Wire Without a Net

The pressure on Brian De Palma was mind-boggled. When it all got to be too much, he'd just stop and sit down with his walkman. Opera music was his escape. It was hard to imagine that Brian ever thought it was fun to make movies, but it seems like he once did when he was younger, and maybe when less was at stake. I used to at our assemblies used to run the Friday afternoon promo for the football game or something. Right. Yeah.

No no no skits. Oh make up little skits for what was coming up on the weekend. You figure out where to put the camera if you don't know anything about still photography, then it's not such a big jump from that. It sounds so obvious, but very few directors know how to create a distinctive look. A dirty word to me is coverage, you know, two shot, over the shoulder, you know, stuff you see, you know, all the time just drives me crazy because this to me is not directing.

You have to f have to think about where the camera is in relationship to the material. That was Brian decades later. In an interview from the Criterion release of Blowout, he was discussing the work he's done with Vilmos Sigmund. Sigmund was a highly regarded cinematographer who Bryant had used on Blowout and Obsession. Bryant would also bring him in to shoot bonfire.

Zygmunt would go to crazy lengths to capture the perfect shot. Brian liked that. He needed Zygmund's creativity to bring his ideas to life. Like one scene in Obsession, a melodrama about a man who loses his wife and then becomes infatuated with a possible replacement. What was she like? He was very much like you. Like me. She was Italian. No, she'd look very much like you.

In the scene, two characters meet at an airport and embrace. Brian didn't just shoot it as a wide shot. He captured the intensity of their emotion by spinning the camera around and around them. Velmos and I are racing around them faster and faster and faster. It's fun. Okay. If you can pull it off. It's funny looking back at this, at least in the context of the Bonfire of the Vanities. On Bonfire, Brian De Palma wasn't having any fun. Everything was a mess, everything was a headache.

On big movies like Bonfire, something is always going wrong somewhere. It's inevitable. But then there are those moments of spontaneity. The ones that remind Brian of the fun of making movies. When, even for just a moment, everything seems to go right. I'm Ben Mankowitz, and this is season two of The Plot Thickens, a podcast from Turner Classic Movie. 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 the Vanities. The director, Brian De Palma. I'm Julie Salomon, and I was there and witnessed it all. I was a film critic for the Wall Street Journal, but in 1990, I spent a year on the set of Bonfire the Vanities with a notebook and a recorder. Barely anyone noticed me, but I noticed just about everything.

This is episode four, Wire Without a Net.

I remember Brian never saying a word to me ever, you know, like just always looking at me and I'm like, okay, hi, you know. That's Amy DuBon. When she worked on Bonfire, her name was Amy Morris. She was a twenty-two year old film school graduate. Bonfire the Vanities was her first real experience as a production assistant or PA. Her job was to get the stars where they needed to go. It was simple, but pretty exciting stuff for a young person who came from a small town in New England.

There was sort of like this natural high from like, holy cow, I'm working on this big movie with these people, you know, and going, I'll just be myself and whatever happens, happens, you know. And Amy was tall with long wild curly hair. She was smart and confident. Well, at least that's how she seemed on the outside. She was particularly good at dealing with the actors, knowing how to respect their limits while ushering them wherever they needed to go.

She was also in charge of getting snacks, lots and lots of them. She'd go to Dina DeLuca, a fancy grocery store in the neighborhood. She buy raisins, nuts, design her water, no junk. One day, after a food run, Amy had her arms full and she ran into Tom Hank. He was on his way to rehearsal. They both stepped on the elevator going up. Tom Hank reached over. He wanted to help her with the grocery bag. It's like, give me those. And I'm like, no, I got them because those. Cut your own.

Hand, give me those. I'm like, no, I was like horrified. I'm like, oh my God, you know, there's no way I can get off this elevator with Tom carrying one of these bags. Help you do. I'm like, no, you're gonna l make me lose my job. Don't touch my bags. Tom Hanks was always friendly to Amy. Whenever there was downtime during filming, the two of them would even play cribbage. It's a board game with playing cards. One day, many years after bonfire, Amy ran into him on the sidewalk.

