7. For a selection of the film reviewers who likened the Corny Collins Show to American Bandstand, see Susan King, “If You Want Some More Hairspray,” Los Angeles Times, November 20, 2007, E2; David Ansen, “ ‘Hairspray’ Is a Plus-Size Pleaure,” Newsweek, July 23, 2007, http://www.newsweek.com/id/33063 (accessed September 15, 2007); Randy Cordova, “Hairspray,” The Arizona Republic, July 20, 2007, http://www.azcentral.com/ent/movies/articles/0720hairspray0720.html (accessed September 15, 2007); Dana Stevens, “Not a Drag,” Slate.com, July 19, 2007, http://www.slate.com/id/2170730/nav/tap3/(accessed September 15, 2007); Steve Persall, “‘Hairspray’ Sticks with Success,” St. Petersburg Times (Florida), July 19, 2007, 22W.
8. Fred Bronson, Dick Clark’s American Bandstand 50th Anniversary (New York: Time Life, 2007), 9.
9. My use of the term mediated history is influenced by Steve Anderson, “Loafing in the Garden of Knowledge: History TV and Popular Memory” Film and History 30, no.1 (March 2000): 14–23; Gary Edgerton, ed., Television Histories: Shaping Collective Memory in the Media Age (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001); Derek Kompare, Rerun Nation: How Repeats Invented American Television (New York: Routledge, 2005); George Lipsitz, Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990); Robert Rosenstone, History on Film/Film on History (Harlow, UK: Pearson, 2006); Lynn Spigel, “From the Dark Ages to the Golden Age: Women’s Memories and Television Reruns,” Screen 36, no.1 (Spring 1995): 16–33.
10. “‘Pilot’ Commentary with Executive Producer Dick Clark and Creator and Executive Producer Jonathan Prince,” in American Dreams, dir. Jonathan Prince (Universal Studios, 2004) (DVD, 7 discs), disc 1.
11. Quoted in Mark O’Donnell et. al., Hairspray: The Roots (New York: Faber and Faber, 2003), 92.
12. Caryn James, “For Fall, TV Looks Back, and Back,” New York Times, May 18, 2002, B7–8; Jeff Giles, “American Dreams,” Newsweek, September 16, 2002.
13. Lynn Spigel, “Entertainment Wars: Television Culture after 9/11,” American Quarterly 56, no. 2 (June 2004).
14. Michiko Kakutani, “And Now, Back to Our Regularly Scheduled Programming,” New York Times, September 11, 2002, 35.
15. Marita Sturken, Tourists of History: Memory, Kitsch, and Consumerism from Oklahoma City to Ground Zero (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 7.
16. Malini Johar Schueller, “The Borders and Limits of American Studies: A Picture from Beirut,” American Quarterly 6,. no. 4 (December 2009): 843; Sunaina Maira, Missing: Youth, Citizenship, and Empire after 9/11 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009); Evelyn Alsultany, “Selling American Diversity and Muslim American Identity through Nonprofit Advertising Post-9/11,” American Quarterly 59, no. 3 (September 2007): 593–622; Ashley Dawson and Malini Johar Schueller, eds., Exceptional State: Contemporary U.S. Culture and the New Imperialism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007).
17. Herman Gray, “Remembering Civil Rights: Television, Memory, and the 1960s,” in The Revolution Wasn’t Televised: Sixties Television and Social Conflict, ed. Lynn Spigel and Michael Curtin (New York: Routledge, 1997), 356.
18. Ibid., 353.
19. Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” Journal of American History 91, no. 4 (March 2005): 1237. Among other studies on the use of color-blind rhetoric to justify racial inequality, see Hazel Rose Markus and Paula Moya, “Doing Race: An Introduction,” in Doing Race: 21 Essays for the 21st Century, ed. Hazel Rose Markus and Paul Moya (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2010); Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States (New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2010).
20. Jonathan Prince, “National Association of Broadcasters Keynote Address,” April 18, 2005. See also Carla Hay, “Music and Showbiz,” Billboard, September 7, 2002; Carla Hay, “Sound Tracks,” Billboard, October 26, 2002.
21. On I’ll Fly Away and Homefront, see Mimi White, “‘Reliving the Past Over and Over Again,’: Race, Gender, and Popular Memory in Homefront and I’ll Fly Away,” in Living Color: Race and Television in the United States, ed. Sasha Torres (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 118–39. On other television civil rights dramas in this era, see Jennifer Fuller, “Recovering the Past: Race, Nation, and Civil Rights Drama in the Nineties” (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2004).
