Devil's Candy

"I love it. It’s so much fun. Picture is from the 1950s. Devil’s Candy is from a very different period, the early nineties. It’s from an era of Hollywood where the decision-making process might be a little more recognizable to contemporary readers. I always felt that the story of the making of a disaster can illuminate as least as much about the world of movie making as the story of a success. There are several making-of-a-disaster books; Devil’s Candy is probably the best. It’s incredibly entertaining. It also gets into the complexities of taking a hot literary property of a novel, which Tom Wolfe ‘s book Bonfire of the Vanities certainly was, and adapting it for film. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Bonfire of the Vanites had challenging things about race and urban politics that have not aged well and that were easily mishandled in a movie. Julie Salamon looks at what happens when people are not thoughtful about those issues. Better than any book I’ve ever read, Devil’s Candy conveys that making a movie is a matter of extreme pressure almost every day. At every stage of the making of the movie, there’s always a combination of high spirits, chaos, and impending emergency. These are strange circumstance under which to create art. Since reading Devil’s Candy, I’ve watched movies a little differently, knowing that any 30 seconds of film that I see probably represents the result of a hundred different decisions and accidents and coincidences and compromises and arguments that I’ll never know about. The key word in your question is Hollywood. What do we mean when we say Hollywood? It’s a noun we all use, but what do we mean by it? Do we mean the studios? Do we mean the heads of studios like Disney or do we mean directors like Ava DuVernay or producers like Shonda Rhimes? The answer to your question changes based on how we’re defining Hollywood and how Hollywood defines itself at any given moment in its history. The more the definition of Hollywood changes, the more that sense of responsibility will grow."