CHAPTER 8
Still Boppin’ on Bandstand
American Dreams, Hairspray, and American Bandstand in the 2000s
It was fifty years ago today that American Bandstand changed the way a generation listened to music and brought rock and roll into American living rooms. … Even today the show is influencing pop culture, changing people’s lives. American Bandstand may not be on the air now, but it’s in our hearts forever.
—Good Morning America, August 5, 2007
For a show that left television in 1989, American Bandstand was very busy in the 2000s. In 2007, Time Life promoted “Dick Clark’s American Bandstand 50th Anniversary Collection” through television infomercials.1 This twelve-CD box set, like the dozens of other compilations over the past half-century, marketed the history of rock and roll under the American Bandstand and Dick Clark brands. Numerous media outlets also paid tribute to American Bandstand’s fiftieth anniversary, including Good Morning America, which described Bandstand as a generation-defining show for baby boomers and traced Bandstand’s influence on the contemporary reality television program American Idol.2 Two months before this anniversary attention, Washington Redskins football team owner Daniel Snyder bought dick clark productions, including the rights to the American Bandstand name and over eight hundred hours of footage, for $175 million. Snyder, whose private equity firm also owns Johnny Rockets, a 1950s-themed hamburger chain, told USA Today: “[w]e feel there’s an Americana synergy between Johnny Rockets and American Bandstand and can visualize a video box system in our locations featuring our content.”3 Snyder is also the chairman of the board of Six Flags amusement parks, and the company’s chief executive officer told the Washington Post that he “envisions the 877 hour-long ‘American Bandstand’ reruns being broadcast on plasma screens across Six Flags parks.”4 Given these developments, the commercial profitability and longevity of American Bandstand will extend well past its fiftieth anniversary year.
While it is impossible to predict how future visitors to Johnny Rockets or Six Flags will understand the history of the American Bandstand era, two recent productions take up these questions directly. The Emmy award–winning television drama American Dreams explores race relations in early 1960s Philadelphia on and around American Bandstand. And the musical film Hairspray tells the story of the struggle over segregation on Baltimore’s version of American Bandstand. As commercial productions, the stories of the past presented in American Dreams and Hairspray have reached, and continue to reach, millions of viewers in dozens of countries. During its three seasons, American Dreams drew an audience of 8 to 13 million viewers each week, and the first season of the show is available on DVD.5 The 2007 film version of Hairspray, meanwhile, grossed over $110 million in the United States and $80 million internationally and earned another $100 million in U.S. DVD sales, and the USA network paid $13 million for the cable rights to the film.6 Although Hairspray does not mention American Bandstand by name, many film critics described Hairspray’s Corny Collins Show as an “ American Bandstand-style” program.7 Even the American Bandstand 50th Anniversary Collection booklet notes that “Hairspray … chronicles the integration of a fictional Baltimore-based Bandstand-type TV series.”8
Whereas the link between Hairspray and American Bandstand was obvious for several reviewers, for younger viewers who were drawn to the film by teen stars Zac Effron (High School Musical) and Amanda Bynes (The Amanda Show), Hairspray might be the first introduction to American Bandstand-era dance shows. Likewise, American Dreams appealed to young viewers with cameo performances by contemporary popular music stars portraying artists from the 1960s. For this younger generation, the history of American Bandstand starts not with the images of the show itself, but with representations of the era in American Dreams and Hairspray. As such, these recent productions are crucial to understanding how the popular history of the American Bandstand era is being articulated in the 2000s.
