According to the scenario of "Bonfire of the Vanities", at the very beginning of the film, one of the main characters of the picture flies to New York. Usually, if a character in a movie arrives in a city, the filmmakers show it with a frame of a landing plane. Even then, in 1990, such a shot was already quite clichéd in films.
De Palma did not believe his colleague, and the men made a $100 bet whether Schwab could film a landing plane so cool that the shot would be included in the final cut of the film. This argument seems to be unfair. After all, de Palma had the opportunity to decide what was included in the film and what was not! But Schwab decided that de Palma would make a decision that was beneficial to the final quality of the picture. They agreed on one condition: the aircraft that will be shown in the frame must be a supersonic Concorde to match the status of the character.
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It was this plane that was supposed to land in the frame. Schwab set to work. He wanted to shoot a landing liner against the backdrop of the setting sun and the Empire State Building. To do this, he had to move the camera further from the runway and use very powerful telephoto lenses.
Flights from Europe that were served by Concordes did not land at such times. Therefore, filmmakers had to negotiate with AirFrance to take one of their planes into the sky without passengers. And then they planted him at the right time. Schwab's film crew used five cameras to film this landing the first time. And they succeeded.
The film company spent $80 to film 000 seconds of the Concorde landing against the backdrop of sunset. Adjusted for inflation, that's over $30 in today's dollars. As a result, the frame turned out to be so unusual that de Palma could not help but insert it into the final version of the “Bonfire of the Vanities”. From the entire film of the plane landing, he used a 170-second fragment. And Schwab, having spent that kind of money (it's good that it wasn't his own!), won a $000 bet.
