Guys, John Travolta is playing Divine's role in the upcoming remake of Hairspray, directed by the dude who brought us The Wedding Planner and Bringing Down The House.

Seeing Travolta eat dogshit would allow me to die happy.

The answer: Jabba the Hutt.

JOHN WATERS ISN'T EVEN DEAD YET

and hopefully won't be for years

true heartfelt emotion tears ;>__

Seriously, imagine him doing "I Cry For You".

"I WAS
BORN IN
THE GHETTO!"

Anyone else: awesome
Travolta: suckdom

Mike Chiklis

My soul is dying.

Clearly they should have cast Hugo Weaving.

I'm more upset about Queen Latifah. Ruth Brown never ho'd for Pizza Hut.

I'm still awaiting the Broadway production of "Cry Baby"

OK WHO DID IT

SPEEDBOAT

User Comments: The most action packed of the three Snake Eater movies (more)

Fans of Waters and the Baltimore milieu of his films can take heart that the original filmmaker endorses the new version, which hits theaters July 20: Waters appears in a cameo near the beginning of the film as a dirty old man who flashes Tracy on the street.

Waters defends Travolta from gay journalist's boycott threat

the only justification for this movie is that Waters deserves to make a bunch of money.

this does not mean the movie is actually worth seeing.

I really think Hollywood needs to put a bit more work into fat suit technology before they make any more of these fat suit movies.

Brando you are missed

I'm sorry, but I am very curious about this. Travolta could be starting a whole new late-life sub-career.

http://www.drudgereport.com/jt.jpg

Okay, I'm in hell. I have died, and we are in hell.

'cuz i'm a little turned on.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=0jd1dhzHWek

enjoy. enjoy it and rot.

http://www.bestweekever.tv/bwe/images/2006/09/JohnTravoltaHairspray.JPG

http://www.themovieblog.com/archives/Travolta-Hairspray.jpg

ACTING

I actually would be excited for this if Travolta was actually just doing DRAG, Divine-style. Travolta in ugly make-up and a little body padding? It's only the fat-face make-up (which kinda just looks like a botox overdose) and the choice of director that bums me out. The rest of the cast sounds fun, and this was Waters' least transgressive movie anyway. Burning Down The House may well have been nastier.

Bringing Down The House, rather.

ok, giving Travolta full facial expression wouldn't have redeemed that "Welcome To The Sixties" number, but it would have made it slightly more entertaining.

the fat-face make-up (which kinda just looks like a botox overdose)

srsly, they can't take one look at that and say, "Time to go back to the drawing board."? Nah, it's fine, they're only spending $75 million on this thing, nobody will notice that it looks nothing like an actual fat person.

christ, i've been looking on youtube for any clip heavily featuring Christopher Walken, Amanda Bynes, Michelle Pfieffer or James Marsden, and all I can find is that "Sixties" song and two Zac Efron snores (though Marsden gets some cute cutaways in "Ladies Choice").

I don't know what I find weirder: his *getup* in this movie, or his plane being parked in front of his house.

nobody will notice that it looks nothing like an actual fat person

guys, John Travolta is actually fat.

yes, but no one wants to tell him.

http://tbn0.google.com/images?q=tbn:fzQfzzpuMolrHM:http://img.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2006/07/travoltaBIG280706_411x600.jpg

BAN SHAKEY

ban those titties more likely

band those titties

http://delivery.viewimages.com/xv/73579479.jpg?v=1&c=ViewImages&k=2&d=17A4AD9FDB9CF1932BBB80AB57C9760261CE6D661EFA34D1655C7925B3CB4ACB

rats.

see here

Seeking His Inner Her, Size XXXL
By JESSE GREEN

LOS ANGELES

WE had only just met, but John Travolta, big and handsome and hypnotic, was fondling the lapel of my navy blue blazer. “Ooh, what a great idea to match this with a cobalt blue shirt,” he cooed. “I wouldn’t have thought of that.”