There is much to recommend both American Dreams and Hairspray. While selected images from American Bandstand have long circulated in popular media, American Dreams and Hairspray provide narrative context to show how televised teenage dance shows became historically important for young people in particular times and places. Both productions use historically informed representations to tell stories in which television plays a central role. This is not to argue that these productions rely strictly on verifiable data or aim for the level of accuracy that one expects of written history. Rather, American Dreams and Hairspray juxtapose familiar televisual themes from the American Bandstand era with fictionalized characters, dialogue, and televisual representations. The resulting narratives present the history of the American Bandstand era in a way that inextricably links the subjects that are central to my project: teenage television, music, youth culture, urban space, racial discrimination, and civil rights. Although American Dreams’ and Hairspray’s respective methods of historical storytelling are tuned to commercial audiences, both productions use moving images, music, and dancing to celebrate and critique the mediated history of American Bandstand in ways that are not possible in written history.9 At their best, American Dreams and Hairspray approach the history of televised teen dance shows with more nuance and complexity than Dick Clark’s popular histories of American Bandstand. At the same time, however, American Dreams and Hairspray frequently use this nuance and complexity in the service of comforting narratives about interracial unity and white innocence.
The producers of both American Dreams and the Broadway version of Hairspray cited September 11 as the event that made their nostalgic stories of interracial unity and white innocence in the American Bandstand era relevant in the 2000s. In his commentary on the pilot episode, American Dreams’ creator Jonathan Prince reflected on the connections between September 11 and the 1960s:
When I wrote the pilot and I turned it in in August, a month later I got a phone call from one of the guys at NBC who had been helping me develop [the show]. … [He] called me and said, “are you watching TV?” … And I turned on the TV, and its September 11th, and I’m watching buildings in flames, and he said, “I think your show just got a lot more relevant.” Because there was a generation of people who didn’t know what it felt like to lose President Kennedy. This is, where were you when you [sic] walked on the moon? Where were you when President Kennedy was killed? Where were you when Martin Luther King was shot? … We have a generation who lived pretty much without that … but this was epic, the tragedy of losing President Kennedy was epic … there are these moments that unify us as a people and often they’re tragedy, sadly. And this was one of them.10
The pilot episode of American Dreams shows characters reacting to news of the assassination of President Kennedy before closing with black-and-white footage of NBC’s live coverage of the event from 1963. Here, American Dreams shows people unified across racial and generational lines in the face of a tragedy, and this historical narrative offers a “relevant” model for viewers after September 11. Jeff Zucker, NBC’s president, agreed that while the series “was not developed in response to what happened [on September 11] it resonates with what happened.”
David Rockwell offered similar comments regarding his work as a set designer on the Broadway production of Hairspray: “The heart of Hairspray—both the movie and the musical—encompasses John Waters’s belief in racial, sexual, class and body-type tolerance. Although it went unspoken, as a result of September 11, 2001, every member of the Hairspray family realized the significance of transferring John’s vision of empowerment and hopefulness to the stage.”11
Critics also reviewed American Dreams and Hairspray in the context of post-September 11 entertainment. When American Dreams debuted in fall 2002, it was joined by another show on the 1960s (the comedy Oliver Beene), remakes of three 1950s and 1960s era programs (Dragnet, Twilight Zone, and Family Affair), two shows about men reliving their high school days in the 1980s (the comedy Do Over and the drama That Was Then), and retrospective specials on Lucille Ba
ll, Jackie Gleason, Jerry Lewis, and Ozzie and Harriet Nelson. Commenting on this fall schedule, New York Times critic Caryn James wrote:
What we’ll be watching in the fall suggests that programmers believe the mood to be overwhelmingly nostalgic and backwardlooking. … One after the other the networks—rarely adventurous to begin with—wrapped themselves in the flag, offered schedules dripping with nostalgia and announced shows that will play it safer than ever.
