http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/jonas/072
Dr. J.'s Commentary
Hairspray: We've Come so Far; We Have So Far to Go
Submitted by BuzzFlash on Wed, 08/08/2007
Steven Jonas
Hairspray is a movie that can be taken on a number of levels, your choice. It's a funny, sassy, heartwarming old-style Hollywood movie musical about teenage life in Baltimore, circa 1962. It's about actors like Christopher Walken, John Travolta, Queen Latifah, and Michelle Pfeiffer playing against type (and doing it marvelously well). It's about a classic Hollywood "discovery," the previously unknown high school senior, an aspiring actress from Great Neck, NY, Nikki Blonsky, delivering a drop-dead performance as the lead, Tracy Turnblad. It's about terrific singing and dancing all designed to make you feel oh-so-good while you're watching it.
At the next level, the social issue of obesity is prevalent, how it affects the lives of so many Americans in so many different ways. John Travolta in a fat suit playing Tracy's mom shows how socially crippling it can be. Tracy, also obese, shows how one can overcome the prejudice our society has against overweight people, even as it encourages overweight (much more now through the role of the food industry than back then, but back then too). Tracy says "I'm happy with myself. I can do tons of stuff, and if you don't like me because I'm fat, that's your issue, not mine."
The next level is classically political. The movie shows very starkly just how the nation was beginning for the first time to deal with race-relations and the coming desegregation, in a former Border State city, Baltimore. A highly popular afternoon teenage TV show that features high-powered singing and dancing by and for teens is totally and consciously segregated. It's an all-white show, with one "Negro Day" a month. In Tracy's high school, when she is sent to detention for some minor infraction in the classroom, virtually everyone else there is African-American. It is in that setting that Tracy, who can already dance, is introduced to the coming wave of African-American popular dancing that is about to burst into the mainstream for the first time.
Tracy, who looks entirely different from all the other white kids on the show, somehow manages to win a dance contest and get a slot on it for herself. But by then, she has already been taken by the black dancing and is beginning to spend time with and work her way into the culture. She eventually proclaims that the show should be integrated and, with Queen Latifah who plays the entertainer-leader of the black kids, she is in the leadership of a street march and demonstration that eventually leads to just that eventuality. For a Hollywood movie, this one has an unusual amount of bare-bones, yes, that-is-what-it-was-like, politics in it. The progressive forces are the good guys. The police and the station management are the bad guys (and boy does Michelle Pfeiffer do a marvelous job of playing a bad guy). And the movie ends with the triumph of integration over prejudice, at least circa 1962.
The next level on which one can view the movie and its lessons is not nearly so happy. This is one that is encapsulated in a line from the movie's climactic musical number: "We've come so far; we have so far to go." Indeed we do, in terms of race relations in our country. The issue is not on the movie's agenda in any way. But the line does make the politically conscious person think, right to the present. Are things better than in 1962? Of course they are, in many areas of discrimination. Are things worse? Oh yes they are, in the political arena. During the 1960s, it seemed that political racism was on the way out, that George Wallace would be its last howl of un-reason. And then came Nixon and the Southern Strategy that has defined the modern Republican Party.
Race prejudice and its political usage is what defines the Southern Strategy, and defined the Nixonian Republicans into the Reagan Era. Starting with Reagan's capitulation to the Christian Right, the modern Bush-Cheney-Rove Republican has taken prejudice to a much broader level and made it into their party's political foundation. Race is there, of course, in the judicial nominations that led to the recent Roberts Court decision that said racism is for communities to decide, through their democratically elected representatives. And racism is there in the conscious campaign started by Ashcroft to use the "Justice" Department to suppress black voting, under the cover of "dealing with election fraud as mandated by the Civil Rights Act (sic, and sick)." But these folks have taken the political use of prejudice to a whole new level.
Just consider: the political exploitation of prejudice against homosexuals simply because of who they are, not anything they have done; the political exploitation of prejudice against those of us (in this case, the majority of the population) who believe life begins at the time of viability, and the drive to criminalize our belief; the political exploitation of prejudice against Hispanics through the whole so-called "illegal immigration crisis"; the political exploitation of a prejudice these people are building from the ground up: Islamophobia; the political exploitation of prejudice against anyone who is labeled a "liberal," because as Ann Coulter/Sean Hannity/Rush Limbaugh/Bill O'Reilly say out in the open and the party's leadership says in code words, "liberals" are traitors, and, it so happens, the penalty in this country for treason is death.
Yes, the modern Republican Party has reached new depths. If the Democrats don't begin to take it on directly on this issue of the political use of prejudice, and soon, it will very likely, very quickly get to be too late. Yes indeed, "We've come so far; we have so far to go."
Steven Jonas, MD, MPH is a Professor of Preventive Medicine at Stony Brook University (NY), a weekly contributing author for The Political Junkies, and contributing editor for The Moving Planet Blog.
Technorati Tags: Steven Jonas Hairspray GOP racism Southern strategy
Showing posts with label Hairspray. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Hairspray. Show all posts
Tuesday, August 14, 2007
Saturday, July 21, 2007
Hairspray’s Revolting History
http://www.mediachannel.org/wordpress/2007/07/17/hairsprays-revolting-history/
Hairspray’s Revolting History
By Polar Levine.