Disarming, but doubtful. When it comes to appearances, Mr. Travolta seems to think of everything. Chatting on Father’s Day in his Spanish-style home here in the Brentwood hills, he was a carefully considered composition in black — blazer, shirt, pants — and crocodile slip-ons. His hair was precisely deployed in a center part flip, which made his bangs look like quotation marks framing his face.

Because we were discussing his role as the obese, fashion-challenged laundress Edna Turnblad in the $75 million movie version of the musical “Hairspray,” which opens nationwide on Friday, the subject naturally kept returning to clothing, coiffure and body type. Before filming he had costumers, special makeup-effects people, even prop masters repeatedly revising their work to achieve the look he imagined in housedresses, fat suits and irons. He did not want to resemble a refrigerator or Jabba the Hutt, he said, but Sophia Loren with a couple of hundred extra pounds. And he got his wish: His Edna, unlike the greasy Gorgon created by Divine in the 1988 John Waters original or the Kabuki hausfrau rendered so memorably by Harvey Fierstein in the 2002 Broadway musical adaptation, has cleavage and a waist and a kind of geologic sex appeal.

So you’d think he must have known, and not cared, that complimenting a writer’s color coordination might seem not just friendly but also really gay. Which would be nothing but a charming detail were it not for the controversy that had recently arisen about his taking the role of Edna in the first place. In a blog entry posted in May on the Web site of The Washington Blade (washblade.com), a gay newspaper, Kevin Naff, its editor, called for a boycott of “Hairspray” because of Mr. Travolta’s membership in the Church of Scientology, which he described as a cult that “rejects gays and lesbians as members and even operates reparative therapy clinics to ‘cure’ homosexuality.” In a subsequent editorial Mr. Naff added that Mr. Travolta’s appearance in the “iconic gay role” is “even more galling given all the gay rumors that have followed him for years.”

Seated in a leather club chair in his paneled library, where books on cigars and aviation share space with Scientology treatises and a “photographic tribute” to the church’s founder, L. Ron Hubbard, Mr. Travolta was not at all defensive about any of this. Asked about Mr. Naff’s comments, he did not protest with allusions to his wife of 15 years, the actress Kelly Preston, or their two children. He merely said that he was completely comfortable around gay people, that Edna wasn’t gay anyway, and that the claims about Scientology were inaccurate. “Scientology is one of the least homophobic religions,” he said. “It’s not very interested in the body at all.”

Perhaps, but Mr. Travolta certainly is. He became a movie star on the basis of a physicality so intense — and so specific to each role — that it almost seemed choreographed. Even beyond the dance moves of “Grease” and “Saturday Night Fever” and “Urban Cowboy,” defining as they were, his ability to create character in the shape of his spine, the tilt of his pelvis, the isolation of various parts of his body was a revelation in films, whether musical or not. The famous slouching Watusi he devised for woozy Vincent Vega in “Pulp Fiction” not only nailed that character but revived a career that by 1994 had fallen into one of its weird, periodic lulls.

Lull is too mild a word, though, for the death-defying plunges in quality, box-office results or both that have usually followed his biggest successes. Whether because of bad hunches, bad advice or a tendency in flush times to grab all the big-ticket jobs he could — owning a fleet of planes doesn’t come cheap — Mr. Travolta has repeatedly diminished his critical capital and stymied audiences with movies whose redeeming qualities were hard to discern.

In conversation, he acknowledged choosing commercial projects like this year’s “Wild Hogs” — a critically panned buddy comedy that surprisingly grossed more than $250 million — “to get permission” to make more personally meaningful but little-seen films like “She’s So Lovely” and “A Love Song for Bobby Long.” “But mostly,” he said, “you just do what’s right for you as an artist, things you morally feel you can contribute to at a stellar level. At the end you want to be able to say, ‘Wow, that was a mixed bag of tricks — but what a bag.’ ”

Amazingly, he managed to rebound after disasters like “Moment by Moment,” “Staying Alive” and “Perfect” — the list goes on. But rebounding from the bad spell that began with the jaw-dropping 2000 flop “Battlefield Earth,” a longtime pet project based on a sci-fi novel by Mr. Hubbard, has proved more difficult; only one of his next nine movies grossed more than $100 million worldwide. Still, musicals and might-as-well-be musicals like “Pulp Fiction” (you could call it a dope opera) have been kind to him ever since the early 1970s, when he made his stage breakthrough as a replacement Doody in the original Broadway “Grease.” If he has not done more, it’s largely because there have not been many to do. He’s turned down only three, he said: “A Chorus Line” (“good move”), “The Phantom of the Opera” (ditto) and “Chicago” (“a mistake”).

