Carl Denham offering an epitaph for the fallen King Kong. Rick and Louis walking in tandem down the Casablanca airport tarmac. Thelma and Louise putting the pedal to the metal one more time. The movie world is packed with memorable and beloved final scenes. One such climax that is certainly memorable–if not exactly beloved–comes at the end of 1972’s Pink Flamingos, as “filthiest person alive” Babs Johnson (Divine) spies someone walking a dog along a city sidewalk. Decorum compels me to offer that brief summation without elaboration, but let’s say it’s something you’ll not soon forget. And that’s just how Flamingos writer/director John Waters, who turns 80 today, wanted it.
Known throughout his filmmaking career as The King of Camp, The Pope of Trash, and The Prince of Puke, Waters was born in America’s “Charm City,” Baltimore, in 1946. One of four children in a respectable middle-class family, he wrote in his 1981 autobiography Shock Value that “even as a toddler, violence intrigued me.” An early fascination with car crashes and a fondness for villains like Captain Hook and the Wicked Witch of the West led to his staging violent neighborhood puppet shows as a child. While at a Catholic high school, John was drawn to the more delinquent elements of the local youth scene. He also hung out at area theatres, getting inspiration from William Castle horror flicks and such “forbidden” films as And God Created Woman, Baby Doll, and Mom and Dad.
In 1964 John put an 8mm movie camera his grandmother gave him for his 17th birthday and some film a friend stole from work to good use, shooting his first picture. A dialogue-free, black-and-white short entitled Hag in a Black Leather Jacket, its one showing at a local coffeehouse made back the project’s $30 cost. Ready to pursue a career in cinema, Waters was accepted into NYU’s film program, only to be expelled for marijuana use. Undeterred, he returned to Maryland and began hanging out with a gang of outcasts and rebels whom he dubbed “the Dreamlanders.” Among them were such future film regulars as David Lochary, Mary Vivian Pearce, Mink Stole, and a Liz Taylor-obsessed hairdresser named Glenn Milstead, who Waters renamed Divine.
Hag was followed by three more shoestring-budget shorts: Roman Candles (1966), Eat Your Makeup (1968), and The Diane Linkletter Story (1969). Later in 1969 Waters made the jump to feature-length projects with Mondo Trasho. Dressed in gold lamé à la Jayne Mansfield, Divine accidentally runs over Pearce and tries to find help for her, leading the pair on encounters with religious fanatics, a mad doctor (Lochary), and a herd of pigs. Along with the usual Baltimore showings, Mondo also played in Los Angeles, Boston, and Provincetown as part of the underground cinema circuit.
John’s first film with dialogue was 1970’s Multiple Maniacs (a title inspired by goremeister Herschell Gordon Lewis’s Two Thousand Maniacs). In it Divine and Lochary are married con artists who tour the suburbs with a “Cavalcade of Perversions” carnival and rob their customers. Divine gets revenge on her unfaithful spouse, meets the Infant of Prague, and is ravaged by a giant lobster (dubbed Lobstora) before she goes insane and is gunned down by the National Guard. Along with receiving play at art cinemas in several states, the picture Waters himself described as “a celluloid atrocity” also introduced a new member of his repertoire, a middle-aged, snaggle-toothed Baltimore barmaid named Edith Massey.
If Mondo Trasho and Multiple Maniacs were opening acts for Waters’ celluloid onslaught on audience sensibilities, the coup de grace came in 1972 with Pink Flamingos. On the run from the authorities, Divine and her family (son Danny Mills, travelling companion Pearce, and egg-loving mother Massey) compete with couple Lochary and Stole (who kidnap and impregnate women, then sell the babies for profit) for the title of “Filthiest People Alive.” Subtitled “an exercise in poor taste” in its release art, Pink Flamingos was Waters’ fist color film. Said color gets put to good use as an array of lewd, vile, and transgressive acts are presented before the aforementioned finish. Thanks to midnight screenings around America as part of the nascent “cult cinema” movement, it also brought the then 26-year-old filmmaker into the pop culture spotlight.
“Crime Is Beauty” was the theme of John’s next picture, 1974’s Female Trouble. Divine stars as Dawn Davenport, who goes from troubled high schooler to single mother to mass murderer as she is goaded into more outrageous criminality by beauty salon owners Lochary and Pearce. Along her descent into depravity Dawn weds hairdresser Gator (Michael Potter), whose daffy Aunt Ida (Massey) keeps urging him to “turn nelly.” “I worry that you’ll work in an office, have children, celebrate wedding anniversaries,” Ida tells her nephew. “The world of the heterosexual is a sick and boring life.” In his review of the film, critic Rex Reed asked “Where do these people come from? Where do they go when the sun goes down? Isn’t there a law or something?” Waters and his distributors, New Line Cinema, quickly seized on the quote and put it in their ads and posters.
Concluding what Waters called his “Trash Trilogy” was 1977’s Desperate Living. Mink Stole plays a troubled wife and mother who flees with her maid (Jean Hill) after they kill Stole’s husband. The fugitive pair wind up in the Bizarro fairy tale town of Mortville, populated by criminals and deviants and ruled by the despotic Queen Carlotta (Massey). This was the director’s first feature without his 300-pound crossdressing muse Divine, who at the time was appearing in the off-Broadway play Women Behind Bars.
