By Jeffrey Jolson
HOLLYWOOD, CA (Hollywood Today) 6/20/07 — John Travolta, of “Grease” and “Staying Alive” fame, said he turned down some serious musical film offers before accepting his new movie “Hairspray.” “I’ve wanted to do musical for thirty years, you know honestly. It’s just that, the ones that were offered to me, at the time they were offered “Phantom,” “Chorus Line,” and “Chicago.” I didn’t see it. And the producers of Hairspray kind of led me to a year and two months of thought on it. ‘We are going to do a little musical.’”
Travolta, who wears a drag fat suit in the film said his remembrances of his mother also entered into the picture. “This is 1962, and of course there was a different mom in those days. Bustiers for instance, But have you especially if you are overweight, but I do remember my mother wearing stockings, griddle bra, and then high heels, of course that was enough to exhaust her in getting ready. I remember her being exhausted, every time, and I thought, you know what’s up with this, why is it so exhausting. Well, cut to forty years later, I know exactly why it’s exhausting; I tried it, you know, and it would even take your breath away putting all that on.”
The mother imagery didn’t end there for Travolta “I have a library of memories, because I grew up with a lot of great women, but I also grew up with a lot of women in theatre, and women on films. And I think that collective memory of watching, you know I like watching women, but remember as an actor, I absorbed as much as I can. So, I think I never thought I would ever have to use it, but it didn’t mean that I wasn’t noticing it.
“I think that, you know you watch your mother’s friends, you watch the ladies on screen, on stage, you get to build up a knowledge of behavior. And to that degree it became, oh this is interesting, and I wonder what it would be like to try this. Or I remember so and so, and they look like that, and, you know the reactions were like, I mean, you know of course I had people reacting to me in fame. Do you know, whether it would be fans, or whatever so, and Tracy becoming a local, the character in that movie becoming a local star, I could be the fan reaction to that in some degree, to some degrees. So it was a mixture of things there.”
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For those who recall his old “Staying Alive 2” plot about how he had to learn to Broadway dance, he said “I remember years ago, when I was wanting to be a dance instructor first there, you had to practice both sides to teach, and I was only there for a couple of months, but I remember okay, I will just go back to that, you know you have to do the other side.”
He said “I am thirty years a leading man, and more then like kind of a macho leading man, what’s up, you know it’s like, why me, you know I was genuinely curious, why me? I mean, what was it about my performances in, you know Face-Off, or Broken Arrow, that made you think that I would look it as a h three hundred pound woman, do you know what I mean? It was that kind of a thing, and I was really dead serious, I said, why, I am not even going to look like me? I said, what is it, they said well, you can sing, and you can dance, and it is because you are sort of the opposite, that will be much more entertaining for people to watch, because you will pull it off.
“Only with our criteria, the criteria was, it had to be a woman, it could not be like a man dressed up as woman, and that meant big breast, big ass, little waist, and full prosthetic, where you really visually believed that there is no man in there. And if I could do that, then I could do the acting part of it, by, you know my ability to move and dance, I can round out a movement to be more feminine than more masculine, that’s just an ability, you know. So, with the help of the visual, I could add to up my character interpretation and my dance movements, they would, I knew I could add those layers to, you know.”