Unless you live under a proverbial rock, you’ll know that journalist/author/dandy Tom Wolfe died on May 14 at the ripe age of 88. I won’t rehash his impact on American arts and letters — there’s been plenty of ink spilled for just that purpose the last week or so, including this obit in the “failing” and now “crooked” The New York Times.

No, this is a movie blog, so I’d like to focus on the film adaptations of Wolfe’s oeuvre, which, despite a bibliography that includes four novels, 13 non-fiction books and dozens of articles, amounts to only two: The Right Stuff and The Bonfire of the Vanities.

Wolfe made no secret that he disliked both movies, The Right Stuff because of the liberties it took with his sprawling source material, The Bonfire of the Vanities because, well, it was one of the biggest streaming turds in the history of cinema.

Let’s take a look at each in some detail to determine whether the late Mr. Wolfe has a point.

The Right Stuff (1983, dir. Philip Kaufman)

Released on October 21, 1983, to critical acclaim and meager box office (don’t blame me; I saw it three times in awe-inspiring 70MM Six-Track Dolby at Edens 2 in Northbrook, IL), The Right Stuff opens on the tight fraternity of test pilots (and the women who loved them!) chasing Mach 1, the speed at which an object breaks through the sound barrier and goes supersonic, about 767 mph as the crow flies at sea level. For purposes of this blogpost, I’ll assume you know the name of the man who finally accomplished the deed over the California desert in the “Glamorous Glennis” on October 14, 1947. If you do not, you are most likely a communist.

Over the next decade or so this pilot, Captain Charles “Chuck” Yeager (Sam Shepard), and his buddies (among them The Band‘s drummer and vocalist Levon Helm) continued to stretch the edge of the envelope in terms of how fast a man could fly, a very dangerous occupation indeed.

But then, in 1957, the Russians launched Sputnik and suddenly flying fast in an aircraft took a backseat to being shot into space strapped to an explosive rocket. Thus Project Mercury was born. And the movie shifts focus accordingly, zeroing in on the recruitment and training, the trials and tribulations, and, thankfully, the eventual triumphs of those who came to be known as the Mercury Seven astronauts: John Glenn (Ed Harris), Deke Slayton (Scott Paulin), Gus Grissom (Fred Ward), Alan Shepard (Scott Glenn), Wally Schirra (Lance Henriksen), Scott Carpenter (Charles Frank) and Gordo Cooper (Dennis Quaid).

Towards the very end of the film, after John Glenn’s historic flight in Friendship 7 in February 1962 (a long sequence that acts as the film’s centerpiece), writer-director Kaufman circles back to Yeager trying to break the altitude record (intercut with a Sally Rand feather dance), providing the audience one last glimpse into the man who truly had “the right stuff.”

Not to disparage Wolfe, but he was wildly off base in his negative opinion of this classic film.

Did The Right Stuff the movie take liberties with The Right Stuff the book? Of course it did. But that’s the tradeoff when adapting 436 dense non-fiction pages into a 192-minute runtime. Key events will be axed, certain characters given short shrift. (Poor Wally Shira barely had a line.) Something’s gotta give, though.

And did the filmmakers add a level of stylization (the man in the black suit and fedora representing death; a giant aboriginal bonfire explaining the bright points of light surrounding Glenn’s capsule) and humor (Harry Shearer and Jeff Goldblum as hapless government officials; the comedy troupe Fratelli Bologna as the overeager press corps) to the proceedings that maybe flew in the face of the book’s tone? Certainly.

But for all of Kaufman’s changes, he still delivered a rousing film, one filled with great performances (Shepard! Hershey! Harris! Quaid! And that guy with the shaggy eyebrows playing LBJ!), edge-of-your-seat flying/rocket set pieces, a memorable Bill Conti score (heavily riffing on Holst’s The Planets and Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto in D Major), a beefy sound design, unique visual effects (fog machines to create clouds, models shot from crossbows to replicate the buffeting intensity of supersonic travel) and, finally, Caleb Deschanel’s elegant “magic hour” cinematography.

Despite the late Mr. Wolfe’s opinion, this one stands the test of time and I’ve little doubt it will continue to do so.

The Bonfire of the Vanities (1990, dir. Brain DePalma)

Back in late 1987, there was no hotter property than Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities, a New York tale of greed, male ego and comeuppance. Which no doubt explains why Wolfe, despite his indifference to the film version of The Right Stuff, agreed to sell the rights to Hollywood. One can only imagine the size of the proffered check. ($750,000 back then, which translates into roughly $1.6M today.)

Unfortunately, Wolfe’s expanding billfold was about the last good thing to come out of the whole debacle that was The Bonfire of the Vanities film adaptation, a debacle that is scrutinized in excruciating detail in Julie Salamon’s entertaining non-fiction book, The Devil’s Candy (1991). A quick overview of some of what went wrong…

• The Director: While there’s no denying Brian DePalma’s directorial chops — there are few more proficient cinematic technicians out there as evidenced by his clever use of the anamorphic wide-screen frame, 360-degree pans, languid tracking shots, the split-focus diopter, etc. — I can say with some confidence that the man behind such shockers as Scarface, Carrie, Blow Out and Dressed to Kill probably wasn’t the best choice for a comedic romp through all levels of Manhattan’s social strata. But he was hot property at the time, his assured direction of 1987’s The Untouchables resulting in the biggest box office of his long career and his follow-up, Casualties of War, providing some of his strongest critical notices. But comedy and its unique pacing just weren’t in his wheelhouse. Add to that some bad casting decisions he OK’d (see below) and a general lack of confidence in what he was doing with the material and, before you know it, the seeds of disaster are sown.
• The Screenplay: According to Wolfe, he’d constructed the book so that “almost every chapter was meant to be a vignette of something else in New York as well as something that might advance the story, and to me one was as important as the other.” In other words, start pruning my prose and the tower will collapse. But pruning was exactly what screenwriter Michael Cristofer did, lots of it. But what else could he do? Where Wolfe had 690 pages to tell the story, Cristofer had two hours of screen time. So he shaped his screenplay in the traditional Hollywood three-act structure, chopping much of what made the book a pleasure to read. Heck, he even added a narrator. In his defense, the whole endeavor was probably a fool’s errand from the beginning — no way this particular book and its unique structure work as a movie unless it’s 10 hours long. Which, ironically, is something that’s quite easy to pull off (and well) on TV nowadays. Actually, you know what? To hell with defense. The script sucked.
• The Cast: When we read prose it’s natural to imagine certain actors embodying the characters in the story. And while we don’t always get our first choice when the movie version hits the big screen, more often than not the actor who lands the role is at least within the ballpark of who we were expecting. Alas, this was not the case with The Bonfire of the Vanities. Tom Hanks as Sherman McCoy, the ultimate entitled blonde-haired WASP? WTF. (Should’ve been William Hurt.) Melanie Griffin as McCoy’s lover? (Ah…maybe, but still not my first choice.) Morgan Freeman as Leonard Kovitsky, the very white, very acerbic Jewish judge? WTF. Saul Rubinek as Kramer, the D.A. with a tic involving flexing his latissimus dorsi and other key muscle groups to impress women. And then this, quite possibly the biggest casting transgression: American Bruce Willis as British tabloid writer Peter Fallow. I mean, W…T…F!

I could go on, but what’s the point? I’ll only make myself more angry. No, Wolfe was definitely right to distance himself from this one. Despite the talent involved, The Bonfire of the Vanities is, without a doubt, one of the most disappointing adaptations ever and, as referenced earlier, a steaming pile of dung.

RIP Tom Wolfe!