THE TRUE STORY BEHIND “THE CORNY COLLINS SHOW”
The following is an excerpt from “Hairspray’s Revealing Portrayal of Racism
in America” by Matthew Delmont, which was originally published in The
Atlantic on December 7, 2016.
In December 1963, producers at Baltimore’s WJZ-TV cancelled The
Buddy Deane Show rather than integrate the popular teen dance
program. This move would have been a footnote in the annals of
television if not for the director and Baltimore native John Waters,
whose 1988 film Hairspray offered up an alternate history, with its
fictional Corny Collins Show and rose-tinted, let’s-all-dance-together ending. Hairspray, which started as a camp flm with a modest
$2.7 million budget, grew into a popular and
commercially successful Broadway musical and movie.
From 1957 to 1963, only white teens were allowed to attend the
weekday broadcasts of the Buddy Deane Show, with the exception
of one Monday each month when black teenagers flled the studio
(the so-called “Black Monday”). In 1963, the Civic Interest Group,
a student integrationist group founded at Morgan State University,
challenged this policy by obtaining tickets for black and white teens
to attend the show on a day reserved for black teenagers. After a
surprise interracial broadcast, WJZ-TV received bomb and arson
threats, hate mail, and complaints from white parents.
Facing controversy over the possibility of more integrated broadcasts,
the station canceled the program.
A devoted fan of the Buddy Deane Show, Waters drew on this history to write and direct the original flm version of Hairspray. Unlike
the tensions that followed the real integration of the Buddy Deane
Show, Waters’s Hairspray ends with the protesters triumphing. The
television news reporter covering the Corny Collins Show in the film
sums up the climactic scene: “You’re seeing history being made today.
Black and white together on local TV. The Corny Collins Show is
now integrated!” Waters himself commented on the film’s revisionist
history, “I gave it a happy ending that it didn’t have.”
1960'S LINGO
Beehive: A hairstyle in which long hair is piled in a conical shape on the top of the head giving it some resemblance to a hive of bees. It can also be called a B-52 due to its resemblance to the nose of a Boeing B-52 Strategic Bomber airplane. The style was popular in America throughout the 1960s.
Cooties: A children’s term for imaginary germs or repellent qualities transmitted by obnoxious or slovenly people. In Hairspray, the term is used as a euphemism to demonstrate racism.
Segregation: The enforced separation of different racial groups in a country, community, or establishment.