And I saw him, I said, Tom, I go, it's your old cribbage buddy from Bonfire. And he stopped and he came over and he gave me the biggest hug and he was like, Amy, and I'm like, how are you? It was such a wonderful moment.

But keeping the other stars happy? That wasn't always as easy as playing board games with them. Take Melanie Griffith. She needed a lot. When she was being picked up at the airport, she asked for an extra cart, just to carry her luggage. And when she got to her camper on the set, she decided it wasn't big enough and that she needed a new one. It's hard making And if you surround yourself with what makes you comfortable, it makes it easier for everyone.

But Amy, she wasn't put off by these prima donna moves. She empathized with the pressure Melanie was under Melanie. Melanie had a genuinely big heart, very sweet, very kind, very conscientious. Bruce Willis? He was a different story. Amy told me that when she and Bruce Willis first met in an elevator with Brian, he ignored her, looked right through her. Then, Brian introduced her by name. Suddenly, Bruce Willis acknowledged her presence.

But it was just a very sort of interesting moment. Like, you know, it was like I didn't exist until Brian introduced me to I think one of the things that makes me sad with any famous person is that there's the balance of protecting yourself and then being able to find a certain level of humility. Bruce Willis certainly wasn't unique in his behavior. It's a personality type. Some people, they don't take well to celebrity.

He wasn't a kid. He was 35 years old. And he'd been famous for five years. But it was like he still hadn't adjusted to it. He had recently married Demi Moore, one of the decade's most popular actresses. They were considered a hot young couple, and the press loved them. You know, to me this is it. This is the best America has to offer. One of the hottest sex symbols in Hollywood. Off the screen, he's recently gone from a bad Bad, bad, bad.

bad playboy of Hollywood to marrying his beautiful wife, actress Demi Moore. Later on, Bruce Willis became catnip for the paparazzi because he gave them what they wanted. Did you talk to Demi at all? No. When they taunted, he couldn't just walk away. He got into it with them. Brother. You get knocked out. You might knock me on my ass. That might happen. On bonfire, even got into it with me.

I was a critic, not a paparazzo. But he still made it clear that he wasn't a fan of what I did for a living. When I was walking around set, he made a point of not talking to me, even though I saw him all the time. Or maybe he just didn't see me, the same way he didn't see Amy, or anyone he didn't think was important. I had to go through his PR person to interview him.

It was noisy when we talked. There were crew members moving stuff around in the background. It wasn't the most convenient setting, but I was happy to take what I could get. And you might lose your composure back. He told me that all the attention started after moonlighting. Some guy's girlfriend would see him on the street and say how good of an actor he was or how cute he was. And then the guy would walk up to him and just start taking swings. Just taking swings of me.

So he said he had to have somebody between him and that guy. That somebody? That was a bodyguard. Bruce Willis was the only actor on Bonfire who had one. The guy would stand posted outside Willis's trailer. He was a big hulking man trained in the Israeli army. The bodyguard was one reason Willis wasn't liked much by the crew. For all of his talk of being just a jersey boy who made good, he kept himself apart.

Willis told me the bodyguard was there for protection, not so much to keep people from threatening him, but to protect him from himself. When Bruce Willis was growing up, hitting people was a natural instinct for him. But as a famous person, he just couldn't anymore. Can't do that anymore. As we talked, I remember thinking, I'd met other actors like him, the kind who claims to hate celebrity, hate being famous, but then they just won't shut up about it.

You know, look, I'd like to think that I'm still... Enough of an ordinary person inside of me anyway. You know how I can scratch my hands? Okay. He even told me that there was a study done a couple of years earlier. Years ago. That showed that putting his face on the cover of a magazine would sell more magazines. And so why? Yeah, because A commercial for their for the National Inquire or for the Daily Cox Upper. Whatever you want. Sounded a little grandiose.

