A New Podcast Reignites A Box Office Bomb

One day last December, Julie Salamon was rummaging through piles of old plastic bins in a lower Manhattan storage unit. Salamon, 68, is a journalist, writer, and describes himself as a “pack rat.” The boxes were accidental galleries in the museum of a life’s work, filled with relics—notebooks, clippings, photographs, and tapes—that have accumulated for a dozen books that Salamon has published since 1988.

Salamon had come looking for a box containing material from his second book. “Devil’s Candy” He had recently agreed to adapt the book, a famous narrative of Tom Wolfe’s notorious blockbuster “The Bonfire of the Vanities,” based on the sweeping social satire of 1980s New York. The second season of The Plot Thickens. a Hollywood history podcast Turner Classic Movies.

Salamon had hoped to find a series of minitapes recorded on set throughout the entire production of the movie. Audio from the tapes included unusually candid interviews with director Brian De Palma, his team, and the film’s stars Tom Hanks, Bruce Willis, Melanie Griffith, and Morgan Freeman, and would become a pivotal component of the podcast.

But when Salamon finally found the “Devil’s Candy” box, the tapes weren’t there. Distraught, she returned to her SoHo apartment and continued the search. A few crazy days later, he found several ziplock bags filled with mini-cassettes in the back of a large home office cabinet. The bags had not been opened for 30 years.

Making the podcast, which recently ended its seven-episode run, was a turning point for Salamon late in his career and a rare opportunity that gave him the opportunity to revisit the story of a lifetime thirty years later. However, as the author knows better than anyone, adaptations are never simple – at least when it comes to “The Bonfire of the Vanities.”

“Putting this podcast together gave me an extra appreciation for Brian’s dilemma,” Salamon said. “At first you have no idea what you’re doing, but then you start doing it.”

“The Devil’s Candy” stunned Hollywood when it hit shelves in 1991. It painted a vivid and well-sourced portrait of an industry that few outsiders had seen up close. (Or I would see it today—studio armies and personal publishers keep journalists from getting too close.) Salamon, then a film critic for The Wall Street Journal (who later worked for The New York Times), had befriended De Palma. By the late 1980s, he had made hits like “Carrie,” “Scarface,” and “The Untouchables,” but was in some sort of career decline. With his involvement, the book portrayed the world of big-budget studio filmmaking as a high-stakes battle where three volatile factions – artists, executives, and audiences – are always at odds with themselves and each other.

At the heart of the story was what remains one of the most notorious trainwrecks in the history of cinema. Wolfe’s “The Bonfire of the Vanities” was an ever-changing expression of greed and cynicism in “Me Decade,” filled with characters that are easy to hate and hard to stay away from. The book became an instant bestseller and media sensation in 1987, making it almost inevitable that someone would try to turn it into a movie. But its sharp edges did not survive in Hollywood. Warner Bros. recently cast Hanks in the movie “Big,” pre-facing the story’s main character, Sherman McCoy, a slick bond trader and self-proclaimed “Lord of the Universe.” His unforgettable brutal end took the ax as well. Instead, there was a made-up scene in which Freeman, playing a judge, preaches a dissonant moral.

Behind the scenes, the project has been uncomfortable from the start. The first biggest cheerleader, Peter Guber, a powerful producer, left the studio before production even started. This is Warner Bros., which wants to protect an inflated $50 million investment with De Palma, an introvert and meticulous visionary. set the stage for a showdown among the rulers. Not interested in oversight, De Palma distracted executives from important aspects of the production. Managers backfired—at one point, they threatened to hold him personally responsible for cost overruns.

No one who worked on the film—not even Salamon who observed the footage and attended meetings—conceded that it was a creative failure until it was shown for test audiences. By then it was too late. Critics attacked ‘Bonfire’ – ‘disgusting, unfunny’ and ‘wildly unbalanced’ announced this newspaper — and moviegoers avoided it. did less $16 million at the box office.

