The Director's Chair: Adam Shankman's Hairspray Diary #18

BroadwayWorld.com has an exclusive look into the making of the movie musical HAIRSPRAY with this special Director's Diary written by Adam Shankman. Check back daily for new entries!

I WOULD KILL TO STOP THE BEAT

We've been shooting "You Can't Stop the Beat" for nine days now. It's been the most grueling, harrowing shooting experience of my career, since a lot of what I've had to shoot, I'm coming up with on the spot.  Many of the placements, entrances and extras were actually never written into the script and I'm just trying to not let the actors know that I am making this stuff up as I go along.  Oh my God, if they knew, it would be like sharks tasting blood in the water. They'd go for my throat.

Nikki looks amazing in her black and white Mondrian dress, and I love the straight hair look on her.  We did that as a little homage to the John Waters movie, but it's great because it's as if Tracy is looking and moving towards the future.  The black and white is obviously a gross overstatement of what we are doing, mixing the black and white, but I love it because she graphically matches with the boys who I put in white dinner jackets with black ties and black pants.  The rest of the girls look like a bunch of scoops of sherbet and Brittany looks a bit like a pineapple - which is a good thing.  

Putting together "It's Hairspray," "Cooties," and "You Can't Stop the Beat" was literally terrifying for Danny, my first A.D.  It's funny because I told Marc and Scott and everybody at the beginning that I didn't think that "It's Hairspray" was ever actually going to be in the movie much, because we would use it in the background to be setting up all the action of Tracy sneaking in.  Yet I ended up choreographing it, sadly, in all of fifteen minutes and it ended up being some of my favorite choreography in the movie. It's just really funny and dorky.  And Jimmy is so delicious I want to kick him right in the nuts.  Maybe I will.

John's red sequence dress came out great.  God, Rita really has done an amazing job on all of this.  I can't wait to hear all of Marc's gigantic scoring on this, because we are just working to these really anemic tracks right now.  All of that will be replaced in post.

One of the really fun things is that Ricki Lake is cameo-ing into this as of one the William Morris agents.  We did a little research and what we thought would be funny is if they were coming to cast "Bye, Bye, Birdie," which was made the following year after HAIRSPRAY supposedly takes place, which is 1963.  I think that's right, anyway.  But I thought it would be really funny if the William Morris agents were coming to scout for who would play "Kim." I'm sure nobody on the planet will understand this, but it makes me laugh.  Having Ricki around has been amazing. She and Nikki get along so well and she just has the greatest energy and has so much joy and support for the project.

It's a bit of a circus around here with people coming and going. We've become the "Looky-Loo" capital of Toronto.  It seems like someone must be selling tickets because there are constantly strangers walking around on the soundstage, but I'll never notice them until it's kind of too late. They'll just sort of be sitting in the bleachers of the TV station. I'm pretty sure they are probably the parents and families of the Canadian dancers.  Has anybody ever heard of a little thing called a closed set?  Oh well…

It took one day to do "It's Hairspray" and then about two days to do "Cooties," which is really where most of the action takes place.  Only two of the days had all of the principals on set and in the same city.  Michelle, Latifah and Chris almost never worked together.  And there are all these shots of them looking at each other, where the other person isn't actually there.  That's what makes making movies fun. It's all the tricks.

I thought Travolta was going to go down in the middle of "You Can't Stop the Beat" because he was giving it one thousand percent every take, and I saw this sort of massive "Timmmmmber…" moment happening, where I was fairly certain that Edna was going to hit the ground and splatter like a giant red plate o' pancake.  It would have been bad, but thankfully, Mr. Travolta - being the pro that he is - pulled it off and finished the day.

There's a sequence that I'm not really liking that replaces the "come on you Von Tussels, gonna shake those fanny muscles" where Velma gets arrested that I'm very unsure of. It seems sort of forced and false. I don't know if I really need it. I think her come-uppance is best presented in the simple fact that she is fired.  Fans of the play, of course, are going to want to cut my throat.  But in a movie, people can't just change in one line of sung dialogue. No one would believe in it.  

Everybody's been exhausted.  We've shot most of the big dance sequences and definitely most of Latifah's verse at 3, 4 and 5 in the morning. I don't know how this keeps happening to us.  But I'm just praying that we got everything done.  Brittany is making me laugh so hard in this sequence; she is just milking every moment and killing it. And Amanda's dress it so tight that she can't dance, walk or run in it at all. She is like a skittering little stick figure.  

I hope that everybody really enjoys this.  I'm kind of feeling so-so about Little Inez's choreography.  I think it sort of got away from us, but oh well, hopefully the whole energy of it will play.  I personally would just like to stop the beat and if there were a God, I would be able to.  That having been said, it's the greatest ending number ever written for any musical ever. Or at least that's my opinion.