The Bonfire of the Vanities
A high‑powered Wall Street lawyer fights to protect his reputation after his lover kills a teenager, while a tenacious reporter races to expose the truth before the city’s power brokers silence him.
“Take one Wall Street tycoon, his Fifth Avenue mistress, a reporter hungry for fame, and make the wrong turn in The Bronx...then sit back and watch the sparks fly.”
Synopsis
A Wall Street executive's life begins to fall apart after his mistress accidentally runs over a Black teenager, drawing intense public scrutiny. Meanwhile, a struggling journalist uncovers the story, and various individuals with their own agendas seek to exploit the situation for personal gain.
Credits
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How many hands made this film
The scale of the collaboration
Principal cast & crew: 21
These are the principals we have on file — the full crew ran to the hundreds. Every film this size was made by far more hands than any credits list ever names.
Why a floor?
This is a minimum, not a total. We only count the credits we’ve captured so far, and coverage is uneven — a blockbuster might show a few hundred names while another of the same size shows a couple dozen. The real crews all ran into the thousands. The number here only grows as full credits are enriched — so we frame it as a floor, never a headcount.
Craft leads on file
Edited by Bill PankowShot by Vilmos ZsigmondScored by Dave GrusinDesigned by Richard Sylbert
Box Office
1990 · Box office
📉 Underperformed — grossed 0.3× its budget
Why 2.5×?
Cinemas keep roughly half of every ticket sold, and a wide release’s marketing often costs about as much again as the film — so a movie needs to gross around 2.5× its production budget just to break even theatrically. It’s a rule of thumb, not the studio’s ledger (home video and streaming come later).
Worldwide gross
$15.7M
Also known as
- Fegefeuer der Eitelkeitende
- La hoguera de las vanidadeses
- Le Bûcher des vanitésfr
- Il falò delle vanitàit
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Cast & Crew
21 unique people credited
Top billed cast
Directors
1Writers
2Producers
1Other crew
8Parents Guide
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