah, sounds good. Then he showed up at the hospital to tell me bonfire was actually starting. I think I just burst out laughing. It seemed common. insane. But I wasn't gonna argue with giving me the kind of comes along almost never. Alright. Monday, Martin Luther King Day. So when my daughter Roxy was six weeks old, there I was, at Brian DePama's office in Greenwich Village. It was day one. No thing.

It was freezing cold and I was exhausted. I have a baby. I had to run home and feed the baby. I was run out. Sleep was a distant memory. But Brian was holding a casting session. If I was even thinking about doing this book, I had to see it. Brian was there with the casting director. They were trying to find the perfect Maria.

Maria was a mistress of the movie's main character, this rich guy named Sherman McCoy. Maria was the movie's seductress. Sherman McCoy was already cast. Tom Hanks had accepted the role. Now they had to find the type of woman that Tom Hanks' character wouldn't be able to resist. Later, I talked to Peter Goober about the essence of Maria. Who was she?

Goober was the producer, the one who puts a project together and is kind of the mediator between the studio and the filmmakers. Bonfire was his baby. Uber described Maria's character as the devil's candy. That's hard. Tack så mycket. Candy. The devil's candy, the apple and little red riding hood, he says. When we see her in the audience, the guys have gotta go, and then he makes this very weird noise. Guy, we gotta go. I might risk my career and my business to get into that.

I think I might risk my career, my business to get into that. Goober told me this out in Hollywood. He showed up for our meeting wearing moccasins. He had wild, wiry black hair that was tied back in a ponytail. He saw himself as an artist. I guess he was an artist in his way, a master of sizzle. I got what he was saying about Maria. She was supposed to be the kind of woman you'd destroy your life for at least if you were a certain kind of man.

Brian had already suggested Melanie Griffith for the part of Maria, and Werner Brothers had liked the idea. Someone's about to get what she deserves. Melanie's career had taken off with movies like Something Wild and Working Girl. I don't expect you to fetch me coffee unless you're getting some for yourself.

But before that, it was Brian who put her on the map when he cast her as a porn star in Body Double. I do not do animal acts. I do not do SNM or any variations of that particular bent. Uh no water sports either. The movie hadn't done well, but it was a breakthrough role for Melanie Griffith. She was in the process of negotiating her contract for bonfire with the studio. Then Brian had a different idea.

Maybe Maria should be played by Uma Thurman. At the time, Uma Thurman's career was just beginning. People didn't really know her. Uma had been in dangerous liaisons the year before, and and had gotten great reviews for it. But he forced you. No. She played this innocent girl seduced by an older man. But I found it almost impossible to defend myself. Why was that? Did he tie you up? No.

He just has a way of putting things. That cold Friday afternoon in Brian's office, Uma Thurman was going to audition for the part of Maria. She would perform a lovemaking scene with Tom Hanks to see how they connected. The office was a comfortable old apartment on Lower Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. It was a small sunny room, no frills. There were a bunch of books, a four mica desk holding a computer and a telephone.

The only personal touches were some movie posters and a plaster Madonna. It had been a prop in one of Brian's movies. I was sitting on a couch off to the side when Uma Thurman entered the room. She was very tall and very slender. Her face had the ageless beauty of a classical sculptor. But she seemed self conscious. She didn't look anyone in the eye, like a teenager, which she was. She was only 19 years old.

Tom Hanks was polite when she came in, but it was all kind of awkward. Tom Hanks had just met her, and he barely knew Brian DePalma. I realized later, when I heard Tom Hanks being interviewed about bonfire, he must have been intimidated by Brian. He is uh I I think the most headstrong director I have ever worked with as far as knowing exactly what he wants.

as far as as telling you, the actor, what this has to be. It's not that he doesn't want to say hello to you in the morning. It's that in his mind he's already jumped so far ahead of that that he They got to work. When Thurman began to say her lines, she immediately became someone else a sexy, self confident woman called Maria. She started slithering all over him, while Tom Hanks just looked uncomfortable. She'd memorized the lines and had her part down cold. Tom Hanks was reading from a script.

