The War Zone

The first time I knew Bonfire was going to be sort of an overfed, maybe slightly indulged feast was in our first Tech Scout lunch. That's Chris Soldo. Chris was the first assistant director. It was his job to orchestrate crowd scenes, help with scheduling, and generally keep order on the set.

He realized early on in production that everything about bonfire was going to be outsized. All the usual problems of making movies would be just a little bit bigger. Chris had this revelation before filming began. It happened at lunch. The scouting crew went to a restaurant on Arthur Avenue in the Bronx, a place famous for its huge Italian feast. Yeah.

Six plates of fried calamari and ante pasta are laid out before us, right? Just to get started. Arugula salads, mozzarella and tomato. Then pasta, sausage, pasta meatballs. At this point, everyone's kind of groaning, looking around at each other. It was really time to get back on the road. Then came the second course. Pork chops, steak, all this veal, all these meats start coming down. You know, choreographed being brought by like these waiters.

Poor Brian De Palma. He was still watching his way. And I'm sending it to Brian and Brian's going, Oh It's like, what are you kidding me? More food? And that's when I knew you're on a big movie, Chris. With Bonfire, there was this feeling right from the beginning that this wasn't just another movie. For Brian, that would be unacceptable to make something ordinary. Brian had five days until april thirteenth, nineteen ninety. A Friday. Friday the thirteenth would be the first day of filming.

What were they thinking?

I'm Ben Mankowitz, and this is season two of The Plot Thickens, a podcast from Turner Classic Movie. 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 Bonfire the Vanities. The director, Brian De Palma.

I'm Julie Salomon. I was there to witness it all. I was a film critic for the Wall Street Journal, but in 1990, I spent a year on the set of Bombire the Vanities. Barely anyone knows that. But I noticed. everything. This is Episode 3, The War Zone. Richard Silbert was the production designer on the Bonfire The Vanities. He was a Hollywood legend, nominated for an Oscar six times with two wins.

He made it to the big leagues in the sixties and seventies when movies were changing, and he hung out with the trendsetters, the ones driving that change. Mark Hamory, Mike Nichols, Warren Beatty, Jeff Nicholson, Joe Sidney, and John Dunn. ご視聴ありがとうございました Years together. In those years, Dick Silbert was living a glamorous life, and he dressed the part too. His closets were filled with hand-tailored suits from Saville Row in London.

But all that was over by the time bonfire came along. He was sixty one at that point. Still tall and slender and charming, in a world weary way, he usually looked tired, like he hadn't slept the night before, or the night before that. By then, he'd moved away from tailored suits in favor of safari jackets, lots of pockets, meant for carrying compasses and other items that you might need in the African bush.

Almost every day he came to work looking like an ad for J. Peterman. All that was missing was a pith helmet. Naturally, he smoked a pipe. Safari suits had become Silbert's uniform, like his hero, the director John Houston. He wore safari suits too. And like another director, Brian De Palma. It was one of the things that made Silbert want to work with Brian. They were both safari soup men.

The only difference was that Dick Silbert's was tan. Brian's was khaki green. Which is a pretty funny image. Two grown men standing on a Hollywood film set dressed for the jungle. But for Silbert, the uniform had a specific purpose. I wear a uniform, this uniform. What is it? It's always meant for me. The Morphane is the war. A movie is a war, and in war, Silbert says, a uniform is necessary for War's between the people with the ideas and the people with the minds. I would be honored.

I saw what Silbert meant. The directors, they're the generals. They have to get the troops on board to fight the fight. Whatever it is. Budgets, executives, the press, angry judges. It may seem out of proportion. This wasn't a war after all, it was a movie. One of a bunch of pictures that would be crowding into theaters before Christmas. And yet, you could feel it on the set, this sense of urgency, this feeling that Bonfire would be one of those movies that really was larger than life.

The movie's$29 million budget was climbing toward 40 million, and not a foot of film had been shot. Things were getting pretty tense. Poor Lucy Fisher, the studio executive. She thought they were all supposed to be on the same side. They all wanted the same thing, didn't they? A great movie, preferably one that made tons of money. But executives and filmmakers, they often have very different ideas about how you get there.

And how much you're willing to pay to get there. That's where the skirmishes begin. Lucy Fisher was at Warner Brothers out in Hollywood. But even from across the country, you could feel her eyes on Brian. She knew the budget was ballooning. She knew there were already problems, and she knew shooting was starting in a few days. So she and a colleague decided to fly to New York. They wanted to sit in on Brian's rehearsals with Bruce Willis.

