Reaching for the Stars – and Paying the Price

Sherman McCoy was thirty eight. He was supposed to look like a waspy aristocrat, tall with a round, majestic chin. He was the main character in Tom Wolf's novel Bonfire the Vanity. Sherman was rich, arrogant, the 1980s version of the 1%. He was a Wall Street guy who assumed the world owed him everything. Tom Wolfe called men like Sherman masters of the universe. master of the universe. Believe it or not, Tom Hanks was cast in the movie role.

Not exactly the part you'd peg him for. Tom Hanks was likable. He was a comedy actor. He falls in love with a mermaid and splash. In Big he played a twelve-year-old boy in a grown man's body. Even Tom Hanks was nervous about playing Sherman McCoy, and he said as much in a TV interview. Why would you be intimidated? For the sole reason that one point seven million people have read this book and have an opinion. Uh.

to take on that, to say, okay, well now I'm the definitive uh Sherman McCoy. Some but maybe you're just not gonna please everybody. Tom Hanks had no idea how right his prediction would turn out to be. I'm Ben Mankowitz, and this is season two of The Plot Thickens, a podcast from Turner Classic Movies. 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. The director was Brian De Palma. I'm Julie S. I was there to witness it all. Wall Street Journal, but in nineteen ninety, I spent a year on the Bonfire of Vanities with a notebook and a recorder. Barely anyone noticed me, but I noticed just about everything. This is episode two Reaching for the Stars and Paying the Price. Once again, Julie is our guide. The nominees for Best Picture are the Accidental Tour.

It all started at the Academy Awards ceremony in nineteen eighty nine. Peter Goober's film Rain Man had just won the Oscar for Best Picture. Winner is Rainman, Mark Johnson today. Following the ceremony, there was the after party, the governor's ball. Peter Goober was thrilled about his win, but he was the kind of guy who was already scheming about his next big project. Sorry, I didn't mean another. He saw Tom Hanks across the room and walked up to him.

Yeah, locked up the time hangs and said to him Hi, I'm Peter Gooby. Goober says, listen, I've got an incredible picture, and you don't even know about it. You are the one to play Sherman McCoy in The Bonfire of the Vanities.

Tom Hanks was far from the obvious choice. He was thirty three years old, and had built his reputation as a light comic actor. That reputation grew with the success of Splash. But it was big that pushed him into a different sphere. I turned into a grown-up mom. I made this wish on. It was a comedy about a 12-year-old boy trapped in the body of a 35-year-old man. I want to spend. Yeah. Yeah.

And it was a huge success. One of the biggest movies of nineteen eighty-eight. A lot of that was due to Tom Hanks. He was brilliant in it. It even won him an Oscar nomination. It was a very different kind of role than Sherman McCoy. But Peter Goober didn't care. Goober was going for sympathy. He thought that a nice guy like Tom Hanks would bring out the nice guy in Sherman McCoy. to show him quite arrogant. Rich. You know the Somewhere in his past. Give it a like a little bit. Okay.

Goober's saying there's an extra component in a film that isn't there in a book. The history of the actor's films and of his likability. He was excited about his idea. He started pressing Tom Hanks to the studio executives and to Brian De Palma, the director. And we talked about Okay. Other names came up for the role. Steve Martin, Michael Caine. But Peter Goober kept coming back to He was so excited about Tom Hanks that he even clapped his hands while he was there.

Peter Goober saw Hanks as the perfect solution to a basic problem. He knew that studio executives might like the idea of taking risks, but building an entire movie around unlikable characters? That would be box office poison. This was a book that really made the And for one specific There was no sympathetic character in the book. That's the screenwriter Michael Christopher. He'd written two movie screenplays and won a Pulitzer Prize for a play he'd written about terminal cancer patients.

terms of all the characters in the book, I found Sherman McCoy sympathetic, so Uh in a nest of vipers the least. the least poisonous is your sympathetic character. So that was that was that was my view of it. For Peter Goober to make Sherman McCoy that sympathetic character, he needed Tom Hank. He would hear of no one else. Tom X, Tom X, Tom X, Tom X. He would call the director and the executives and he would literally chant the actor's name. Com X, Tom X, Tom X, Tom X.