22. John Levesque, “‘American Dreams’ Strikes Timely Chord,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, July 26, 2002.
23. “New Frontier,” in American Dreams, disc 1.
24. Ibid.
25. On the struggle over the memory of segregation on American Bandstand, see chapter 7.
26. Jonathan Storm, “Philadelphia Dreamin’ (out in L.A.),” Philadelphia Inquirer, January 4, 2004, H1.
27. On the North Philadelphia riot, see Leonora Berson, Case Study of a Riot: The Philadelphia Story (New York: Institute of Human Relations Press, 1966); Matthew Countryman, Up South: Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 154–64.
28. The original performance of “Jenny Take a Ride” by Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels took place in January 1966. Michael Shore and Dick Clark, The History of American Bandstand: It’s Got a Great Beat and You Can Dance to It (New York: Ballantine Books, 1985), 135.
29. “Past Imperfect,” in American Dreams, disc 5; “The Carpet Baggers,” in American Dreams, disc 5.
30. “City on Fire,” in American Dreams, disc 7.
31. “‘City on Fire’ Commentary with Executive Producer Dick Clark and Creator and Executive Producer Jonathan Prince,” in American Dreams, disc 7.
32. Ibid.
33. Ibid.
34. Ibid.
35. Jennifer Hochschild, Facing Up to the American Dream: Race, Class, and the Soul of the Nation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 55.
36. Darren K. Carlson, “Civil Rights: A Profile in Profiling,” Gallop, July 9, 2002, http://www.gallup.com/poll/6361/civil-rights-profile-profiling.aspx (accessed October 15, 2010).
37. On how race and class shaped ways of seeing the 1992 Los Angeles riots, see Darnell Hunt, Screening the Los Angeles ‘Riots’: Race, Seeing, and Resistance (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
38. Gray, “Remembering Civil Rights,” 351.
39. “‘City on Fire’ Commentary with Executive Producer Dick Clark and Creator and Executive Producer Jonathan Prince,” in American Dreams, disc 7.
40. Barry Goldwater, “Peace through Strength: Private Property, Free Competition, Hard Work,” Vital Speeches of the Day 30 (October 1, 1964): 746.
41. Gerald Horne, The Fire This Time: The Watts Uprising and the 1960s (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1995); Steve Macek, Urban Nightmares: The Media, the Rights, and the Moral Panic over the City (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), xii.
42. George Lipsitz, “Foreword,” in Listening to the Lambs, Johnny Otis (1968; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), ix.
43. Laura Wexler, “The Last Dance,” Style: Smart Living in Baltimore, September/October 2003, 130–35; 166–69; John Waters, Crackpot: The Obsessions of John Waters (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1986), 97; “The Roots of Hairspray,” in Hairspray, dir. Adam Shankman (New Line, 2007; DVD, 2 discs), disc 2; “Buddy Dean, 78, TV Host and Inspiration of ‘Hairspray,’” New York Times, July 27, 2003, N30.
44. Wexler, “The Last Dance,” 167.
45. Aljean Harmetz, “John Waters Cavorts in the Mainstream,” New York Times, February 21, 1988, 84.
46. Hairspray was reviewed more widely and, in general, more favorably than Waters’s earlier films. On these reviews, see Julie Salamon, “On Film: ‘Hairspray’ and ‘Frantic,’” Wall Street Journal, February 1988, 24; Alan Bell, “ ‘Hairspray’ Settles on 60s Integration,” Los Angeles Sentinel, March 10, 1988, B8; Janet Maslin, “Film: ‘Hairspray,’ C
omedy from John Waters,” New York Times, February 26, 1998, C17; Rita Kempley, “‘Hairspray’: John Waters’ Baldly Comic Look Back,” Washington Post, February 26, 1988, Bi; David Sterritt, “Two Films Dealing Unconventionally with Concerns of Blacks,” Christian Science Monitor, February 26, 1988, 21.
47. My use of fat rather than overweight is influenced by The Fat Studies Reader. Marilyn Wann, writes: “Currently in mainstream U.S. society, the O-words, ‘overweight’ and ‘obese,’ are considered more acceptable, even more polite, than the F-word, ‘fat.’ In the field of fat studies, there is agreement that the O-words are neither neutral nor benign. … In fat studies, there is respect for the political project of reclaiming the word fat, both as the preferred neutral adjective (i.e., short/tall, young/old, fat/thin) and also the preferred term of political identity. There is nothing negative or rude in the word fat unless someone makes the effort to put it there; using the word fat as a descriptor (not a discriminator) can help dispel prejudice.” Marilyn Wann, “Foreword,” in The Fat Studies Reader, ed. Esther Rothblum and Sondra Solovay (New York: New York University Press, 2009), xii.
