The Screengrab : alan king

When Good Directors Go Bad: The Bonfire of the Vanities (1990, Brian De Palma)

Paul Clark — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Of all the prestige projects of the 1990 awards season, few had more potential than The Bonfire of the Vanities. To begin with, it was based on Tom Wolfe’s first fiction book, which had been widely read in serialized form in Rolling Stone before becoming a bestseller upon its publication as a novel. The director was Brian De Palma, who made his reputation with a series of kinky, Hitchcock-inspired thrillers during the seventies before branching out into more mainstream fare such as Scarface, The Untouchables and Casualties of War. With a wildly popular novel and an A-list director, Warner Bros. had visions of Oscars dancing in their heads, and they consequently filled the cast with big names, from recent Oscar nominees Tom Hanks, Melanie Griffith, and Morgan Freeman to newly anointed action superstar Bruce Willis, and backed them with plenty of first-rate character actors.

Ideally, The Bonfire of the Vanities should have been one of the biggest movie events of 1990. But then, if it had been, I would be writing about it in my Yesterday’s Hits column instead of When Good Directors Go Bad. As it stands, the big-screen adaptation remains one of the most notorious fiascos in Hollywood history, earning back a mere $15 million of its then-extravagant $50 million budget, and receiving mostly savage reviews. As a De Palma fan of long standing- I’m the guy who liked The Black Dahlia, after all- I’d like to say that the film was merely misunderstood, but even I have to admit that it’s a failure.

Part of the problem is the casting of the principal roles, from the top on down. If you were casting the role of an ambitious commodities trader and self-anointed “Master of the Universe”, whose name would come to mind? Michael Douglas? Tom Cruise, perhaps? But after Warner Bros. deemed the character too unsympathetic on the page, they decided to cast Tom Hanks in the role, which is sort of like casting Jimmy Stewart as Gordon Gekko. Also problematic was the casting of Willis. The character of journalist Peter Fallow was written as a dissolute Brit (the role was originally offered to John Cleese), but Willis ended up being cast for marquee value, and gave one of his laziest performances, smirking his way through the role and pissing off most of the people involved with the production with his ego.

Worst of all is Griffith. During the eighties, Griffith’s dumb-blonde persona proved to be surprisingly adaptable to a number of filmmakers’ visions, from the tart-with-a-heart of Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild to the streetwise porn star of De Palma’s own Body Double. However, the role of Maria Ruskin was far beyond her limited talent. On the page, Maria may be the trickiest character in the novel, a wily manipulator whose ditzy façade hides a pitch-black heart. But Griffith can only manage the ditzy part, so when the character begins to reveal her shameless nature after Sherman’s life begins to go down the tubes we never believe it. The two halves of her personality- sexy and cunning- never mesh convincingly, so rather than lacing her manipulations with an erotic charge, her dark side makes the sexy stuff creepy, which surely wasn’t what the film was aiming for.

But while the casting issues might have been out of De Palma’s hands, he’s far from blameless. Admittedly, Wolfe’s novel is something of a tough nut to crack, simultaneously a cross-section of New York City life, a morality tale, and a savage takedown of the craven greed and ambition that fueled the eighties. However, it fails on all three counts. Much of its power as a snapshot of the Big Apple’s social strata is lost because its characters are sketchy and one-dimensional, a problem that might have been partially alleviated by spot-on casting, but not entirely. Likewise, the film places its morality tale aspects on the back burner for most of its running time, only to have judge/voice of reason Morgan Freeman bust out an extended monologue about decency in the film’s final five minutes, at which point it comes off as a tacked-on moral rather than a natural outgrowth of the story.

This leaves only the exposé aspect of the story. In nearly 700 pages, Wolfe was able to lay bare the motivations of nearly all of the major players in the story, from Sherman, Maria and Peter, to the lawyers, politicians and community leaders who opportunistically seized upon his case for their own personal gain. Without the time to do this onscreen, De Palma instead focuses on the circus (political and media-driven) that ensues. But while a more assured comic filmmaker might have been able to spin even an abbreviated Bonfire into a bitter little pill (imagine what an Ace in the Hole-era Billy Wilder might have done with this material), De Palma brings almost nothing to the material aside from the liberal use of unflattering wide-angle close-ups to underline the grotesqueness of the characters. Sure, there are a handful of cool camera tricks- especially the nearly five-minute-long opening Steadican shot- but for the most part they don’t really work in the context of the story, and mostly just call attention to themselves. I hate to use a criticism that De Palma’s detractors are wont to levy at him, but in this case, they’re right.