Even in this context of nostalgic television programming, American Dreams’ promotional material stood out. NBC promoted American Dreams heavily during its 9/ii anniversary coverage, encouraging viewers to “Remember the innocence. Remember the music.”12 As part of the first television season developed after September 11, American Dreams was part of what media studies scholar Lynn Spigel describes as an effort to channel “the nation back to normalcy—or at least to the normal flows of television and consumer culture.” “The return to normal,” Spigel argues, “was enacted not just through the narrative frames of news stories but also through the repositioning of audiences back into television’s fictive time and places.”13 Michiko Kakutani, writing in the New York Times, noted that this emphasis on nostalgia and a comforting return to normalcy extended to both Hollywood and Broadway, where
producers have decided Americans want … nostalgia—the logic being that people in times of trouble will gravitate toward entertainment that reminds them of simpler, happier times [such as] the candy-colored Broadway musical ‘Hairspray’ and the much hyped new NBC show ‘American Dreams [which] draw on fond remembrances of the ‘American Bandstand’ era.14
One of the interesting things about the renewed attention to the American Bandstand era in the 2000s is that both producers and critics of American Dreams and Hairspray took it as self-evident that stories about race relations in the 1960s would be comforting and nostalgic for viewers in the years after 9/11. Left unsaid in the promotion and reception of these productions was that both American Dreams and Hairspray looked to the familiar domestic black-white racial binary at a time when the dimensions of race in the United States had become increasingly multiethnic and transnational. Viewed in this light, the narratives of innocence and interracial unity featured prominently in American Dreams and Hairspray can be seen as comforting because they are not about the geopolitics of the contemporary United States. As media studies scholar Marita Sturken argues,
American national identity, and the telling of American history, has been fundamentally based on a disavowal of the role played in world politics by the United States not simply as a world power, but as a nation with imperialist policies and aspirations to empire. This disavowal of the United States as an empire has allowed for the nation’s dominant self- image as perennially innocent.15
Similarly, with narratives that solve the problem of black-white racial tensions in the 1960s through interracial cooperation, American Dreams and Hairspray could also be comforting because they were not about the political and cultural citizenship struggles of Muslims and Muslim-Americans. Focusing on these citizenship struggles in the context of 9/11 and U.S. imperialism, scholars like Sunaina Maira, Evelyn Alsultany, and Malini Johar Schueller have reiterated the “problems of imagining the nation as singular community.”16 The racial profiling and detention of Muslims and Muslim-Americans may seem far removed from the American Bandstand era, but that, in some ways, is the point. More research is needed to understand how civil rights narratives are being used after 9/11, but at a time when other racial dimensions were emerging, American Dreams and Hairspray located their narratives of national unity and innocence safely in domestic black-white racial tensions in the 1960s.
While both American Dreams and Hairspray portray racial conflicts to raise the dramatic tensions, both productions manage these racial conflicts so as not to offend the “fond remembrances” of contemporary viewers. American Dreams cuts between overlapping story lines to present multiple perspectives on racial conflicts, but refuses to criticize white racism. Hairspray, meanwhile, locates racism within a single villainous character. Both productions, moreover, are organized around the coming of age stories of teenage protagonists. Encouraging viewers to identify with these innocent characters, American Dreams and Hairspray make a virtue out of historical naivety regarding race. Presented in this way, the American Bandstand era becomes part of a simplistic history in which changing racial attitudes in the 1960s produced a color-blind and fully equal society.
In this respect, American Dreams and Hairspray are part of a much larger struggle over how the history of the civil rights era is remembered. As media studies scholar Herman Gray argues, “the civil rights subject performs important cultural work since it helps construct the mythic terms through which many Americans can believe that our nation has now transcended racism.”17 These popular histories of the civil rights era, Gray notes, say as much (or more) about the present as the past, producing raced subjects “who fit the requirements of contemporary circumstance.”18 For viewers in the 2000s, American Dreams and Hairspray provide narrative proof that individual racial prejudice existed “back then,” but was overcome through the racial tolerance of whites and the successful assimilation of African Americans. Scholars like Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Paula Moya, Hazel Rose Markus, and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva have described how narratives such as this provide the foundation for claims that in the post-civil rights era, the United States is a color-blind or post-racial society. Hall traces the logic and implications of this narrative:
In the absence of overtly discriminatory laws and with the waning of conscious bias, American institutions became basically fair. Free to compete in a market-driven society, African Americans thereafter bore the onus of their own failure and success. If stark group inequalities persisted, black attitudes, behavior, and family structure were to blame.19
With limited consideration of the structural aspects of racism, the narratives of interracial unity in American Dreams and Hairspray too easily bleed into narratives that take color-blindness to have been the singular objective and most important legacy of the civil rights era. My point here is not that American Dreams and Hairspray are bad history. Rather, I am most interested in the ways American Dreams and Hairspray look to the American Bandstand era to tell stories about the past and present, and how these productions foreground narratives of white innocence and interracial unity that work against structural understandings of racism.
