Much a do. – Review – movie reviews
Maria Di Paola
The men who created the outlandish dos for The Big Tease admit it wasn’t pure locks
Talk about your hair-raising finales. In the current vanity biz satire The Big Tease, a dauntless gay Scottish hairdresser (The Drew Carey Show’s Craig Ferguson) heads to Los Angeles to horn his way into an international hairstyling championship. And for the film’s final hair-off, “judged” by real-life locks-smiths-to-the-stars like John Paul DeJoria and Guiseppe Franco, models sport outrageous dos in shapes such as a pagoda, a Viking ship, and–soccer fans rejoice–Wembley Stadium. Hair hasn’t been this big since, well, director John Waters’s 1988 comedy Hairspray.
But drag divas will need more than Aqua Net if they’d like to have their hair so Tease’d. The film’s production designer Joseph Hodges and art director Mark A. Thomson used Play-Doh and Elmer’s glue to achieve their mountainous creations. “It was quite horrifying,” Hodges says of the workload. After Hodges sketched the whimsical designs, Thomson oversaw a team of technicians who painstakingly dyed, stitched, and glued real human hair to plastic sheeting that had been stretched over clay models. Each headpiece weighed from four to eight pounds and cost up to $12,000. Thomson, 42, who is gay, took advantage of his homo-ingenuity when the script called for a male doll to come pop from one of the dos. “Mattel [toys] was not at all interested in having their Ken doll seen in a gay context, so I suddenly remembered the Billy doll,” he says, referring to the toy marketed as a queer riff on Ken. Thus, the “out and proud,” anatomically enhanced doll was cast–proving that even in doll circles, gay men give good hair.
Di Paola also writes for the Los Angeles Times.
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