Finally they gave in. I talked about it with Lucy Fisher, the Warner Brothers executive in charge of production. We were sitting in our office on the Warner Brothers lot in Hollywood. The question of sympathy and a very overused word of the Lucy says that in books, protagonists can be unsympathetic and they can be fascinating. It won't matter for readers. But in movies, you've got to have a protagonist that people like. For big expensive movies, that's just the rule.

And we always knew this was gonna be a big budget Hollywood It is Well yeah. I was laughing with Lucy, but wasn't really sure why she was laughing. Was she nervous that it was a big expensive movie? Or was she proud? Brian DiPlama also liked the idea of Tom Hanks as Sherman McCoy. He called him to explain why he should take the part. Well actually. Were you surprised? Hanks recounted the conversation on Larry King. Why they picked you.

Uh I asked Brian De Palma, why me? Because the first time I spoke ever spoke to the man was he called me up on the phone to tell me that that he wanted me to do this. And he said very simply that he wanted somebody that could be funny and yet could deliver all the drama and the emotion at the same time. That closed the deal. How could any actor resist? Tom Hanks took the role seriously. He wanted to know exactly what it was like to be a bond trader, a master of the universe.

So, before shooting on the phone began, he took a trip to the financial district in Manhattan. He wanted to visit the bond trading room at Merrill Lynch. That was gonna be a location for a scene that showed Sherman McCoy and his element as a master of the universe. Tom Hanks had already visited Yale University. That was Sherman's alma mater. He'd also had his teeth capped to make them look more aristocratic.

And now he was gonna hang out with a bond trader just to see what the job was all about. This was research. The closest I ever got to do. He actually let me tag along. I'm much more relaxed. If you can enjoy it. I like Tom Hanks right off the bat. He was nice, he was unpretentious.

The studio offered to pick him up in a stretch limo. He turned it down. I was a little disappointed, but he wanted to head downtown in a plain black sedan that looked like the cars that always idled outside those firms. He wanted to slip in without anyone knowing he was there. Well, that didn't happen. So the women were excited. The men were very excited because I mean it's not often that they get to go to work and think that they might be in a movie with Tom Hanks.

Bobby Collins was the vice president of corporate communications for Merrill Lynch at the time. She was the one in charge of the arrangements with the bonfire team. Well, um, overwhelmed would say the least. It it was a very scary thing for a thirty-two year old young lady on Wall Street. I remember him coming down through the elevators and there was just tons of people who were moving in and moving to desks and working.

And what a nice guy. Remember he came down and he just started like karate chopping and throwing his leg up in the air and just making people giggle. From the minute he entered the room, it was almost like trading stopped. I followed him to a desk where he sat down with a bond trader. Bunches of traders started gathering around in little groups. You could see everyone sneaking glances from their desks nearby.

Hank spent the next few hours sort of hanging out with people and making jokes on their trading phones. I think he even called somebody's wife. At lunchtime, the traders usually just ate at their desks. They didn't want to miss a beat. When someone handed a box lunch to Hank He took it. He ate his sandwich, his apple, whatever else right alongside them. At one point, the trader Hanks was hanging out with turned to him. He said, This isn't just get rich quick, it's get everything quick.

the power and the movement on a trading floor, it's palpable. You walk down there and people standing up screaming with phones hanging across their necks and across the floor and you walked away with like your breath taken away. Tom Hanks really wanted to blend in that day, but that just wasn't gonna happen. People wanted to get close to him. He couldn't avoid it. He was a movie star and a really sweet movie star. You need it. the villain in that role and he's not the villainous type.

Being a ruthless master of the universe didn't really seem to be in his blood.

