(FORTUNE Magazine) – William Goldman, the very successful screenwriter, first promulgated an ironclad law of Hollywood life in his professional autobiography, Adventures in the Screen Trade. It holds that NOBODY KNOWS ANYTHING. Or, as Goldman also put it, ''Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what's going to work. Every time out it's a guess . . .'' In The Devil's Candy, Julie Salamon's case study of the making and unmaking of the film The Bonfire of the Vanities, there were two very important things all concerned did not know. The first was that they were attempting to adapt to the screen a virtually unadaptable novel. The second was that having decided to pursue their impossible dream, they did not have the wit to see that their only hope lay in faithfulness to their source's blunt, brutally satiric spirit. You couldn't make a movie, as Hollywood generally understands the term, from Tom Wolfe's best-seller. But it might just have been possible to make a good and original, if highly unconventional, film out of his tale about Sherman McCoy, a Wall Street ''master of the universe'' brought low by a hit-and-run accident, which in turn makes him a victim of New York City's vicious class and racial politics (not to mention its tabloid journalism). But to do so you would have to know about something other than conducting business as usual. This would not be so difficult, one would think, since in actuality there is no such thing as business as usual in Hollywood, each of its products being in theory a one-off enterprise, different from all the others. This, however, is precisely what those who think of themselves as masters of this particular universe don't know. Or, more precisely, don't want to know. Some of the fascination the movie game holds for its players surely lies in the way its mysteries glamorize its risks. The endlessly frustrated hope of imposing factory-like rationality and predictability on this totally unreasonable business accounts for the tensions -- not to say hysteria -- that characterize its conduct. All this makes their business more interesting to themselves and to the rest of us than the manufacture of steel beams or computer chips. As Salamon, a Wall Street Journal critic, demonstrates in her well-reported and wickedly readable book, many highly paid and not entirely stupid people thoughtfully and conscientiously took the decisions that assured the film's calamitous fate, spending along the way a very large sum of money -- eventually close to $50 million -- to create the film's negative. Prints, promotion, and advertising certainly more than doubled that figure. (So far Bonfire has returned $26 million at the box office worldwide to Warner Bros.) Wolfe's novel is, in conventional screen terms, a bummer. The script was rewritten time and again in an attempt to achieve yet more ingratiating ( qualities. But that robbed the movie of its moral point and most of its dramatic punch. Deprived of the book's outrage and outrageousness, Bonfire had nothing left to sell but its miscast stars, Tom Hanks and Bruce Willis. There was no reason for director Brian DePalma to have made it, and certainly no compelling reason for anyone to go see it. AND YET, right up until the reviews came out and the first dismal box office returns came in, the executives chiefly responsible for The Bonfire of the Vanities retained their faith in its possibilities. By this point in the book, one recognizes that there is little evil in their unknowingness -- egotism, maybe, but not evil. There is -- to employ a word not often applied to discussions of movie executives -- a kind of perverse innocence about it. All unknowing, they sometimes permit masterpieces to be made. Maybe good-hearted misjudgments like The Bonfire of the Vanities are the price they -- we -- have to pay for the classics. But as the man says, who knows?

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EXCERPT: ''A small man wearing large clothes showed up on the set. ((He)) was Mark Canton, executive vice president of worldwide picture production. DePalma explained the shot. 'Looks good, man, looks good,' said Canton. He stretched out the words, for emphasis. 'Looooks, goooood.' ''