Brian, he didn't want that. He froze them out, didn't take their calls. He just sent back one word No. I asked Lucy Fisher about it. Were you sort of thrown off that he wouldn't let you into rehearsals and stuff? Have you heard about that? Oh yeah. I've been around. Yeah, we've had two giant fights, that was one of'em. Right. Is that normal though on a m m movie?

Apparently it is for me and it isn't for him.'Cause I'm always the director's friend. I've never been excluded on that way and apparently for him it's the worst possible thing he could ever imagine. Lucy felt personally wounded. She thought she and Brian had been getting along really well, much better than she thought they would. Sounds like some weird marriage. It does. I think it does sound like some weird. Marriage. Very

Brian didn't see it that way. He didn't want to worry about whether he was hurting Lucy Fisher's feelings, and he didn't want the studio people to see any of his vulnerabilities. He told me that once you give up control, it's perceived as weakness, that you need help. He says you have to take on a facade of I know everything. Those are people. Brian was nervous.

Who wouldn't be with that much on the line? He didn't want the executives looking over his shoulder. And remember, on a normal set, there'd be a producer running interference.

Brian had to do it all on his own. And one of his biggest battles was yet to come the one with the media. It shouldn't have surprised him. Media hype was partly what Bonfire the Vanities was all about. And movie making was a business that always lived and died by publicity. Still, he didn't expect the onslaught from the New York press, but they were always primed and ready for a little bloodletting, especially when Hollywood came on their turf.

The gossip columnists came first. They'd noticed that a bunch of New York socialites were interested in bonfire. Actually interested in being in bonfire. They'd started coming out to audition for roles as bit players, mostly in the fancy party scene. Especially the party that was gonna be filmed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the Temple of Dender. They wanted to be at that party playing themselves. The gossip writers love this.

Even the New York Times picked up the story. They covered the socialite auditions in the newspaper. The headline was Vanity's Galore. Right around then, a Warner Brothers executive received a handwritten note from a woman named Joan Tish. She was the wife of a business type. one. Somehow that nice thick cream colored note card, it ended up in my backpack. I really can't remember how, but I found it in the box with my tapes. Mrs. Tish had good handwriting and an even better sense of humor.

Dear mister Canton, she wrote, It was with great interest that I read in the Sunday, april first, New York Times that your film company is auditioning for bit rolls in Bonfire of the Vanities. Then she started listing the advantages of casting her. She wouldn't need a hotel. She owned one. She wouldn't need air transportation. She had her own plane. And then she wrote. You wouldn't even have to provide space at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as I have my own wing.

And then there's this bit towards the bottom where she brings up Nan Kempner. She was this famously thin socialite. She wanted to play herself in the movie. Joan Tisch wrote, P.S. Should Nan Kempner need an understudy, I am prepared to lose 50 pounds. The whole thing was hilarious. It was all just silly, and kind of fun to watch it go down, until the museum people got tangled up in it.

The Board of Trustees there at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, they didn't think it was so funny. They didn't like all of this outside activity. They got cold feet. They said, you can't film here. So Brian's team had lost a major location again. But I gotta say, what happened with the socialites? It was nothing compared to what was happening in the Bronx.

Sometimes a studio will invite in a reporter, a friendly reporter, to visit Set during production. The idea is to generate a story that will get potential viewers excited about the movie. But that didn't happen on board. The book was really divisive. There were a million essays about what the book was and what it wasn't. Was Tom Wolf reporting on realities of class and race? Or was he exaggerating things, making them worse?

The Warner Brothers marketing people felt the less they said about the movie in advance, the better. They even sent out a memo telling everybody on the set not to talk to the media. Anyone who broke the rule would be fired. Of course, I guess Brian broke the rule even before the movie started by bringing me onto the set. But the studio would have to deal with me later. They were worried about the press that the movie was getting then, in real time.

Now that Borough President Fernando Ferrer has seen the script, he says it's Bronx bashing at its worst. When we got to the script, the script tended to accentuate all of those aspects of the Bronx that are generally considered stereotypical. Fernando Ferrer was the Bronx Borough president. He was only 40 years old, pretty young for a politician, and he was a progressive.

