Beauty Shop movie storyline. Leaving the Chicago crew behind, Gina Norris (Queen Latifah) is a long way from the Barbershop — she now lives in Atlanta and is making a name for herself and her cutting-edge hairstyles at a posh Southern salon. But when her flamboyant, egotistical boss, Jorge (Kevin Bacon), takes it one criticism too far, she storms out of his salon to open a shop of her own, taking the shampoo girl (Alicia Silverstone) and a few key clients (Andie MacDowell, Mena Suvari) with her.
Gina risks it all to buy a rundown beauty shop and gets to work making it her own, inheriting an opinionated group of headstrong stylists (including Alfre Woodard, Golden Brooks, and Sherri Shepherd), a colorful clientele, and a sexy upstairs electrician (Djimon Hounsou). It’s a rocky road to fulfilling her dreams — and Jorge does his best to ruin her plans — but you can’t keep a good woman down… and you can’t keep a shopful of outrageous women from speaking their minds! Join Gina and her stylists for a raucous good time at the Beauty Shop.
Beauty Shop is a 2005 American comedy film directed by Bille Woodruff. The film serves as a spin-off of the Barbershop film franchise, and stars Queen Latifah as Gina, a character first introduced in the 2004 film Barbershop 2: Back in Business. This film also stars Alicia Silverstone, Andie MacDowell, Mena Suvari, Kevin Bacon and Djimon Hounsou.
Setting Up Shop
The runaway success of the Barbershop films was a surprise to many – but not to MGM. From the very beginning, the studio believed in the projects and saw great potential in a film franchise about a place almost everyone has to go, full of characters everyone feels like they know. Audiences saw their own lives reflected in the films’ comedy and loved hearing the characters say the outrageous things they’d been thinking. As soon as the first film opened, the studio and producers put Barbershop 2: Back in Business on the fast track to production.
For the sequel to Barbershop, bringing back Ice Cube and the rest of the gang was a given, but the films’ characters were mostly men and the comments were from a man’s point of view. The studio and filmmakers knew it would be great to give the ladies a chance to speak their minds. While preproduction for Barbershop 2 was underway, the filmmakers were also busy with plans to build a Beauty Shop. And there was only one woman they wanted to anchor the project: Queen Latifah.
“Latifah is just a great lady,” says producer David Hoberman. “She has a great spirit and brings great energy to the set. She just makes everyone feel good when she’s working. For Beauty Shop, we had to have someone of her stature and talent, and we only wanted her. We were thrilled when she saw the potential in the project and agreed to join us.”
“Latifah and I work really closely together,” says producer Shakim Compere. “We wanted to find a film that would be hilarious and a lot of fun to work on, but also had a lot of heart. We loved the idea of Beauty Shop and knew Latifah would be able to bring her own flavor to the piece. It was a great fit.”
The filmmakers decided to launch the Beauty Shop idea by working a character named Gina into the Barbershop 2 script. In that film, Gina worked at the beauty shop next door to Calvin’s (Ice Cube) Barbershop and a past was established between the two of them. To show that Gina wasn’t afraid to speak her mind, a hilarious war of words with Cedric the Entertainer’s Eddie was included that became one of the highlights of the film. Audiences responded with huge laughs and confirmed the filmmaker’s intuition: the world was ready and wanted to see more of Latifah’s character. The foundations for Beauty Shop were laid, and filming began soon.
Not only is Latifah the lead in the film – she also donned a producer’s hat for the project. Her instincts and trust in herself are what empowered her to take on such responsibility. “I love being able to take something from A to Z,” she says. “I don’t consider myself a control freak, but I consider myself someone who never wanted to be controlled. From day one it’s been about trying to express myself. There’s no greater feeling than taking an idea and seeing that idea all the way through to fruition and presenting it to people, having it accepted and be a success.”
Once Latifah joined the project, the other main course of business was to find a director. The filmmakers quickly decided on Bille Woodruff and felt he had the skills to steer the comedy – and handle a cast full of women. Known for his award-winning work on music videos for artists like Jessica Simpson, Britney Spears, Celine Dion, Outkast, Missy Elliot, and TLC as well as the Jessica Alba starrer Honey, everyone was excited when he signed on.