The podcast version of “The Devil’s Candy” preserves the core narrative of the book but adds new layers. The strongest is the sound recovered from Salamon’s freezer bags. Throughout the series, backward narration leads to simultaneous recordings that capture events as they happen. Records also transform written characters into living, breathing people. Everything you need to know about the special type of tough movie star Bruce Willis was back in 1990 – the ever-present bodyguard, rude to assistants – in the brash tone he used in his interviews with Salamon.

“For me, tapes really add a richness that is not possible otherwise,” Salamon said. “I like to think I’m not a bad writer, but there’s no way to write something as impressive as telling a human’s story.”

Salamon adapted “The Devil’s Candy” in close partnership with narrative podcast company Camp Media, co-produced this season of “The Plot Thickens” with TCM. He needed to devote his 420-page book to seven 40-minute podcast episodes.

Natalia Winkelman, 28, a producer at Campside (and a freelance film critic for The Times), was the kind of doula and confidant who guided her through the months-long process of turning her months-long reports into podcast scripts for The Times. Although Salamon’s career as a writer spanned fiction, memoir, and children’s literature, he lacked experience in writing for the ear, a distinctive form with unique qualities and limitations.

“Sentences don’t work that well in audio, you have to be more direct and conversational,” Winkelman said. “At first I think there was a bit of a learning curve for Julie, but things started to click really quickly when the two of us got into the recording studio. If I give her a shout – This sounds a little read–y He’d come back with something much better than I could come up with.”

Salamon also wanted to improve the book by adding new reports and interviews. Many of the podcast’s more emotionally challenging moments stem from the transitions between then and now, recording and memory. One of the few indelible people from the book that Salamon re-interviews is Eric Schwab, the second unit director of “Bonfire” and De Palma’s protege, who was preparing for a debut career before the movie bombed.

“A lot of people who worked on the movie were at a crossroads in their careers,” said Angela Carone, director of TCM podcasts, which ran the season with Salamon. “We will tell all of their stories on the podcast in a way that is not in the book.”

Not everyone who collaborated with the book returned for the podcast. None of the movie’s stars sat down for new interviews (TCM said the recordings are legally Salamon’s property and inform those whose voices were used in the show). Although Salamon said the two remained good friends, De Palma did not. (Through a representative, the director and stars also declined to speak for this story.)

In the absence of stars, the podcast becomes more systematic in appearance. It shows the idealistic and hardworking zealots reaping small victories amid the turmoil and horror of the movie set—his assistant who dreams of becoming a producer, the space scout who takes aspirin for breakfast.

Some of what Salamon documented 30 years ago looks different through a modern lens. Episode five resets the few women in the movie who have always held more precarious positions than their male peers. In this episode, present-day Aimee Morris, a 22-year-old production assistant on “Bonfire,” angrily remembers filming a scene not in the novel with actress Beth Broderick. In the scene, Broderick’s character is photocopying his bare crotch; Making the movie required Broderick, then De Palma’s girlfriend, to spend nine hours repeatedly removing his underwear and getting in and out of a Xerox machine.

“It just made me sick to my stomach,” Morris says in the episode. The scene “had nothing to do with anything. This is just disgusting. It’s just misogynistic.”

Salamon, who critically wrote about the Xerox scene in his book, said that revisiting with Morris made the anecdote more meaningful this time around.

“It just made me realize how much garbage women accept in the days when we rightly no longer accept it,” she said.

Working on the podcast for Salamon was a strange and emotional experience, forcing him to reflect on his own journeys, not just his characters.

When she first thought of what would become “The Devil’s Candy” in 1989, she was a frustrated novelist who worked full-time at The Journal while she was carrying her first child. The book became an instant classic of its genre (it is still taught regularly in film schools) and changed the course of his life.

“Hearing these sounds took me back to that moment,” said Salamon, describing what it was like to listen to the tapes for the first time. “I was starting a new life and becoming a young mother and transitioning to a new job that I love. It was very difficult. I was on an adventure.”