Back then, crime was high all over New York City, all over the country. To him, Bonfire of the Vanities felt like another unfair swipe at the people who lived in the Bronx. When you talk about a community, you must take care. There are 1.2 million people living in the borough of Le Bronx that don't consider themselves hustlers or pimps.

prostitutes or media hounds. They're people who have worked over the course of years to make their lives here, to educate their kids, to bring up their families, and they deserve some recognition as well. Tom Wolf understood there were two faces of the Bronx, but he argued that the crime was what you heard about.

criminal behavior to cast a paw over an entire area. And all you have to do is wake up in the morning to as many people do to a station called WINS and you'll just get a catalog of shootings in the Bronx every morning. W-I-N-N. You'll give us 22 minutes. We'll give you the world. We're coming off the bloodiest year in the history of New York.

The Bronx was different back then. The whole city was. There were six times as many murders in nineteen eighty nine as there were three decades later, in twenty nineteen. But Ferrero was making A Bonfire's vision of the Bronx was a caricature, one that ignored the lives of the actual people who lived there. Ferrer thought the movie version of Bonfire should somehow acknowledge that. He was a shrewd politician. He made his case publicly in a press conference that was televised.

And Ferrer is demanding a disclaimer, which would mention some good things about the Bronx. At least a few seconds at the end of the movie. At the end of the movie. Telling people, oh by the way, the Bronx isn't exactly Calcutta or the murder capital of the face of the planet. That press conference by the Bronx Borough president was covered everywhere. On radio, TV, newspapers, all over the world. The New York Post ran it on the front page. They even printed part of the movie script.

Brian was annoyed by it all. He thought the press was being ridiculous. exhaustive lengths, like it was the most important thing in the world. Bonfire does this, bonfire does that, you know, and in relationship to us, it was like, is this all they have to report? Bonfire had become a lightning rod. For Brian, the battles would last a few months, and then he would move on. For Fernando Ferreira, the battles were his real life. Probably it seemed to him

We're in the Bronx, April twenty-three. I'm talking to Brett Batullah. I understand where these guys have come from. We just had a meeting with Fernando Ferrer, the Bronxboro president. Repetula had been scouting locations in New York ever since he spent a couple of years at NYU film school, about a decade earlier. He was trim, a friendly looking guy with these round boyish cheeks. His job was to find the locations for each scene, then get permission to use them. And then get Brian on board.

It wasn't an easy job. You just had to figure things out, even if the demand seemed impossible sometimes. Everything they say, you say yes. No matter what they say, you say yes. If they say, can we Blow up the Brooklyn Bridge, you go, yes. And then you run around, you find out if you can blow up the Brooklyn French as fast as you possibly can. Brett was working really hard, trying to balance the demands of a tough boss and an even tougher city.

walking a thin line because I don't have any fucking control if Brian De Palma decides he wants a blah blah blah. I mean they could mow me over and he doesn't even know who I am. Bro was only twenty-nine, but he talked like someone who had been around forever. He explained the ropes to me, figuring out how to break the rules, go places you weren't supposed to go, and who knows what else.

Basically everything that we do is uh uh illegal or unheard of or blasphemous or preposterous in one form of another to somebody. You cannot bring a guy from Los Angeles or Idaho or anywhere else and drop them into New York and get that done. But when it came to Bronx locations, Brett sympathized with the borough president, Fernando Ferrer. These guys are trying to... uh bring back vital neighborhoods that are totally trashed, right? Um this is this is the classic problem.

Alright. Everyone comes to New York to either shoot the uh diamond draped halls of Park Avenue or to shoot the farned out buildings of the Bronx. That is classic. That's every Remove it. Bret Batullah may have understood the big picture, but right now he had a specific job. That job was to find a courtroom. He had one general to report to, and that was Brian DePar. Dick Silbert had been building this beautiful courtroom on a set in Los Angeles.

But casting Morgan Freeman as the judge? That adjumbled everything. Now Brev Petula needed to find a courtroom on the East Coast for Morgan Freeman's scenes, close to New York City if at all possible. And he had less than two weeks. That's when they'd be shooting those scenes. Timing was tight, and it was a tough assignment. Most judges weren't eager to turn their courtrooms over to movie crews.

Rebatullah hired another location scout just for the search. The team checked out 50 courtrooms or buildings that could double as courtrooms. Yeah. They traveled to Boston, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Baltimore, DC, and other smaller cities in Ohio and Delaware. Brett's office was overflowing with folders holding pictures of courtrooms. He felt like he knew every courthouse from Boston to Baltimore like the back of his hand. And every last one of them was wrong.

He told me he was no longer measuring bonfire by the number of folders he had, but by the amount of aspirin he'd taken. He figured he had taken so much aspirin that if he piled it up, it would reach the top of the World Trade Center. It was like the Greek myth of Sisyphus. The stone the crew was pushing up the hill was Morgan Freeman, and the top of the hill was a courtroom. Every time they thought they'd found a location, it vanished. It didn't work out.