Brian revealed nothing as they went through the scene. He had light green eyes that seemed like they could look through you. Plus, he had this ability to sit very still. He was like a big watchful cat or a psychiatrist, taking it all in without revealing anything.

The actors went through two scenes several times. Uma Thurman was slithering away. Tom Hanks looked really uncomfortable. Brian and the casting director muttered a word now and then. After forty minutes, Brian just said, That was very good of. It was clearly a dismissal. All of a sudden, it was like she was a nervous teenager again. She grabbed her bag and yanked on her coat. Then she shook hands with Hanks and the casting director. She kissed Brian on the cheek.

Then she was gone. The three men started to discuss Uma, pro and con. They said she was sexy and funny, but maybe not as naturally funny as Melanie Griffith. They said Uma had freshness and beauty, but Melanie had that adorable squeaky voice and comic timing. Also, Melanie was thirty two, Uma was nineteen.

As I listened to these three men talking about the two actresses, I felt like they were counter guys at a butcher shop, comparing chickens. It was so clinical, just sort of looking at them strictly for their body parts. With Uma, you have no question in your mind why this character is cheating on his wife. N not for a second. Not for a

And she's more like a kind of elegant, sophisticated she brings that to it. Melanie, you're gonna get core more of your kind of lower class cookiness, which is what Melanie He does. The issue of Melanie Griffith's shape came up. She'd recently had a baby and My ears perked up at that one. But mostly Brian was worried Melanie would be moody, unpredictable. The thing that disturbs me about Melanie is that you know Melanie is an accident waiting to happen.

Always. Now If an anybody can handle her, I can handle her. But it does concern me a little bit.

Brian made a decision. Uma Thurman should fly out to Los Angeles. She should do a screen test with Tom Haynes. Let's see how they look together in front of the camera. But the following Tuesday, Brian gets a message from the studio. It was about Tom Hanks. He didn't want to do the test with Uma Thurman. Bryant was not happy. He called one of the production executives at Warner Brothers. Of course she couldn't be reached right away. It was part of the game.

I was there in his office when all this was going on. So he says, Well, I'm not gonna sit around waiting. He said, Let's go to lunch. We went to one of his favorite places, Il Cantonore. Guy leads us to the table to held Brian He books fans. It's really charming and rustic, expensive enough to keep the riffraff out. Goodbye. Brian had recently lost a lot of weight. He didn't want to gain it back. Yeah, what kind of soup? You have any soup today? He was watching his diet. He was in a bad mood.

He was a real grump about Tom Hanks. And didn't you have dinner with Long Friday night and his wife? Project number came up. At all, he didn't talk about Uma at all. Oh no, we talked about her afterwards. Right. And he seemed very enthusiastic. After lunch, Brian just had one thing on his mind. Back at Brian's office? Lucy Fisher was the Warner Production Executive in charge of bonfire. So this doesn't really sound that good.

But Brian let me listen to his side of the conversation with Lucy. She didn't know I was sitting there or recording. Yeah. Well there were a couple of disturbing things about me. Number one is Tom should communicate these things to me directly. I had dinner with him on Sunday, I didn't hear a word, number one. So I'm gonna have to have a talk with him directly about this. I did not like to hear information via his uh managers through you back to me.

Please, uh I know how to deal with Tom Hanks, but it annoys me this is the way he's doing things. Number two is I I don't want you to close any deal with Melanie until I tested Uma because approach to this material and I know what Melanie's approach is gonna be and I think should stay up. Brian had spent many years wheeling and dealing in the movie business. He knew how to make a studio executive anxious. He used scheduling. Then he played the budget card. Plus we don't move.

our schedule all around to deal with it which can only wind up being a little expensive. Brian won that round. Uma Thurman did fly to Los Angeles for her screen test with Tom Hanks. Some people loved her. They thought she was astounding. Others didn't. The only opinion that mattered though was Tom Hanks. The studio had asked him what he thought, and he told them. I just can't act with Uma, he said. So Melanie Griffith it was, she would be Maria. I could see how elusive it was.

I wondered how Melanie might have felt if she knew someone else was being for this role, this role she thought she had in the bag.