But honestly, I kinda give him credit. He didn't even try to be polite to me. True or false. I was just another cog in the machinery that kept the spotlight on him.

The epic search for a courtroom was finally over. Finding one on short notice hadn't been easy. It took ages, and it was wildly expensive. The courtroom was important. It would be the location for the movie's biggest scene, the showcase for Morgan Freeman, who was playing the noble judge, the only upstanding character in the entire story. Judge Roberts had offered his courtroom in the Bronx, and they'd almost used it, but then at the last second, they found a better one, out in Queens.

But if the hunt for the perfect courtroom had been a headache, filming the scene wasn't gonna be much easier. The courtroom they chose was being used until 6 p.m. every day. The crew had to wait until trials finished, then they'd swoop in and set up. Morgan Freeman was working on another project during the day. He was rehearsing for Shakespeare in the Park, and after that, he'd have to come to the courthouse at night for his bonfire scenes.

I talked to Fred Caruso about it. He was the lime producer. He had to oversee all these logistics. Morgan came in at eleven o'clock at night and filmed until he was tired because he had to go back to sleep. And at the end of the day at six in the morning, we had to strike the set, take every light, every grip stand, every camera, every prop away from the courtroom in order for them to go back in session.

They ended up shooting 14 nights, and every morning they had to strike the set so court could be in session. That meant it took twice as long to do half the work for double the cost. They needed an extra crew to make the courtroom look like it was daytime. They hired extra lighting people called grips and extra electricians, fifteen in total. That was on top of the regular crew. Everyone was paid double time. It wasn't easy.

But Ryan didn't feel he had to apologize for wanting to shoot in a real courtroom. And he also thought it was right to cast a black actor in the role of the judge, even though the judge was written as Jewish in the book. The judge character was tough and uncompromising. He had to scold the black defendant. To Brian, it made more sense for that scolder to be black too. Here's how he described it in a T V interview. was something that worked better dramatically for me.

You know, I'm an Italian and I can make jokes about other Italians. And uh no one will get offended. But if a Jewish guy makes a joke about an Italian or an Italian makes a joke about a Jewish guy, it's a whole other thing. During the day, the Queens County Courtroom was filled with real plaintiffs and real defendants. At night, the movie people invaded a lot of movie people. All the stars had to be there, plus a couple of hundred extras.

There's always a lot of downtime making a movie, sitting around, waiting. It's boring during day. At night, it can be excruciating. Bruce Willis and Melanie Griffith went to their trailers when they weren't needed. She was so frustrated she wanted to scream. 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 and then tell me that come on, get ready, you're on.

Tom Hanks, he organized card games with the crew and other cast members. And Morgan Freeman, he circulated, talked to everyone. Sometimes it looked like he was running for office. I asked him about it one day on set. Oh, but you were ming you know, like you're at Mr Popular. I told him you seem like Mr. Popularity among the extras. Well I know a lot of these people, he says. They're New York actors, friends of mine.

He starts rattling off names of the extras, actors whose whole job on bonfire was just running down a hallway. It ain't Jackson. a lot. Thank you. He says he's known those extras for ten years, in some cases twenty. Yeah. So they just do this to pick up extra money in between. Then he starts talking in the third person. Incredible rise to glory that Morgan Freeman. He says, I mean not all of us are having this incredible rise to glory like Morgan Freeman is having here. I'm a major standout.

Stand out. Me and Denzel. At the time, Morgan Freeman was turning fifty three, and he'd only just become incredibly famous from his role in driving Miss Daisy. He was almost twenty years older than his co stars. His problems they were different than theirs. One thing, I've never had miles of people trying to catch you. Tom Cruise, Bruce Willis, you know, you do these kinds of movies that make a trillion dollars. What made Bruce Willis a superstar? Blue lighting.

