Hacker Cinema
Hairspray
2007 · Film · 116 min
Directed by Adam Shankman
Pleasantly plump teenager Tracy Turnblad auditions to be on Baltimore's most popular dance show - The Corny Collins Show - and lands a prime spot. Through her newfound fame, she becomes determined to help her friends and end the racial segregation that has been a staple of the show.
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4 comments on Hacker News
In addition to the headline, this bill would also criminalize such popular movies as Hairspray, Mrs. Doubtfire, and Tootsie, for which Dustin Hoffman won a Golden Globe. (And quite obviously a fair bit of music videos and general entertainment industry content would also become illegal.)
>> The bill also includes a section that takes aim at transgender individuals by prohibiting material "that includes a disconnection between biology and gender by an individual of 1 biological sex imitating, depicting, or representing himself or herself to be of the other biological sex."
But there were other sorts of fame which are less popular today than yesteryear.
Secret lodges were once very popular, with their own hierarchies and (internal) fame.
Newspaper kiosks would carry a wider range of newspapers and magazines, but have now effectively disappeared.
Local clubs were also more common. When my old neighborhood was build in the 1950s, one of the lots we set aside as a clubhouse, with square dancing events. (It's since been turned into a pool.)
> go back a few decades and "everyone" watched the same lineup of TV on a Thursday night and it would probably have been something of a cultural knowledge shortcoming if you didn't know who the network news anchors were.
Sure, but godelski was talking about 50 years ago.
In the 1970s, a local TV station in Miami had "Toby the Robot" in a show to read the Sunday comics - https://www.pbase.com/donboyd/image/132365543 . Toby would also appear in local parades.
At https://www.pbase.com/donboyd/memories_tv_and_radio you can see some of the local Miami TV shows produced in the 1950s and 1960s .
Rick Shaw was an important local radio DJ - https://pbase.com/donboyd/memories_rickshaw . Read the comments about how locally famous he was.
Go back a few more years and there was even less network programming. If you saw the musical "Hairspray", that portrays a show based on Baltimore's Buddy Deane Show, which was one of several local teen dance television shows later replaced by national shows.
Remember, it wasn't until 1951 that we had a nation-wide microwave system that could carry TV broadcasts, and at the beginning most TV shows were still created locally. The Prime Time Access Rule went into place about 50 years ago to try to prevent that centralization.
(For another fictional movie portrayal, O Brother, Where Art Thou? shows The Soggy Bottom Boys achieving local fame because of their song on The Flour Hour.)
So even though there are new methods now, my observation is still that there were other ways to get famous, and some of these ways are no longer so common, making them somewhat hidden to modern viewpoints.
How then would you determine the validity of "There's way more B list and C list celebrities than ever before."?
I certainly don't know how.
Not by then. After Jerry Lee Lewis and Elvis had their explosive starts in the late 50s (that went into pauses with cousin-marrying and military service), white music was determined to market versions of them with all the implications of blackness stripped out. Instead, you had teen idols and white doo wop groups singing "Mister Sandman, bring me a dream..." White rock and roll is dead until the British invasion, who consisted of people who gleefully mined US race/blues records (and Elvis, and Jerry Lee Lewis), and fed it back to Americans.
That's a bit of what the movie Hairspray was about. The pause, that is.
edit: honestly, rock and roll probably would have died then if it weren't for the British Invastion. The kids were getting into folk.
Honestly, John, you were responsible for a massive hit Broadway musical, one that's entirely acceptable to the out-of-towners after their visit to Times Square. You didn't "become respectable". You sold out.
Getting gross stuff shown in a modern art museum is hardly an accomplishment. Manzoni did his "canned poop" thing in 1961. You're gonna have to try a lot harder than clips from porn movies. Pink Flamingos is still gross. You could do that again, if you wanted.
Though these days you're competing for attention from everybody on YouTube. You were an attention whore when it took some real effort to get it distributed. Now everybody can do it. They'll censor Pink Flamingos to put it on TV, but I'd be shocked if there weren't a dozen imitators on YouTube. (No, I'm not going to look.)
Congrats, you lowered the bar on bad taste, and I guess that's enough of an accomplishment to make you a commencement speaker. But once people figured out your formula, the bar lowered pretty far pretty fast, and rather than get ahead of it you let 'em make Hairspray.