Ryan that's like the Relationship I have with the director. I feel really Thanks for camming. I'd been a film critic for six years when I sat in on that casting session with Tom Hanks and Uma Thurman. I'd written many stories about Hollywood. I'd interviewed a lot of famous people. None of it compared to what I would experience on bonfire. I knew I was seeing things no outsider could normally see. I was hearing things no outsider could hear. Recording? Yes. That's fabulous.

It's important at this point to know a little about the book the movie was based on, and the man who wrote that book, Tom Wolfe. He had no mercy in print. His satire was ruthless. But in person, he was this polite southern gentleman, like someone from a different era. We met at the dining room at the Carlisle Hotel. He loved that place. The Carlisle is iconic. Home away from home for legend like Frank Sinatra, Princess Die, Jackie Kennedy.

It was a place to be seen, but very discreetly. It was on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Wolf was dressed in a three piece plaid suit, fancy shoes. I remember thinking he was like the writer version of a rocker with style. We had a very long breakfast. Wolf ate three bowls of grain cereal with stewed fruit. I kept my recorder on the table while he explained why he didn't think a film version of Bonfire was a good idea. Yeah. To your place. One after another.

It seemed impossible to him. The book had too many layers. He couldn't imagine writing the script for it, but he would never express his doubts about the movie in public. That would be rude. After all, he was paid$750,000 for the rights to his book. Thank you. I think it's... Bad matters in the social. That'd be a very bad mouth for me to be. Sharply critical of it. I take cash to charge. I did cash the check, he said.

The book was wildly popular. Producer after producer in Hollywood was interested, but when you hear the basic plot, Tom Wolf's doubts make sense. Bonfire at the Vanities tells the story of a rich guy, Sherman McCoy. He's out with his mistress, Maria. Sherman and Maria get lost driving in the Bronx and then hit a black kid with their car. They don't know if he's dead or alive, but they leave him lying there and speed off. Stop!

That rich guy Sherman is the star of the story. The author Tom Wolf made fun of him. He wrote that Sherman thought of himself as a master of the universe. Today, we would call Sherman part of the one percent. The type who thinks he can get away with anything just because he has money. The book was big, complicated, and inflammatory. In Hollywood, every executive claimed to love it, but no one was willing to put money on the table. No one wanted to take the risk of actually buying the right.

Almost no one. I realized that there was part of me in Sherman McCoy. The one man who saw potential was Peter Goober. That producer who told me Maria was the devil's candy. He decided he wanted to make a movie out of the bonfire of the vanities the minute he read it. And it was a hard time. Peter Goober had an exclusive deal at Warner Brothers, so he convinced the studio that bonfire was a good idea.

Goob, he could talk circles around anybody, and he would talk in circles even when there was nobody to talk around. His genius? It was his ability to convince people that nothing was impossible. He was crude and shrewd, and he said exactly what he wanted, and then he left it up to you to figure out what it was he'd said. Here was a story. We're Tiny little event, the pea at the bottom of the mattress. A little pea.

The whole entire fabric was unrolled by one tiny little event, almost anocuous event, an event that would otherwise go unnoticed. any other ordinary person that might even not have Wait, is he calling a hit and run an innocuous event? That's seriously awful. Disturbed even. But in the moment, I wasn't really comprehending what he was saying. I was just thinking, how can anyone talk like this? It was just one metaphor after another. I remember listening and being completely mesmerized.

Here's how he describes Sherman. as a fellow. soul to get it all and gave it all up to get his soul back. He became the meat on the bone. He became the barbecue. One little act of redemption at the end, one recognition of it all, allowed him to become worthwhile and Yeah. Difficult film to execute. Goober was right, a difficult film to execute. The studio reached out to Mike Nichols and Norman Jewison. They sent the script to Steven Spielberg. They tried Martin Scrcesi and James Brooks.

None of them worked out. The book was insanely popular. But think about it. What were one million readers, or even two or three? That would make for a literary phenomenon. But it wouldn't even register a movie's existence. Those numbers weren't impressive in Hollywood. Peter Goober was losing patience. What about Brian DePama? he asked the Werner executive. New York is a character in the story. What a director could We wanted a director who the media and the press would say Спасибо.