My point is, my agent said to me, you know, you now you're getting to a level where you have to be careful, you know,'cause you become a mood star. and you won't have to act anymore. Morgan Freeman didn't think he was at that level of stardom, the diehard level, but he knew that once you got there, you had to be careful.

He said that once you're a movie star, you don't really have to act anymore. At least not in the same way. And for a theater guy like him, that was a distinction he didn't want to forget. His schedule was grueling, but he still looked like he was enjoying himself. He told me that bonfire was nothing compared to Taming of the Shrew, the Shakespeare and the Park play he was in. What made the two projects different? For Shakespeare, he had to memorize the lines. He said it was easier with movies.

You just look at the page and do what he says. Well, Brian didn't quite have the same feeling about that. He really liked Morgan Freeman, but the line thing irritated him. They kept having to reshoot, take after take, because Morgan Freeman kept screwing up his lines. Those lines he didn't have time to memorize. All this while they had thirty thousand dollars worth of extras sitting around waiting. Brian felt like the biggest pressure was on what they all called the decency speech.

The decency speech was Morgan Freeman's big important monologue about ethics and virtue. ¡Es la ley! The law is man's fable Attempt. To set down the principles Decency! And decency is not a deal. Or a contract or a husband? This was the movie's big climactic moment. It's the moment when the judge tells the outraged spectators at Sherman McCoy's trial they have to accept the verdict. No matter how unpopular it is. It would be close to the final scene in the movie.

Brian hated speeches in movies, but the screenwriter loved it, and so did another important group, the Warner Brothers Executive. Tom Wolf, though, he was on Brian's team. He was just surprised the speech was even there. Wolfe had originally written Bonfire as a series of articles in Rolling Stone magazine. That's where the screenwriter had found the decency speech.

But that speech, it hadn't even ended up in bonfire the book. Tom Wolf had removed it. He didn't think it was true to life. People, not even judges, they don't walk around giving speeches. I talked to Wolf about it. There's a speech just a speech and it's not in the final book. That's right. When the movie people mentioned the decency speech, Tom Will said, what decency speech? Yeah. Good night. He couldn't even remember it.

The whole thing was yet another reminder. The movie was gonna be very different from Tom Wolf's best-selling book. Season two of the plot thickens, The Devil's Candy. We'll be back right after this.

Endings are important. So are beginnings. The opening sequence of a movie, it sets the tone for the whole thing. Before production started, Brian had met with Eric Schwab to discuss what that opening might be. Eric was the second unit director, Brian's protege, Eric was the one who was gonna film the airplane landing. The Concord. Brian had already bet him a hundred dollars. It would never make it into the movie. The Concord shot was one of Eric's two big chances to showcase his talent.

The other was gonna be bonfire's opening shot. They came up with an opening that would show New York as the glittering city. It was gonna be a series of shots to kind of show the jewel that New York is and the way it works on such a high level that it's a unique place. of not just a big city, but this sort of fantastical magical you know wizard of oz sort of place.

Eric had gone through stacks of books on architecture and then gone with a location scout all over the city. They stopped at nothing. I I was purposely getting on top of buildings to try to find these amazing shots that could be used and would probably end up being maybe ten shots, which were quick shots, but hopefully each one would be spectacular in capturing the magnificence of the city.

There had been months of planning. His location scout, he'd already cleared a whole bunch of the locations they'd need for fifty angles on Manhattan. That in itself was huge, given how hard it is to clear locations in New York City. At one point, I remember Eric telling me the opening would cost more than$250,000. That's as much as Brian's first five films put together for a three-minute sequence. Ridiculous, perhaps, but so exciting.

