“I feel like Uncle Remus every time a kid comes up and says, ‘Tell me about the time Divine ate dog shit.’”

John Waters and Bob Shaye
by Eric Gladstone
March, 1997

Call it another glorious chapter in the saga of the American Dream. John Waters, once the most outrageous and marginalized of film directors now enjoys almost ‘living legend’ status. The Baltimore native who dared to make an obese transvestite (Glenn “Divine” Milstead) his star player, and who took bad taste to new heights (or depths, actually) made his first splash with Pink Flamingos, a low budget trailer trash tale which climaxed with Divine munching doggie doo.

Celebrating the 25th Anniversary of its first screenings, New Line Pictures, the company which first established itself with Flamingos, is rolling out the, um, classic, for a re-release with previously unseen footage added in April, 1997. Waters and Fine Line prez, Bob Shaye, sat down for an intimate chat with myself and a handful of other reporters at this year’s Sundance festival. Here are the juicy bits:

Q: Who first came up with the idea of a 25th Anniversary re-release?

JW: Well, I tried to pitch it to Bob at Cannes. I said, “Let’s do a low-rent Belle Du Jour.”

Q: Was it always the idea to add the new footage?

JW: Yeah, because I knew I had the footage. I hadn’t seen it, but I knew it was up there. I was amazed when I saw it because I didn’t remember shooting some of it. I showed that murder scene to Mary Vivian Pierce and she said she didn’t remember shooting it.

Bob: I remember making the trailer…

JW; I know, Bob made that trailer, that’s his voice on it. When I first went to New Line, there were maybe six employees on University Place. And Divine used to come in the office in full drag, walking though. We didn’t have big promotional budgets then. There were no ads, ever, for Pink Flamingos. There was one little ad in the Village Voice. No “print marketing.” But I would make Divine wear that outfit and ride the subways and hand out flyers. People would run from the subway cars! But it was effective advertising at the time!

Q: Is there any way you measure the influence of Pink Flamingos, or see it resonate in current culture?

JW: Well, I feel like Uncle Remus every time a kid comes up and says, “Tell me about the time Divine ate dog shit.” I’m very flattered when kids come up and say, “I made a movie because of you, you’re the first thing I saw…” But the weirdest thing is now they say, “My parents saw your movies.” Boy is that different. It’s very touching to me. My parents have still never seen Pink Flamingos, and my father paid for it! I paid him back, too, with interest…

I’ve always said if I could brag about anything I’ve even done it’s that I made trash maybe one percent more respectable. I always wanted people to laugh first. This movie was made kind of at the height of a cultural war. It was the year porno first became legal. It was a very different time than it is now. But [at the screening] last night, people laughed at the same places, they moaned at the same places, they covered their eyes at the same places. The same as 25 years ago, so not that much has changed, even though there is hardly a cultural war going on right now, I don’t think.

Bob: The real strength of the movie is when you tell people the story of it, not to denigrate John’s filmmaking skills. But what he managed to include in the story is so off the wall, that even when you tell people what they’re going to see today, it has that peculiar duality of repelling and detracting at the same time.

JW: And the weird thing for me was that, it was kind of normal for us at the time!

Continued at Pt. 2

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–FF–

Copyright 1997, ECG

“Unions are driving animation out of the country. It can be done. It just takes time.”

MIKE JUDGE interview
By E.C. Gladstone

Eric Gladstone: I have to start by telling you that I enjoyed the film much more than I thought I would.

Mike Judge: One of the things that are funny about Beavis & Butthead on the big screen is the same thing that’s funny about them I think on TV. They’re these people that just don’t belong on TV, and there they are, reckless. And on the big screen, when they’re 20 feet tall and in surround sound, that makes it even funnier. It’s a hard thing to explain well.

EG: What was the process from doing five minute bits on TV to an 80 minute full length big screen piece? It seems like a monumental leap.

MJ: Yeah, yeah it is. For one thing, the writing was a real challenge. Movies are what I really want to do, but writing the B&B movie, it’s kind of difficult. The thing about B&B, for them to work, is that they have to stay in character, these characters that are very one-note. So the idea was to build a big story around them where they were just oblivious to the whole thing. It was a little hard to pull off. That was a little tricky. I was always a big fan of the Clouseau/Pink Panther movies. Peter Sellers never became smart or anything but he was what he was, and the story just happened around him. Same in other movies of his like Being There.