Then Brett found one that might work. And it was actually in the Bronx. And it was being offered up by someone you wouldn't expect. Robert. You remember Roberts. He was the judge who the character was based on. He auditioned, and in my opinion, he probably should have gotten the part. He was still annoyed that he hadn't been cast. But he was willing to stay involved. He thought, Well, maybe I can't be in the movie, but my courtroom can be.

It was Bret Batulla's job to convince Roberts to let the crew use it. So Bret and I went over on a scouting trip. It's Judge Robins, man. He's a he's a tough one. Brent and I were standing on the steps of the Bronx County Building. It was an imposing monument of a place made of granite and limestone. Because he has to

Good VLK puts the work here because for this simple reason we cannot disturb unless they the functioning of the courthouse of the justice system, all right. That is a total judgment call. Pete chose, you could say this disturbs the function of the corner. I hate the word schmooz. Schmoozing to me has a connotation. Thank you. Brev pointed at a row of parking spots in front of the courthouse. You wanna have some fun and know what part of the negotiation? It's the justice.

Yeah. Parking spots with Judges Park. All right. Like a silly thing. But I'll tell you what, if we came here this morning and we didn't have those parking spots right there, I would be out of a job. See how it's clear there? Yeah. Sometimes the things that seem mundane are the most important. Like parking spots.

The Warner Brothers executives, they may have been out in Hollywood, but they were watching the search for a courtroom closely too. The budget was now officially thirty percent over and still climbing. Lucy Fisher knew it would be wildly expensive to shoot the courtroom out of town, and she felt she was never getting a straight story.

Every day I would say where is the location? Where is the you know, nine I am a dog with a bow and I repeat everything two thousand times. And I will say, where is it, the location, where is it? Do you have it? And he'll say, Yeah, yeah, yeah, we have it, we have it, and I'll say, is it signed and sealed? He'll say, yes, yes, yes, they're done, they're done, they're done.

Well maybe they're ninety nine percent done, but one percent isn't done, or maybe they're eighty percent done. I'll never know what percent was really done. But I know they weren't done. So for the second time that month, she and another studio executive decided to fly back to New York to see what was going on. Thank you. So I was with Fred Caruso when he told Brian.

She wanted to know whether you would be available to meet with her tomorrow or speak with her tomorrow or dinner with her tomorrow. I don't know. This time Brian took the meeting. कर दो कर दो Yeah. I know. At least for the moment. But the fallout from casting Morgan Freeman, it was sinking in. No what the Morgan Freedom decision was going to mean in terms of the ends. But I'll tell you in January. We're afraid.

I'll tell you in January. No, we had we did not realize how much it would affect everything financially. Through all of this chaos, finding the right courtroom, losing the Met, every once in a while I would stop and think. Where's Brian? Then I'd see him, sitting in the middle of it all. Safari jacket, looking remarkably calm, even peaceful with a smile on his face. Then I realized he had his Walkman headphones on his ears. He was listening to one of the operas he loved.

You have to block out everything. You gotta see it in the frame. That's what artists have to do, or they would never create anything. They have to block everything out. To create the illusion that what they are doing matters more than anything, and to keep their focus. If they lose that tunnel vision, whatever they were trying to do, it wouldn't get done. Season two of the Black. Candy. We'll be back right after this.

Everyone is close to me, please. One of the things I remember most about the bonfire set was the social status ladder. Like the military, there was a hierarchy. And it felt like everyone was always angling for a better role. The camera operator wanted to be a cinematographer. Cinematographer wanted to Secretaries, they wanted to be associate producers. Since they wanted to be anything that wasn't lowest runk on the ladder. And everyone, I mean everyone, was working on a script.

Sometimes people broke through the ranks, but it was rare. Though there was one guy who seemed to be outside the hierarchy, who could break rank and who could break through to Brian. His name was Eric Schwab. Let me let me start the uh I'm gonna start the recorder. Yeah, I started my kid. Now Eric, don't talk too fast. Well just tell me to slow down whenever you want me to'cause I speed up without When I met Eric on the Bompire set, we hit it off.

People sometimes asked us if we were related. We had a similar look, a similar way of talking too fast when we got excited about something. We've stayed in touch over the years, but But I hadn't spoken to him for a while when I called him up in February. Oh yeah. Me acting like a bossy sister. So I know you've told me this before, but Start with when you actually first met Brian.