Starting around the time Peter bought it, it suddenly there was a lot of commotion. That's Lucy Fisher, the Warner Brothers executive. She liked the idea of Brian DePama. People were afraid of how would they shrink it down, how would they make it not a miniseries, and how would they make it so it wasn't so controversial, their life became unpleasant. And Brian had no fear on either front.

He came in and said, I don't ha worry about any of those things. I know exactly how to do this. I know exactly the tone I want. I don't think it's racist and I don't care if some people think I am. Thank you.

By the time Bomfire rolled around, Brian DePama had already made 19 movies. When he started out in the 60s, he was seen as friendly and fun. This kind of quirky guy, part of the counterculture. He wrote and directed a movie called Greetings and a sequel called Hi Mom. They were comedies, but they were also political, and they were very low budget. So what are you talking about? Both of them starred Robert De Niro. He was just getting started then. Be gentle with me.

But then Brian went in a different direction. He became obsessed with Alfred Hitchcock. He started gravitating towards suspense and horror. That was just to kill. Do you find me attractive? Blowout. And carry. These were violent stories that dealt with obsessive love. Sexual anxiety, confused identities, they were bloody movies, but they were also weirdly poetic. They were full of passion, but also distant. As a filmmaker, Brian was starting to become a cult figure, but he was also becoming one.

I've had it my whole career. Either battling with the ratings board or or being accused of a hitchcock ripoff. Ooh. You name it. I think Brian wanted to be a Hollywood director very badly, but also liked making these avant-garde Brian De Palma movies. That's Marty Bauer, Brian's former agent. When we talked, he was retired, living in Los Angeles. We caught up on a Zoom call. It's been very strange going back through all of this so many years later. Well you have an age, I have.

It's the zoom lighting. It's very good. I don't look so good, but that's okay. Back in the 80s and 90s, Marty was a big wig in Hollywood. He co-founded United Talent Agency, or UTA, in 1991. Later, he became its president. Back then, Marty had two prized possessions. One was Brian DePama. The other was Sunny Blossom, a thoroughbred racehorse. Sunny Blossom got Marty trophies. They were all over his office. But it was Brian's name that got him tables in fancy restaurants.

Marty remembered his days with Brian Weld. He reminisced about the filmmakers that Brian hung out with. It was a group of young guys who in the 70s were shaking up the business. Francis Coppola, George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and Martin Scorsese. Those were Brian's best friends. The directors who made The Godfather, Star Wars, Jaws, Taxi driver. But Brian never really felt that comfortable in Hollywood. Not the way Spielberg and the rest of that group did.

Brian doesn't play well with others. He's not a bad man. He's a good man. But he's got these kind of quirks that makes it difficult for people to relate to him the way they relate to Scorsese or Spielberg, who kind of have a very polished persona. Brian had no illusions about relationships in Hollywood, and he understood his place in the filmmaking universe. He alternated between success and failure, and learned the hard way what success meant.

Here's how he described it during a talk at Lincoln Center in New York. What's the false sense of what you're doing that you get in Hollywood? If your movie makes a lot of money, you're a genius. You don't care if it's crap. I mean everybody tells you. That's great. Let's make 10 more. No. Yeah. In nineteen eighty seven, Brian got it all with the untouchables, critical praise, good box office. It starred Kevin Costner and Sean Connery. Sean Connery won his only Oscar ever for that movie.

Want to get Capone? Here's how you get him. He pulls a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the mall. We kind of blew everybody away the first weekend. You know, The Untouchables was another one of those magical movies. And very few happen in your career. Then I get them to make a movie nobody wanted to make. For a decade, Brian had been trying to make a movie out of a New Yorker article that haunted him.

There was this true story about a squad of American soldiers in Vietnam. They kidnapped and raped a Vietnamese girl, and then they murdered her to erase the evidence. Like the army, don't you Ericks? This ain't the army, Sarge. Michael J. Fox. Sean Penn. Casualties aboard. Casualties of War was powerful. Maybe it was too powerful. Brian realized that when the studio screened it for preview audiences.