The Hollywood version of Hairspray opens this week as a big screen and big star version of John Waters original film celebrating 1960’s youth culture. Yet there is a “back story” that Hollywood ignores and News Dissector Danny Schechter remembers as recounted by Polar Levine.
The Invisible Star of the Show Behind The New Movie
August 1, 2003
Buddy Dean died last month on July 16. Probably not too many people besides Baltimore-bred baby boomers noticed. John Waters and Danny Schechter did.
Before The 60’s there was a sliver of time that never got a zingy name. America in The 50’s was marked by a mania for order and predictability following the prolonged chaos of WWII and the Depression. Post-war America had a psychic need to lacquer in place every hair on Uncle Sam’s beard. That era lived its final days as the aerodynamic JFK jettisoned America into a dayglow future. But the future crash-landed onto the streets of Dallas late in 1963.
The Kennedy assassination left in vertigo an American society absolutely sure of God’s favor, yet deeply paranoid of possible agents of destruction within and without. Within a year of the assassination, the British had invaded the airwaves, further polluting our children’s rock & roll-infested DNA. These mutant offspring grew up to channel the dormant remains of the commie virus that spawned the dreaded New Deal. They would soon turn the known world upside down with the arrival of the Beatles/Dylan/hippie cultural trinity that certified the 1960’s as “THE 60’s.”
That short period has been a historical orphan child in America’s cultural imagination until the recent phenomenon of HAIRSPRAY — both John Waters’ cult film and the Broadway musical adaptation. HAIRSPRAY has fabricated the definitive image of the early 60’s with a vaudeville take on that transitional era. When the curtain falls, what sticks in our memory is the explosion of pastel colors, period hair sculptures and cross-gendered burlesque of suburban motherhood.
While white America was distracted by yellow waxy buildup, the grandchildren of slaves were setting off a storm that would forever end the official narcolepsy of The 50’s. The part of the HAIRSPRAY craze that has received less attention is the actual canvas for this ugly-duckling love story and period caricature: the segregated TV dance show actually existed, and its host city, Baltimore, was on the frontier of the segregated South as it was undergoing explosive change. And that’s where the recently deceased Buddy Dean becomes a nplayer in this story. It was the Buddy Dean Show that John Waters used as a model for The Corny Collins Show.
Dean’s show was a six-day-per-week magnet for Baltimore’s teen set. Dean was very conscious of his role in the community and apparently was not opposed to integrating the show. “It was just the times. The kids said they didn’t care if we let black youngsters on the show. Hell, they were going to school together. But they said their parents didn’t want it.” One day a month, and later, one day a week were set aside for an all-black show, including a black co-MC. The blurb on the Broadway show’s website illustrates the weight it intended to give to the civil rights aspect of the story: “… can a trendsetter in dance and fashion… win the heart of heartthrob Link Larkin, and integrate a television show without denting her ‘do?”
The racial drama that was beginning to rattle the silverware in Camelot reached most Americans on black and white tv where the teen set watched a sea of spit-shined white kids twisting to black beats.
But their parents and grandparents watched a more troubling picture unfold: Rosa Parks rearranges the seating of buses, fire hoses and attack dogs are aimed at unarmed people, black churches are bombed and both blacks and whites are murdered for trying to register black voters.
On the lighter side of the drama a white boy from the Bronx, NY decides to ram de facto integration into a segregated teen dance show through a brazen political prank.
In 1963, 21-year old Danny Schechter moved to East Baltimore to join the civil rights movement. The Buddy Dean Show was Baltimore’s answer to Philadelphia’s nationally broadcast American Bandstand. Schechter, working with the black youth he was organizing, dreamed up what might have been the first act of political theater in the 60’s. The event was chronicled in the climax of HAIRSPRAY — when a bi-racial crowd of clean-cut teens scammed its way into the Buddy Dean Show: Teen America was integrated for all to see while the sponsors and their lawyers were overheating the phone wires. It was the movement;’s first “Dance-in.”
In his book THE MORE YOU WATCH, THE LESS YOU KNOW, Schechter describes the coup: “Dancers on the shows were all white except for one day every other week when they were all black. To add insult to injury, the show packed in twice as many dancers on the black kids’ day, so that no one could really show off their best moves.
“We came up with a plan to desegregate the show through what no doubt was the first and probably last civil rights ‘dance-in.’ Using our BAYOU (Baltimore Area Youth Opportunities Unlimited) group as a cover, the kids secured tickets to one of the black-only sessions presided over by Fat Daddy, a black radio DJ who co-hosted these ‘Negro shows.’ With my encouragement, they invited a group of white college tutors from our Northern Student Movement (NSM) ‘each one teach one’ tutorial project to come along. The black students went into the studio first while the whites waited in the parking lot until the last minute. With two minutes to air time, we rushed into the studio for the live show. The ticket taker was confused but let us in. The TV crew was equally perplexed. TV then was still black and white but those two colors weren’t meant to be mixing in Bal’more, not then, not ever.