That “Hairspray,” unlike those others, began life as a movie does not mean it’s a likelier prospect for successful remaking, as the recent “Producers” debacle proves. Still, it is perhaps the most filmworthy stage musical in decades, combining great characters, a strong story and a flawless pop Broadway score. Surprising, then, that Mr. Travolta, now 53, took 14 months to agree to make it, stringing along the producers, Craig Zadan and Neil Meron, like lovesick freshmen at Rydell High.

But it was not, after all, self-evident casting. Edna is not the lead in the story; her daughter, Tracy, moves the action. She is also, for all her heft, a dainty creation, not Mr. Travolta’s usual territory. Executives at New Line Cinema, the studio financing the movie, naturally expected a comic actor in the role: Robin Williams, Steve Martin, Tom Hanks. “Which was valid,” Mr. Meron said, “but we argued, ‘Why not get the musical film star of our generation?’ ”

Having failed three times to snag him for Billy Flynn in “Chicago” (the part eventually went to Richard Gere, as have many of Mr. Travolta’s castoffs), Mr. Zadan and Mr. Meron knew how painfully deliberate he could be in selecting projects. (It took him six months to say yes to “Pulp Fiction.”) And so, after sending him a DVD of the Waters film and getting him tickets to see a touring production of the stage musical when it played near his home in Florida, they set about to address his concerns. But they were wrong about what those concerns were.

“Playing a woman attracted me,” Mr. Travolta said. “Playing a drag queen did not. The vaudeville idea of a man in a dress is a joke that works better onstage than it does on film, and I didn’t want any winking or camping. I didn’t want it to be ‘John Travolta plays Edna.’ That’s not interesting. It had to be something I could go all the way with, disappear in, like I did in the Bill Clinton role in ‘Primary Colors’ or in ‘Saturday Night Fever.’ ” And here he got up and instantly incarnated those characters with a quick redeployment of his weight and posture.

There was no film precedent for this approach to Edna. Though Dustin Hoffman in “Tootsie” and Robin Williams in “Mrs. Doubtfire” did well donning drag, they were playing explicitly male characters who for plot reasons needed to dress as women. Edna is something much rarer: a female character whose DNA, as the stage director Jack O’Brien put it, requires that she be played by a male — the cosmic opposite of Peter Pan. Divine, whose real name was Harris Glenn Milstead, didn’t so much act Edna as perform a variation on his usual camp persona. What Mr. Travolta wanted was a seamless transformation; it was not lost on him that the last time such a cross-gender feat had been seriously tried — in “The Year of Living Dangerously” — it had won Linda Hunt an Oscar.

Without saying yes, Mr. Travolta began to imagine the woman he’d be willing to become. Because the story is set in Baltimore, he wanted her to have the honking vowels and slurred consonants he’d heard while filming “Ladder 49” there a few years earlier. Focusing on a new lyric for the song “Welcome to the Sixties” — “I haven’t left this house since 1951” — he decided that Edna should seem “damaged,” too ashamed of her weight to be seen in public.

That was simple: “Vulnerability I know how to capture,” Mr. Travolta said. Motherliness too. “I was beautifully parented by two very doting parents, so it’s very easy for me to adore someone,” he went on. “I adore my children. I adore other people’s children. I adore other people. I can make a fuss over you like nobody can. The bigger problem here was how do I convince you I’m a woman doing that and make you want to watch her for an hour and a half?”

