For a man who made his name with gleefully hilarious guerrilla films populated by drag queens, provocateurs, foot fetishists, misguided egomaniacs, furtive suburban psychos and assorted criminal lowlifes, John Waters is taking his elevation to the Hollywood stratosphere in stride.
The 77-year-old director of Pink Flamingos, Hairspray and Serial Mom has never come close to winning an Oscar – Oscars are not what you get when you delight in bad taste and write that someone vomiting during one of your films is “like getting a standing ovation”. Yet this weekend in Los Angeles, the museum run by the Academy of Motion Pictures is opening a lavish, lovingly curated exhibit that chronicles Waters’ extraordinary life and work.
On top of that, he is being honored on Monday with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, an accolade that will put him in concrete next to Gene Autry and Ray Bradbury (“good company”, he calls them) but has so far eluded the likes of Clint Eastwood, Al Pacino and Beyoncé. It’s been more than 15 years since he last directed a movie – a symptom of the industry’s enduring nervousness about his material – but his acceptance into Hollywood polite society is beyond question.
Or, as he puts it: “I’m so respectable I could puke.”
Unlike other older filmmakers who might worry that being feted like this is Hollywood’s way of saying “thank you for your body of work but please don’t make any more of it”, Waters is keenly attuned to the vagaries of celebrity, including his own, and seems genuinely delighted by the attention.
“Yes, it’s nuts,” he told the Guardian, as the first visitors streamed into an advance viewing of the exhibit and he observed them poring over such quirky artefacts as an ultra-gay pack of Husky toilet paper, with tongue hole, from the 2007 sex comedy A Dirty Shame, or an order issued by the Maryland film censorship board in 1974 to remove a cunnilingus scene from Female Trouble.
“But it’s nuts in a great way,” he said, clearly at home mingling with reporters and posing for photograph after photograph in a space devoted exclusively to him. “Being here, at the Academy, reminds me of the start of my career, when the only place I was showing my films was in churches. It’s the same irony, the same surprise to people.”
The difference, of course, is that Waters is no longer a long-haired rebel risking arrest along with his devoted gang of oddball art student friends for shooting without permits on the streets of Baltimore, Maryland. He has long since established himself as one of the US’s most beloved wits and storytellers, instantly recognizable by his trademark pencil mustache and reliably eye-catching line of colorful, perfectly cut jackets.
Whatever shock his films stirred up on their release – one critic once referred to them as “celluloid atrocities” – has tended to give way, over time, to a recognition of his originality, the subversive brilliance of his writing and directing, and his surprisingly warm-hearted embrace of misfits and deviants. “I make fun of things I love, not hate,” he says.
Still, he has no intention of going soft or making any boilerplate Oscars-style thank-you speeches for the honors bestowed on him. “I promise I won’t use the word … journey,” he says, with eyes twinkling. “Or … humbled.” He is still, after all, the Pope of Trash – a description the novelist William S Burroughs came up with in the 1980s, now the title of the exhibition. And to people who love Waters’ movies, Oscars-style speeches instantly evoke the end of Female Trouble, when a woman who thinks crime is high art (played by Waters’ childhood friend and regular muse, Divine) goes to the electric chair and thanks “all the wonderful people that made this great moment in my life come true”.
When the Academy first approached Waters four years ago, the museum was in its conceptual phase and its building still under construction on the corner of Wilshire and Fairfax Boulevards. Still, he didn’t hesitate to give them whatever they wanted: props (including that electric chair), costumes, paintings inspired by his films, yellow legal pads with the drafts of his screenplays written in longhand, and the names and addresses of everyone he knew who might have stories to tell or memorabilia to share.
“Why would I not?” he said. “I’m just happy I’m alive for it. A lot of people who were part of my success aren’t.”
The more interesting question, perhaps, is why the Academy Museum was so interested in him. The high-minded answer is that the museum wanted to distinguish itself from the conservative tastes of its voting membership over the past half-century – more Driving Miss Daisy than the filthiest people alive – and reflect a fuller variety of film-making and audience tastes. Previous shows planned before the opening also include one on the hidden history of Black cinema (conceivably a response to the #OscarsSoWhite controversy) and another, still showing, on the French film-maker Agnes Varda.