“It was probably the first interracial dance party on TV. On Buddy’s shows, the guest organization was invited to say a few words about who its members were and what they did. One of the black teenagers and I were pushed forward. We made political speeches, speaking out against segregation on the show, looking right into the stupid grin plastered on Buddy Dean’s face. He was beside himself. Seething. Fat Daddy chuckled.”
Later, at the Sundance Film Festival in 002, Schechter met John Waters. He told him about that day in the summer of l963 and asked if he had seen it, and if it influenced him. He smiled and said that he had and that it absolutely had influenced Hair Spray. And yet you will find no references to this event in any of the publicity hoopla surrounding the release of the new star studded Hairspray Movie.
The Buddy Dean Show was cancelled on January 1964 — the same month that The Jack Paar Show ran a clip of a ridiculous looking British band howling Yeah Yeah Yeah at Royal Albert Hall. It was screened for comic effect. Everybody laughed. Six months later Yeah Yeah Yeah sent The 50’s packing.
Danny Schechter went on in 1970 to become the controversial News Dissector for Boston’s pioneering FM rock radio station WBCN. He continued his civil rights work in South Africa, bringing weekly reportage of apartheid onto American TV and spearheaded, with rocker Little Steven, the WE AIN’T GONNA PLAY SUN CITY protest involving the major pop musicians of 1984. Sun City was the South African resort that contracted many famous Americans to entertain whites-only audiences. He was among the first producers for CNN and 20/20.
Today Schechter produces documentaries on subjects as diverse as China’s persecution of the Falun Gong, the disputed presidential election of 2000 and the re-recording of Nile Rodgers’ WE ARE FAMILY after 9/11. In the past three years he’s authored THE MORE YOU WATCH, THE LESS YOU KNOW about his career in broadcasting and the dumbing down of news reporting on tv; DISSECTOR, an anthology of Schechter’s essays over the course of thirty years; MEDIA WARS, about news coverage of 9/11 and its aftermath; and, most recently, EMBEDDED about the effect “embedded” journalists had on coverage of the Iraq War. He serves as global media watchdog on his MediaChannel.org supersite and continues to force fresh air into our new era of hairsprayed certainty.
– Polar Levine
Yankin’ The Food Chain
polarity1.com
Hairspray’s Revolting History
By Polar Levine.
The Hollywood version of Hairspray opens this week as a big screen and big star version of John Waters original film celebrating 1960’s youth culture. Yet there is a “back story” that Hollywood ignores and News Dissector Danny Schechter remembers as recounted by Polar Levine.
The Invisible Star of the Show Behind The New Movie
August 1, 2003
Buddy Dean died last month on July 16. Probably not too many people besides Baltimore-bred baby boomers noticed. John Waters and Danny Schechter did.
Before The 60’s there was a sliver of time that never got a zingy name. America in The 50’s was marked by a mania for order and predictability following the prolonged chaos of WWII and the Depression. Post-war America had a psychic need to lacquer in place every hair on Uncle Sam’s beard. That era lived its final days as the aerodynamic JFK jettisoned America into a dayglow future. But the future crash-landed onto the streets of Dallas late in 1963.
The Kennedy assassination left in vertigo an American society absolutely sure of God’s favor, yet deeply paranoid of possible agents of destruction within and without. Within a year of the assassination, the British had invaded the airwaves, further polluting our children’s rock & roll-infested DNA. These mutant offspring grew up to channel the dormant remains of the commie virus that spawned the dreaded New Deal. They would soon turn the known world upside down with the arrival of the Beatles/Dylan/hippie cultural trinity that certified the 1960’s as “THE 60’s.”
That short period has been a historical orphan child in America’s cultural imagination until the recent phenomenon of HAIRSPRAY — both John Waters’ cult film and the Broadway musical adaptation. HAIRSPRAY has fabricated the definitive image of the early 60’s with a vaudeville take on that transitional era. When the curtain falls, what sticks in our memory is the explosion of pastel colors, period hair sculptures and cross-gendered burlesque of suburban motherhood.
While white America was distracted by yellow waxy buildup, the grandchildren of slaves were setting off a storm that would forever end the official narcolepsy of The 50’s. The part of the HAIRSPRAY craze that has received less attention is the actual canvas for this ugly-duckling love story and period caricature: the segregated TV dance show actually existed, and its host city, Baltimore, was on the frontier of the segregated South as it was undergoing explosive change. And that’s where the recently deceased Buddy Dean becomes a nplayer in this story. It was the Buddy Dean Show that John Waters used as a model for The Corny Collins Show.
Dean’s show was a six-day-per-week magnet for Baltimore’s teen set. Dean was very conscious of his role in the community and apparently was not opposed to integrating the show. “It was just the times. The kids said they didn’t care if we let black youngsters on the show. Hell, they were going to school together. But they said their parents didn’t want it.” One day a month, and later, one day a week were set aside for an all-black show, including a black co-MC. The blurb on the Broadway show’s website illustrates the weight it intended to give to the civil rights aspect of the story: “… can a trendsetter in dance and fashion… win the heart of heartthrob Link Larkin, and integrate a television show without denting her ‘do?”