There he is. Cheers! When I was eight months pregnant, I reviewed a movie called Look Who's Talking. Do you know who I am? Actually I don't know. It starred Bruce Willis. He narrated the part of a baby. Okay lady, if you say so, you're my grandma. So what do you want from me? Who's got a wet tushie? I give up. Maybe because I was pregnant at the time, I thought it was hilarious.

But so did a lot of other people. It even spawned two sequels. But there was another movie Bruce Willis starred in around that time. Die hard. Got invited to the Christmas party by mistake. Oh no. It was a massive hit. Everyone was quoting Bruce Willis's lines from the movie. Five years earlier, Bruce Willis didn't have a career. He was 30 years old, working as a bartender in Manhattan, facing rejection after rejection at acting auditions. Then in 1985, he hit gold.

He was cast in Moonlighting with Sybil Shepherd. This is gonna work. We're really gonna do this. Yes, we're really gonna My name is Addison, David Addison, and I'd like the opportunity to take care of all your investigatory needs. The show sent Bruce Willis from unemployed actor to TV star. But like Tom Hanks, he felt typecast. He wanted a role with more complexity. That's when he heard about a big part in Bonfire the Vanities. Peter Fallow.

Peter Fallow was a tabloid journalist. The character writes a bunch of sensational stories about Sherman McCoy, which causes Sherman's downfall. Peter Fallow was written as a drunk and a hack, and British. The British part was important. Tom Wolf thought the British looked down on Americans, so he wrote Fallow as this total sleazebag. I think it was a little bit of writer's revenge.

Peter Fellow was also gonna be the movie's narrator. He'd be omniscient, narrating Sherman McCoy's undoing and voiceover. Brian had decided on it with the screenwriter. Using a narrator would help simplify the story and make it easier to understand. But there was a problem. Brian DePommet didn't want an English voice. When Stanley Kubrick adapted the Nabokov novel Lolita, he had also used a narrator, the British actor James Mason.

Brian loved that movie, but in his mind, it wasn't a sensation. And for some reason, he blamed it on James Mason's British voice. It didn't make any sense. It wasn't logical, but it's how he felt. And he didn't want to make the same mistake. He talked about this on a program called The South Bank Show, which, ironically enough, was on British television. I wanted to get a narrator that they could sort of feel kind of chummy with.

And that's why I chose an American narrator and somebody whose voice they're very familiar with. That meant that Peter Fallow, the character Tom Wolf had specifically written as British, would be American. The executives tried to get Jack Nicholson for the part. He was busy. And then Bruce Willis came along.

I mean this was not a not necessarily a safe choice for me. It was it I I mean there are there are other things that I that I could have done that I was that I would have been much m more comfortable with or much surer that I would have done a a good job at. Sometimes stars are the best people for the part. That's why they're stars sometimes. Yeah. In the movie business, some people are actors, even great actors, and some people are stars.

When I talked to Lucy Fisher, she was just open about it. She liked the idea of Bruce Willis as Peter Fallow. She thought he was talented, but that really wasn't the point. It wasn't his most important credential. Do you think the Bruce Wallace would have been on your list to play Fowl if he weren't a movie star? She went to a movie store? Probably not because we wanted a movie store. Easter.

So that was that. Just as he'd narrated for the baby and look who's talking, Bruce Willis would narrate the bonfire of the vanities, sounding very much like Bruce Willis. Yeah. If you will. A phrase from another little bestseller. For what does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his soul? Mr. Fallow. They're waiting.

Shooting on Bonfire the Vanities was set to begin on April 13, 1990. Which happened to be a Friday. Friday the thirteenth? What were they thinking? I thought movie people were supposed to be superstitious. Two weeks before that, Lucy Fisher called Brian DePama. She was worried. There was a big issue with the script. Some of the changes that we made incrementally were that we redeemed Sherman McCoy more. We gradually redeemed Peter Fallow more.

