NBC’s Hairspray Live! maintains the basic of Waters’s story, but like the Broadway version and musical film, it features more than a dozen songs that help to convey the hopeful narrative. Hairspray’s happy ending gave the story an arc that appealed to Broadway and Hollywood producers. The Corny Collins Show is now integrated!” Waters himself commented on the film’s revisionist history, “I gave it a happy ending that it didn’t have.” The television news reporter covering the Corny Collins Show in the film sums up the climactic scene: “You’re seeing history being made today. Unlike the tensions that followed the real integration of the Buddy Deane Show, Waters’s Hairspray ends with the protesters triumphing. Facing controversy over the possibility of more integrated broadcasts, the station canceled the program.Ī devoted fan of the Buddy Deane Show, Waters drew on this history to write and direct the original film version of Hairspray. After a surprise interracial broadcast, WJZ-TV received bomb and arson threats, hate mail, and complaints from white parents. In 1963, the Civic Interest Group, an student integrationist group founded at Morgan State University, challenged this policy by obtaining tickets for black and white teens to attend the show on a day reserved for black teenagers. On the other, Hairspray Live! has the chance to resurface a forgotten history of how discrimination in pop culture intimately shaped the lives of young people 50 years ago.įrom 1957 to 1963, only white teens were allowed to attend the weekday broadcasts of the Buddy Deane Show, with the exception of one Monday each month when black teenagers filled the studio (the so-called “Black Monday”). On the one hand, the story’s feel-good conclusion implies that colorblindness is the silver bullet that ends racial discrimination, that good intentions and individual acts of bravery are enough to bring about harmony. Hairspray is firmly rooted in 1960s America, but it offers both sophisticated and (tellingly) simplistic ways of understanding racism today. On Wednesday, NBC is broadcasting Hairspray Live! as its newest live-television musical adaptation. Hairspray, which started as a camp film with a modest $2.7 million budget, grew into a popular and commercially successful Broadway musical and movie.
This move would have been a footnote in the annals of television if not for the director and Baltimore native John Waters, whose 1988 film Hairspray offered up an alternate history, with its fictional Corny Collins Show and rose-tinted, let’s-all-dance-together ending. In December 1963, producers at Baltimore’s WJZ-TV cancelled the Buddy Deane Show rather than integrate the popular teen dance program.
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