Hairspray 2 Tagged Articles at Cinematical

While I've made no secret of my distaste of musicals, there's a faction of them that really, really irks me most of all. In fact, if not for the ever-prevalent existence of these suckers, I'd be much more appreciative of the whole musical movement. That faction: Sanitized, Purelled musical remakes -- Hairspray being the prime example. If you want to celebrate a film, celebrate it. Don't lobotomize it.

Yeah, Adam Shankman went wild throwing John Travolta in a female fat suit, but as we all know, that's merely a tiny shade of "perversity" in the Waters universe. In January, he mentioned not being able to do some of the wild "John Waters-y" sort of things in the upcoming sequel, but now he's described this whole project to a T. Straight from Collider: "John Waters wrote a treatment that was so insane. That was really a sequel to his version of the movie with all the cattle prods and the electro shock therapy, and seaweed. And Penny blew up the world at a certain point out of anger. It was this crazy thing. But we saw it as something to borrow from, so we took some of the less insane ideas." (Emphasis mine.)

The unique, visionary minds of cinema are not idea banks to pillage and plunder, picking wholesome moments out of a world of perversion and insanity -- especially when that world is created by Waters. You want to make a sequel out of a watered down remake? Make it. Don't get the original film's creator to write a wonderfully insane-sounding story just so you can pick at it and rip it apart at the strangely wonderful seams and take it in a different, tame direction. That's pure laziness.

But it's not like we should be shocked. Hollywood seems to have lost the art of risk taking and brainstorming long ago.

I think its time that John Waters gets a phone tree going, lassos in his worldwide band of freaks and friends, and introduce Adam Shankman to a different sort of life. He needs to get wild. Besides tackling Bye Bye Birdie, there's more Hairspray sequel news, courtesy of MTV, that has its quirky perks and boring pitfalls.

The sequel will be titled Hairspray 2: White Lipstick -- which just so happened to be Waters' original title for the 1988 film (without, of course, the "Hairspray 2" part). And it does have some Waters zaniness, according to Shankman: "[The treatment] is amazing, but it's crazy. There are things in there that I was like 'Can we do that?' It's real John Waters-y stuff, and it was more like a sequel to his movie than to our movie. Which I love, because then that becomes re-interpreted."

But don't expect too much quirk -- this is Shankman, so his crazy scale definitely isn't equivalent to your run of the mill Waters fan. Sadly, one of the things to go is Zac Efron taking acid and having "trippy conversations with acne on his forehead." (Wussy!) Things from the treatment he'll probably keep: Edna's addiction to diet pills, a new villain -- which means that Michelle Pfeiffer and Brittany Snow are most likely out, and lastly, someone (other than Link) will get drafted for Vietnam.

Any guesses? Any hopes for this White sequel?

Remember that Hairspray sequel that William Goss mentioned back in July? Adam Shankman had signed on to direct the sequel, and the master of the perverse (and creator of the original), John Waters, was going to whip up a story to send out to writers. Looks like things are on schedule -- according to EW, Waters has finished scheming up the sequel, and they're now hunting for a writer.

Basically, Waters has handed over "an outline and some ideas" for the film that will ultimately become the next instalment of Tracy Turnblad as she heads for the "next era of music," the '60s. "That period was superpolitical, it was a time of serious change. We're trying to track, in a comedic way, the historical elements" says Shankman. This will include the British Invasion, which consumes Link (played by Zac Efron in the remake).

On the plus side: Waters schemed up the outline. On the negative side: Waters isn't writing the meat of the script. Will a Waters outline be enough? I'm not so sure.