As the story had changed, Sherman McCoy had become more and more likable. Peter Fallow had become less and less despicable. Tom Wolfe's MO had been to insult everyone equally, but now the script was telling you to feel sympathetic to the white men who carried the story. These were not decisions where we sat one day and they went from black to white. I'm sorry to keep using the word black, they went from But for the black communities, Jews and women, it was still a bunch of nasty caricatures.

Lucy Fisher was happy with the changes in how the two male leads were depicted. It was everyone else she was worried about. So we were ner you know, we were uh nervous maybe too uh we were We were cognizant of that and the and the racial thing, you know, the book the book did get slammed for it and we didn't want him be inadvertent. Certainly.

I mean the book is about racism, so obviously you can't take that out. That's like declawing it in a terrible way. It's a but yes, we were worried that there were no black characters. And I promise you that. Well, there were black characters, just no sympathetic black characters. You take care of us and we'll take. Brian thought the studio executives were being cowardly. How much more did they want to dilute the bonfire of the vanities?

Racial dynamics cut through the heart of Tom Wolfe's book. Brian knew that. Demographics in New York were changing during the nineteen eighties. In response. And we're coming off the bloodiest year in the history of New York. Almost every week is a bad week for the people of the South Bronx who are mostly black and Puerto Rican. It was an era of high crime and toughening crime laws. More and more people were being incarcerated. Black communities were hit hardest.

Wool's book in its own way was pointing out how the judicial system is rigged. His characters reflected that, that it was rigged in favor of people like Sherman McCoy, people who are white and rich, and rigged against people like Henry Lamb, the black teenager who was hit by Sherman's car. In Bonfire the Vanities, the book, Tom Wolfe showed a vision of New York City that was bleak. Helpless politicians, clergy on the take, cops and prosecutors who are either cynical or sold out.

But there was one decent character, that was Judge Kavitsky. Sherman McCoy would be brought to trial in front of Judge Kavitsky, and Kavitsky ultimately does the right thing, but at great cost to himself. Kavitsky represented the old guard of the Bronx, the Jews and Italians who had run the borough for years. And Judge Kavitsky was based on a real judge, Judge Burton Roberts. Roberts was outspoken, a public figure. The kind of judge who showed up on late night talk shows.

Here he is on nightline in the nineteen eighties. That we're being somewhat tough on crime, and at the same time, we're being smart on crime by using most of our funds. For treatment, and I know it has become a dirty word in the uh justice system in rehabilitation. Judge Roberts was Chief Administrative Judge of the State Supreme Court in the Bronx. He was also Tom Wolfe's friend. I asked Tom Wolf about him. to ask you about, um when did you first meet Judge Roberts? My new favorite person.

Wolf told me he met Judge Roberts in Southampton and started trailing him at work. It was watching Roberts in Court that gave Wolfe the idea for Bonfire. He modeled Kabitsky on him, and later even dedicated the novel to him as a thank you. Okay. I don't remember this thing for me on the show. That might sound weird. That Judge Roberts would call me and single. It sounds weird to me too. For the life of me, I can't remember what it was. Except that it was kind of endearing.

When Judge Roberts heard about the movie, he wanted to audition for the role of Judge Kavitsky. To him, there was no question, the role was made for him. Brian DePama wasn't so sure. He figured, this is a judge, not an actor. casting Roberts would be nothing but trouble. But Judge Roberts was quite a character. He kept leaving messages with Brian's assistant, like Judge Roberts called. He heard you tried out Joel Gray for the part of Kavitsky, and he had a real laugh with Tom Wolf.

Judge Roberts did end up auditioning. I was there when he came down to the Tribeca Film Center, Command Central. I was surprised at how deferential and respectful Brian was when he greeted him. But then, before they even started, the judge started offering advice on how to change the scene. Brian was really patient and amused. You could see he was being polite, kind of running out the clock. Until Judge Roberts got started.