Having grown up the youngest of six children in a bohemian working-class family in Englewood, N.J., he modeled his idea of a watchable woman on his “very sexy mother” (Helen Travolta was a high school drama teacher and sometime actress) and on the bombshells in the European movies they enjoyed: Ms. Loren, Anna Magnani, Anita Ekberg. “I’m not as beautiful as any of those people,” he said, “but I’m not unpleasant to look at, and I thought: ‘This is my library. Not grandmas or Aunt Bee from Mayberry, but the kind of person a blue-collar woman would aspire to be if she had money. What if that kind of woman had gone to flesh?’ ”

A more naturalistic, filmic Edna, not flamboyant or stagy (Mr. Travolta told the costume designers to “think East Berlin”), began to take shape. “But I was also concerned,” he continued, “that if I was going to do another musical after the success of ‘Grease’ ” — which remains the highest-grossing live-action musical ever made — “it had to be different and had to be right. Musicals are the most difficult genre outside of westerns and sci-fi to put on the screen. If you don’t have every throttle at full, every department at grade A-plus, you fail.”

He was not shy about promoting his agenda. He wanted assurances that the Broadway score would not be ruined in translation, as so often happens, and that he would not be the only big star on the bill. (He requested, and got, Christopher Walken as his husband and Michelle Pfeiffer as the villainess.) Adam Shankman, the choreographer-director to whom the producers entrusted the project after talks with many A-list names, had to share his vision of Edna’s liberation through costume and dance. She basically becomes Tina Turner in the finale.

Even with all this pinned down, he held out until faced with an absolute deadline. On that day Mr. Travolta — a night owl since childhood, when he’d wait for his mother to return from the theater — called his agent with his answer one minute before midnight.

If he was ambivalent even after 14 months, it wasn’t about money; the salary was nonnegotiable. (Like the movie’s other stars, Mr. Travolta accepted a much smaller fee than usual, and a compensatory cut of the gross, in deference to the enormous cost of producing a musical.) Nor does his ambivalence seem timid; an afternoon with him, complete with singing, bear hugs and sartorial compliments, quickly dispels the idea that he’d shy away from a role just because it might open him up to questions about sex and religion. (“If he were homophobic,” Mr. Waters, an executive producer of the new film, said, “he’d have had a heart attack on the set.”) However he lives his life, his talent seems to exist in a world beyond such concerns.

Interpreting such choices is in any case a tricky business because there is something irregular about stars that made them stars in the first place. Even compared with lesser celebrities, they have a different way of being concerned about reputation, a concern that’s refracted through their roles and parceled out over time. They are less like the hothouse flowers they’re often compared to than like a volcano or an iceberg; whatever their particular temperature, they just do what they do, not thinking much of themselves or of you. No accident that pride of place on a mantel in Mr. Travolta’s library goes to a photograph of him huddled along with other admirers around an inscrutable Marlon Brando.

Mr. Travolta is no doubt kinder than Brando, but for all his friendliness he’s just as opaque. His every move reflects a private survey of his resources and a need to exploit them as effectively as possible. That he has sometimes failed is the sign of an imperfectly questing human nature. Which is why attempts to prosecute his sexuality and religion over his choice to play Edna seem not only illiberal but also tin-eared, antithetical to the spirit and style of “Hairspray.”

Whatever Scientology teaches, he never raised the subject on the set. (“Is there such a thing as a Reform Scientologist?” Mr. Shankman asked.) And whatever the contours of his personal life, they didn’t keep him from embracing his inner — and outer — Edna. As Mr. Waters said, “He’s in a dress singing a love song to his husband, so what’s anyone complaining about?”

Perhaps only this: Great performers are so watchable, but also so alarming, because they won’t be pinned down. Wherever there’s x they mix it with y, and vice versa. Vile characters like Vincent Vega are leavened with pathos or humor; lightweights like Edna are deepened with sex and sadness.

If this disturbs people who prefer sharper definition, you get the sense that it thrills Mr. Travolta a little too much. After our conversation, as a photographer snapped and a stylist micromanaged his bangs, he moved so easily and without prompting from one pose to another, shifting onto his toes as if to bunny hop or turning up his wrists with timid excitement, it seemed that all the business of the fat suits and the four hours of makeup each day had not been a way of finding Edna so much as a way of delaying and controlling the process by which he became her.

