The Devil’s Candy by Julie Salamon

The Devil’s Candy is a brilliant book with a terrible title. I can’t even remember the bizarre reason given for the title, but I bought Salamon’s 1992 book after hearing it recommended on the funny Australian cultural podcast Chat 10: Looks 3 – and posting about it here, I was encouraged to start reading it straightaway by some positive comments. For those I am grateful, as this is an astonishing book.

It doesn’t feel like something that would necessarily be up my street. It’s non-fiction, as Salamon painstakingly follows the creation of the movie adaptation of Tom Wolfe’s famous novel The Bonfire of the Vanities. I haven’t read Wolfe’s novel, and I haven’t seen the film, and I don’t really have any interest in doing either of those things. That doesn’t matter at all. It’s completely fascinating – and a lot of that is to do with the writing and, importantly, the pacing that Salamon brings to the book.

The Devil’s Candy starts at the early stages of casting and trying to establish a final script. Not knowing who’s in the final film was an advantage for me, as it meant I had no idea who’d get the role during the discussions and auditions. I didn’t know what sort of film it would be, either, so conversations between script supervisors and directors and whatnot had genuine tension. From here, we go through 400+ pages in which Salamon observes pre-production, shooting, and post-production. Nothing is raced through; nothing is considered trivial. We spend a lot of time watching the second unit trying to get the perfect shot of a plane landing; we follow in minute detail the attempts to find a courthouse for filming. We are party to the recasting of a role to make the film seem less racist; we see an actress’s insecurities as she has to do part of a scene naked.

To anybody with a passing interest in film, or in the mechanics of an enormous production of any kind comes together, it is completely fascinating. It’s not unduly technical at any point, but you get a sense of the size of people’s roles without needing to know quite how it all works. And the central figure is the director, Brian De Palma. As director, every moment is his vision – and we follow the highs and lows of his feelings about the film (particularly as costs spiral and the studio executives get increasingly involved). It is an absorbing character study of what drives him, and how he takes on such a challenging role, all revealed piece by piece, day by day.

He may be the central figure, but it feels like the whole cast and crew are open to us. Particularly the crew; you can read between the lines that Salamon didn’t get much out of Tom Hanks or Bruce Willis. We see what they do, but we don’t learn how they feel. Not that Salamon ever reveals her methods or, indeed, herself. I loved Janet Malcolm’s very individual and subjective reportage – this is the flip side. Salamon never mentions doing interviews – or, indeed, being on the set at all. She is absent from the page, and this gives the prose a feeling of god-like omniscience. She is not so much in the room as in their minds. It is oddly hypnotising.

De Palma was tense. Broderick was upset with him. She’d been insulted when he complained about the service at the restaurant and didn’t believe him when he insisted that running down Madeo was a standing joke between him and his brother Bart. One of the things they liked about the place was complaining about it.

When she woke up grumbling that she had a hangover, he said, “No wonder, you certainly had enough to drink.” Broderick was furious and hurt. She told him he;d ignored her all evening, that he hadn’t even touched her, and now he was attacking her. De Palma felt bewildered. He distinctly remembered putting his arm around her. As they rehashed the evening, they felt as if they’d been to two different parties.

The great success of this book is how steady and unshowy it is. That steadiness, the pacing I mentioned earlier, means that nothing is rushed or overdramatised; the lack of false tension means that every moment comes together into something special. And because nothing is showy, it feels as though there is no filter or bias at all – it feels as though we are there.

It’s an extraordinary book. Yes, if it were about a film I loved I might have found it still more captivating – but there is something in the fact that The Bonfire of the Vanities was a flop that makes this still more interesting. Particularly as it is not forecast in Salamon’s writing, and even the gradual realisation that the film will get mediocre reviews and make a sizeable loss doesn’t come as a ‘gotcha’ – it is part of the same pacing, as the film’s journey sort of peters out, and the book concludes. Not like anything I’ve read before, but definitely one of my books of the year.