Trailer
Plot summary
Tracy Turnblad is a sixteen-year-old in 1962 Baltimore who loves The Corny Collins Show and watches it every day with her best friend, Penny Pingleton. The show's lead dancers, Amber von Tussle and Link Larkin, go to their school. Amber's mother Velma manages the station that airs the show, and Black dancers get only a monthly Negro Day, hosted by the DJ Motormouth Maybelle Stubbs. When a dancer leaves for nine months, auditions are held. Tracy skips class to try out, and Velma rejects her over her size and her support for integration. In detention she meets Seaweed, Maybelle's son, who shows her some dance moves.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Hairspray (2007)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Executives at New Line Cinema originally expected the part to be filled by an actor accustomed to playing comic roles, tossing around names such as Robin Williams, Steve Martin and Tom Hanks; producers Craig Zadan and Neil Meron aggressively sought Travolta because he had starred as Danny Zuko in Grease.
- Kevin Naff, a managing editor at the Washington, D.C. and Baltimore area gay newspaper the Washington Blade, called for a boycott, alleging that Scientology, to which Travolta is an adherent, was homophobic; Adam Shankman rebuffed the boycott, saying he and several other homosexual crew members got along well with Travolta.
- After auditioning over eleven hundred candidates, Nikki Blonsky, a high school student from Great Neck, New York, was chosen for the lead role of Tracy.
- Blonsky was working at Cold Stone Creamery at the time, and received the news that she had received the part from film director Adam Shankman himself.
- James Marsden's character Corny Collins is based upon the Baltimore TV personality Buddy Deane, who hosted an eponymous local teen dance show in the late 1950s and early 1960s; Marsden beat out both Joey McIntyre and X-Men co-star Hugh Jackman for the part.
- Hayden Panettiere was also considered for the part of Amber, but was decided against in part because of her then-upcoming work with the NBC television series Heroes.
- The sequel was set for a mid-July 2010 release by Warner Bros., which owns New Line Cinema, but in June 2010 Shankman told British press that Hairspray 2: White Lipstick was no longer in development.
- Queen Latifah, who had appeared in the successful Zadan/Meron film musical Chicago and worked under Adam Shankman's direction in Bringing Down the House, took a role for which Aretha Franklin had previously been considered.
