“I’m old,” growls John Huston’s scary patriarch in Chinatown. “Politicians, ugly buildings, and whores all get respectable if they last long enough...”
John Waters, writer, director, artist, raconteur and celebrated Pope of Trash (as William Burroughs had it), may well be the exception that proves the rule.
“I prefer the term filth over trash nowadays,” says Mr. Waters. “To me, camp is a word that’s completely used up. In the US, it means two old gay gentlemen who run an antique shop. Kitsch has the same problem. I did like using the word trash for a long time but even that’s spent now. There are just too many people around who are trying to be trashy. It ruins it, you know? So I’m using the word filth a lot now. I know it’s been co-opted by the punk movement but it still has a bite to it. It’s still a word that puts some people off. Yes, your ears will need washing out when we’re done.”
Since the mid-60s, this last great American auteur has been peddling hilarious smut and corrupting young minds. Where were you when you first learned what teabagging was? Or felching? Or top-decking? Or plate jobs? Unless your dad is Larry Flynt, odds are, you were watching a John Waters production at the time.
Mr. Waters’ raucous devotion to properly alternative lifestyles has, over the decades, congealed into quite the theme park, a sort of mondo anti-Disneyland scored with Eileen Barton’s ‘If I Knew You Were Coming I’d Have Baked A Cake’. In Female Trouble (1974), a rebellious housewife performs a burlesque act by jumping on a trampoline and cavorting in a playpen filled with dead fish. In Desperate Living (1977) deviants and nudists conspire to overthrow a cruel queen who uses rabies to keep her subjects in line. In A Dirty Shame (2004), David Hasslehoff’s bowel movement in an airplane cubicle plummets to earth and hits Chris Isaak on the head, an injury that brings about the latter’s chronic sex addiction.
“During a presidential campaign Jesse Jackson once said he saw his people as the damned, the depraved, the despised,” Mr. Waters tells me. “I like to think that’s my contingent too.”
He has, to date, served this constituency with no little aplomb. His films, a gallimaufry of drag queens, grotesques, convicts and indescribable sexual acts, celebrate unadulterated trash and deviant subcultures with good humour and wit.
“I’m about the minority who don’t fit in the minority,” he says. “I’m proud to be gay but I never fitted all that comfortably into the gay world either. They had just as many rules as my parents had that I didn’t want to follow. And besides, I’m generally against separatist thinking unless it’s for mentally ill, deviant queers.”
The Waters oeuvre has rarely troubled megabucks producers at the major studios, never mind the Academy. But if he’s never courted more respectable folks, somewhere along the line, respectability came a calling just the same.
A global celebrity, he has long been a reliably entertaining fixture on chat shows and campus tours. Indeed, his trademark pencil moustache is so instantly recognisable among the general public, it allowed him to play a version of himself in the ‘Homersexual’ episode of The Simpsons.
“When they asked me, my first thought was, ‘God, look what they’re paying me. I better do this’,” he recalls. “But I’m such a big fan of that show and kids still come up to me everyday. Their parents just love that.”
The Broadway adaptation of his 1988 film Hairspray has, moreover, been an unbridled mainstream success. In 2003 the show opened with a record $12 million in advance sales. It has since garnered eight Tony nominations and was adapted into a surprise smash hit movie last summer. It continues to attract hordes of musical theatre aficionados in New York and in London’s West End. For the guerrilla filmmaker, such glitzy red carpet occasions mean he finally has a project that can be enjoyed by his devout Catholic parents.
“I just hope they keep making Hairspray in different media,” he smiles. “That way I can keep taking them to premieres.”
Anxious to repeat the trick, a Tony nominated musical adaptation of Mr. Waters’ 1990 film Cry Baby hit Broadway last year. A sequel to Hairspray will soon follow.
“I know,” says Mr. Waters. “I never thought those people would be lining up for me. But I have always felt Female Trouble would work as a musical too. You’d have an Oscar acceptance speech sung from the electric chair. That’s the sort of theatre I’d like to see.”
This potential show stopper is not nearly as unlikely as it might once have been. But the man who shot to fame for filming Divine chowing down on steaming dog poo in Pink Flamingos could not be accused of selling out.
Just look at his most recent film, A Dirty Shame, a fantastically rude plea for tolerance featuring Selma Blair with a 60 inch chest and Tracy Ullman picking up a bottle with a lady part never intended for waitressing. Had it been edited down for an ‘R’ rating, noted an MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) wonk at the time, “there would be less than ten minutes left.”
“When I was in France for the premiere of A Dirty Shame I took Jeanne Moreau for my date,” says Mr. Waters. “So we’re sitting there watching a movie about tromboning and I’m putting my head in my hands wondering what must she be thinking. As the credits roll, I apologise. And she says ‘But why? It was poetry.’ Nobody had ever called it that before.”
Mr. Waters’ current spoken word tour, This Filthy World, is an equally potty-minded and poetic monologue offering his insights into ‘early negative artistic influences’, true life crime, exploitation films, fashion faux pas, the crazy world of the contemporary art and the forthcoming US elections.
“I always vote, usually more than once but that’s getting harder to do,” he says. “And I’ve always thought that we might get a more representative government if we allowed sex in the voting booth. Get the young people out. I guess I’m voting Obama. But I feel people whine too much about Bush. If you feel that way, get out there and overturn cars. That’s what I did when I was young. Stop being lazy and do something about it.”
Born into an upper-middle class family in 1943, John Waters grew up in Lutherville, Maryland, a suburb of Baltimore, the city where he continues to work and reside.
