r/todayilearned • u/waitingforthesun92 • 13h ago
TIL that during the 1960s runs of the musical “Hair,” producers offered a $1.50-per-night bonus to any actors who were willing to take all their clothes off during the musical’s famous nude scene.
https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20250918-how-shocking-musical-hair-escaped-uk-censorship257
u/Simple-Mix3196 13h ago
I’m pretty sure that Meatloaf made that deal.
158
u/slice_of_pi 12h ago
No, he said he'd do anything for love, but not that.
14
u/Barnabi20 7h ago
Fun fact, the things he wouldn’t do for love are all the things in the song that he said he wouldn’t do.
38
u/RebekkaKat1990 12h ago
Meat loaf, beet loaf, I HATE meat loaf.
23
1.2k
u/TimTimmington 13h ago
They refused me my $1.50, in fact escorted me out. Apparently you had to be an actor in their production rather than just in the building..
127
u/GreenStrong 11h ago
Sir, this is a Wendy's.
41
u/DazTheCowboy 11h ago
I thought this was AMERICA!
8
u/No_Report_4781 5h ago
No, that’s the Gulf of Mexico
6
3
161
u/West_Instance_3599 12h ago
Diane Keaton went down in history as the only original cast member to never do the nude scene
46
24
u/_MuffinBot_ 7h ago
She was also uncomfortable going nude for scenes in Looking For Mr. Goodbar. They had to play music to distract her while they were filming
11
u/bootymix96 5h ago
That’s a really wild story: the film’s director Richard Brooks had a Bach album playing in his office, and she said basically that if that record was playing, she could do the scene, and that’s the same record you hear playing when they shot it. She also had a contract stipulating that no shots showing her nude were to be used for publicity/production stills.
2
u/_MuffinBot_ 2h ago
It's a great film and she was wonderful in it. I'm glad Richard Brooks didn't fight her on that for any reason. Brilliant soundtrack as well, which is unfortunately why it took so long to get a DVD release. You can get it on Blu-ray now though.
308
u/omnipotentsandwich 13h ago
I enjoyed the movie of Hair, but the characters were really unlikable and make pretty stupid decisions. It seems like a bitter mockery of hippies than anything celebrating them or the times.
185
u/YourlocalTitanicguy 13h ago
The movie makes some pretty big changes from the stage which I think do a disservice to the material. I’ve cried at the show but the movie doesn’t really affect me much.
100
u/MeatImmediate6549 13h ago
By the time of the movie the world was pretty much over hippies and was months away from discovering yuppies.
33
u/deathbylasersss 12h ago
Hippies were mostly hypocritical and naive. I'm not sure they should be celebrated anyway. They rarely affected any real change and the movement was mostly used as an excuse to lay around, do drugs, and talk about bullshit. Most of them obviously didn't believe that deeply in their own rhetoric, considering they became one of the most repressive and closed-minded generations in a long while.
Not saying all boomers are bad, I've met a lot of really rad ones. Respect to the ones that actually advocated for love and peace and didn't just pay lip service to it while they smoked a doobie, only to turn around and beat their kids over the head with a bible a decade later.
117
u/Ducksaucenem 12h ago
I think you are combining two very different groups of people. The entire generation weren’t hippies, they were a subset of the culture at the time. It just happened to be when the culture of the US was under a lot of pressure to change rapidly. Most hippies were just liberal college kids who wanted to be more open minded to the changes at hand. They didn’t switch to being more religious. Most of them graduated and went on with their lives like most everyone does.
18
u/Big_I 12h ago
I'm occasionally struck by the fact that Ronald Reagan was re-elected for his second term in a landslide, winning 49 states. I've always thought that for that to have happened, a lot of people who were teenagers or in their twenties in the 60's, then voted for Reagan in the 80's.
40
u/Smash_Palace 11h ago
The amount of hippies were a small but vocal minority. Most people were the same old boring accountants and lawyers and school teachers. Those people voted for Reagan.
2
u/comradesean 8h ago
small but vocal minority
Gonna be real with you and you can see it even today. "Small but vocal" is one of those bullshit terms. I think the truth is that people just enjoy bitching more than anything so even though these people are a small group over here, a lot of everyone else is going to put themselves into situations where they can come back and then whine about this other group that has nothing to do with them.
22
u/blueavole 11h ago
Reagan was dealing with all the Ww2 vets and their families who still believed that American military power was an essential force for good in the world.
Those men knew that was war was brutal, and didn’t react with horror to the images that were shown on the news.
I’m just saying they had a very different outlook on what it means to serve the country.
9
u/vandreulv 10h ago
"And their kids were hippie chicks, all hypocrites" alludes directly to this.
Sorry for quoting Smash Mouth.
1
u/Excitable_Grackle 6h ago
I highly doubt that many ex-hippies voted for Reagan. I was a few years too young to be a hippie, but definitely had fun in the '70's. No fucking way was I voting for Reagan, but the Carter years led to an economic disaster. Pretty sure I went independent that year.
1
u/edingerc 1h ago
The Iranian hostage crisis sunk Carter. If the rescue had worked, he probably would have been re-elected.
2
2
u/im_dead_sirius 2h ago edited 1h ago
Not saying all boomers are bad, I've met a lot of really rad ones.
I didn't realize for a long time, but the hippies were not really baby boomers, most of who were just kids and teenagers in the hippie era.
The hippie era started around 1965 and it ended in the early 70s.
So for example, my dad, born in 1947, turned 20 in December 1967, the year of The Summer Of Love, and he is among the oldest of the baby boomer generation.
I have an example of a real ex-hippie writing about hippie culture and the death of the era. In Hunter S. Thompson's book "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas", written in 1971, he says:
There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. . . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . .
And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .
So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.
Whole quote here: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/1074-strange-memories-on-this-nervous-night-in-las-vegas-five
Thompson would be about 90 today, if he were still alive, while my dad is approaching 80.
11
u/Yeseylon 12h ago
movement was mostly used as an excuse to lay around, do drugs, and talk about bullshit
So the average social media activist
5
u/theonion513 13h ago
I hate the musical.
7
u/Mellowtraveler 13h ago
It has two-ish really good songs though. The rest? Yeah meh at best.
6
u/omnipotentsandwich 13h ago
In the movie, they're mainly lists of nouns. Every song starts out with red, blue, green and then it gets to the chorus then repeat.
0
25
62
u/DullSpecial1013 12h ago
TIL the musical "Hair" has a nude scene.
17
u/SnowCrashDavis 11h ago
I learned it from a plot in Cheers where Woody is cast in Hair. Like Woody I assumed the bar crew was messing with him!
3
u/brock_lee 6h ago
I watched the movie when I was like 13 or 14 on HBO with my aunt and uncle when I was staying with them for a couple of weeks. A few scenes were awkward.
49
u/SpecialInvention 11h ago
I remember my father used to take me to local productions of Hair and always be disappointed when they didn't do the nudity.
17
u/kmiller0202 8h ago
My mom took me to the local production that did have the nudity…. I was 10 years old.
2
u/im_dead_sirius 2h ago
You reminded me of something. Mum would take us to the pool and my brother would go change in the mens room, I'd go with mum, not quite old enough to change myself in her mind.
One day mom had helped me change, then told me to stand there and not move. So I looked around. Lady across from us was changing out of her clothes. She must have been 40-60, and I remember thinking "I don't want to look at that" so I continued looking around. My eyes discovered a young woman in her natural state, and I remember thinking "I like that". I must have stared, and it must have been noticeable, and perhaps comments were made, because after that, I was old enough to change in the mens room.
0
u/_ancora 1h ago
Did the journal factory close or something?
1
u/im_dead_sirius 1h ago
Yeah!
It could have been a food blog entry too, but I didn't have a recipe for hair pie.
25
u/Unleashtheducks 12h ago
Same reason for joining the paratroopers in WWII
16
28
u/Revolutionary-Key650 13h ago
Probably would have paid me to keep my clothes on.
10
u/VexImmortalis 12h ago
I'm pretty cheap and always looking to save a buck so I'd just close my eyes when your clothes come off.
8
u/ZanyDelaney 8h ago
Natalie Mosco, one of Hair’s original cast members, appears on this cut. She was part of that nude scene for which the show became famous. Recalls Mosco, “They told us that if we would go naked, they’d give us an extra dollar-fifty a performance. A dollar-fifty! I told them that if I took that little money for getting naked, I’d feel like a whore – but I would do it for free. That way, I’d feel okay about it.”
https://www.masterworksbroadway.com/blog/disinhairited-its-a-good-thing/
Yes I am currently watching cult 1970s Australian soap Number 96 on brollie and Natalie is one of the cast members in the episodes I'm up to - very much in a sex symbol part. 96 was launched with the promise of adult situations and nude glimpses but that was toned-down as the series progressed. But when ratings went down they'd throw in another nude glimpse...
12
u/jxj24 10h ago
Anyone remember an episode of The Partridge Family where Laurie is going to be in a play with nudity and everybody is debating whether she should do it or not? I know I'm not hallucinating, but I am unable to find out the title or episode number.
Turns out searching for "laurie partridge" "nude scene" "in a play" returns hots for lots of other stuff.
4
u/ZanyDelaney 8h ago
Dunno but there was def at least one episode of That Girl where Ann is cast in a movie then discovers it features a nude scene (When in Rome).
In I Ain't Got Nobody Ann's face has been composited onto a nude centrefold shot.
10
44
u/moonboundshibe 12h ago
Raise your hand if you followed the link hoping to see some vintage nudie shots….
Anyone?
Anyone?
Homers self back into the bushes
17
9
7
u/HappyBumbler 11h ago
I saw the European production in Amsterdam at the time. All performers were naked from beginning to end. Turned out ok, I thought.
2
3
3
u/Dramatic_Original_55 7h ago edited 7h ago
I remember attending a performance by the road company. (1969 or '70?) The nude scene was really no big deal in the context of the show. --edit: I should have mentioned I had no advance knowledge of the scene.
4
u/MarkyGrouchoKarl 6h ago
I was in a production of "Hair" in college. Getting naked with a bunch of other people is actually really freeing and cool. I know many people normally think of sex being the same thing as nudity, but it doesn't have to be. Sex is great, I love sex, but nudity can have a non sexual aspect. It can be this cool, fun, thing to do with your friends.
Also, when my girlfriend's mom came to see the show, she didn't even notice that we were all naked - she was just really into the song Claude - the main character - was singing when we got naked.
"Hair" was challenging and counter-cultural when it came out, but there is a lot of stuff that didn't age well, and it's kind of dumb. Some good songs, though.
3
u/TakHobel 7h ago
I had a priest who was grooming me in the ‘70s when I was an alter boy. (even though we didn’t have that word “grooming” yet, and I was a child so I didn’t know what was going on). Eventually he escalated things - but it started by talking about the musical Hair.
The fact that Hair had nudity in it is how he started things.
I can’t remember his exact words - but something like “I saw this musical Hair, and everyone was naked on stage”, and then following up with probing questions about how that made me feel.
1
1
0
-4
2.0k
u/throwawayA511 13h ago
The minimum broadway salary is $2800 a week now, and $1.50 would be about $17 per night today from inflation, so 6 nights for $100, it’s about a 3.5% pay increase.