AMERICAN DREAMS
In looking to the music, television, youth culture, and race relations of the American Bandstand era, American Dreams’ producers offered the show to advertisers and viewers as a series that could be both entertaining and educational. In a speech at a broadcasters’ meeting, American Dreams producer Jonathan Prince said that in addition to commercial success in ratings and advertisements, “what we want is to make a difference. What we want is to know that people are watching. And not merely watching, but talking about it.”20 Unlike I’ll Fly Away or Home-front, early 1990s civil rights dramas that earned critical praise as “quality television” but failed to draw large popular audiences, American Dreams promised to be serious enough to prompt conversations regarding race relations while remaining commercially viable.21 As part of this commercial appeal, Prince gained Dick Clark’s permission to use old clips from American Bandstand.22 Prince and Clark became co-executive producers of American Dreams, although Prince led the day-to-day series production. American Dreams also featured contemporary musical artists portraying historical performances on American Bandstand (e.g., Usher as Marvin Gaye, Vanessa Carlton as Dusty Springfield, and Kelly Rowland as Martha Reeves).
Through historical footage and recreated per formances, American Dreams established the importance of American Bandstand, and television more broadly, to the social life of the 1960s. Television, moreover, is central to the social and economic dreams of several of the show’s characters. The program examines the lives of a white family (the Priors) and a black family (the Walkers) in early 1960s
Philadelphia. The social life of the show’s teenage protagonist, Meg Prior (Brittany Snow), revolves around American Bandstand. The economic well-being of both families, meanwhile, hinges on the success of Jack Prior’s (Tom Verica) television store, where Henry Walker (Jonathan Adams) also works. By making television central to how the show’s characters have fun, earn a living, and learn about the news of their city and the nation, American Dreams fused television history and local race relations in a provocative way. Regardless of how different viewers interpret American Dreams or the show’s portrayal of American Bandstand, the program demands that these interpretations account for television as a medium that mediates, records, and reenacts history.
Unlike Dick Clark’s popular histories of American Bandstand, which detached the show from the social history of postwar Philadelphia, American Dreams offers a more nuanced history of American Bandstand by situating its story line in the context of early 1960s Philadelphia. The first scene in the pilot episode, for example, opens with a caption reading “Philadelphia, 1963” and immediately shows teens waiting to be admitted to American Bandstand. Next, the program shows two of its teenage protagonists, Meg Prior and Roxanne Bojarski (Vanessa Len-gies), running home to watch American Bandstand on television. As these teens race home, the camera cuts to Meg’s mother and sister in the living room watching a locally broadcast cooking show. The scene moves through the television, from the living room to the WFIL studio, where a camera crew is shooting the cooking show. This television-as-portal shot is used a second time, to move from the WFIL studio to Jack Prior’s television store, where kids are gathering to watch American Bandstand. The scene then returns to show Meg and Roxanne running home as the crew of American Bandstand counts down to airtime inside the WFIL studio. The reenactment of American Bandstand opens with a soft focus on the actor playing Dick Clark in the background, and a hard focus on the black-and-white historical footage of Dick Clark on the television monitor. After the “historical” Clark introduces Martha and the Vandel-las, the scene shifts among three sets of dancers: Meg and Roxanne dancing at home, kids dancing in Meg’s father’s television store, and teens dancing in the American Bandstand studio. Within the first six minutes of the debut episode, American Dreams portrays the complexity of the production and consumption of American Bandstand through this range of televisual representations.
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