The racial drama that was beginning to rattle the silverware in Camelot reached most Americans on black and white tv where the teen set watched a sea of spit-shined white kids twisting to black beats.
But their parents and grandparents watched a more troubling picture unfold: Rosa Parks rearranges the seating of buses, fire hoses and attack dogs are aimed at unarmed people, black churches are bombed and both blacks and whites are murdered for trying to register black voters.
On the lighter side of the drama a white boy from the Bronx, NY decides to ram de facto integration into a segregated teen dance show through a brazen political prank.
In 1963, 21-year old Danny Schechter moved to East Baltimore to join the civil rights movement. The Buddy Dean Show was Baltimore’s answer to Philadelphia’s nationally broadcast American Bandstand. Schechter, working with the black youth he was organizing, dreamed up what might have been the first act of political theater in the 60’s. The event was chronicled in the climax of HAIRSPRAY — when a bi-racial crowd of clean-cut teens scammed its way into the Buddy Dean Show: Teen America was integrated for all to see while the sponsors and their lawyers were overheating the phone wires. It was the movement;’s first “Dance-in.”
In his book THE MORE YOU WATCH, THE LESS YOU KNOW, Schechter describes the coup: “Dancers on the shows were all white except for one day every other week when they were all black. To add insult to injury, the show packed in twice as many dancers on the black kids’ day, so that no one could really show off their best moves.
“We came up with a plan to desegregate the show through what no doubt was the first and probably last civil rights ‘dance-in.’ Using our BAYOU (Baltimore Area Youth Opportunities Unlimited) group as a cover, the kids secured tickets to one of the black-only sessions presided over by Fat Daddy, a black radio DJ who co-hosted these ‘Negro shows.’ With my encouragement, they invited a group of white college tutors from our Northern Student Movement (NSM) ‘each one teach one’ tutorial project to come along. The black students went into the studio first while the whites waited in the parking lot until the last minute. With two minutes to air time, we rushed into the studio for the live show. The ticket taker was confused but let us in. The TV crew was equally perplexed. TV then was still black and white but those two colors weren’t meant to be mixing in Bal’more, not then, not ever.
“It was probably the first interracial dance party on TV. On Buddy’s shows, the guest organization was invited to say a few words about who its members were and what they did. One of the black teenagers and I were pushed forward. We made political speeches, speaking out against segregation on the show, looking right into the stupid grin plastered on Buddy Dean’s face. He was beside himself. Seething. Fat Daddy chuckled.”
Later, at the Sundance Film Festival in 002, Schechter met John Waters. He told him about that day in the summer of l963 and asked if he had seen it, and if it influenced him. He smiled and said that he had and that it absolutely had influenced Hair Spray. And yet you will find no references to this event in any of the publicity hoopla surrounding the release of the new star studded Hairspray Movie.
The Buddy Dean Show was cancelled on January 1964 — the same month that The Jack Paar Show ran a clip of a ridiculous looking British band howling Yeah Yeah Yeah at Royal Albert Hall. It was screened for comic effect. Everybody laughed. Six months later Yeah Yeah Yeah sent The 50’s packing.
Danny Schechter went on in 1970 to become the controversial News Dissector for Boston’s pioneering FM rock radio station WBCN. He continued his civil rights work in South Africa, bringing weekly reportage of apartheid onto American TV and spearheaded, with rocker Little Steven, the WE AIN’T GONNA PLAY SUN CITY protest involving the major pop musicians of 1984. Sun City was the South African resort that contracted many famous Americans to entertain whites-only audiences. He was among the first producers for CNN and 20/20.
Today Schechter produces documentaries on subjects as diverse as China’s persecution of the Falun Gong, the disputed presidential election of 2000 and the re-recording of Nile Rodgers’ WE ARE FAMILY after 9/11. In the past three years he’s authored THE MORE YOU WATCH, THE LESS YOU KNOW about his career in broadcasting and the dumbing down of news reporting on tv; DISSECTOR, an anthology of Schechter’s essays over the course of thirty years; MEDIA WARS, about news coverage of 9/11 and its aftermath; and, most recently, EMBEDDED about the effect “embedded” journalists had on coverage of the Iraq War. He serves as global media watchdog on his MediaChannel.org supersite and continues to force fresh air into our new era of hairsprayed certainty.
– Polar Levine
Yankin’ The Food Chain
polarity1.com
Monday, July 16, 2007
John Travolta becomes the perfect woman
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml;jsessionid=XTZTTLZ5YYNP5QFIQMFSFFOAVCBQ0IV0?xml=/arts/2007/07/13/nosplit/bftravolta11.xml
John Travolta becomes the perfect woman
13/07/2007
When John Travolta finally agreed to star in his first musical since 'Grease', he had some very firm ideas about just how voluptuous his character should be, he tells John Hiscock
When you've been a sexy teen idol, a tough action star, danced with Diana, Princess of Wales and been nominated for two Oscars, you think long and hard when someone asks you to put on a dress and portray an outsized, overly protective mother.
