AND OTHER STORIES CULLED FROM JULIE SALAMON'S 'THE DEVIL'S CANDY' OVER AT YAHOO
Yesterday, Ethan Alter at Yahoo Entertainment posted an article with the headline, "The Bonfire of the Vanities at 30: Melanie Griffith's secret plastic surgery and other wild stories from the box office bomb." Those wild stories are culled from Julie Salamon's book The Devil's Candy, about the making of the film. Along with anecdotes about the aforementioned Melanie Griffith, Uma Thurman's screen test, and "an out-of-his-depth" Bruce Willis "throwing his proverbial weight around on set," among others, Alter includes the story about Eric Schwab's painstakingly-achieved Concorde shot:
If nothing else, The Bonfire of the Vanities does contain one of the most impressive — and most expensive — single shots in cinema history: a plane touching down at New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport with the setting sun behind it. [Michael] Cristofer wrote a simple version of the scene into the screenplay, but it was second unit director Eric Schwab who brought it to glorious life on the big screen. Schwab himself volunteered for the seemingly thankless assignment, and made a $100 bet with De Palma that he’d come up with a shot so great, it would have to end up in the movie.Schwab’s first directorial decision was that the famed Concorde turbojet — which flew between Europe and America from 1969 until 2003 — was the only aircraft impressive enough to execute the shot he had in mind: an image of a plane touching down at the exact moment that the setting sun and the Empire State Building lined up in the same frame. After an enormous amount of preparation that included coordinating with the Concorde’s pilots and studying almanacs to determine the most favorable weather conditions, he eventually decided on June 12 as the date for his grand experiment.
That afternoon, he and his crew set up five cameras on the JFK tarmac preparing to film the arrival of the inbound Concorde flight. Each camera had only one role of film, and there wouldn’t be any second chances to get the shot. The plane took off 20 minutes prior to sunset, and for several frightening moments, Schwab was convinced they wouldn’t hit the runway at the designated time. At one point, his nerves got the better of him and he started filming a different plane as it came in for a landing.
But then, precisely on schedule, the Concorde descended, the sun and the Empire State Building were in perfect alignment and it was all captured on film. The final price tag? $80,000. But the feeling of having pulled off an impossible shot, and winning the $100 off of De Palma? Priceless.
Updated: Wednesday, December 23, 2020 12:16 AM CST
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