‘The Bonfire Of The Vanities’ In Apple TV Series Deal; David E. Kelley & ‘Batman’s Matt Reeves Spark Adaptation Of Tom Wolfe’s Searing Satire 

Tom Wolfe’s incendiary ‘80s NYC satire The Bonfire of the Vanities is being turned into an Apple TV series. David E. Kelley (Presumed Innocent) is writing the episodes, with The Batman helmer Matt Reeves aboard to direct and be executive producer.

The series hails from Warner Bros Television and it marks the continuation of a burgeoning relationship between Apple TV and Kelley, the Emmy-winning showrunner behind the acclaimed adaptation of Scott Turow’s Presumed Innocent. Kelley’s the writer and executive producer of Margo’s Got Money Troubles, which stars Elle Fanning and Nicole Kidman and which Apple TV premieres April 15.  It’s Kelley’s second turn adapting a sprawling Wolfe tale: he was creator/showrunner of A Man In Full, which starred Jeff Daniels and Diane Lane for Netflix.  

The Bonfire of the Vanities has a colorful cinematic history. Wolfe lacerated ‘80s NYC high society, from the rise of Wall Street “masters of the universe” traders and raiders to their stick-thin “social x-ray” wives and mistresses, to the simmering racial tensions between moneyed Manhattan and the have nots in the outlying boroughs, down to lightning rod activist leaders who rode racial volatility to national stardom.

The tale unfolds as a Wall Street bond trader named Sherman McCoy, the quintessential master of the universe, lives a charmed life until he takes a wrong turn, ends up in the Bronx, and his frightened mistress takes the wheel and runs over a Black man who approached the couple. Cue the mayhem.

Published in 1987, Wolfe’s novel captured a moment New York, at a time when Wall Street titans like Michael Milken became stars, and activists like Al Sharpton made names for themselves seizing on powder keg situations. Like the case of Tawana Brawley, a young Black woman who claimed to have been assaulted and smeared with feces by a group of white men, and the tragedy of Michael Griffith, a young man hit and killed by a car, fleeing a gang of white teens who had beaten the 23-year old and his friends outside a pizza parlor in the white neighborhood. The novel used all these tensions to propel a study of greed, avarice, and racial divisions between the haves and have nots, leading to McCoy getting his comeuppance.

The book was quickly acquired by Warner Bros, which set Brian DePalma to direct a film which seemed to have blockbuster written all over it. Tom Hanks played McCoy, Melanie Griffith played his mistress, and Bruce Willis played a scurrilous journalist in the center of it all. Confident the film would be a hit, DePalma allowed Wall Street Journal critic Julie Salamon full access on the set to chronicle the making of the film.

Bonfire became one of the big flops of its era, and Salamon was the only winner. Her expose, The Devil’s Candy,’ becoming a bestseller and seminal study of what can go wrong in moviemaking, despite the best efforts of top filmmaking and actor talent.

Wolfe’s books have always been challenging adaptations, though his space saga The Right Stuff became a terrific film under the direction of Phil Kaufman. A Man in Full went through several iterations before Kelley nailed it as a series; others like the LSD-fueled The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, is in the midst of numerous attempts to squeeze a movie out of it about LSD-proponent One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest author Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters, with Oscar winning Oppenheimer producer Charles Roven the most recent to take on the material.

Two and a Half Men’s Chuck Lorre took a previous crack at turning The Bonfire of the Vanities into a limited series at Amazon, back in 2016. It stalled.

The series exec producers will be Reeves and Sarah Geismer through his 6^th and Idaho Productions banner, and Matthew Tinker through David E. Kelley Productions.

Kelley is repped by CAA and Gendler Kelly & Cunningham, Reeves by CAA and Jackoway Austen.