Pretty quickly, everyone in the room felt his power. I remember thinking he was terrific, like Moses coming down from the mountain. Someone boarded out, Jit Robert, you should have been an actor. And Chit Robert said, Yeah, I should have been an actor. Later on I talked to Tom Wolfe about the audition. Thank you. cast them in my opinion. She was great. The casting director was really tempted. He called Judge Roberts an ethnic Spencer Tracy. That's code for a Jewish Spencer Tracy.

Brian liked Roberts too, but it came down to that same old question. Roberts was authentic, but was he likable? And would he be a pain in the neck to work with? Judges were used to giving orders, not taking them. Brian decided they should play it safe. Walter Mathau. Come on, you know I do nice work. I better, because if I don't, you guys are gonna have my ass, right?

But Mathau asked for one million dollars for eight days of shooting. Alan Arkin said he'd do it for a hundred twenty thousand dollars. They signed a contract. That was it.

Alan Arkin would be Judge Kavitsky, until he wasn't. The devil's candy. We'll be back right after this. And the Oscar goes. Mm-hmm. March 26, 1990, less than three weeks before filming, Brian DePalma watched the Academy Awards. Driving Miss Daisy? Driving This Daisy won the Oscar for Best Picture That Year. It was about a rich white woman and her black chauffeur, who was played by Morgan Freeman.

Suddenly De Palma had an epiphany. He understood the studio's race problem with bonfire. He understood what Lucy Fisher meant about there being no sympathetic black character. And he had a solution. He was the one that actually came. To us. And so I've been thinking about it. Brian's idea was this. Judge Kavitsky was the character who would give the picture heart and decency, but he wasn't gonna be Jewish. He would be black, and he would be played by Morgan Freeman.

And it was not something forced upon him by the studio at all. It was his decision. Morgan had emerged as such. She says, It wasn't that they wanted just any black actor. And it wasn't that they didn't want Alan Arco. Yeah. It really was Morgan Freeman that convinced them. It was his talent, his persona. Tom Wolf, he wasn't convinced. He had deliberately taken a back seat when it came to the movie production, but when he heard about the Judge Kavitsky decision, he wasn't happy.

Uhly on television and in the movies too, I guess. Wolf told me that oftentimes movies and TV would deal with racial hostility. As long as later on, there's an enlightened black character, one who teaches everyone the error of their ways. He told me, as the drama ends, everyone heads off into a warmer sunset. Sadder perhaps, but wiser. I've gotta say, no one was more surprised.

Freeman when he was offered the part of Judge Kavitsky. I talked to him about it at the time. He was totally friendly and seemed a bit amused at the absurdity of the whole situation. We were on set between takes. There was a lot of noisy stuff going on in the background, so it's hard to make out. But what I asked him was, why do you want to make this movie? I mean, do you feel like you're the person anyone would have thought of as Judge Kavitsky? He entered honestly.

Don't answer that question, no. He says the general answer to that question is no. He told me he'd read the book beforehand. He knew the character. But when he heard about the other casting choices, it seemed like everything was up for grabs. Who's Willis? I wouldn't have cast Tom Hanks or Bruce Willis or me. That's some brutal honesty you don't normally. Yeah. Morgan Freeman was happy with the role. His only problem was a good one for him.

At age fifty two, with his movies Oscar, he was a hot property. His time was limited, and his heart was in theatre. He was about to start rehearsals for taming of the shrew. Субтитры сделал DimaTorzok He was playing Petruccio. Morgan Freeman told me, you've got an actor here with a narrow schedule, an actor here with a narrow schedule, an actor here with a narrow schedule.

A bureaucracy. But his job his job wasn't to be involved in that, not to worry about it. Worrying about it, that was Fred Caruso's job. Fred Caruso was the movie's line producer. That's not the same as the producer. That was Peter Goober. And he had left Bonfire before pre-production even began. I know the titles are confusing, but they're important. The producer is the buffer between the studio and the picture. The line producer is the person that puts everything together.