John Travolta thought for 14 months before saying "Yes."
The decision was a good one, because he makes a sweet, lovable Edna Turnblad, who sings, dances and is madly in love with her husband, played by Travolta's old pal and fellow former Broadway hoofer Christopher Walken, in the third incarnation of John Waters's musical, Hairspray.
The story, as most people know by now, is set in Baltimore during the 1960s TV dance craze and centres on Edna and Wilbur Turnblad and their daughter Tracy (played by screen newcomer Nikki Blonsky), who graduates from outsider to celebrity trendsetter while kicking down racial barriers on local television.
Edna was portrayed in the original 1988 movie by the transvestite Divine and in the subsequent Broadway show by Harvey Feirstein.
But in this version, which the film's producers Craig Zadan and Neil Meron describe as a "re-invention" based on the stage musical, the first choice for the role was always Travolta. They had originally chosen him for the Billy Flynn role in Chicago, but it went to Richard Gere after Travolta turned it down.
"When they asked me to be Edna Turnblad I said, 'Gee, 32 years as a leading man… why me? What makes you think I'd be the perfect woman?'
"It took me a year and two months to decide to do it. It was a long and arduous decision."
He was finally convinced by director-choreographer Adam Shankman's vision and passion.
"He basically said to me, 'I take this movie personally and if it doesn't come out right, I'm going to die.' And I said, 'Whoa, I've got to go with that guy,' because musicals don't work unless every throttle's on full, so when I got the sense everybody cared, then I said, OK.
"I had the biggest musical in history, Grease, and I wanted to leave it like that, so excuse the pun but it took a lot of grease to get me back in the frying pan."
He was so determined to create the Edna he wanted that he rejected several versions of the fat suit designed for him until he was given one he considered made her suitably curvaceous and voluptuous.
"It wasn't real to me to make her like a refrigerator," he says. "I said, 'Make her as big as you want as long as you give her a waist and make her pretty because it will be more interesting, more appealing and more entertaining.' I wanted people to enjoy looking at her, because if she's grotesque, it's not fun.
"My challenge was making sure I was convincing as a woman, so I drew on a library of memories of watching great female performances in the theatre and on film and in my family, and I used role models like Sophia Loren, Anita Ekberg, Elizabeth Taylor… these women with voluptuous shapes."
He had to spend up to five hours a day encased in a full body suit weighing more than 30lb with five separate gel-filled silicone prosthetic appliances for parts of Edna's face. But it had its compensations.
"I'm happy to be a man, but I miss being groped," he says, laughing. "Everybody tried to grope me all day. Suddenly having breasts and a big bottom gained me so much attention. Men and women wanted to feel my breasts and feel my bum. I must be a slut because I didn't care. Men were flirting with me and I was being given power I never had before. I found it fascinating. Women have power I didn't know they had."
Hairspray is a testament not only to 53-year-old John Travolta's versatility, but to his ability to defy the rules of Hollywood and continue to thrive.
In a business where the adage "they never come back" is especially true, he returned to Hollywood's A-list after languishing in semi-obscurity for a decade and is now as much in demand as he was when his portrayal of the posturing Italian-American Tony Manero in Saturday Night Fever, one of the signature films of the 1970s, earned him an Oscar nomination and international stardom.
Maybe it is due to his well-reported affiliation to the Church of Scientology, but he gives off the aura of almost unnatural calmness. He is remarkably easy to talk to and has an unexpected quality of being able to laugh at himself.
He and his actress wife Kelly Preston avoid the Hollywood social scene, preferring to remain at home some 100 miles up the coast, with their two children, Jett, 15, and seven-year-old Ella Bleu, who is already a budding actress.
An avid flier since he was 16 years old, Travolta also owns a fly-in/fly-out house in Florida, where he lands his Gulfstream 11 and customised 707 jets on a private runway, taxiing right up to the house.
Although he is all movie star nowadays, Travolta is a man who has paid his showbusiness dues. When he was six years old, he took dancing lessons from Gene Kelly's brother; he made his stage debut when he was 12 in Who Will Save the Plowboy?, dropped out of high school when he was 16 to begin work in summer stock and made his Broadway debut in 1974 in Over Here! with the Andrews Sisters.
But after achieving worldwide fame with Saturday Night Fever (1977) and Grease (1978), he became trapped for nearly 10 years in a series of forgettable flops. He was in danger of becoming one of Hollywood's forgotten men until, in 1985, at a party at the White House, Diana, Princess of Wales asked him to dance and he was once more making headlines around the world.
"That was an amazing moment for her and for me because at that time I was having a dip in my career and no one was very interested in me," he says. "But with Princess Diana I was suddenly the only thing that mattered in America to her and I was reborn. I was like, 'Wow! I matter to someone again.' "
Then Quentin Tarantino and Pulp Fiction (1994) restored his acting credibility and won him his second Oscar nomination. Since then, he has thrived in films such as Get Shorty (1995), Broken Arrow (1996), Michael (1996), Face/Off (1997), Primary Colors (1998) and Swordfish (2001), while emerging unscathed from such critically assailed flops as Battlefield Earth (2000).
