It’s not easy to shock John Waters. The “Pink Flamingos” director spent his career pushing, prodding and profaning the envelope in every way imaginable. But one thing the self-proclaimed “pope of trash” never thought he’d see was a career-spanning show at the Academy Museum.
The exhibition — which features everything from a full-scale trailer home to Ricki Lake’s cockroach-covered dress from the movie “Hairspray” — opened last September and runs through the end of August. Waters spoke to Variety ahead of the opening, but because of the writers’ strike last summer, he wasn’t able to discuss current or upcoming projects.
Back in Los Angeles this weekend, Waters provided a candid live commentary for his first two (newly restored, practically-never-screened) short films, “Hag in a Black Leather Jacket” and “Roman Candles,” and fielded questions from the audience. When asked how he feels to be paid such respect by the same organization that bestows Oscars, Waters made a clutching-his-pearls gesture and quipped, “Astonishing!”
At 77 years old, the queer icon has lived long enough to see film critics, museum curators and even the Cannes Film Festival come around to his irreverent sensibility. But that doesn’t mean financiers are lining up to make his next movie (after NC-17-rated 2004 flop ‘A Dirty Shame’).
“My last film was 20 years ago, but I’ve been paid to write six other ones in that time,” he told the crowd, ticking off the projects: “Four different sequels to ‘Hairspray’; [Christmas comedy] ‘Fruitcake,’ which has gone through a couple of versions that still might happen; and ‘Liarmouth,’” based on his 2022 novel, which he dubbed “a feel-bad romance.”
“The book was optioned. I turned in the script. They like the script, but we don’t have the money to make it,” said Waters, who confirmed reports that Aubrey Plaza has been cast as compulsive kleptomaniac Marsha Sprinkle. “I’m thrilled that she’s going to [star in it], but we don’t have the money yet,” he said, “I don’t know what’s going to happen, and so I’m trying to get ‘Fruitcake’ going too. We’ll see.”
Judging by the full house for Waters’ weekend shows at the Academy Museum, there’s certainly an audience for whatever the director winds up doing. Screening on Saturday night, the unapologetically indecent “Pink Flamingos” — which notoriously features a scene of its drag-queen star Divine scooping up dog stool and smearing it across his teeth — has lost none of its capacity to offend.
On Sunday, fans of Waters’ outrageous sensibility turned out to see how his first two fast-and-loose experimental films might forecast where his career was headed. They came looking for such skidmarks in his early shorts, and found them loaded with familiar themes.
Made in 1964 while Waters was still in high school, the 17-minute, black-and-white “Hag” challenged local mores by focusing on a taboo relationship between a white girl and her Black boyfriend (tensions that would later inspire “Hairspray”), climaxing with Mary Vivian Pearce showing off racy dance moves forbidden on Baltimore’s “The Buddy Deane Show,” as “Hairspray’s” Tracy Turnblad later would.
Heavily indebted to early-’60s underground films (the Kuchar brothers and Andy Warhol in particular), pop art and the theater of the absurd, the loosely plotted film is full of endearing glitches: Waters did all of his editing in camera, resulting in awkward “jump cuts” and accidentally double-exposed sequences. “We screwed it up badly, technically, and just called it art,” Waters explained.
Rather than recording dialogue, he prepared a soundtrack full of unlicensed songs — the reason the film has rarely been seen since its original 1964 screening (in a beatnik coffee shop), since music rights would cost a fortune. The actual budget couldn’t have been more than $60, Waters estimated, since the whole escapade was shot on 8mm footage stolen by the gay director’s then-girlfriend “Mona Montgomery.”
Mona (not her real name) also stars in “Hag,” dancing with her on-screen boyfriend (Bobby Chappel) in the woods, before marrying him on the roof of Waters’ childhood home. The ceremony is overseen by a man in a Ku Klux Klan costume and attended by a collection of weirdos, including a young man in drag — not Divine, as Waters had not yet met his future muse.
Harris Glenn Milstead (the actor audiences know as Divine) made his screen debut in 1966’s “Roman Candles,” appearing alongside Waters troupers David Lochary, Pat Moran and Mink Stole (who attended Sunday’s show, calling out from the audience at times). The project’s ostensible star was a well-known local beatnik named Maelcum Soul, who tended bar at Martick’s and wore heavy face paint everywhere she went — a look later adopted by Divine. Appearing in what Waters called “half drag,” Milstead wears makeup and a kind of turban toward the end, lurking behind bushes to spy on the other characters.
Clearly modeled after Warhol’s three-and-a-half-hour, two-screen “Chelsea Girls,” Waters’ much-shorter satire features characters lounging in bed, pretending to shoot up and pantomiming various sexual kinks (foot fetishes, a bondage scene set to “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’,” a ticklish ménage à trois). To up the ante, Waters’ renegade film called for three 8mm projectors running simultaneously, the images stacked one on top of another. Spliced in amid the shenanigans is black-and-white footage of the pope and scenes from classic Castle Films releases, like “Creature from the Lagoon” and “Tarantula!”
“There was nothing left on the cutting room floor,” Waters claimed, apologizing at times for the characters’ repetitive and silly behavior. With three screens, he said, “you could look at something else. Each one by itself would have been really boring, but three at once made it confusing, at least. That’s better than boring.”
Not that anyone would accuse Waters of being boring. The Academy Film Archive restored Waters’ first five films — including “Eat Your Makeup,” “Mondo Trasho” and “The Diane Linkletter Story” — and though rights issues makes them tricky to screen publicly, excerpts can be seen in the museum’s exhibition.
“Sadly, I didn’t know then that you had to pay for music rights,” the cult filmmaker admitted. “I didn’t even know there was editing. I just shot the shots in order of the movie and that’s it.” In a way, Waters joked, his avant-garde naiveté anticipated Denmark’s lo-fi Dogma 95 movement, “and I was Lars von Queer.”
