Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "Hairspray (2007 film)" in English language version.
By the way, for those who don't know the agents are Marc Shaiman, uh, that's [Adam Shankman] in the sunglasses, there's Ricki Lake, and Scott Wittman, the other lyricist, smoking....
Except that opening shot of Baltimore is the only shot of Baltimore in the entire movie. That and the newspaper going down on the stoop were actually shot in Baltimore. The Baltimore film commission made a big play to try and have us come there. We asked the question 'Do you have big sound stages?' and, uh, unfortunately the answer was no. When you do a movie musical you need big sound stages to build big sets, so because Baltimore did not have any big sets we shot in Toronto.
So the opening shot, basically coming down through the clouds and finding Baltimore is our homage to Robert Wise, to the director of West Side Story and The Sound of Music because both of those movies begin with shots through the clouds coming down. In West Side Story, it was through the streets of New York to find the Jets on this... schoolyard, and in, of course, the classic Sound of Music coming down through the clouds and finding Maria spinning on the mountaintop. And the other homage that we have in this song is, uh, our homage to Funny Girl. When Tracy Turnblad eventually gets on top of that garbage truck, that was our homage to Barbra Streisand in a tugboat during "Don't Rain on My Parade" in, in that great sequence in Funny Girl.
This was Michelle Pfeiffer's first scene, and [Blonsky's] hairstyle I stole... as a joke off of Funny Girl, which is also what the garbage truck was too, which is like the tugboat in Funny Girl, but Barbra Streisand has, like, a hairdo just exactly like this in, umm, the scene where she goes over to Nicky Arnstein.
I think we had to sew Amanda into that dress.... It's her curtains from her bedroom which is an homage to Sound of Music. Another one of my little musical references.
