No writer of fiction was meaner to his characters than Evelyn Waugh. In Vile Bodies, Waugh's second novel, written in 1930, Adam Fenwick-Symes aims to make his fortune with his memoirs, written in Paris. But they are confiscated and burned by English customs at the very opening of the book. That's the start of Adam's many hapless attempts to get enough money to marry the socialite Nina Blount, who is the belle idéale of her set. "For physical pleasure I'd sooner go to my dentist any day," she says.

Her sensibility may have something in common with that of Stephen Fry, the actor and novelist. "My first words, as I was being born," he reportedly said, "[were when] I looked up at my mother and said, 'That's the last time I'm going up one of those.'" At any rate, Fry saw other similarities between the milieu of his own youth as "a party animal in the 80s" and the cynical and debauched glamour of the bright, young people in London at the twilight of the Jazz Age, featured in Vile Bodies. He wrote a screenplay based on the novel and is making his directorial debut with it, under the title Bright Young Things. Two relative unknowns, Emily Mortimer and Stephen Campbell Moore, play Nina and Adam, but one can anticipate a spate of deliciously wicked cameos from Peter O'Toole, Margaret Tyzack, Simon Callow, Sir John Mills, Stockard Channing, and Dan Aykroyd.