No, I had a very good location people that got me anywhere and enjoyed it, you know, as the challenge'cause we were autonomous. We were just trying to do a great thing. While he was doing his own work, Eric tried to show up as much as he could for dailies. That's the raw footage that had been filmed the day before. Dailies are an important part of production. Every night, the team gathers to watch them. I want it to report

Then one night on the way to viewing the dailies, Eric bumped into Brian. For once, Brian seemed to be in a good mood. He was lit up. He had a new idea about how to start the movie. came up with a a different idea of of how to start it off. And so it kind of negated what what I had been working on. Eric couldn't believe it. He just stood there, trying not to let his face fall as Brian laid out the movie's new opening.

That meant that Eric's opening sequence, that glittering Wizard of Oz montage of the city, it was erased. a lot of work into it, and we pretty much had it all refined, so of course I was disappointed. I felt so bad for him. He knew that with a big film like Bompire, he had a chance for his work to be noticed. Now it felt like even more was writing on that Concord shot. Not just the hundred dollar bet they'd made.

Even worse, Brian told Eric he was in charge of finding a location for the new opening. Oh, and they needed it in three days.

Larry McConkey was the steady cam operator on Bonfire. I have serious objection to the way you described it because it's not getting even close to what I have to do. That's him complaining about how I described him in my book. But before I tell you what I said about him, let me tell you what a steady cam is, and why you use one.

A steady cam is a kind of metal mount for the camera. The steady cam operator, that's Larry here, straps the whole thing onto his body. That way he can walk around holding the camera while keeping it steady. To say it's difficult? That's an understatement. The thing can weigh anywhere from 40 to 100 pounds, and half the time the operator is walking backwards. It takes a lot of core strength and coordination to keep the motion fluid. A good steady cam shot turns out smooth and beautiful.

But watching the steady cam operator at work? It isn't exactly pretty. While Larry McConkie was hooked up to the steady cam. For some reason, his walking reminded me of the waddle of a pregnant duck. So I wrote that in my book. When we talked recently, he really objected to the description. So I asked him, how would you describe it? I won't tell you his entire answer. That would take a whole episode. Here's the short version.

If you want to go forward, you lean forward slightly. If you want to slow down, you lean back. You want to stop and then you come forward. If you want to go left, right. So constantly doing that dance. You actually have to walk like a tightrope walker. I guess one person's tightrope walker is another person's pregnant duck.

Either way, Brian was in awe of Larry McConkie. Larry was the best in the business. He was the one who held the camera for the famous Copa Cabana long take in Martin Scorsese's film, Goodfellas. Every time I come here. trying you two He'd also worked with Brian on casualties of war. But the new opening Brian had dreamed up, it would test McConkie's skill for sure. It would be one extended long take that would go on for nearly five minutes.

Audiences might not know the difference, but people in the business, they knew just how hard this was to pull off. Everybody's on double time, triple time. When I started thinking about it, realized this is By far. The single most expensive shot I've ever been a part of times 10, times 50. I don't know, like millions for one shot. The other thing I already knew about Brian, there is no plan B. This is what we're doing.

The new opening was based on a memory of Brian's. Brian had been at a literary dinner one time when Truman Capote walked in, a little inebriated. It's the kind of thing that's both funny and well, embarrassing. Bonfire would play on that. It would open with Bruce Willis's character, Peter Fallow, drunk at an award ceremony. Brian had given Eric Schwab three days to find a location for the scene. A place big enough and grand enough to house an awards gala.

And Eric did it. He found the perfect place to shoot, in a big room at the World Financial Center. It was right across the highway from the World Trade Center. This was 1990. The twin towers were still standing. The room was called the Winter Garden. It was very glamorous, a big open space. There were marble floors and palm trees growing inside. And most importantly, there was this whole maze of concrete hallways beneath it.

To get up to the winter garden, you could start in an underground parking lot and then weave your way around to an elevator that would open up into the space. Brian wanted to use that underground maze in the steady cam shot. The camera would trail Bruce Willis from a limousine through those long underground hallways, into an elevator, and then out into the fancy gala.