I mean the material is so emotional and so depressing. What's a preview gonna tell you? I don't wanna see the movie? It disturbed me too much, I don't know what to tell my friends. I find it hard to look at it myself. I thought Casualties 4 was amazing. Pauline Cale, the New Yorker critic, loved it. There were only a few of us though. The rest of the reviews were mixed, at best.

Nobody went to say it. terrible disappointment. After all that work and it was a lot of work. Then came a breakup with the woman he loved, and that sprained ankle, at a film festival in France. I felt kind of abandoned by everybody. By my girlfriend Emma. I remember talking to him after he got back from Dauville, the festival in France. He was really, really sad.

I felt so bad for him. He pretty much went into hiding, moping around in his room. Then he got a call from his agent, from Marty Bauer. Marty told Brian he should get to work again. Warner Brothers was interested in him for Bonfire the Vanities. Tom Hanks in it. I I mean I hate to be Philistinian, but it there was a big payday. It was a big studio movie and he had just come off of a bomb. It was the most famous book in the world, but I think he was the wrong director for the movie.

And I never said anything. That decision, it didn't have a happy ending for Marty. A few years later, Brian moved on to a different agent. He stopped talking to Marty, and in interviews he never mentioned him. I never existed. My feelings were really hurt, I have to be honest with you. Because I considered myself very attached and devoted to Brian. I really went out of my way to please him and to do a good job. And I think mostly I did.

And he never even mentioned my name. He mentioned Mike Oviz's name. Because I think somewhere deep down, Brian's a star fucker.

Well, the pain in Marty's voice caught me off guard. Clearly, this wasn't just business for him. I mean tell him if you talk to him that he really hurt my feelings. Tell him. Marty, he died in April of this year. It was just under three months after we caught up. He was only seventy four. I never did get the chance to tell Brian what he said. Season two of the Blot Thickens, The Devil's Candy. We'll be back right after this.

Yeah. Okay, this is working. What would you like to know? Maybe it was inevitable that Brian would end up in a high profile and nasty business like filmmaking. A business where accomplishments are judged publicly and often harshly. So Brian was a mistake. I mean I didn't really want to have another child. That's Brian's mother, Vivian.

I always talk to the mothers. It tells you a lot. He was premature baby. He weighed four pounds when he was born. I was later for three days too, having when he couldn't talk he'd screamed. I think he had to do it. It must it must have been really tough for him competing with Bruce and Bart. Bruce was the oldest brother, Bart the middle, and Brian the youngest. During the making of Bonfire, I interviewed the whole DePama family. I talked to Bruce at his home in Santa Barbara, California. Yeah.

Exactly. Modern medieval furnace. Bruce was an odd man. He had invented this thing called the N machine. I couldn't begin to explain it, but supposedly it produced great quantities of energy. It wasn't accepted by mainstream scientists. Bruce was five years old when Brian was born. Brian was what they call a headbang. And certain children get on their hands and knees and then they bang their head into the headboard.

That banging would cause the bed to scooch across the floor right up to the wall. And then my father would And my father would go in, Bruce says, and there would be quiet. Their father was aloof and demanding, a renowned orthopaedic surgeon in Philadelphia, Their mother Vivian was depressed and needy. For most of Brian's early life, up until he was six, his father was away at war.

Vivian was young, and she was caring for those three boys alone. The boys often competed with each other to be the smartest, the best, the favorite, especially Brian and Bruce. The two of them actually looked a lot alike, except Bruce had a noticeable birthmark above his right eye. When I talked to Bruce, it was obvious he still felt competitive with Brian. I got a hundred on the physics final in in high school. Wouldn't the class average was something like thirty two or something like that?

Now, I don't know why anybody would want to hold that against me. I was interested in it. I liked doing it. And Brian, if he has some kind of you know, inferiority complex over that. That's his problem. The other brother, Bart, was a classic middle child. He tried to stay out of the way. Everybody has he told me for him, mealtime was a horror story.

verbal one-upmanship, usually l uh colored by my older brother. Thank you. Grazie. This wasn't Bart's imagination. Their father, Doctor Anthony DePama, told me the same thing. And he confirmed what Brian had always told me, that Bruce was held up as the genius, and Brian didn't quite measure up. He was always contending with Bruce, you know. And Bruce was happened to be a very uh intellectual youngster.

from the very beginning and um intellectually Bruce went in one direction, Brian went in another direction. When he was in his teens, Brian began to suspect that his father was cheating on his mother. He was so suspicious he started following his father to the office where he worked. Bruce told me about it. And so one day he went over there, let himself in, and he said, I know somebody's here. My father said, no, there's nobody there. Brian searched the place from the cellar to the attic.

