Do you remember sending the cast, maybe it was just Ricki Lake, but you sent them a VHS tape demonstrating some of the Hairspray dances, the Mashed Potato… Do you remember making that tape?
Oh yeah, I made it with the real people who were on the committee of The Buddy Deane Show. The real people, they helped with this movie. It was based on a real local show in Baltimore that was our local version of American Bandstand. We never had Dick Clark in Baltimore, we had our local version where the girls’ hair was higher, the boys’ pants were tighter! I think they are on that tape with me, doing the dance. I totally remember it. I can still do those dances, gimme a couple of drinks late at night in my apartment and I’ll do the Madison for ya!
It was important to you that the dances felt authentic to Baltimore teenagers of that era.
The time period here was the early ’60s, right between the ’50s of Elvis and right before The Beatles happened, so there was this weird little pocket of time, and the authenticity was very important to me. I remember being so amazed when the people that were on The Buddy Deane Show saw the movie and they said, ‘God, I feel like that was a flashback’, it was so close to the real thing. It was such an influence on me that I wanted to make it real. Just imagine, there were so many gimmick dances. Why wasn’t there a dance about Covid? The song ‘The Bug’ at the end of this movie, when you catch a disease and throw it to somebody else and they catch it – that certainly would’ve been a good one for that time.
With Debbie Harry and Sonny Bono, I wonder whether their individual public personas at the time factored into their casting?
Sonny Bono was running for mayor of Palm Springs and played a racist, which he was most definitely not! He worked for Specialty Records before he was famous for Cher or anything. He was one of the few white men that worked at Specialty Records which was an era where he discovered Little Richard, he knew Ruth Brown… Sonny Bono very much knew the time period, and I think that’s why he did the movie. Debbie Harry I had known because she helped with the music in Polyester, and she loved Tab Hunter. Debbie and I certainly had the same taste and sense of humour, so I just thought that she would be great as the evil hair hopper mother that was jealous of Divine. I think she was brilliant casting. Debbie’s a really good actress, I’ve seen her in a lot of movies! And she was thrilled it was gonna be Sonny. She loved the idea. Sonny did too. He was a little more apprehensive because he heard about Pink Flamingos and he did ask me ’nobody’s gonna run in and eat shit in this right?’, but he knew Debbie and liked the idea too. Even though they were from very different worlds at that particular time in music history, they both were already icons and they wanted to work with each other.
I wanted to ask you about Chris Mason, there’s really not much out there about her, but she was the visionary behind all the amazing hair design.
Chris Mason was a huge part of the success of my movies. She did the hairdos in Hairspray and they were all real, except for Debbie’s. Chris was something! She was quite a character. She was a very, very out gay woman who was quite upfront about it, and scary! Ricki Lake always said to me ‘usually the hairdresser’s the nice, motherly figure…’ Chris Mason was scary but I got along with her great. She had a great heart, she was wonderful. She did Cry-Baby too. The hairdos in those movies are really truly amazing. She was a hairdresser in real life before getting into movies and she did those hairdos for real in East Baltimore beauty salons. In Baltimore those hairdos in working class communities were not considered rebellious. Your mother had the same hairdo. That’s what people actually looked like, which is amazing to imagine today when you see it. There’s still people that look like that in Baltimore and they always say: ‘you find a good look and you stick with it’.