Plot
Tracy Turnblad and her best friend, Penny Pingleton, audition for The Corny Collins Show, a popular Baltimore teenage dance show based on the real-life Buddy Deane Show. Penny is too nervous and stumbles over her answers, and Nadine is cut for being black (there is a 'Negro Day' on the show on the last Thursday of every month, she is told). However, despite being overweight, Tracy becomes a regular on the show, infuriating the show's reigning queen, Amber Von Tussle, a mean, privileged, beautiful high school classmate whose pushy stage parents, Velma and Franklin Von Tussle, own Tilted Acres amusement park (based on Baltimore's Gwynn Oak Amusement Park, where racial problems occurred). Tracy steals Amber's boyfriend, Link Larkin, and competes against her for the title of Miss Auto Show 1963, fueling Amber's hatred of her.
Tracy's growing confidence leads to her being hired as a plus-size model for the Hefty Hideaway clothing store owned by Mr. Pinky. She is also inspired to bleach, tease, and rat her big hair into styles popular in the 1960s. At school, a teacher brands her hairstyle as a "hair-don't" and sends her to the principal's office, from which Tracy is sent to special education classes, where she meets several black classmates who have been put there to hold them back academically. The students introduce Tracy to Motormouth Maybelle, an R&B record shop owner and host of the monthly "Negro Day" on The Corny Collins Show. They teach Tracy, Penny, and Link dance moves and Penny begins an interracial romance with Motormouth Maybelle's son, Seaweed. This horrifies Penny's mother, Prudence, who imprisons her daughter in her bedroom and tries to brainwash her into dating white boys and oppose integration with the help of a quack psychiatrist, Dr. Fredrickson. Seaweed later helps her break out of the house and run away. It is implied that she will never return, as she has finally broken free from her mother.
Undeterred, Tracy uses her newfound fame to champion the cause of racial integration with the help of Motormouth Maybelle, Corny Collins, his assistant Tammy, and Tracy's agoraphobic, slightly overbearing, and overweight mother, Edna. After a race riot at Tilted Acres results in Tracy's arrest, the Von Tussles grow more defiant in their opposition to racial integration. They plot to sabotage the Miss Auto Show 1963 pageant by planting a bomb in Velma's bouffant hairdo. The plan literally blows up in Velma's face when the bomb detonates prematurely, resulting in the Von Tussles' arrest by the Baltimore police after it lands on Amber's head. Tracy, who had won the crown but was disqualified for being in reform school, dethrones Amber after the governor of Maryland pardons her; Tracy then shows up at the competition, integrates the show, and encourages everyone to dance.
Read more about this topic: Hairspray (1988 Film)
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“If you need a certain vitality you can only supply it yourself, or there comes a point, anyway, when no one’s actions but your own seem dramatically convincing and justifiable in the plot that the number of your days concocts.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“The plot was most interesting. It belonged to no particular age, people, or country, and was perhaps the more delightful on that account, as nobody’s previous information could afford the remotest glimmering of what would ever come of it.”
—Charles Dickens (1812–1870)