His most recent film, Wild Hogs (2007), was a huge financial success, and he is due to start work soon on the Walt Disney film Old Dogs, which co-stars his wife and daughter. He is also awaiting a final script for Dallas, the movie version of the 1970s television series in which he is due to play JR.
"As you get older you have to force yourself to have new dreams," he says. "For instance, I've been flying for 37 years but now teaching others to fly is interesting for me. Sometimes you have to find new angles on life to keep you interested, like sharing successes and inspiring and helping others. You have to go out of your way to activate your dreams and keep them going in this third chapter of your life."
'Hairspray' is released on Friday July 20
CROSS-DRESSING AT THE MOVIES
Some Like It Hot (1959)
"Have I got things to tell you!" says Jerry (Jack Lemmon) to Joe (Tony Curtis). "What happened?" "I'm engaged!" "Congratulations! Who's the lucky girl?" "I am!"
The absolute mother of cross-dressing comedies, Billy Wilder's movie remains a thing of beauty - not, perhaps, something that could be said of the suspiciously big-boned Daphne and Josephine.
Mrs Doubtfire (1993)
Robin Williams is like a kiddy in a sweetshop as the husband who, after an acrimonious divorce, decides to pretened to be Euphegenia Doubtfire, nanny extraordinary, in order to spend more time with his children.
It all requires mammoth suspension of disbelief, but there's a nicely waspish edge to the script and much of it is far funnier than it has any right to be.
Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949)
Alec Guinness plays pursed-lipped Suffragette Lady Agatha, the fourth of eight members of the D'Ascoyne family (all played by Guinness) murdered by Dennis Price in pursuit of the dukedom he believes should be his.
"I shot an arrow in the air/She fell to earth in Berkeley Square," he says gaily after downing her hot-air balloon.
Tootsie (1982)
Dustin Hoffman's portrayal of a struggling young actor who turns himself into a middle-aged woman to get a part - and thereby gains an unwelcome insight into life on the other side of the sexual divide - won him an Oscar nomination. His biggest problem with the role? Getting the voice right, he said.
The Crying Game (1992)
If you've never seen this film, stop reading now, because the revelation that the sexy, sultry Dil (Jaye Davidson) is actually a boy is the plot's big twist, helping to make this one of Neil Jordan's biggest hits. Much confusion among male viewers who found themselves fancying her/him.
Sunday, June 24, 2007
Travolta echoes Cruise on psychiatry
http://omg.yahoo.com/travolta-echoes-cruise-on-psychiatry/news/526
Travolta echoes Cruise on psychiatry
June 19, 2007
Associated Press
NEW YORK - John Travolta says his thinking is in line with fellow Scientologist Tom Cruise, who has publicly defended the religion's stance against psychiatry and the pharmaceutical industry.
Cruise, during a famously heated debate on NBC's "Today" show in 2005, criticized Brooke Shields for taking anti-depression drugs and berated host Matt Lauer for suggesting that psychiatric treatment might help some patients.
"I don't disagree with anything Tom says," Travolta says in the July issue of W magazine, on newsstands Friday. "How would I have presented it? Maybe differently than how he did, but it doesn't matter. I still think that if you analyze most of the school shootings, it is not gun control. It is (psychotropic) drugs at the bottom of it."
"I don't want to create controversy; I just have an opinion on things, and there is nothing wrong with stating your opinion if you are asked," he continues. "Everyone wants that right, and because you are famous doesn't mean you have less of a right."
Travolta, who also talks of his habit of going to bed at 6 or 7 in the morning and waking in the early afternoon, says being famous has little impact on how he lives his life.
"I will tell you the things that would be the same, fame or no fame," he says. "Being up all night would be the same. Liking empty restaurants, liking empty movie theaters Ã? unless I am starring in it."
Travolta, 53, portrays Ms. Edna Turnblad in "Hairspray," the adaptation of the stage musical that was spun from the 1988 John Waters film of the same name. The new film opens July 20. The role, in which he dons a fat suit and feminine garb, has added fuel to ongoing speculation about his sexuality.
"I have never been compelled to share with you my bathroom habits or share with you my bedroom habits," says the married father of two. "Everyone has a right to privacy, so I have never felt - even though I am famous - that I had to share that with anybody."
Do the rumors bother him? Does he think they've affected his career?
"No and no," he says. "What affects your career is the quality of the product. I don't think anyone can hurt me."
"Hairspray," a New Line release, also stars Christopher Walken, Michelle Pfeiffer and Queen Latifah.
___
New Line is a division of Time Warner Inc.
___
On the Net:
W magazine: http://www.style.com/w
http://www.hairspraymovie.com/
Travolta echoes Cruise on psychiatry
June 19, 2007
Associated Press
NEW YORK - John Travolta says his thinking is in line with fellow Scientologist Tom Cruise, who has publicly defended the religion's stance against psychiatry and the pharmaceutical industry.
Cruise, during a famously heated debate on NBC's "Today" show in 2005, criticized Brooke Shields for taking anti-depression drugs and berated host Matt Lauer for suggesting that psychiatric treatment might help some patients.
