"Hairspray" And The "Art" Of The Remake

One of the most abhorrent things about Hollywood, and the show-business machinery whose core lies within the limits of Los Angeles County, is the utter and replete dearth of original ideas which originate from the community of creative people based there.

Admittedly, I’m thinking about the tendency of the movie industry to recycle ideas that have been previously tried and found to be worthy of consumption. Movie studios of all types, from independent to massively corporate, rely heavily on art that has been previously produced and consumed (on some level) and build from there.

This isn’t always a bad thing, necessarily. There have been many stunning film adaptations of books, plays, and other source material; every year, the Academy Awards present an award for the best adapted screenplay – nominations for this honor have included masterworks including “Dr. Strangelove,” “Breakfast At Tiffany’s,” “Apocalypse Now,” “The Shawshank Redemption,” and “Field Of Dreams.” That’s not a bad little DVD collection there.

Where Hollywood tends to get in trouble, however, is when it shifts away from adapting items of previously-created art for films, and gets into the business of remaking films. Point in case: Billy Wilder’s wonderfully romantic “Sabrina,” a mid-1950s gem of a film which starred the lovely Audrey Hepburn in the title role alongside the fantastic Humphrey Bogart and William Holden. Phenomenal movie; pick it up from your local library or video store if you get the chance. However, do not mistake it for the 1995 remake, which starred Harrison Ford and the beautiful (but by no means Hepburn-esque) Julia Ormond and was an utter, deserved flop.

The annals of Hollywood history are littered with flops like this; some, like the aforementioned “Sabrina” fiasco, are underwhelming from the get-go. Others, like “Psycho,” which was remade by Gus Van Sant in 1998, have higher aspirations (and therefore are subject to higher expectations from the audience). Van Sant, in remaking the 1960 Alfred Hitchcock, decided to remake the film on a shot for shot basis. He got the job done, and technically speaking, that was an amazing feat. However, it was underwhelming because, ultimately, the original “Psycho” thrived on the shock of what was occurring onscreen, while the remake took for granted that the audience had seen the original, which muted the overall impact of the film, and all but ensured that it would die a terrible death on impact.

There are scores upon scores of unnecessary remakes that litter multiplexes on what seems like a weekly basis. Cedric the Entertainer in a remake of “The Honeymooners?” Someone thought that would be good. Billy Baldwin as Barney Rubble in “The Flinstones: Viva Rock Vegas?” That got a green light from an executive as well.

Today is June 20th, and a movie is coming out today that signifies a new low in the remake trend. That movie is “Hairspray,” and, like last winter’s “The Producers,” it follows a curious path to the silver screen: original movie becomes Broadway revue, which then becomes a movie itself.

The purpose of the second movie, I would assume, is to satisfy the desires of the unwashed masses of the lumpenproletariat, who hope to find in the film some semblance of the Broadway extravaganza that they either couldn’t secure tickets for (but wanted to see) or that they spent good money on (and got to see the understudies). In the case of “The Producers,” I understood that. The combination of Matthew Broderick and Nathan Lane was a true phenomena when that hit the Great White Way years ago; why wouldn’t you want to capture that on film somehow?

Where the film remake of “The Producers” went wrong, and where it seems like “Hairspray” is bound to go terribly, terribly astray, was in the other casting. Rather than use the actors who made supporting parts in the stage adaptation memorable, the film relied on “name” stars like Uma Thurman and Will Ferrell to carry these parts. Bound by the large number of interpretations of the part that had already been committed to the public’s memory, from Broadway cast to touring company to original film, Ferrell and Thurman failed – possibly because their parts were essentially third-generation copies of the original roles, weighed down with the schticks that were added on from interpretation to interpretation. And then, as such, the film remake failed as well.

“Hairspray” looks like it will suffer from a similar fate. While John Waters’s original film is nowhere near iconic, it served to create vivid comic characters. These characters carried over nicely to musical theater; however, it will take incredibly gifted actors to succeed in these roles in the movie remake because they will need to create their own characters. Unfortunately, the casting department for the movie instead delivered actors like Queen Latifah (who, despite having garnered an Academy Award nomination in her brief acting career, seems to mistake mugging and smug line delivery for comic performance) and John Travolta (who relies so heavily on his persona for movie roles that the majority of his promotion for “Hairspray” consists of statements like “you won’t believe that it’s me). Perhaps I’m biased (I would not mind it one bit if either actor retired from moviemaking today), but the movie looks like a tremendous trainwreck, propelled by “aren’t we clever, aren’t we retro” stylings that do not seem to offer one iota of originality to a viewing public who will (sigh) probably make it the number one movie in America this weekend.

Needless to say, I will not be in line to see “Hairspray.”