Maybe the third time is the charm. Writer/producer David E. Kelley is adapting Tom Wolfe's "The Bonfire of the Vanities" novel into a series for Apple TV, with "The Batman" director Matt Reeves.
David E. Kelley is still best known for "The Practice" and "Ally McBeal" shows, but he's also the writer of Apple TV's "Presumed Innocent" and "Margo's Got Money Troubles." Now according to Deadline, he's dramatizing Tom Wolfe's famous 1987 novel of greed and Wall Street money.
Not to spoil the story, but as excellent as it is, Wolfe's novel feels as if it fades out rather than have a big finish, which has made it difficult to successfully adapt. It was filmed in 1990, with Tom Hanks starring and Brian DePalma directing from a screenplay by Michael Cristofer, but that was a flop.
Amazon attempted to create a series from the novel in 2016, written by Chuck Lorre, but it never entered production.
The story centers on Sherman McCoy, a bond trader for whom nothing ever goes wrong — until he takes a wrong turn and drives into the Bronx. The fact that one wrong turn unravels his life was later used in the AppleInsider forums as an example of how bad Apple Maps was at launch.
It's not been revealed how many episodes Apple's "The Bonfire of the Vanities" will run for, but reportedly Kelley is writing them all. They are also all to be directed by Matt Reeves, best known for "The Batman."
Apple has not commented on the news and there is no indication yet of when the series may start streaming.
Coincidentally, though, David E. Kelley's first series for Apple was a dramatization of another 1987 novel, "Presumed Innocent" by Scott Turow. Despite that originally being a single-season retelling of the book, Apple subsequently commissioned a second run, based on an entirely unrelated novel by Jo Murray.