"I don't disagree with anything Tom says," Travolta says in the July issue of W magazine, on newsstands Friday. "How would I have presented it? Maybe differently than how he did, but it doesn't matter. I still think that if you analyze most of the school shootings, it is not gun control. It is (psychotropic) drugs at the bottom of it."
"I don't want to create controversy; I just have an opinion on things, and there is nothing wrong with stating your opinion if you are asked," he continues. "Everyone wants that right, and because you are famous doesn't mean you have less of a right."
Travolta, who also talks of his habit of going to bed at 6 or 7 in the morning and waking in the early afternoon, says being famous has little impact on how he lives his life.
"I will tell you the things that would be the same, fame or no fame," he says. "Being up all night would be the same. Liking empty restaurants, liking empty movie theaters Ã? unless I am starring in it."
Travolta, 53, portrays Ms. Edna Turnblad in "Hairspray," the adaptation of the stage musical that was spun from the 1988 John Waters film of the same name. The new film opens July 20. The role, in which he dons a fat suit and feminine garb, has added fuel to ongoing speculation about his sexuality.
"I have never been compelled to share with you my bathroom habits or share with you my bedroom habits," says the married father of two. "Everyone has a right to privacy, so I have never felt - even though I am famous - that I had to share that with anybody."
Do the rumors bother him? Does he think they've affected his career?
"No and no," he says. "What affects your career is the quality of the product. I don't think anyone can hurt me."
"Hairspray," a New Line release, also stars Christopher Walken, Michelle Pfeiffer and Queen Latifah.
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New Line is a division of Time Warner Inc.
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On the Net:
W magazine: http://www.style.com/w
http://www.hairspraymovie.com/
Tuesday, June 12, 2007
Travolta Is 'Divine' in 'Hairspray' Film
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,277008,00.html
Travolta Is 'Divine' in 'Hairspray' Film
Friday , June 01, 2007
By Roger Friedman
And now, “Hairspray,” the John Waters musical film based on the Broadway musical that was based on the original 1988 John Waters non-musical film that launched Rikki Lake.
It’s brought to us by the producers of the movie musical version of “Chicago” and directed by Adam Shankman, a choreographer with some pretty awful movies on his resume.
Into this mix comes John Travolta, looking a little like Barney the dinosaur (except not purple) as Edna Turnblad, previously played on Broadway by Harvey Fierstein and in the movie by Divine, Waters’ late transvestite of choice. Who can forget Divine in “Pink Flamingos”? Did we ever think that Vinnie Barbarino would play his/her part?
And yet, you really have to see Travolta to believe him, especially toward the end of “Hairspray” when he finally lets loose — dressed in a fat suit as a woman in a red tutu and high heels — and dances up a storm in the film’s finale. He’s remarkable.
I don’t know if it’s an Oscar performance, but I do know that when “Hairspray” is shown in big theaters (I saw it in a screening room, still a little unfinished), audiences are going to go wild with cheers and whistles.
Travolta even signals the audience with his now-trademark "cat eye” from “Pulp Fiction” as he launches like a spinning top onto the stage of the fictional Corny Collins Show. You can only love it. Somehow he brings that old Travolta warmth and charisma to a crazy costume (what a change from his last strange outfit, in “Battlefield Earth”).
“Hairspray,” if you don’t know, has a very simply plot. Circa 1959, 17-year-old Tracy Turnblad of Baltimore — wide as she is tall with a huge beehive hairdo — only wants to dance on the local “Corny Collins Show.” It’s like Dick Clark’s “American Bandstand.”
Tracy is played by newcomer Nikki Blonsky with such infectious ebullience, a whole new cult may quickly grow up around her.
Corny Collins, though, is the revelation: James Marsden, known previously from a series of cardboard performances in “Superman” and “X-Men,” turns out to be a terrific song and dance man. He’s an absolute knockout. I wouldn’t be surprised if Broadway producers start contacting him to play leads in shows.
Anyway, Tracy’s parents are played by Travolta and Christopher Walken, who almost steals the movie as the proprietor of a joke shop. Her best friend is Amanda Bynes, and Bynes’ mom is “West Wing” star Alison Janney returning to her comedy roots.
There isn’t a lot more to “Hairspray” except for the subplot. Not only does Tracy want to dance on the "Corny Collins Show," she wants to integrate it. The show occasionally features “Negro Day,” hosted by Motormouth Maybelle (Queen Latifah) and showcasing R&B then known as “race music.”
It’s Tracy’s one desire “to make every day Negro Day” and bring the black kids who dance on the satellite show onto the main stage. One of the funnier bits is a running joke where all the really cool kids (read: black) get detention on purpose. The detention room is really a juke joint, where there’s great music and cool dancing. It’s very funny.
Right now, New Line Cinema is downplaying “Hairspray,” hoping to avoid the hype machine that nearly killed “Dreamgirls” last year. This may work. Enough fans of the Broadway show will want to see this movie. As word spreads, others will come, too.
