"THE BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES HAD BECOME A FORM OF ENTERTAINMENT"
In the prologue of her book The Devil's Candy, about the making of the film adaptation of Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire Of The Vanities, Julie Salamon describes Wolfe eating breakfast at the Caryle Hotel in Manhattan, in 1990, diplomatically speaking "about how the people from Hollywood were progressing" with the movie version:
He wasn't willing to criticize the moviemakers -- just yet. "I think it's bad manners in the Southern sense to be sharp and critical of it," he said. "I did cash the check." However, with his good Southern manners the author had made it clear to the Hollywood people right after he accepted the $750,000 they paid him for the rights to his book that he didn't want to have anything to do with the making of their movie."To tell the truth, I've never wanted to write any script based on something I've done," he said. "From my standpoint it's too bad that movies don't run nine or ten hours. The way I constructed the book, almost every chapter was meant to be a vignette of something else in New York as well as something that might advance the story, and to me one was as important as the other."
The author paused briefly. "It's a fairly simple story. It's not a complicated story. But I wanted there to be all these slices, one after another. Not that I gave very much thought to how the movie could be made, but I never could see how you could do that."
Updated: Sunday, November 22, 2020 12:32 AM CST
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