In the end, the biggest failing of The Bonfire of the Vanities is one of tone. The scathing satire of the original novel was replaced by a more hamfisted style that was both broad and shrill. A few of the jabs hit (I love how Andre Gregory’s poet is introduced: “he’s on the shortlist for the Nobel Prize. He has AIDS.”), but most of the time they whiff. Scenes like the one where Maria’s cuckold husband (Alan King) suddenly dies in mid-conversation or the famous “crumbs” monologue by Sherman’s wife might have worked on the page, but they flounder and die onscreen, the former because it’s not inherently funny to see a minor character kick the bucket, the latter because Kim Cattrall plays the character as such a high-strung harpy that it’s hard to focus on anything she says.

Now, it’s entirely possible that Ebert was right when he wrote that The Bonfire of the Vanities might be enjoyable to those who are unfamiliar with the book. But I wouldn’t bet on it. De Palma and the studio took a powerful and lacerating story and adapted it in the most pedestrian way possible, and replaced the prickly citizens of Wolfe’s New York City with characters who are both cartoonish and, worse, uninteresting. If anything good came out of my watching Bonfire again, it’s that I’ve been inspired to re-read the book, to immerse myself in Wolfe’s language and marvel at the world he created. By now, it’s become a cliché that people are generally better off reading the book, but in this case that’s the only way to go.

The Screengrab 24-Hour Stephen King Marathon: The Final Chapter

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 18:30:00 GMT

Introduction

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

6 p.m. – 8 p.m. CUJO (1983)

My very first published review is lost to the ages. It was a book review I wrote during my freshman year of high school, published in our school newspaper The Schoodic Breeze (derisively known to its detractors among the faculty and student body as The Schoodic Sneeze). The subject was Stephen King’s Cujo, the first of the horrormeister’s books that truly disappointed me. (It wasn’t until many years later I learned King had written most of the book while either drunk or coked-up or both, and had no memory of writing it.) Now, 20-odd years later, I guess I’ve come full circle, writing a review of the movie version of Cujo while too drunk to remember it. (I’m kidding! Maybe.) Here’s the problem: the copy of Cujo I secured (never mind how) turns out to be in Spanish with no subtitles, and there’s no time left to get a new one. I probably missed some of the subtleties in the first half, which mainly consists of scenes of domestic discord amongst the Trenton clan. After checking with Wikipedia, I confirmed that mom Donna (Dee Wallace) is having an affair, dad Vic’s advertising career may be in the hopper because a client’s kiddie cereal is making the wee ones shit pink, and son Tad is afraid of monsters in his closet. When Donna and Tad take the family clunker out to Joe Camber’s garage on the outskirts of town, Tad has a real monster to worry about: Cujo, the Camber family St. Bernard, has been bitten by a bat and gone rabid. The second half of the movie mainly consists of Donna and Tad trapped in their car, which the mangy mutt occasionally attacks. It’s not that scary, probably because no matter how menacing you try to make a St. Bernard look, he still just comes off as dopey and lovable. One thing in the book’s favor: King kills off the whiny kid, while the movie lets him live.

8 p.m. – 10 p.m. CAT’S EYE (1985)

Cujo director Lewis Teague also helmed this trilogy of tales, loosely connected by a wandering cat. There’s an amusing moment near the beginning when the cat is chased by Cujo and they are nearly hit by Christine, but Teague ruins it by cutting to the “I am Christine” bumper sticker on the red Fury. Oh, now I get it! Anyway, the three stories here are presented more for amusement than scares – at least, I hope that was the idea. In the first, James Woods attempts to quit smoking with the aid of a shadowy organization that employs extreme measures (such as giving his wife a series of electric shocks the first time he sneaks a butt). In the middle segment, a mobster forces the man who’s been boinking his wife (Robert Hays) to walk all the way around a tall building on a tiny ledge. The finale brings us the return of Drew “Firestarter” Barrymore, who is menaced by a funny little troll in a jester cap. Woods and Alan King provide some chuckles, and I did like that troll – Was there a tiny person in there? A monkey, perhaps? – but this is pretty typical mid-80s cheese. If it’s late at night and you happen upon it on cable, it’s a good movie to semi-watch while conking out on the couch. And by this point in the marathon, I’m doing a lot of conking.