A simpler answer, though, is that Bill Kramer, the museum’s founding director, who grew up in Baltimore, and his team of curators were all huge John Waters fans and couldn’t wait to collaborate with him. “When I was a teenager, we would watch Cry Baby every slumber party, basically every weekend,” said Dara Jaffe, the associate curator. “Then I saw Pink Flamingos in a film class. I’m insufferable whenever anyone watches one of his movies with me, because I can’t help saying all the lines.”
Jaffe’s co-curator, Jenny He, had a similar story: she saw Serial Mom at an early age and “from that moment on, I was hooked”.
Their love for Waters shines through the show, starting with the first room, designed to resemble one of the Baltimore churches where Waters first aired his work because the rent was cheaper than an actual movie theater. A large screen shows a montage of film extracts that deftly illustrate his abiding themes: infamy, crime, the newspapers that report on it, protest, outsiders and suburban domesticity. Waters’ reaction on seeing the montage: “It’s better than the real films!”
The exhibit is full of sly jokes and knowing winks at Waters’ most diehard fans. A 1972 trailer for Pink Flamingos, notable because it includes no footage from the film, only spoof interviews with outraged filmgoers, plays in a replica of the trailer where Babs Johnson, played by Divine, lives with her family. A trailer within a trailer. Similarly, an area devoted to the 1981 dysfunctional family comedy Polyester imitates the film’s cul-de-sac setting by being itself designed like a cul-de-sac.
Through a collection of 400 artefacts (whittled down from 1,000 unearthed by the curators), the show tells some intriguing origin stories. For example, the idea of presenting Polyester in Odorama – a gimmick dreamed up by Waters involving scratch-and-sniff cards handed out to audiences and smell cues indicated by numbers on the screen – came from Hustler magazine, which promised a “scratch-and-sniff centerfold” in its August 1977 edition, minus the farts and sniffed glue.
Or how the “Pink Phlegm-ingo” barf bags, also handed out to audiences to steel them for what was promised to be “positively the most horrifying film ever made”, were inspired by an earlier independent film-maker, William Castle. Castle offered audiences of his 1961 film Homicidal a “fright break”, when they were allowed to leave and get a full refund – the only catch being they’d have to stand in a “coward’s corner” to receive it.
More broadly, the exhibit shows how Waters effectively invented his own genre of cinema by blending the art films he revered growing up with the sex-and-schlock exploitation movies he found himself drawn to like a rubbernecker to a car wreck. In 1950s Baltimore, the two genres actually got muddled up, as exploitation houses showed European art movies with the promise of more female skin than the Hollywood studios allowed.
“Bergman’s Summer with Monika originally showed in a skin theater. They called it Sins of Monica and cut a lot of the dialogue,” he recalled.
By the time Waters’ movies started appearing in the late 1960s, he was unable to appeal to the same audiences because strictures around nudity and bad language had loosened dramatically and the filthiness that he captured and spoofed wasn’t nearly filthy enough for some. “My films did best in the richest, smartest neighborhoods and worst in exploitation theaters,” he said. “People got mad, because I wasn’t giving them what they were used to. They knew something was wrong, and what was wrong was me.”
Years later, his hometown newspaper, the Baltimore Sun, would actually write, tongue firmly in cheek, that Waters was to Baltimore “what Ingmar Bergman is to Sweden”. Whether his most devoted early fans – “hippies, bikers and gay people who couldn’t get along with other gay people” – picked up on this particular art-house inspiration is, sadly, a detail lost to history.
It seems less odd now to mention Waters in the same breath as the major European cineasts, or for that matter the USmainstream. Alongside Varda, he is sharing exhibition space with Casablanca and The Godfather, and the Academy sees nothing wrong with that.
Neither does Waters, mostly. “Here I am,” he writes in the exhibition catalogue, “in the same building as the Shirley Temple Education Studio. Blasphemy? A miracle? Both, I hope.”
John Waters: Pope of Trash is at the Academy Museum in Los Angeles from 17 September 2023 to 4 August 2024