Watching the movie, you understand why, because John Travolta is utterly gone, as if Edna had swallowed him whole. All that’s left, peering out from her lunar face, are those famous blue eyes — bluer, even, than a cobalt blue shirt.

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

so I can still complain about the remake because I think John Travolta is an embarrassment as an actor, right?

well, it's not really a remake. It's an adaptation of a musicalization.

oh man if walken is dancing in this i may actually have to watch it

or like watch those bits on youtube or something

that article makes me ill in that you get done reading it and realize they're not talking about a jon waters movie, they're talking about some kind of artsy fartsy 75 million bullshit wank piece. I mean really Mr. Travolta you think maybe the main character in the story is perhaps "damaged?" NYURRGH

jesse green your writing style does not appear to be compatible with my digesting style

I just find it odd that the tone of the article is "OMG I can't believe you would accuse John Travolta of being GAY just because he is in drag in a musical!!!" As if people are actually doing that.

they're talking about some kind of artsy fartsy 75 million bullshit wank piece

OTM - where's teh fun

The fun is in 1988 at yr video store

although, who knows... suddenly $75 mil budget precludes fun here?

http://www.slantmagazine.com/film/film_review.asp?ID=3065

I just find it odd that the tone of the article is "OMG I can't believe you would accuse John Travolta of being GAY just because he is in drag in a musical!!!" As if people are actually doing that.

-- jessie monster, Monday, July 16, 2007 8:27 PM (32 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

ud be surprised

I think people are accusing him of being gay cuz he's a big fat queen

lol right

I'M SO GLAD HE CHOSE TO PLAY HER AS A "REAL" WOMAN AND NOT AS A DRAG QUEEN. IT'S SO MUCH MORE REALISTIC THAT WAY(?????????????????????)

http://i53.photobucket.com/albums/g52/Hairspray-Movie-Musical/TravoltaLaugh.jpg

just a couple of bros sayin later to eachother
http://img190.imageshack.us/img190/6721/jtcz8.jpg

about the only reason i would want to see this film is because it was shot at the top of my street. they transormed the whole block, which was pretty cool. some of the buildings were vacant beforehand so the mock store signs are still there. i go by the fake "jimmy's records" every day...

http://www.movietrio.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/01/hairspray-movie-11.jpg

never forget...

http://www.geocities.com/johnny_loves_kelly/Staying_Alive_Tony_on_Stage.jpg

why the fuck would anyone want Edna to be a "real" woman

http://cityrag.blogs.com/photos/uncategorized/john_travolta_diet.jpg

http://i46.photobucket.com/albums/f123/katiezo/07mayb/travolta3.jpg

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/pubs/sfn98/travolta.jpg

why the fuck would anyone want Edna to be a "real" woman

Presumably because she isn't in the original?

I mean I think the challenge of remaking a John Waters film "straight" is more interesting than most other ways of remaking it. I doubt very much that they'll pull it off, but it seems like the right challenge to take on.

ok that JOHN TRAVOLTA file folder is totally comedy

no Turl no credibility

the chewing with his mouth open one should be a ytmnd or something

oh wait wading w/ chocolate bar is even better

are the Marc Shaiman songs any good? The B'way version was OK, some say.

This movie will be really terrible but I will end up seeing because I have friends with very dubious taste in movie selection (they made me see "Rent", too). One friend in particular said the Broadway show was "AMAZING!" and is awaiting the movie with bated breath. I am dubious.

I am not above enjoying a musical but I have "why bother????" problem with musical movies based on musicals based on movies.

dood i bet you a box of chocolate covered altoids that you're going to love it. you jizzed all up on dreamgirls.

i already kinda think of the original movie as a musical.

I found the original film cute .. and that's it. The best things about it were the integration comedy AND all those awesome old 45s on the soundtrack (hence the second-ratedness of doing a song score for it).