48. Hairspray, dir. John Waters (New Line Cinema, 1988; DVD; New Line Home Entertainment; 2002).
49. “John Waters Commentary,” in Hairspray (1988); “The Roots of Hairspray,” in Hairspray (2007), disc 2; O’Donnell et. al., Hairspray: The Roots, 11. On John Waters’s revision of the history of the Buddy Deane Show, see Renee Curry, “Hairspray: The Revolutionary Way to Restructure and Hold Your History,” Literature Film Quarterly 24 no. 2 (1996): 165–68.
50. “John Water interview with Terry Gross,” Fresh Air (NPR, 1988), July 19, 2007, transcript available on Lexis-Nexis Academic Universe.
51. O’Donnell et. al., Hairspray: The Roots, 6–13.
52. Jesse McKinley, “Baltimore Embraces Its Offbeat Child, ‘Hairspray,’” New York Times, September 18, 2003.
53. “The Roots of Hairspray,” in Hairspray (2007), disc 2.
54. On the use of music to increase the commercial potential of popular films, see Jeff Smith, The Sounds of Commerce: Marketing Popular Film Music (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998); Jonathan Romney and Adrian Wootton, ed., Celluloid Jukebox: Popular Music and the Movies since the 50s (London: British Film Institute, 1995).
55. Hairspray (2007), disc 1.
56. Ibid; O’Donnell et. al., Hairspray: The Roots, 22–26. On the comic uses of music in film, see Jeff Smith, “Popular Songs and Comic Allusion in Contemporary Cinema,” in Soundtrack Available, ed. Pamela Robertson Wojcik and Arthur Knight (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 407–30.
57. “Commentary with Producers Craig Zadan and Neil Meron,” in Hairspray, dir. Adam Shankman (New Line, 2007; DVD, 2 discs), disc 1.
58. Ibid.
59. “Commentary with Producers Craig Zadan and Neil Meron,” in Hairspray (2007), disc 1.
60. Ibid.
61. Ibid.
62. Hairspray (2007), disc 1.
63. On the financial exploitation of black musicians, see Redd, Rock Is Rhythm and Blues; Guralnick, Feel Like Going Home; Chapple and Garofalo, Rock ’n’ Roll Is Here to Pay, 231–69; Walsh, “Black-Oriented Radio and the Civil Rights Movement,” 67–81; Brian Ward, Just My Soul Responding: Rhythm and Blues, Black Consciousness, and Race Relations (Berkeley: University of California, 1998), 339–450.
64. “Commentary with Director Adam Shankman,” in Hairspray (2007), disc 1; “Commentary with Producers Craig Zadan and Neil Meron,” in Hairspray (2007), disc 1.
65. Hairspray (2007).
66. Ibid.
67. Ibid.
68. “Commentary with Producers Craig Zadan and Neil Meron,” in Hairspray (2007), disc 1.
69. “You Can’t Stop the Beat: The Long Journey of Hairspray,” in Hairspray (2007), disc 2.
70. See note 48.
71. “The Roots of Hairspray,” in Hairspray (2007), disc 2.
72. “Adam Shankman Interview with Terry Gross,” Fresh Air (NPR), July 19, 2007, transcript available on Lexis-Nexis Academic Universe.
73. Allison Graham, “Reclaiming the South: Civil Rights Films and the New Red Menace,” in Brian Ward, ed., Media, Culture, and the Modern African American Freedom Struggle (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001), 82–103; Fuller, “Recovering the Past.”
74. Hairspray (2007), disc 1.
75. Ibid.
76. Ibid.
77. Ibid.
78. “Commentary with Producers Craig Zadan and Neil Meron,” in Hair- spray (2007), disc 1.
79. Hairspray (2007), disc 1.
80. Ibid.
81. Richard Dyer, “Entertainment and Utopia,” in Hollywood Musicals, The Film Reader, ed. Steven Cohan (New York: Routledge, 2002), 19–29.
82. On Mississippi Burning and Forrest Gump, see Robert Rosenstone, Visions of the Past: The Challenges of Film to Our Idea of History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 72–73; Sumiko Higashi, “Walker and Mississippi Burning: Postmdernism versus Illusionist Narrative,” in The Historical Film: History and Memory in Media, ed. Marica Landy (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001), 218–31; Vincent Rocchio, Reel Racism Confronting Hollywood’s Construction of Afro-American Culture (Boulder: Westview Press, 2000), 95–113; Robert Burgoyne, Film Nation: Hollywood Looks at U.S. History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 104–19.