“The thing about Baltimore is that no one suburb is like another,” he tells me. “You have The Wire and Barry Levinson staking out parts of the city that don’t look alike. Sadly, that’s coming to an end now as all the yuppies move down from Washington DC. It’s all becoming very gentrified.”
Inspired by the MGM musical Lili, young Master Waters began staging violent Punch and Judy puppet shows at the age of seven. His interest piqued, he started sneaking out to watch X-rated drive-in movies through binoculars. He soon fell in love with the medium, consuming everything from the high art of Ingmar Bergman and Rainer Werner Fassbender to the low rent gore of Hershell Gordon Lewis.
“I don’t like straight pornography nowadays,” he says. “The heterosexual stuff is so mean to women. I do think it’s still the only outlaw cinema left. And it’s probably the biggest subculture in America. But I’ve always felt I owe a great debt to the old school pornographers in America because they helped make art movies legal. The first Ingmar Bergman movie I saw was shown in sex theatres because it had topless women in it. Monica In America was renamed The Sins Of Monica. They cut out all the conversations and left the tits in. That mix of weird art movies and exploitation was what inspired me.”
He attended NYU for ‘about five minutes’ but was expelled for smoking marijuana. It hardly mattered. He had already started shooting films in his native Baltimore with an 8mm camera and childhood chums such as Mary Vivian Pearce and Harris Milstead (better known as female impersonator Divine). Together they formed the famous filth mongering repertory known as the Dreamlanders.
“I never thought of the Dreamlanders as anti-celebrities”, he says of his cohorts. “I genuinely was pushing them as actual celebrities. Some went on to better things. Divine didn’t start out as the top billed star. He clawed his way up just like a regular Hollywood starlet. We all had a wild time. It was the 60s and the entire population was popping pills. There was a doctor near me named Doctor Keybert and I used to go to him. Now I’m over 6 feet tall, weigh 130 lb., and I’ve never exactly been heavyset but I used to go in to him and say, ‘I’m a model, I need to lose weight’. And he would give me like fifty Black Beauties, which were the strongest meta amphetamine you could get back then. I’d give a fake name then come back the next day and tell him I’d lost the script. Worse, he’d always hand me another one. I saw a lot of movies on diet pills. I owe them a lot.”
In 1969, the budding director borrowed $2,000 from his father to finance his first feature, Mondo Trasho. A no-fi fairytale that ends with Divine receiving magical bird feet, between the shoot and the premiere, the entire cast and crew (save Divine) were arrested on a charge of “conspiracy to commit indecent exposure”.
“I’m still not sure what that means exactly,” says the offending filmmaker.
He followed up in 1972 with his midnight movie masterpiece Pink Flamingos, in which various Dreamland players, including Divine, Mink Stole, and David Lochary vie for the title of ‘World’s Filthiest Person’. The film, which features lip-synching through an anus and a chicken getting crushed between Cookie Mueller and Divine as they get it on, became an instant cult classic.
“Most of that movie came from not knowing how to make a movie,” laughs the director. “I didn’t go to film school. You can tell, I’m sure. I learned by doing it. It was an obsession. Basically, I was going to make those movies somehow. I had grown up watching art movies and drive in movies and underground movies. I knew as much about Truffaut as I did about Kenneth Anger. I still do. It gave me permission to make an exploitation movie for arthouse theatres. And somehow it caught on.”
Since then Mr. Waters has continued to produce pioneering high class trash on shoestring budgets with occasional career breaks to write books and teach ‘humour in film’ classes to prisoners. Polyester was presented in ‘Odorama’ so that audiences might ‘pay to smell shit’ through the miracle of scratch and sniff cards. Cecil B. Demented played out gun battles at unapproved locations.
Many of the original Dreamlanders have, through time and riotous lifestyle choices, left behind beautiful corpses, though pop culture icons, including Debbie Harry, Iggy Pop, Pia Zadora, Patti Hearst, and Waters’ discoveries such as Ricki Lake and Johnny Depp have rushed to take their places.
“I don’t know if I can take the credit for Johnny,” says Mr. Waters. “When I cast him in Cry Baby he was so desperate to escape that whole 21 Jump Street thing. He was just happy to be making a film that blew apart the idea of the teen idol.”
He perhaps got more than he bargained for.
“On my sets there’s so much stuff going on, you can hardly believe what you’re seeing half the time,” admits Mr. Waters. “One day the cops came to take away (underage porn star) Tracii Lords, and she started crying. So Patti (Hearst) says “We’ve all been arrested, honey” and we all started playing this little game to see who could be the meanest to Tracii because it’s just disgraceful that she hadn’t been arrested until then. But Tracii was a very sweet girl. She was so excited to make out with Johnny Depp that she actually fainted.”
I wonder if it’s still the same for John Waters. The gross out humour that once defined his work has, over time, become the mainstay of big budget Hollywood comedies. It is, moreover, harder to shock ‘net literate audiences in an age when most Z-grade reality stars would happily gobble feces if it would put them on the front of Heat magazine.
“Yes, but there’s no love in that,” he says. “I really do love the people in my movies. I think you have to respect things to make fun of them properly. You may not agree with them, but you have to know the rules and you can’t hate it. If you hate it then you can’t make it funny for 90 minutes. You’re going to start hating what’s on screen pretty quickly. Making fun should be joyous, not mean spirited and bad taste should be its own reward.”

John Waters’ This Filthy Earth is at Vicar Street, Dublin on September 17