I choose to remember Divine masturbating in church and eating dogshit, which Travolta won't be doing (onscreen) anytime soon.

have you people ever heard actors talk about acting before?

you mean Acting

AND all those awesome old 45s on the soundtrack (hence the second-ratedness of doing a song score for it).

totally agree - Waters' (and his soundtrack/source guy's) taste in music is impeccable and usually really entertaining. why would I want to hear a bunch of shitty Broadway songs "approximating" the original material (kinda like how I don't care if I ever heard Dreamgirls' version of Motown)

i don't really think they are making the movies for guys like you and me

HORATIO CAINE: When the fat lady sings...

:|
B|

...you know it's Travolta.

It is sort bizarre yet awesome that a John Waters movie (of sorts) is getting heavily promoted on the channel that airs the 700 Club.

And that ten year olds can buy Hairspray charm bracelets at Claire's.

a bunch of shitty Broadway songs "approximating" the original material

In fairness, the songs are by the guy who wrote the music for South Park -- Bigger, Longer, Uncut. But you probably can't tell without the lyricists.

omg @ Horatio emoticons

Did they shoot this one in Baltimore?

In fairness, the songs are by the guy who wrote the music for South Park -- Bigger, Longer, Uncut.

ok dude stop telling me things that make me want to not hate this movie's existence

here I will make you hate it more: JOHN TRAVOLTA, THE MAN WHO BROUGHT US MICHAEL.

oh my god michael is like the worst movie ever

my mom made me go see that with her in the fucking theatre

it really cemented how much i hate andie macdowell

OK dere, Shaiman also scored Sleepless in Seattle and Patch Adams. Better?

(but also wrote "Everyone Has AIDS")

oh god don't get me started on patch adams!!

Ally what the HELL were you doing seeing those movies? They are the anti-you.

are you kidding! she is the wacky schmaltz queen.

i've never seen patch adams

it was just the subject of an intense, violent throwdown between me and my father one thanksgiving.

That is a beautiful image.

wow, you pick your battles...

i don't think my dad has ever seen patch adams either.

Patch Adams is HORRIBLE. As is Michael. God, I can't even start on Michael.

Another John Travolta Gem: Phenomenon. The movie where I spent two hours hoping Travolta would just die from that fucking tumor already.

OH MY GOD PHENOMENON

my mom made me go see that in the theatre with her too!!

I made my mom see X-Men in the theatre.

Okay so is it more than your mom hates you or loves Travolta?

And did you see Battlefield Earth in the theatre with her?

xpost

you lived at the Travoltaplex for 3 years?

Dudes, moms love travolta.

What's the one where he's an angel who smells of homemade chocolate chip cookies? Wlliam Hurt's in it too, and I don't know who looks doughier.

x-post - Mine doesn't!

Did they shoot this one in Baltimore?

-- jessie monster, Tuesday, July 17, 2007 2:35 PM (29 minutes ago)

soundstage in Toronto :(
that'll probably seem more like a good thing once it's all said and done, though.

that's Michael, and Travolta is definitely doughier. I think a small dog also plays a major role in that film. xpost.

ALSO: speaking of Travolta, and upon my realization that apparently NOT EVERYONE KNOWS THIS HILARIOUS FACT: South Carolina's motto on their license plates is "Smiling Faces, Beautiful Places."

oh and I guess they did film some exterior shots here? (xpost)

I had no idea Travolta was now a beautiful place.

(xpost)

i have never made my mom go see a movie. she basically likes every movie ever made.

and yeah, wasn't the dog in michael like a jack russell or something? they're usually little terriers, aren't they.

Walken on Daily Show is an example of why I don't want Stewart interviewing politicians.

http://www.walken2008.com/

This surprisingly turned out to be a funny movie.

I'm so angry at all the people I know who keep saying that they don't really care about seeing the John Waters one but think this horrible Travolting remake looks "hilarious"

yeah, that bothers me too...

I LOVE the original and thought that this remake would be nothing but crap, but it's actually funny. It's very different than the original though.

People really should see the original though. It's a classic!!!