“Hairspray” is like a big colorful carnival, with loads of cotton candy. It’s never anything but happy, even when it’s trying to be profound.
More importantly, the performances are so well-defined that each one of them is going to be noticed. My favorite was Queen Latifah, whose voice is so amazing, and performance so mesmerizing, I wouldn’t be surprised if she wound up with a lot of awards and nominations. Once again, as with “Chicago,” she is the breakout star of the movie.
Travolta, Blonsky, Walken and Michelle Pfeiffer as the uptight producer of “Corny Collins” are all excellent. Teenagers, I’m told, will flock in to see Zac Effron of “High School Musical” as the heartthrob of Corny’s show. And Jerry Stiller reprises his role as Mr. Pinky from the original movie.
“Hairspray” opens on July 20, on an open weekend with competition only from Adam Sandler and TV’s Kevin James in “I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry.” It’s a tricky weekend, since NFL pre-season is still three weeks away. Guys, John Travolta in a dress awaits you like it or not.
Travolta Is 'Divine' in 'Hairspray' Film
Friday , June 01, 2007
By Roger Friedman
And now, “Hairspray,” the John Waters musical film based on the Broadway musical that was based on the original 1988 John Waters non-musical film that launched Rikki Lake.
It’s brought to us by the producers of the movie musical version of “Chicago” and directed by Adam Shankman, a choreographer with some pretty awful movies on his resume.
Into this mix comes John Travolta, looking a little like Barney the dinosaur (except not purple) as Edna Turnblad, previously played on Broadway by Harvey Fierstein and in the movie by Divine, Waters’ late transvestite of choice. Who can forget Divine in “Pink Flamingos”? Did we ever think that Vinnie Barbarino would play his/her part?
And yet, you really have to see Travolta to believe him, especially toward the end of “Hairspray” when he finally lets loose — dressed in a fat suit as a woman in a red tutu and high heels — and dances up a storm in the film’s finale. He’s remarkable.
I don’t know if it’s an Oscar performance, but I do know that when “Hairspray” is shown in big theaters (I saw it in a screening room, still a little unfinished), audiences are going to go wild with cheers and whistles.
Travolta even signals the audience with his now-trademark "cat eye” from “Pulp Fiction” as he launches like a spinning top onto the stage of the fictional Corny Collins Show. You can only love it. Somehow he brings that old Travolta warmth and charisma to a crazy costume (what a change from his last strange outfit, in “Battlefield Earth”).
“Hairspray,” if you don’t know, has a very simply plot. Circa 1959, 17-year-old Tracy Turnblad of Baltimore — wide as she is tall with a huge beehive hairdo — only wants to dance on the local “Corny Collins Show.” It’s like Dick Clark’s “American Bandstand.”
Tracy is played by newcomer Nikki Blonsky with such infectious ebullience, a whole new cult may quickly grow up around her.
Corny Collins, though, is the revelation: James Marsden, known previously from a series of cardboard performances in “Superman” and “X-Men,” turns out to be a terrific song and dance man. He’s an absolute knockout. I wouldn’t be surprised if Broadway producers start contacting him to play leads in shows.
Anyway, Tracy’s parents are played by Travolta and Christopher Walken, who almost steals the movie as the proprietor of a joke shop. Her best friend is Amanda Bynes, and Bynes’ mom is “West Wing” star Alison Janney returning to her comedy roots.
There isn’t a lot more to “Hairspray” except for the subplot. Not only does Tracy want to dance on the "Corny Collins Show," she wants to integrate it. The show occasionally features “Negro Day,” hosted by Motormouth Maybelle (Queen Latifah) and showcasing R&B then known as “race music.”
It’s Tracy’s one desire “to make every day Negro Day” and bring the black kids who dance on the satellite show onto the main stage. One of the funnier bits is a running joke where all the really cool kids (read: black) get detention on purpose. The detention room is really a juke joint, where there’s great music and cool dancing. It’s very funny.
Right now, New Line Cinema is downplaying “Hairspray,” hoping to avoid the hype machine that nearly killed “Dreamgirls” last year. This may work. Enough fans of the Broadway show will want to see this movie. As word spreads, others will come, too.
“Hairspray” is like a big colorful carnival, with loads of cotton candy. It’s never anything but happy, even when it’s trying to be profound.
More importantly, the performances are so well-defined that each one of them is going to be noticed. My favorite was Queen Latifah, whose voice is so amazing, and performance so mesmerizing, I wouldn’t be surprised if she wound up with a lot of awards and nominations. Once again, as with “Chicago,” she is the breakout star of the movie.
Travolta, Blonsky, Walken and Michelle Pfeiffer as the uptight producer of “Corny Collins” are all excellent. Teenagers, I’m told, will flock in to see Zac Effron of “High School Musical” as the heartthrob of Corny’s show. And Jerry Stiller reprises his role as Mr. Pinky from the original movie.
“Hairspray” opens on July 20, on an open weekend with competition only from Adam Sandler and TV’s Kevin James in “I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry.” It’s a tricky weekend, since NFL pre-season is still three weeks away. Guys, John Travolta in a dress awaits you like it or not.
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