King’s cameo: In addition to the in-joke mentioned above, there’s also a scene with Woods watching The Dead Zone, and another with Barrymore’s mother reading Pet Sematary in bed.

10 p.m. – Midnight SILVER BULLET (1985)

Did someone mention typical mid-80s cheese? I’ve saved the least for last, assuming anyone is still awake out there. Silver Bullet may not actually be the worst King adaptation, but it doesn’t offer much besides a pop culture anthropologist’s glimpse of Ground Zero for modern celebreality rehab shows. Both Corey Haim and Gary Busey appear in this lame werewolf flick, which also features Everett “Big Ed” McGill as the preacher-turned-lycanthrope. (That’s technically a spoiler, I guess, but since everyone with an IQ above room temperature will figure it out five minutes into the movie, it shouldn’t count as one.) Haim is the crippled boy in the souped-up motorized wheelchair Silver Bullet and Busey is his drunken Uncle Red, a part he could play even more convincingly today. Considering that Silver Bullet came out several years after The Howling and American Werewolf in London, it’s remarkable how shoddy the were-suit is. Of course, it’s not quite as shoddy as the Casiotone soundtrack, which conjures all the excitement of a game of Simon. (Ask your drunken uncle, youngsters.)

Well, looks like we made it all the way to the end. Except…wait! I’ve actually been dead since 8 a.m. and the rest of this has been written by the zombie Scott Von Doviak. BWA HA HA HA HA!!!!

Nah, just joking. I meant to say I’ve actually been drunk since 8 a.m. I forget – did we watch Cujo?

Forgotten Films: "Just Tell Me What You Want" (1980)

Phil Nugent — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 20:00:00 GMT

In his the most recent film of his incredibly long, checkered, impressive career, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (out on DVD next week), director Sidney Lumet played to his strengths: his rapport with his actors, and his ability to tap into an energy that can be exciting even when it turns scabrous. Lumet turned those qualities on his own show-business-industry set in his 1980 comedy Just Tell Me What You Want, which came out early in 1980, got appalled reviews, and vanished from sight. Like much of Lumet's work, the movie is uneven and feels patched-together in places, but the very qualities that seemed to gross out critics at the time are part of what makes it such a bold, distinctive entertainment, a romantic comedy without illusions. It's cynical without being judgemental, which is so unusual that some reviewers may have had trouble believing what they were seeing. (Lumet got great reviews for some of his duller '80s films that were eager to point fingers at their characters' moral defects.)

Its hero, and its target, is Max Herschel, a self-made corporate head (played by the stand-up comic Alan King) who sees everything, including his love life, as a succession of deals to be made. Max is married (to a drug-addled, bejewelled WASP goddess played by Dina Merrill), but he's been juggling a long-term affair with a TV producer (Ali MacGraw), and when she leaves him for a playwright (Peter Weller) who represents artistic purity and uncommercial values, Max freaks. What makes his decision to wage war on his ex-girlfriend, by wrecking her career while offering her writer-lover the chance to corrupt himself by adapting his own work to the movies, weirdly charming is that, like Cary Grant in His Girl Friday, he's trying to win her back by bringing her to her senses. He's right to think that she really belongs in the executive suite with him instead of blowing on her fingers in a cold hovel playing muse to some proud literary loser. And Alan King, in his only starring movie role, makes Max a hard man to dislike. (The large, lively cast also includes Myrna Loy, smooth as silk in her final screen role as Max's secretary.) Just Tell Me What You Want may have been a few years ahead of its time; a year after its release, Ronald Reagan was president, manipulative rich bastards were on their way to being redefined as glamorous "Masters of the Universe", and in People magazine and on TV series such as Dynasty, Americans were cheering on pushy, multimillionaire hustlers without a fraction of Max's charm. It might be the tragedy of Donald Trump's life that he had to settle for playing himself instead of staying home and letting Alan King do it for him.