“Bille is precious,” says Latifah. “I’ve known him for years from his music videos, so I thought it’d be cool for him to do something like this, and he’s definitely used to working with women. I thought whoever directed this movie needed to have the ability to communicate and keep everyone together and on the same page. You have to have a certain sensitivity to be able to understand where we’re coming from sometimes. Bille’s got it.”
Meet Gina
Describing her attraction to the project, Queen Latifah says one of the big draws was her character, Gina. “I like to play strong characters who are vulnerable at the same time,” she says. “Gina reminds me a lot of my mother, a lot of myself – she reminds me of woman like my mom and me and friends of mine and single parents who are out their raising their kids and have to wear many hats. I like to see someone go through challenges and overcome them, and that’s what Gina’s all about.”
The other aspect of the script that appealed to Latifah was the strength of Gina’s dream to open her own shop. “You’ve got to have a dream,” she says, “You have to decide, ‘Here’s something I really want to accomplish and here’s how I’m going to do it.’ There’s a lot of people out there with dreams that never get anywhere. You have to dream, because then you’re not limiting yourself in what’s possible, then you fall in love with it, have a passion for it, and you make it a goal. And you go for it.”
Latifah says the thing that most gives Gina her need to succeed is her love for her daughter, Vanessa. Vanessa’s the reason Gina leaves Chicago for Atlanta – Vanessa is accepted at a prestigious music school – and she’s the reason she works so hard to make it on her own. Gina wants to set an example for her daughter, which is also why she decides towards the beginning of the film that she’s had enough of Kevin Bacon’s Jorge, who owns the salon Gina works in at the beginning of the film.
Boot Camp
To prepare for the film, the actresses had to learn their way around a salon from a pro – technical advisor Randy White spent several days with the actresses teaching them how to look like they were cutting hair. How did White get the job? He does director Woodruff’s hair.
“We went to beauty boot camp,” laughs Latifah. “We went to Golden Touch salon in Inglewood, California, and our homeboy Randy showed us what to do – how to cut, how to color, how to perm, how to style, how to exactly hold scissors. There’s a technique to everything, and you have to learn because it needs to look authentic. There are a whole lot of hairstylists out there; there are about 90,000 beauty shops in this country. We knew people would know when we weren’t cutting right, so we wanted to make it look as realistic as possible.”
There were varying degrees of “hair familiarity” among the cast. “Keshia Knight Pulliam was the only person there who really knew how to do hair, being that her mom owned a salon at one point,” says White. “Everyone else had to start from scratch.” Learning by doing, they all had to pick up scissors and get to work.
The cast quickly found that cutting hair is much harder than they thought. “I’m so glad I’m not a hairdresser,” says Silverstone. “I had attention deficit disorder in boot camp. I’d go numb and feel like I was in science class. I have much more respect for hairdressers now. It’s a real skill and such an art.”
“You know what I realized from that whole boot camp experience?” says Sherri Shepherd. “It is NOT what I was called to do. The first 20 minutes I was like ‘My back is hurting, okay? I’m an actress, not a hairstylist.’ They thought they had free labor, so they had me washing all these people’s heads. I was like ‘Wait a minute! Nobody’s paying me!’ Nobody was tipping me! It was hard – but we learned.”
And did anyone mess up? “I cut somebody’s hair too short, but I didn’t tell her,” grins Shepherd. “I just combed it over, and hopefully she won’t know. Maybe she’ll think it was Queen Latifah, because we both worked on her hair. Sounds better to say Queen Latifah cut her hair wrong than me.”
Shop Talk
The haircutting and styling is authentic, but there was one other key salon ingredient the filmmakers were intent on capturing: the shop talk. The Barbershop movies are notorious for their frank talk, and Beauty Shop is no different. Often the actors would get on a topic and improvise in character, the more outrageous the better – and they had a fabulous time doing it.
“The bikini wax thing was a serious discussion,” Latifah laughs. “Men crying was definitely a discussion. Politics always becomes a discussion, especially in an election year. And of course, image. Image is always something that comes into play. We got into ‘Why does so-and-so look like that?’ and ‘Who needs a makeover?’ With the exception of male issues and political talk, we actually kept it pretty shallow – just where we wanted it to be,” she laughs.
