Years ago, I read a library copy of The Devil's Candy, the 1991 book by Julie Salamon about the making of the movie version of Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire Of The Vanities, in which Murphy's Law ran roughshod, beginning with the two most important elements of the movie: casting and writing. Of the former, John Frankenheimer once said, “If you cast the picture correctly, you have a whole lot of leeway. You can make mistakes in other aspects but pull it off with the right actors.” Regarding the script, legendary screenwriter Ernest Lehman has said, “bear in mind that a film production begins and ends with a screenplay”.

So let's cast Tom Hanks (in his first dramatic role) as a WASPy old money bond trader, Bruce Willis as a boozy English journalist, and Morgan Freeman as a character originally named Judge Myron Kovitsky, and originally intended for Walter Matthau or Alan Arkin.

And then let's have the screenwriters edit out all of class and racial conflict that made Tom Wolfe's book so deliciously attractive to millions of readers, and make the movie as politically correct and vapid as possible.

The Devil's Candy, which explores all of those Hollywood train wrecks as they happen, is a terrific read, and infinitely more interesting than Warner Brother's 1990 movie. But as Austin Bay's corollary to Murphy's Law goes, If it can go wrong, it already has and we just don’t know about it.” I finally bought a copy from Amazon this week, and just noticed something on the back cover of the softcover edition. It's the blurb from Kirkus Reviews:

Like watching a World Trade Center tower topple onto Wall Street.

This was written two years before the 1993 WTC bombing (in which the terrorists attempted unsuccessfully to collapse one tower into the other) and of course ten years prior to 9/11. DAMN.