Thank you. He pulled open this closet door, and there, standing in her slip, There standing in her slip was my father's suture nurse, who he eventually married, Trudy. At that point he almost killed Brian. At that point, he almost killed Brian. I mean, talk about family drama. Brian internalized it. Later on, he used it as material.

In nineteen eighty, he directed a film called Home Movies. It was about a film student with a philandering father. And in the film, the boy uses a movie camera to catch his father in the act of cheating. Wait a minute. That's it, I'll shoot my father in the act for the maestro and get mom's divorce evidence at the same time.

Brian's films were often eerie, cold, clearly influenced by Hitchcock, but they were also clearly influenced by his own life. If you squinted, they started to look like a running autobiography. And those parallels, the ones between his movies and his childhood, they weren't lost on his family.

Watching Brian's movies i is like going into a wing of a house of your family home that you had never been into but had been decorated and uh you know sort of set up just like the home was But you've never been in there. Bruce told me that he saw different facets of their home life in Brian's movies. The same lamps, fixtures, people, places. Then he said something really eerie. Have you ever seen uh Dresda Kill with the psychiatrist in the office and everything, Michael King?

Well that's the street. We used to live on. His childhood explains a lot about Brian. Over the years I've seen many sides to him. He runs hot and cold, depending on the situation. And at some level, definitely while he was making bonfire, that wounded child still existed. Not that he invited anyone to see it. One thing was consistent. Whatever side of Brian you experienced, you felt you were in the presence of a commanding force.

He was forty nine when he made bonfire. He had a deep reservoir of knowledge, and he had survivors instincts. After more than twenty years in the business, he understood what it took to be a director, how to wield power, He had this ability to make everyone feel, at least at that minute, that this film was the most important thing in the world, that this could be the big one, whatever it was that meant.

It should have been clear right from the beginning that nothing would be easy about making bonfire the vanities into a memory. Before pre-production had even begun, Peter Goober, the producer on the film, he left Warner Brothers to run Sony Pictures. Producers are supposed to mediate between the director and the studio. Bryan was the movie's de facto producer. director. Without Goober, Brian was on his own. The pressure was obvious. He had 14 months to make script revision.

Cast more than a hundred speaking parts, including the Hire a crew, find locations. Shoot and edit the film and oversee it. And now there would be no buffer between him and the studio.

I talked to Brian before we started this podcast to see if he wanted to participate. He was helpful. He pointed me to interviews he'd done about bonfire, and he did tell me he had listened to season one of The Plot Thickens, and he liked it. But he told me he had talked enough about bonfire over the years, including with me. He just didn't want to talk about it any more. It was a painful episode in a long, successful career. It's not what he wants to be remembered for.

Over the years, people have asked me when exactly I knew the film was going to be a disaster. The truth is I didn't. I never knew. Bonfire was never allowed to be simply a movie. Not by me, not by anyone. It was certainly not the masterpiece they'd hoped it would be. But it wasn't the worst movie ever. Not by a long shot. What I remember most is the thrill. The thrill of watching talented people trying to create magic. And that that's almost always against the odds.

That's what I was trying to write about. On the next episode of The Devil's Candy, Brian De Palma begins pre-production on the movie that could make or break his career. At least that's what his mother thought. I'm worried about bonfire. Because it's a great story. You know, I've read the book twice. But it has to be successful. I think it will I think it will destroy him. Season two of the Plot Thickens was produced by Campside Media in partnership with Turner Classic Media.

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 Press. Fact checking by Callie Hitchcock. Mixing by Glenn Matulo. Production support from Jakob Friedman and Susanna Zapeta. Special thanks to Megan Majur, 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 Tavish is the executive producer. TCM's general manager is Polishagnon. 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.