I caught up with Fred Caruso on a call this year. He's still working as a producer of various sorts in Hollywood. When we talked he was in Santa Monica. I could hear the sound of birds in the background of our conversation. When I met Fred thirty years ago on bonfire, he wore his black hair slicked back into a little duck tail. He had a tendency to hug people he liked. Probably wouldn't do that today. As Lime Producer, Fred was part psychologist, part manager, part con artist.

He liked to get the job done and he also wanted to make everyone happy. He understood that one person's happiness mattered a lot more than everyone else's. I'm a crew person. I like to know who they are, how their family is. Good morning, good evening. I would like to have a calm, calm crew for the director because ultimately it's the director's job. to make the movie. Our job is to support the director. That's that's all we do.

That support, it often fell into two categories, budget and schedule. Fred's job was to make sure neither one of those got out of control. The studio says, You gotta bring it in on budget. You gotta bring it on schedule. You gotta bring it on budget. You gotta bring it. And the director says, I'm making a movie. I'm making a movie. Don't talk to me about schedule and budget. I'm making a movie.

Brian, he wasn't concerned with the ripple effects of his creative decisions. He had to focus on the creative. Fred Caruso was the one who had to go around making sure those ripples didn't turn into tidal waves. In this case, the thing causing the ripples was casting Morgan Freeman. It was causing problems nobody had anticipated. For starters, Ellen Arkin had already agreed to play the part of Judge Kavitsky. The deal was done. Fred told me about it when we were on set together.

is entitled to one hundred and twenty thousand dollars. That's the contract. When you're settling pissed off and you get inside a divorce. You know. So when you're getting a divorce, you're not doing anybody any favors. So now that we're getting a divorce He's saying, Fine, I want all my money. Why should I do you a favor?

Just do the math. Alan Arkin's fee was$120,000. Morgan Freeman was asking for more than five times that. Fred could see already, the movie's budget of$29 million, that was a mirage. As for scheduling, Morgan Freeman had already committed to the Shakespeare play. His free time for bonfire was very, very tight. Book between now with Morgan Freeman's dating, Bruce Willis's dating, Melanie Griffith's dates and the release of the picture. What's gonna shoot in New York?

The shooting schedule kept changing, at least twenty times according to Fred. If he felt frazzled, he never showed it. Fred was the son of immigrant parents, and he'd been a high school music teacher in New Jersey for seven years. He loved it, but he had a show business itch. When he signed on to Bonfire, he'd been on film cruise for twenty-two years. He'd worked his way up the ranks on some of the biggest pictures ever made. I'm as mad as hell and I'm not gonna take this anymore!

And some of the toughest. I want to make him an offering camera for you. Bonfire would be Fred Caruso's fourth movie with Brian, but once the movie lost its producer, Fred Job it just got a lot more complicated. So it's Ryan who's dealing with the writer, the casting. and how this look of this film is going to be. And yes, he talks to Lucy Fisher at the studio. But there was no middle person to act as a go between, no buffer. Fred had to step in.

Yeah. There'll be 65 phone calls a day for the next 65 days. as to why this is happening and why that's happening or why isn't this happening or why isn't that happening.

Then there were special problems raised by bonfire of the vanities itself. Tommel's book had been wildly popular with a lot of people, but it had made just as many people really angry, and a lot of those angry people lived, worked, and prayed in the same places where Brian De Palma wanted to film. Well, w I got thrown out of uh Temple of Manu. The bonfire naysayers included a certain group of elite New York women. The bony socialites who Tom Wolf called social x-rays.

They were women who believed you could not be too rich or too thin. And some of those social x-rays were Jewish, and some of them went to Temple Emmanuel. Caruso found that out the hard way while visiting the temple where he wanted to shoot. At first it seemed like the rabbi there was interested, but Come on in, the synagogue, how wonderful, and what's the name of the movie? He stalled for time. Finally, he had to tell them. Fire the vanities. Ouch.

