He Who Laughs Most Laughs Best

CREEMEDIA

He Who Laughs Most Laughs Best

John Waters Goes Beyond Pink Flamingos

by

Billy Altman

John Waters, whose latest film Desperate Living opened in New York recently to a typical Waters crowd, a collection of bizarros and well-to-do thrill slummers that looked like an issue of Interview magazine out for an evening on the town, laughs a lot. I suppose I would too, if I could spend the better portion of my days trouncing around Baltimore, Maryland, making movies with mostly home grown talent on shoe string budgets which go on to shock and revujse most of the mainstream movie world but leave anyone whose mind and world outlook is healthily out of kilter in stitches. Best known for such frontal attacks on that rotting edifice known as good taste as The Diane Linkletter Story, Mondo Trasho, Female Trouble and the eternal Pink Flamingos, Waters, with his neatly cropped short hair and suave pencil-thin moustache, is probably one of the happiest artists around; he doesn't have to answer to any higher-ups and apparently has a, marvelous time doing just about anything he pleases.

Waters' career began back in the Sixties when, after a childhood dominated by repeated viewings of Disney's Cinderella and The Wizard of Oz ("I rooted for the witch") and regular running away from home junkets to New York to see the openings of underground films, his grandmother made the grave error of giving him a movie camera as a present. Soon his first effort, a 15-minute, eight millimeter black and white film was in the can—done for the whopping total of $80.

"I had a friend who worked in the camera store and she stole all this film and gave it to me and she also snuck it through the developing equipment and I was on my way." The film premiered in a church. A church? "Yeah,"

chuckles Waters. "Backthen, the churches were bending over backwards to be liberal, anything to get people into the place. For awhile I always debuted my movies in churches. It was pretty strange, especially with Multiple Maniacs, because in that one we had this really sacrilegious scene that takes place in a church. But the priests didn't complain. How could they? The place was jam-packed. "

Ever arrtbitious, Waters tried film school at New York University in 1965. He lasted six weeks. "I got kicked out in the middle of this drug scandal, with the Daily; News taking pictures of my parents coming to get me. I never went to classes anyway, just watched the films they screened. Every night I'd go to the drivedns—all the-early Russ Meyer movies and Herschel Lewis films like Blood Thief and 2000 Maniacs. They were the films that really got me wanting to make my own movies."

The rest of course is history, which brings us to Desperate Living, and one of the most interesting things about Waters' approach to movie making is that, with arguably the most crazed plots in modern celluloid circles, he does do his homework. A good > example is the flashback wrestling scene in which Susan Lowe, as Mole McHenry , beats the livihg daylights—and one eyeball—out of her male opponent. Noting that although most of the violence in his filrns is rather unrealistic ("Yeah, it's like Woody Woodpecker cartoons; someone gets stabbed through the hand and says, x 'Ouch. That hurt!' " says Waters), the wrestling scene is somewhat realistic, Waters nods his head in agreement. "See, I went to a wrestling match for research and Bruno what's-his-name was fighting and I didn't even watch the match, I watched the audience. I couldn't believe my eyes—what a low brow event. The meanest hillbillies imaginable. A kick in the nuts always got the biggest applause. They would love it if someone's eyes really got gouged out."

Similarly, the sex change operation and resultant attached appendage which Mole gets in Baltimore was also researched.

"The hospital we filmed at is where they do all the sex change operations for people from all over the country," says Waters. "The head of the clinic,

Dr. Money—isn't that a great name?— showed me pictures and the way it looks in the movie is pretty much the way it really looks. Real fake, lots of scars." (The new cock doesn't go over too well with Mole's girlfriend Muffy and Mole, emotionally crushed, cuts it off with a knife and throws it out the door. "I can always tell which scene in my films is going to get people running to the exits," laughs Waters, "and in Desperate Living, that's the one.").

Oh, and about that eyeball. It comes, Waters informs me, from his special gore butcher. "I have this butcher and I only see him when I'm making a movie. Whenever he sees me coming he starts laughing. I think it was a cow's eye that he gave me. I'll go to him and he'll say, 'Hey, you gotta have this,' and he'll take'me in the back anci show me a pile of guts." The roast rat used in the opening credits is another story completely. "I had offered the little black kids in the neighborhood five dollars for a dead rat, but they wouldn't do it. So we finally bought one in a pet store| but then god, trying to find an oven. That proved to be the 'buck stops here' with all my friends, No one would let us cook it at their home, but we finally got it done by sneaking into someone's house while they were away. Boy, did it stink."

Waters' newest disco very is 400 lb. black actress Jean Hill, who plays the faithful maid. "I had an ad in the Washington Post and the Baltimore Sun," Waters explainsi "It said Wanted: 200 lb. black actress. The Post refused to let me put "200" or "black", but the Sun let it run. We interviewed about 15 women and they were all terrible. Then I asked a guy in my building if he knew any women who fit the requirements and he said, 'I know one that weighs 400 lbs. ' She was starring in a black theater group and also working as a substitute teacher. I told her she'd have to dye her hair blonde and she said, 'Big deal, I've had blonde hair twice before.' Nothing I fazed her, although she was a bit uptight about her nude scene. It was the very last thing that we did, and when she saw it, she burst out laughing."

Waters is already at work on his next film ("I think it'll be a love story. I've done so many hate stories"). I ask him how his plots come together in that weird mind of his. "I just fill notebooks with ideas and stuff, and when I get the money, then I sit down and work out a plot. I read lots of newspapers and when I see someone peculiar walking down the street , I just fantasize and exaggerate what their lives could be like. A lot of people come to Baltimore to visit me and tell me that all the time they'd seen my films, they thought I was exaggerating, but being therje, they realized what it's like in that city. "

Although he admits he knows next to nothing about music, Waters says he • likes the punk scene a lot. "I like the look of it, and there's a lot of energy in it. I hope it happens big, because I really like to dance and if it happens, I can smack people while I'm dancing again." Asked if he would like to get a hpge budget for his next movie (Desperate Living, at $65,000, is his j most expensive work to date)' Waters shrugs his shoulders. "I do want to make them technically better each time, but'in a way I think that a lot of money would ruin the progression of my films. Actually, what I'd really like to do is make ermovie with Annette Funicello and Troy Donahue. In Smell-o-Vision."

And, finally, I ask John Waters how it feels to be a cult herov "Well," he laughs, "it beats welfare."