The Devil's Candy

Granted unlimited access to the film production of Tom Wolfe’s best-selling The Bonfire of the Vanities, Salamon serves up a fascinating portrait of one of Hollywood’s most notorious flops. Miscast (Tom Hanks as an arrogant Wall Street heel?) and tone-deaf, the resulting film ran roughshod over Wolfe’s satire and Salamon was there to record every juicy and head-scratching nugget explaining just how the disaster unfolded. Detailing the head-on collision between ego, money, and power in smooth, vivid prose, Salamon will keep any reader interested in Hollywood turning pages long into the night.

When Tom Wolfe published The Bonfire of the Vanities, he managed to capture the zeitgeist of the go-go Big Money ‘80s in a way that no one else had. Of course, it didn’t take Hollywoof very long to turn his bestseller into a film…and screw it up royally. Salamon’s tremendous access to Brian De Palma’s big-budget fiasco provides an insane fly-on-the-wall immediacy, showing us how even talented people with good intentions can completely whiff. There’s schadenfreude on every page.