The second installation of the Broadway Musical Hairspray had wise casting techniques. With a budget of $75 million, the civil rights movement musical film held an open casting call to cast unknown actors. After over eleven hundred candidates, Nikki Blonsky, a high school senior from Great Neck, New York was choses to stare as the movies protagonist, Tracy Turnblad. With the incorporation of unknown actors, the producers were wise to include major celebrities in the casting. John Travolta, Queen Latifah, and Zac Efron were casted bringing a massive fan-base and anticipation. Not only was there already a hype about this famous casting but the fact that Travolta was playing a woman (Tracy's mother) brought a lot of discussion and popularity to the film.
Since the movie consisted heavily on complex choreography, it became a major focus for the producers to hire multiple choreographers and pay over a hundred and fifty dancers in total.
"Appropriately enough for a movie with such a democratic sensibility, there is plenty of credit to go around. Mr. Shankman (director and choreographer), drawing on long experience as a choreographer, avoids the kind of vulgar overstatement that so often turns the joy of live musical theater into torment at the multiplex."
"Hairspray is a musical full of different styles of music. The different styles of music are comedy, dancing, feel good, classic Broadway, old-fashioned, high-octane show dancing, high jinks, emotion, rocking Motown, electric blues, 60’s sock Hop, blues, pop, doo-wap, and lover’s duet. The diverse musical genres also helped make the movie drift from the typical cheesy musical."
“Hairspray” is a great musical. It has history, different productions of it including a 1988 film and a new musical film 2007. It can be analyzed in multiple ways, research, listening to music, watch youtube, see production of it, and compare it to other events in the world, yours or history."
Ending its domestic run on October 25, 2007, Hairspray has a total domestic gross of $118,871,849 and $202,548,575 worldwide. The film was able to adapt well and portray the musical on the big screen successfully. The real reason why this movie was successful was mostly because of its diverse, famous, musically talented cast.
It's really interesting that you chose to focus on how important the cast of a movie is, because I definitely agree that casting actors for a movie is an extremely important factor in the process of filmmaking. It contributes to the possible success of a film, and I really liked that you went into great detail on what you think about it and how it worked so well with the movie adaptation of "Hairspray."
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