I first met Brian on Body Double. Body Double was Brian's erotic thriller, the one that starred Melanie Griffith. Eric was twenty six at the time, doing Brett Batullah's job. He would drive around with Brian, scouting for locations.

remember one time him and I were looking at a location. We were walking along the aquatuck and he kind of looked at me and he got and goes, What's your story? You know, we kind of just wanted to know what my background was, you know, where I came from, if I studied something like that. So but he only did that in small groups.

Brian hired Eric again for the Untouchables, but it was casualties of war that really changed things for Eric. He told Brian he would only work on the film if he could shoot second unit and get into the director's guild. The second unit is a separate crew, with its own director. It's used on large films to shoot the less important shots, usually ones that don't require the main actors. Surprisingly, Brian said yes.

He gave Eric the job, and he even sponsored his application to the Union. The studio resisted, but Brian went to BAP for him. Brian basically told him if you don't get Eric in the Union and direct second union, I'm not doing this film. And so he did. He he actually told them that. Eric had gone to film school, but Brian gave him a completely different kind of training. More like an old fashioned apprenticeship, the training that Eric needed to become a director himself.

They bonded over the way they saw the world through the frame of a camera lens. Fred Caruso, the lime producer, he saw it. Eric was very cerebral and and could sit and listen and talk to Brian and they got along and Brian felt comfortable. Not that Brian wasn't comfortable with me, but if I didn't have anything to say

I wouldn't go to Brian just to chat and talk about the weather or politics or movies or whatever. Whereas Eric had a special relationship with him and Eric had a very good eye. He had Brian's eye. So I had more freedom'cause I was off on my own with my second unit and so I could do shots that I could experiment with more and do things, you know, that that we didn't even discuss and then hopefully he would be pleased with, which he did, which he ended up using.

And then there were the times when Eric didn't quite pull it off. Brian noticed. said something to me like, I'm gonna put that shot in the movie so every time you see the movie you're gonna know you should have done it better or something like that. I don't think he actually did, but just to kind of remind me, these things are permanent. You gotta get it great, you know. After casualties of war, Eric decided it was time for him to make his own movie, to strike out on his own.

But then something else happened. Eric's father died. Around the same time, Brian sent word to Eric about Bonfire the Vanities. Eric was grieving. His head was swirling. There was so much to think about. And he didn't want to think about any of it. So rather than waiting around for his own movie, Eric decided to battle his grief with work. He told Brian, yes. He would be the second unit director on bonfire. Just like on casualties of war, he'd have his own crew, his

Shots to take care of. It was his fourth movie with Brian. By that point, they were really bonded. On set, it was obvious to everyone. I remember Brett Batullah, the location scout, talking to me about their relationship. One thing that was good great about this film is that Eric Schwann is like Brian De Palma's eyes and ears. You listen to Eric and Bryant talk. No one would dare. I mean Eric.

Brian, no, that's all wrong. Those guys are like I don't know if they're like brothers or father and son or whatever. But the point is, is that if Eric says, I think Brian would like this or Brian wouldn't like that, it means something. I was intrigued. How had this young guy broken through to Brian, got past that wall of self-protection? I figured I should go to the source.

So at the time I interviewed Eric's mother, Fei Schwab. Every reporter has their shtick. I guess mine? It's interviewing people's mothers. thinker and he's also a long range planner. He doesn't um just think of the moment. He builds for the future. She told me Eric's infatuation with film began with a class he took at Harvard Prep. That's a fancy private high school in Los Angeles. Now it's called Harvard Westlake.

He read everything there was to read on film. He saw every movie that was ever made, either locally or on tape. He particularly loved Japanese filmmaking. And used to go there was a Japanese film festival at the Sherman Theater in Sherman O. He used to go there and weeks on end seeing every Japanese film that was ever done. Eric was obsessed with film, just like Brian. But it was something else Mrs. Schwab said that helped me understand Eric's relationship to Brian. Eric.

is prepared in every detail when he goes into something. He has a vision of what he wants it to be. He is the youngest of my four sons. But he's the rock. He's the one that if I want to get some advice, I'll go to Eric. She was saying Eric was an old soul, someone you could rely on in a way you wouldn't expect from a young guy. Brian saw that.

Eric was proud of his work on bonfire. He valued his role. He valued his relationship with Brian. But sometimes it felt to him like people didn't really see him and his talent directly. When Eric described it to me back then on set, he seemed a little defensive. have no idea what I do. I mean people do not know the difference between what I do and an assistant director.