The first part is simple. Bruce Willis rides for a few hundred feet on an electric cart, like the ones you see driving around airports. Larry McConkey, the steady cam operator, he sits at the front, facing the rear, so he can capture Bruce Willis on camera. But once they get off the cart, the rest of the shot is on foot. Larry has to walk backwards, holding that very heavy camera. Mr. Caroline, welcome! And so much happened.

Bruce Willis chugs whiskey and champagne, moves past an ice sculptor, flirts with women. staggers, changes clothes, swipes a big hunk of salmon mous with his bare hand. and all in one uninterrupted shot. A shot that goes on for almost five minutes. In film time, that's an eternity. Brian couldn't just stand behind the monitor and direct. The action was occurring down a long, dark corridor. There wasn't enough room. And Brian didn't want to miss a beat.

So he did something he usually didn't. He put himself in the shot, just like Alfred Hitchcock used to do. because this shot is so complex the only way to observe it was to be in it. This is not a Hitchcock move. This is basically in order to watch the shot.

He came to me, Larry, how do I look? And he had shaved his beard. Never seen him without that. And he had cap on, like security guard. He had his little outfit beard. How do I look? And I'm looking at him and it's like Down so far his ears are sticking out. Brian would play a security guard who rides in the cart with Peter Fallow. That way he could direct the shot second by second.

The only time they could shoot at the winter garden was a weekend, Memorial Day weekend. They rehearsed for two days, then prepared to get the shot that second night. Rehearsals went well, but once they started shooting, it got a lot more complicated. especially during one part, the ice sculpture part. As Peter Fallow stumbles along, he passes a huge hunk of ice shaped like a lion being wheeled along on a cart. Larry McConkie, who was filming the whole thing, was supposed to navigate around it.

That ice sculpture, it hadn't been around for rehearsals. They'd been practicing without it, and they didn't anticipate how heavy it would be, nearly one hundred pounds. They set up for the shot. The first part went okay, but then they got to the ice sculptor. It was so heavy that it slowed down the whole caravan.

And they didn't come and I'm slowing and slowing. I'm getting further and further behind the group. And somebody hit the door and that blocked somebody else and somebody else trip. And then my assistant was right behind me. He fell and I fell. It was like a domino. Larry's assistant fell, and then Larry toppled down on top of him with all of that equipment. For a second, they just lay there.

Then I remember Brian coming over me as I was struggling. Okay, take that. Yes, thanks. Lizzie, you ready? I'm gonna let go of you ready? There, yours. Okay, somebody take my arm. And then their space came down. And it was Brian. And he said, I didn't think you could fall. The assistant was bloody. His face had smashed into the concrete floor. Larry was concerned about him, but there was something else he was even more concerned about.

I was thinking like, oh my God, how's the camera? And my assistant is bleeding now badly, a big dash. And he's saying yeah, I think it's probably okay. I s I soften the blow. They all tried to convince his assistant to go to the hospital, but he insisted he was fine. He wanted to keep on working, so they started setting up to shoot again, take after take. Luckily, there was a nurse on set ready to jump in.

The nurse after every take would open up the partially healing, you know, scar tissue because she didn't want it to close until they got him to the hospital and get stitches, which was a good eight hours away from them. The assistant did end up getting stitches eventually after they wrapped. But Larry was gratefully stuck around to nail the shot. We could not have done the shot with another assistant and had it be perfect, which it was.

You couldn't really tell what the shot would look like, but you could tell something exciting was happening. Being there, it felt kind of like a big party. I never saw Brian that animated at any other time on the film. Even when he was casting the scene, he kept muttering. Wire without a net. Wire without a net. Like they were all tightrope walkers. with nothing to catch them if they fell.

The following week, the bonfire crew was back in the Bronx. It was the final night of shooting before they moved to LA to finish the film. That last night, it had a surreal quality to it. It was the perfect ending to the New York shoot. Once again, they were filming at night, but not inside a courtroom. They were out on the street.