83. “Commentary with Producers Craig Zadan and Neil Meron,” in Hairspray (2007).
84. Joseph Cermatori, Emily Coates, Kathryn Krier, Bronwen MacArthur, Angelica Randle, and Joseph Roach, “Teaching African American Dance / History to a ‘Post-Racial’ Class: Yale’s Project O,” Theatre Topics 19, no. 1 (2009): 11.
CONCLUSION
1. Nina Simone with Stephen Cleary, I Put a Spell on You: The Autobiography of Nina Simone (New York: Da Capo Press, 1993), 89.
2. Nina Simone, “Mississippi Goddam,” 1964, Nina Simone: Anthology, disc 1 (compact disc; RCA/BMG; 2003).
3. Simone, I Put a Spell on You, 90.
4. Thomas Sugrue, Not Even Past: Barack Obama and the Burden of Race (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 4.
5. Robert Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003); David Freund, Colored Property: State Policy and White Racial Politics in Suburban America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); Becky Nicolaides, My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working-Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920–1965 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Eric Avila, Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).
6. Thomas Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (New York: Random House, 2008); Jeanne Theoharis and Komozi Woodard, eds., Freedom North: Black Freedom Struggles outside the South, 1940–1980 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); Jeanne Theoharis and Komozi Woodard, eds., Groundwork: Local Black Freedom Movements in America (New York: New York University Press, 2005); Martha Biondi, To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003).
7. Lynn Spigel, Welcome to the Dreamhouse: Popular Media and Postwar Suburbs (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001); Lynn Spigel, Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Anna McCarthy, Ambient Television: Visual Culture and Public Space (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001); Steven Classen, Watching Jim Crow: The Struggles over Mississippi TV, 1955–1969 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004); Mark Williams, “Entertaining ‘Difference’: Strains of Orientalism in Early Los Angeles Television,” in Living Color: Race and Television in the United States, ed. Sasha Torres (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 12–34; Victoria Johnson, Heartland TV: Prime Time Television and the Struggle for U.S. Identity (New York: NYU Press, 2008).
8. George Lipsitz, Time Passages: Collective
Memory and American Popular Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990); Mimi White, “‘Reliving the Past Over and Over Again’: Race, Gender, and Popular Memory in Homefront and I’ll Fly Away,” in Living Color: Race and Television in the United States, ed. Sasha Torres (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 118–39; Jennifer Fuller, “Recovering the Past: Race, Nation, and Civil Rights Drama in the Nineties” (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2004); Herman Gray, “Remembering Civil Rights: Television, Memory, and the 1960s,” in The Revolution Wasn’t Televised: Sixties Television and Social Conflict, ed. Lynn Spigel and Michael Curtin (New York: Routledge, 1997), 349–58.
9. Kelly Schrum, Some Wore Bobby Sox: The Emergence of Teenage Girl’s Culture, 1920–1945 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); Susan Douglas, Where the Girls Are: Growing up Female with the Mass Media (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1994); Aniko Bodroghkozy, Groove Tube: Sixties Television and the Youth Rebellion (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001); Matt Garcia, “‘Memories of El Monte’: Intercultural Dance Halls in Post-World War II Greater Los Angeles,” in Generations of Youth: Youth Cultures and History in Twentieth-Century America, ed. Joe Austin and Michael Nevin Willard (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 157–72.
10. Matthew Countryman, Up South: Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006); Matthew Countryman, “‘From Protest to Politics’: Community Control and Black Independent Politics in Philadelphia, 1965–1984,” Journal of Urban History 32 (September 2006): 813–61; James Wolfinger, Philadelphia Divided: Race and Politics in the City of Brotherly Love (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); James Wolfinger, “The Limits of Black Activism: Philadel- phia’s Public Housing in the Depression and World War II,” Journal of Urban History 35 (September 2009): 787–814; Guian McKee, The Problem of Jobs: Liberalism, Race, and Deindustrialization in Philadelphia (Chicago: University Chicago Press, 2008); Guian McKee, “ ‘I’ve Never Dealt with a Government Agency Before’: Philadelphia’s Somerset Knitting Mills Project, the Local State, and the Missed Opportunities of Urban Renewal,” Journal of Urban History 35 (March 2009): 387–409; Lisa Levenstein, A Movement without Marches: African American Women and the Politics of Poverty in Postwar Philadelphia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009).
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