John and his main “leading lady” reunited in 1981 for their most ambitious movie to date. Spoofing the “heroine in turmoil” melodramas of Ross Hunter and Douglas Sirk, Polyester features Divine as hefty housewife Francine Fishpaw, whose idyllic suburban life crumbles around her. Her porno house owner husband (David Sampson) is cheating on her, while her teen kids (Mary Garlington, Ken King) are delinquents. Coming to her apparent rescue is the handsome Todd Tomorrow (’50s Hollywood heartthrob Tab Hunter), who runs an arthouse drive-in. Hunter, who had yet to come out as gay, was enthusiastic about working opposite his crossdressing co-star (the duo would reunite in the 1985 Western spoof Lust in the Dust). He was also the first name actor to appear in a Waters production.
Polyester was notable for being released to theatres in “Odorama.” Inspired by William Castle’s gimmicky shockers, the promotion featured scratch-and-sniff cards that audience members would use when cued by an on-screen number to smell what the characters are smelling (Here’s a tip: avoid numbers 2, 6, and 9).
It would be seven years before Waters’ next movie, the unexpectedly successful (and PG rated!) musical comedy Hairspray. The charmingly upbeat tale of an overweight teen (Ricki Lake) who becomes a dancer on a 1960s Baltimore TV show and winds up striking a blow for integration offered Divine a chance to expand his acting chops. He plays Lake’s ironing-obsessed mom as well as a bigoted male TV station head. The cast also included such notables as Sonny Bono, Ruth Brown, Debbie Harry, and Jerry Stiller. Sadly, Divine died from a heart attack at 42 just nine days after the film opened. Hairspray introduced Waters to new avenues of fans. As for the film itself, it became a Tony-winning 2003 Broadway musical before a big-screen adaptation directed by Adam Shankman came out in 2007 (look for a cameo by Waters in the opening number).
By the 1990s John was finding the rigors of raising funds for his filmmaking taking a backseat to writing books, developing photo art projects, and making guest turns on such TV shows as 21 Jump Street and The Simpsons. Those movies he did finish would rely more on satire than shock. The ’50s-set high school send-up Cry-Baby (1990), which offered Johnny Depp one of his first leading roles as the titular teary-eyed teen rebel, was, like Hairspray, later turned into a Broadway musical. 1994’s Serial Mom finds Kathleen Turner as an unassuming housewife who kills people for what she deems “unforgiveable offenses” and hides her homicidal leanings from her family. A young Baltimore photographer is thrust into the spotlight when his “primitive” snapshots of his family and neighborhood make him a hit with New York’s art scene in 1998’s Pecker, starring Edward Furlong, Christina Ricci, and Lili Taylor.
While his own pace of moviemaking slowed down, the iconoclastic auteur found time to appear in other people’s pictures. Among his more notable screen cameos are Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild (1986), Woody Allen’s Sweet and Lowdown (1999), Seed of Chucky (2004), Jackass Number Two (2006), and, believe it or not, Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Road Chip (2015).
Waters took aim at the potential pretentiousness of underground cinema and added a story straight out of the Patty Hearst kidnapping with Cecil B. Demented (2000), starring Melanie Griffith as top Hollywood actress Honey Whitlock. Abducted by would-be director “Cecil’s” (Stephen Dorff) band of guerrilla cineastes and forced to star in his latest work, Honey begins to identify with her captors. John would return to another of his favorite subjects–sex, and the hypocrisy that surrounds it–in 2004 with A Dirty Shame. Tracy Ullman plays a convenience store owner whose long-dormant libido is rekindled by a blow to the head. Now craving erotic fulfillment in any form, she becomes the newest acolyte of a mechanic-turned-“sex saint” (Johnny Knoxville) whose followers are searching for the ultimate pleasure.
The “kiss-of-death” NC-17 rating A Dirty Shame received doomed its box office chances. And what is truly a dirty shame is that the film is John’s last to date. In a 2017 interview, Waters complained that companies “all want you to make a movie for under a million dollars, which I don’t want to. I don’t want to be a faux radical film-maker at 70. I did that. I don’t need to do it again.” His most recent attempt, an adaptation of his 2022 novel Liarmouth which would star Aubrey Plaza, appears to be in–you guessed it–funding limbo. Movies notwithstanding, he’s managed to keep busy with books, speaking tours (including his annual “A John Water Christmas” shows), running a Camp John Waters retreat for adults, and other projects.
There’s a scene in the film Time After Time where David Warner’s Jack the Ripper, transported to 1970s San Francisco, flips through TV channels depicting war, crime, and violence and comments “90 years ago I was a freak. Today I’m an amateur.” In some ways, the last 50 years of punk rock, tabloid TV, reality show stardom, and online erotica have taken the themes John Waters mocked in his early films to new highs…or should that be new lows? “Hollywood now does do bad taste,” he said on a British radio program, “and mostly they do it badly.”
Regardless of whether he gets the chance to make another film, Waters’ cinematic body of work is as unique and unforgettable as any director’s…even without that final shot in Pink Flamingos. MovieFare says “Happy Birthday, and have fun celebrating 80 shock-filled years!,” John.
For an in-depth look at Waters’ early films, and why they’re not on home video, click here. And for MovieFanFare’s salute to Edie “The Egg Lady” Massey, click here.