Nina Metz: New podcasts take on Siskel and Ebert story and ‘Bonfire of the Vanities’ flop with Tom Hanks

Podcasts about the movies have to somehow translate these inherently visual stories into something compelling in an audio-only format and two new podcasts, “Gene and Roger” and “The Plot Thickens: The Devil’s Candy,” exemplify what works and what doesn’t when it comes to tackling this challenge.

Produced by The Ringer, “Gene and Roger” traces the influence of Chicago film critics Gene Siskel (who wrote for the Tribune and died in 1999) and Roger Ebert (who wrote for the Sun-Times and died in 2013).

“I really miss them, and not because they helped me figure out what movies to see,” host Brian Raftery says in an early episode. “Mostly, I miss listening to them get lost in conversation.”

I know what he means. Siskel and Ebert’s show — which had various titles over the years but always retained the same format — was an handy roundup of what was new in theaters each week. Watching it, you had a decent sense of whether or not you might like any of these titles. The conversations were smart — critical, impassioned, thoughtful, fun — and yes, sometimes the pair would go at it, verbal guns a’blazing.

“They taught an entire generation how to argue,” Raftery says. Maybe? Even if you take this at face value (I don’t) that’s not a neutral statement. Should disagreement be an argument? Raftery doesn’t stop to consider that question or wonder, at least in the early episodes, how that template has been reinterpreted and corroded over time into something far more fraught.

But the podcast has a larger dilemma, as I see it. There’s little here that will be new to anyone with a passing familiarity with Siskel and Ebert, particularly Chicagoans. The primary audience, then, are people who came of age after their show went off the air. But I’m not sure a podcast — at least this podcast — is the best format to make that story come alive. Siskel and Ebert’s joint effort was one that happened in front of the camera. So much of that chemistry, what made them appealing as a team, is absent here.

Something entirely different is happening with the addictive multi-episode “The Devil’s Candy,” which is the title of this season’s “The Plot Thickens,” the TCM-produced documentary podcast about the movies and the people who make them.

“The Devil’s Candy” succeeds in all kinds of fascinating ways, largely because it’s an insider account from journalist Julie Salamon, who was there during the making of the 1990 Tom Hanks flop “The Bonfire of the Vanities.” Salamon was a film critic at The Wall Street Journal in 1990 and she had just had a baby when she was invited by director Brian De Palma to spend a year on the set, observing everything.

Salamon would eventually write about all of it in a book published two years later, but she saved her mini-cassette recordings — of De Palma on the phone with studio executives, of her interviews with stars Bruce Willis and Melanie Griffith — and she uses them here to augment and fill out the storytelling, which pulls back the curtain not only on this project but on Hollywood itself.

“It was just easy to fit in,” Salamon says. “Another person in a hoodie carrying around a notebook; barely anyone noticed me. But I noticed just about everything.” The podcast is a combination of her own research as a reporter, then and now (with new interviews), as well as her firsthand observations, memories and thoughts looking back in hindsight.

Adapted from the Tom Wolfe novel of the same name, “The Bonfire of the Vanities” is the story of a smug Wall Street type who is driving through the Bronx one night with his mistress when they hit a Black teenager with his car before fleeing the scene. He’s eventually caught and the subsequent trial puts issues of classism, racism and New York politics front and center. It’s a cynical endeavor in Wolfe’s telling and nobody is redeemable — not the political figures who try to shape the fallout, not the skeezy journalist covering the story (played by Willis), not the society snobs and for sure not the white man at the story’s center, played by Hanks.

Hanks was among the first to be cast. But there was still some question about who would play the mistress. Six weeks after giving birth, Salamon was in an office with De Palma (known for directing “Scarface,” “Carrie” and “The Untouchables,” among others) and executive producer Peter Guber for a casting session. Melanie Griffith was lined up for the role, but here they were secretly auditioning Uma Thurman.

Why? Because Griffith was a new mother and these men had opinions about her body and her moods; she was deemed an “accident waiting to happen.” Guber in particular comes off as particularly crass and he has strong feelings about what the role should evoke: Someone no man could resist. “This woman’s the devil’s candy,” as he put it. And suddenly Salamon had a title for her book and the podcast.

Salamon listened to the men discuss the merits of Thurman vs. Griffith: “I felt like they were counter guys at a butcher shop comparing chickens. It was so clinical, just sort of looking at them strictly for their body parts.” The role would ultimately go to Griffith. According to Salamon, Tom Hanks told the studio: “I just can’t act with Uma.”

These kinds of details — these conversations that happen all the time in Hollywood — they’re rarely public knowledge. “I was hearing things no outsider could hear,” Salamon says. But sometimes this information — the misogyny — was just openly offered up. Salamon talks about the movie’s cinematographer telling her he would have to use “all kinds of trick lighting to make Melanie look like anything but an old bag.” Griffith was 33 at the time.

My one real critique is that the podcast needs an outside voice who isn’t white to offer some necessary context. Salamon talks about filming the hit-and-run scene in the Bronx. The creative team wanted to show the Bronx the way the Hanks and Griffith characters saw it: “As ominous and threatening — a ‘goddamn war zone’ — and to do that they attempted to push the boundaries of caricature. But those depictions go way beyond caricature. They are offensive. And racist. The street was filled with burning cars and actors in bright clothing. Some played drug addicts stumbling around. And one man playing a pimp was bare-chested, decked out in gold chains.” The script had been widely criticized for straying from the book. But this time, Salamon says, “the moviemakers were very faithful to the book; Tom Wolfe, a white man, had been criticized for stereotyping the people of the Bronx, and those stereotypes were amplified when you could actually see them.”

Bronx residents were there too, watching the cast and crew, and some started throwing eggs. The first assistant director laughs it off but it’s notable that he doesn’t stop to consider why the crew was being egged. Another time, Salamon recalls, a man snuck onto set. He was upset about the fact that “there were no Black crew members on the film and said so to Brian De Palma.” The director’s face went blank and then “this man was taken away.”

Salamon moves on from this too quickly, I think. Earlier in the episode she talks about then-borough president Fernando Ferrer speaking out out against the film’s portrayal of the Bronx. The movie kicked up a lot of dust while it was being shot (and it’s a good reminder that even before social media, people were loudly expressing opinions about works-in-progress and concerns about racist portrayals) and I’m surprised Salamon didn’t do any present-day interviews about this with Ferrer or any Black people who were living in the Bronx at the time.

By the way, to tie all of this together, you can see what Siskel and Ebert had to say about “Bonfire of the Vanities” (two thumbs down) when it came out on Dec. 21, 1990.

Together, they pinpoint why the film would ultimately do so poorly with audiences. With a nearly $47 million budget, it made less than $16 million, not only because it’s a bad movie (it’s nearly unwatchable) but because it doesn’t actually feel connected to the story told in the book.

“The question I have is for Brian De Palma,” Siskel says. “If you want to make this film, why make it this way?”

Ebert zeroes in on the decision to cast Willis as the scummy reporter. In the book, the character is British; Willis plays him as American.

“Why do they get so tied up with the notion that they have to fill up a movie with stars that they don’t look at the book and see who this drunken, British, freeloading little guy was?” Ebert says. “Why not get somebody that can play that fascinating character instead of having a big lump of dead space there taking up so much screen time?”

A lump of dead space. That’s as succinct a review of Willis’ performance as you’re going to get.

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