He told me that the one thing that drove him crazy was people not understanding that he was a director of his own unit, even if it was the second unit, not the first. If Brian was the general, Eric was the lieutenant. It was a good spot to be in. People on set, people like Prepatula, they would have killed to have Brian's ear the way Eric did. But sometimes that bond, it could also be a liability. Was he ever gonna step out of Brian DePama's shadow?

When Eric signed on to Bonfire, he and Brian sat down together and flipped through the script. They were deciding which moments could go to Eric's second unit. Eric stopped at one shot. It was of a plane landing. It sounds like the biggest cliche ever. Character about to enter scene, show a car pulling up, a plane landing. Done, but so boring. Brian said to Eric, The day I have a shot like that in one of my movies, that'll be the day I retire. But Eric.

Differently. For him, the plan was an important moment. He was right. Like a drum roll announcing the entrance of Maria. Maria is Melanie Griffith's character, the mistress, the devil's candy. Eric decided he could make that entrance memorable. He knew Brian was skeptical, and he took it as a personal challenge. They sat there poring over the scene, arguing over the shot.

He said, No, no, no, I'm not gonna put a shot of a plane landing. We've seen it in too many films. And I said, Brian, let me just get a great shot. And he said, Okay, I'm gonna bet you it won't be in the movie. A hundred dollars. And it was. We said, Okay, we'll make a hundred dollar bet that the shot won't be in the movies.

The bed up the ante for Eric. Not because of the money. It was the principle. Getting that shot into the movie became his devil's candy. That temptation, that impossible thing. It was almost a game. Even Brian got into it. They agreed that a character like Maria, a social climber, she wouldn't fly back from Europe on a normal plane. She would take the Conquered. The Concord was a supersonic jet. It could fly at twice the speed of sound. It was noisy and extremely expensive.

In the nineteen eighties, flying on the Concord, that was a sign that you were very, very rich. Probably no one in the audience had float. So this showed you there are people that, you know, don't wait in line, don't have to do what you do, don't have to uh trudge through the traffic like you do, and hopefully just get this film that theme that something's wrong with. That there is people like this.

Eric's Concord Shop became a standing joke around the production office. Fred Crusoe liked Eric. He was amused by his obsession and the bet. But Crusoe also had to help with the logistics. And the obstacles, they were obvious right from the start. To get permission. No, you can't do it. No, it's not possible. No, you can't go on the runway and no you can't and so on and so on and so on. And actually capturing the shot, it'd be close to impossible. Like trying to catch a moonbeam.

Eric wanted to shoot it just as the sun was setting behind the New York skyline. He would have literally seconds to film the Concord landing. Everything had to line up just so. The exact moment. that the sun and the moon and the stars and the planets and and ever and the air and the oxygen and everything about when that plane can be seen in the sky over Manhattan and

puts its nose down and ready to land. And what was gonna happen if on that day it was cloudy? And what was gonna happen on that day if it was raining? And what was gonna happen on that day if something If if if If became the operating word on bonfire. If things worked out, there could be Oscar prospects. Maybe a shot at upward mobility for everyone. Maybe even a plane landing in a Brian DePom movie.

But nobody was oblivious to the other outcome. The other if. If things didn't work out, one person would pay the highest price. That would be the director.

When a big battle is lost, people mourn the soldiers who are wounded or die. They blame the general. On the next episode of The Devil's Candy, shooting finally begins with some casualties. Larry, my assistant's bleeding now badly, a big gas. The nurse after every take would open up the partial Healing scar tissue because she didn't want it closed until they got her to the hospital and get stitches, which is a good eight hours away from then. The stars grow crankier by the time. Really?

Second rate. I mean I waited around So nine days in New York before I started shooting. Something like that. When they made me get on a plane the next day after finishing Pacific Heights'cause I had to be there. And then I didn't shoot. And it was like that the whole fucking time. 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 Corone. Editing by Mike Volgeris and Maya Croth. The associate producer is Julia Press. Fact-checking by Callie Hitchcock. Mixing by Glenn McDonald. Production support from Jacob Friedman and Susanna Zapaya. 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. Vanessa Gregoriatis, Adam Hoff, and Matthew. TCM's direction.

Is Angela Coron. Charlie Tabish is the executive producer. TCM's general manager is Polishon. Check out our website at TCM's Backslash the plot thickens. It has info about each episode and tons of great photos. Again, that's T C com backslash the plot thick. I'm your host. Thanks for listening. See you next time.