They were filming the scene where Sherman McCoy and his mistress Maria get lost and end up hitting a teenager. For the scene, the creative team wanted to show the Bronx the way Sherman and Maria saw it. As ominous and threatening. Oh, Jesus Christ, Sherman, we're in the middle of a goddamn war zone. You're worried about doing the right- To do that, they attempted to push the boundaries of caricature. Hey baby, we have the party. But those depictions go way beyond caricature.

They are offensive and racist. The street was filled with burning cars and actors in bright clothing. Some played drug addicts stumbling around. And one man playing a pimp was bare chested, decked out in gold chains. This time the movie makers were very faithful to the book. Tom Wolfe, a white man, had been criticized for stereotyping the people of the Bronx, and those stereotypes were amplified when you could actually see them.

Well, we wanted to portray the Blancs, you know, like it is, but you know, even push the kind of wasteland aspect to it. So we wanted to make it bleak. And you know, we just took every kind of journalistic cliche and just hyped it to the max. The actors weren't the only ones at the chute that night. The streets were crowded with people, with real Bronx residents. the people who lived and worked in the community. They were trying to get a look at what was going on behind the police barricades.

I remember it looking absurd. The people from the neighborhood, they were dressed in jeans and t-shirts, just like the crew. And then there were the actors playing them wearing these wild costumes. That juxtaposition drove it home. The reality of the Bronx was very different from the way it was portrayed in movies, television, and the evening news.

That night on the street, it was noisy. Lots of radios playing and people talking and yelling. Then in the middle of it all, you could hear these small flat sounds. Ping. Ping. Splat. They were eggs. People were throwing them from the perimeters. The egg throwing incident was just funny. Chris Soldo, the first assistant director, recalled the scene. And I had to tell my PAs, sorry you look at that side of the street, you look at that sort of say

Try to figure out where these eggs are coming from. It w it was just funny. It was they were eggs, you know. They were eggs. It's like somebody's throwing eggs at us. Okay. I remember one of the camera operators was up on a crane wearing a raincoat and holding an umbrella to protect himself from flying eggs. People were throwing light bulbs too. And then Solda reminded me of the time someone actually snuck on to set at a different Bronx location.

It was a man who was upset about the fact that there were no black crew members on the film. He got past the barricade and walked up to Brian. He went on a tirade about the lack of black crew members on this film. And I'll never forget it because Brian became as stoic and still as a portrait in the National Portrait Gallery. He just listened, his face went blank, he listened, and then finally this man was sort of taken away.

I didn't see this happen, but as Chris told me about it thirty years later, he empathized with the man's frustration. And in retrospect the guy had a point. He did have a point for doing this with a all white Hollywood crew, you know.

It was the last week of shooting in New York. Ryan was exhausted. And moving the movie to Los Angeles to the gated community of the Warner Brothers lot that would present a whole other host of problems. On the next episode of The Devil's Candy, Melanie Griffith shows up in Los Angeles with something that left the wardrobe team scrambling. The Melanie, what is this article on movie line about your new brother? Did you see those? Is it really? What is it?

There's a whole article about new breaths. Oh my god. Season two of The Plot Thickens was produced by Campside Media in partnership with Turner Classic Movie. It was hosted and written by Julie Solomon. Tatalia Winkleman is the producer. Story editors are Joanne Ferrian and Angela Carone. Editing by Mike Volgeris and Maya Croth. The associate producer is Julia Pratt.

Fact-checking by Callie Hitchcock. Mixing by Glenn Matulo. Production support from Jacob Friedman and Susanna Zapeta. Special thanks to Megan Major, Matthew Owen. David Byrne, Lisa Fu, and Ajua Jimmer Brempong. Thomas Avery of Toon Welders composed our theme music. At Campside Media, the executive producers are Josh. Dean, Vanessa Gregoriatis, Adam Hoff, and Matt Sher. TCM's Director of Podcasts is Angela Carone. Charlie Tavish is the executive producer. TCM's general manager is Polishnon.

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.