Alfre Woodard says, “You know, with beauty shops, that’s like saying ‘my poker game.’ When you sit down to a poker game, there’s a certain atmosphere and there’s rules and decorum. You switch into poker game mode, and that’s kind of the same with a beauty shop. There’s always this thing that happens when you get in there. You get hyped, you get chatty, and you talk a lot. It’s like stream-of-consciousness, but in a communal sense. If you disagree, you’re hollering ‘No!’ and if you’re agreeing you’re screaming ‘Yes!’ There’s a heightened sense of hysteria.”
“You have customers that can talk, you have all the stylists that can talk, and people talk about all kinds of different issues,” director Woodruff says. “We touch on everything from hybrid cars to sex and relationships. There are a million things to talk about, and we tried to touch on a diverse representation of some of the things people want to speak their minds on.”
Beauty Bites
Alicia Silverstone: “Hair really frames your face and can change how you look. When you’re having a bad hair day, it’s not fun. Most of the time I just put my hair in a ponytail – easy, low maintenance hair.”
Andie MacDowell: “I have very, very, very curly hair now, but when I was little I had straight hair, and I had a pixie and it was fabulous! There’s no way I could cut my hair in a pixie anymore because I’d look like Bozo the Clown, but I liked the pixie.”
Alfre Woodard: “My mommy had a hair salon. I remember – this is one of my earliest memories – I sat and watched her as she did a woman’s hair. She washed it, she dried it, and they were sitting there chatting the whole time. So I sat there watching them, and the world of grown women seemed so wonderful, you know? I just thought, “Oh, to be forty…” Well, by the end it’s been around two hours that she’s been working on this woman’s hair. She turned the woman around and she was looking in the mirror, and I was playing in the shampoo bowl, and before I knew it I turned the bowl and it went flying around spraying water over this women’s face and head. Her hair was hanging wet again. My mother turned to look at me, and the woman’s mouth was open – and I just flew. I wrecked that hairstyle!”
Mena Suvari: “I remember crimping a lot. I remember being 11 and there was this big craze to crimp your hair – and fry it. You pretty much fry your hair when you’re crimping. I also remember I really wanted lavender hair when I was sixteen, and my mom wouldn’t let me.”
Sherri Shepherd: “I had very thick hair and my mother hated to do it because she would press it and then I’d go and play and it’d be this big Afro. So my mother would just let it go crazy, or she’d try and braid it and one braid would stick up and one braid would stick down. That’s the way I’d go to church. I looked like a doggone crazy person. I looked like Chaka Khan at three.”
Keshia Knight Pulliam: “When I was in college, when a girlfriend needed a trim or to put a perm in or flat-iron her hair, I did all of that. Even in my mom’s salon I’d help out doing whatever when I was in high school. I even tried to cut my own hair, but I realized the reason you let someone else cut it is it’s really hard once you get to the back. And one side was shorter than the other. After that, I left that part to the professionals.”
Kevin Bacon: “The thing I hated was that the barbers would take the clippers and shave the back of my neck. The feeling of that – those tiny little hairs in the back of my neck and the sound of the clippers – I was terrified of it. I thought he was going to cut me. And I didn’t like that thing they put around your neck; I’ll never forget that piece of paperish stuff. I hated going to the barber.”
Bille Woodruff: “I’ve had all kinds of hairstyles. My favorite I think was when I copied Prince’s hairdo when he had ‘Little Red Corvette’ out. I had my hair down over one eye. Kind of crazy, but it was my favorite.”
Beauty Shop (2005)
Directed by: Bille Woodruff
Starring: Queen Latifah, Alfre Woodard, Alicia Silverstone, Andie MacDowell, Mena Suvari, Paige Hurd, Golden Brooks, LisaRaye McCoy, Keshia Knight Pulliam, Sheryl Underwood
Screenplay by: Kate Lanier, Norman Vance
Production Design by: Jon Gary Steele
Cinematography by: Theo van de Sande
Film Editing by: Michael Jablow
Costume Design by: Sharen Davis
Set Decoration by: Traci Kirshbaum
Music by: Christopher Young
Art Direction by: Kevin Kavanaugh, Jon Gary Steele
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for sexual material, language, drug references.
Distributed by: Metro Goldwyn Mayer
Release Date: March 30, 2005
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