Fred did a great job of mimicking the rabbi's reaction. It was hilarious. Out, we don't want you here. Cooler Rabbi, what's up? All of them Jews that are in this book, in your book, are in this. Guys. They know who they are and Tom Wolf wrote about them from this synagogue and them x rays and so on out. We don't want you to throw us out.

On top of all that, there were the usual problems of filming in New York, where nobody wants to be taken for a sucker. Location after location fell through. And even when they nailed one, it wasn't gonna come cheap. When Fred Cruz and I talked, we were on Park Avenue. It was the first week of shooting. The crew was planning a shot of a fancy apartment building. It was supposed to be where the main character, Sherman McCoy, the master of the universe, lived.

We stood on the sidewalk looking up the boulevard. Park Avenue itself was the star of the scene. It was lined with elegant buildings. The street was separated with a median filled with tulips. It was the best place to see spring arrive in Manhattan. But all those tulips, it wasn't enough for the Moothy people. They hired a team to plant even more. Fred and I stood there, watching them plant them. Then he gestured to the building in front of us. Like this building where we're here.

He broke down how much it cost to shoot the scene. Thirty-five thousand dollars to use the sidewalk outside the building. Plus fees to the security guards, dormants, superintendents, When it's all over, Fred tells me, shooting that tiny little scene cost fifty grand. $50,000. For four days. The whole thing was new to me. It was a spectacle.

And there was so much money being tossed around all the time, everywhere. You could already feel flashes of panic coming from the studio. Bonfire had sat in limbo at Warner Brothers for a year. And now it was an urgent project. The studio wanted that Christmas release, and it was April. That urgency was getting more pronounced with every last minute creative decision.

I was starting to get the hang of it. Every time Brian made a new call, I'd just go look for Fred. I'd ask him, what does this mean for the schedule? What does this mean for the budget? But on that beautiful day in April, standing there on Park Avenue, Fred Crusoe said. Deep breath. So we sent the rows to every department. With a little no thanks for the help in getting us to the first day of shooting. Every secretary.

He'd send a rose to everyone on the first day of shooting, to the secretary, the legal department, the music department, to everyone. And the roses came with a short note, thank you for getting us to the first day of shooting. That day, Fred Crusa sent two hundred roses. That kind of courtly gesture was completely alien to Brian DePama. Strange as it sounds, Brian hated making movies. He loved to dream them up and sketch them out, alone in his room.

But the actual process? He called it the nightmare, the horror show. Most often, he referred to the experience as the dreaded tunnel. The tunnel is this dark and scary place you're stuck in until you emerge on the other side. For the next four months, Brian, this guy who's happiest alone in his room. Would be surrounded by dozens and dozens of people every day, all of them looking to him. Waiting for him to tell them what to do, watching for him to make a mistake.

I'm the one that's completely responsible for this movie. I'm going to come back. Right. This is not successful and I'll be the one that will be blamed. You'll be on to your next project and your next job and I'll be the one that'll be looking at the. I'll be the one who will live with this movie for the rest of my life, Brian says. And now here I am, doing a podcast about it thirty years later. I guess Brian was right.

On the next episode of The Devil's Candy, Brian De Palma and his crew are ready to shoot in the Bronx, but when they get there, they find out not everyone is excited about their movie. And Ferrer is demanding a disclaimer which would make it. At least a few seconds at the end of the movie. end of the movie. Oh by the way, the Bronx isn't Yeah.

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 Press. Fact-checking by Alex Jabl. Mixing by Glenn Matulo. Production support from Jacob Friedman and Susanna Zapeta. Special thanks to Megan Major, Matthew Ownby, and David Burns.

Thomas Avery of Toon Welders composed our theme music. At Campside Media, the executive producers are Vanessa Gregoriatis, Adam Hoff, and Matt Scher. TCM's Podcast is Andrew. Charlie Tavish is the executive producer. TCM's general manager is the first Check out our website. 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.