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hannahstohelit 's review for:
The Devil's Candy: The Anatomy of a Hollywood Fiasco
by Julie Salamon
This was a lot of fun! Read it as it's always recommended as a "behind the scenes" Hollywood book, despite the fact that I've never read or seen The Bonfire of the Vanities (after reading the book I watched the first ten-fifteen minutes and hated it, but then again it never really seemed my kind of thing). It was definitely interesting, but I think it almost would have benefited from a bit more editorializing about what's typical and what isn't. With the understanding that it's only retrospectively that this can be seen as a depiction of an obvious disaster (as the author herself says in an endnote), as a common thing you hear about the industry is that people often don't know they're making a bad movie til it's in the can or even in theaters, it still could be confusing to see the different pieces and not have a super clear idea of what's happening, what's the timeline, what's the usual expectation. There were moments of obvious dysfunction but there were also moments that felt like making any movie and it felt like they were blended together in a way that made discerning what actually happened challenging.
The funny thing is, I'm not even sure I'd be thinking in those terms if not for all the blurbs about how the book is a "postmortem" of how everything went wrong or whatever- maybe that's true of movie people, they can read nuances in that I can't (and if so it might have been nice to have more info)- but it felt like that element didn't track at all. Like, was the problem with the movie its going over budget or its direction or its casting or its script (from watching a bit of it I'd say the latter has things to answer for)? Was it the book being unfilmable? Was it going overbudget PLUS the rest being bad so they had no chance to get close to recouping? Or was it just flukey in some way? I enjoyed the book regardless but it definitely didn't feel like I now understood what went wrong. If anything, the description in the book of how it was made felt significantly more competent than the bits of the movie that I watched afterward.
The funny thing is, I'm not even sure I'd be thinking in those terms if not for all the blurbs about how the book is a "postmortem" of how everything went wrong or whatever- maybe that's true of movie people, they can read nuances in that I can't (and if so it might have been nice to have more info)- but it felt like that element didn't track at all. Like, was the problem with the movie its going over budget or its direction or its casting or its script (from watching a bit of it I'd say the latter has things to answer for)? Was it the book being unfilmable? Was it going overbudget PLUS the rest being bad so they had no chance to get close to recouping? Or was it just flukey in some way? I enjoyed the book regardless but it definitely didn't feel like I now understood what went wrong. If anything, the description in the book of how it was made felt significantly more competent than the bits of the movie that I watched afterward.