And also, just the look of it, we had to do it on bigger field sizes. I can’t believe we pulled this off. The movie is all hand-inked and painted cel animation. It has a really nice look that I’m really happy with. Real cels shot on film hasn’t been shown in theatres to regular audiences in a long time, and I think it’s a look that’s really cool.

EG: Even the rough cut looks much smoother than the TV stuff.

MJ: Well, yeah, it’s all really about time and budget. You’ll hear people say there’s a difference between the good cartoons and the bad ones. I think those people are just lazy. It’s all budget, unions are driving animation out of the country. It can be done. It just takes time.

EG: On the scale of animation films, how high was the budget for this.

MJ: It was pretty low. The way we were able to pull this off is like a Disney movie. They have to start from scratch, design all the characters and design all the rotations [movement positions]. We had a system up and running with this, it was just a matter of beefing it up some.

EG: This might seem like an old question, but where did these characters come from in the first place?

MJ: The way they first started, I had a sketchbook and I was trying to draw this guy I went to high school with. I tried like five, six times. And one of them ended up being Butthead and another ended up being Beavis, neither of which looked like the guy I went to high school with. But it was kind of a thing where I started drawing and say, “that’s funny,” and I give up on drawing the guy I went to high school with, I’m just drawing something else. Then they just sat there for a while and I made a short cartoon of them like a year later, Frog Baseball.

EG: This is from your own adolescence?

MJ: Yeah. Just kids I grew up with.

EG: How many other things came from your adolescence?

MJ: Oh, yeah, you know, there are tons of things. When I was in college, I went to UC San Diego and lived out in Miramesa, in this very cheap suburban tract home. And this kid called himself “Ironbutt”–these kids were a little younger than B&B, like 11 or 12–his whole claim to fame was that you could kick him in the butt as hard as you wanted and it wouldn’t hurt. Ironbutt had a friend that my roommate started calling Butthead. These guys, you’d have a girl over and they’d be like at the window going “huh huh.” And Ironbutt set the tree in our front yard on fire.

EG: Speaking of fire, was there anything in your original screenplay that the studio made you tone down or take out?

MJ: There wasn’t anything that anyone said, “You should take this out,” other than for the MPAA rating. We’re going for a PG-13. You know, there’s things, if Beavis and Butthead said “fuck” or “shit” at this point–they don’t say “shit”–there’s something funnier about just really dumb vulgar sixth grader type stuff. At one point, there were some people saying “what about the ‘fire’ stuff?” And I said, “Look, you guys asked me to do the movie, if you want me to do the movie we’re not going to go through this again.”

EG: How did the original “Fire” incident (in which the mother of children who set fire to their trailer home blamed the influence of a certain B&B episode) affect you and your work?

MJ: Well, obviously it’s this horrible, awful thing that happened. But it had nothing to do with B&B in any real way. I mean, in this media frenzy, this never got reported until weeks later: But the woman left a five year old and a two year old alone in a trailer and went out to another guy’s house on a date. They didn’t get cable TV there. What had happened a couple weeks before, B&B were in the news because a little incident happened where a girl did something with an aerosol can and said “Beavis and Butthead.” So it was in the local paper. The mom was about to be arrested–well, she was–for child abandonment, and she said, “B&B” because I think she’d heard about it in the papers. So then it just blew up. And no one mentioned, because I know people who work for NBC, I know for a fact that they knew that the kid had started another fire when he was three, before B&B was on the air, and that they didn’t get cable. They just didn’t report it because it wasn’t as juicy a story. It’s something that I’m going to be answering the rest of my life, but I know that I didn’t do anything wrong, and I don’t think we were irresponsible. Beavis is mostly fixated on saying “fire” and watching it on TV. I could go on and on. I think there was this new show that the media knew was pushing a button and making parents scared.

EG: Was there any fear in the transition to film that you’d lose the essence of the show?

MJ: Well, not really for me, because I knew that I had control of the writing. But I didn’t know how much interference from about I’d get. I know how to not let B&B get out of character, so I know when it’s getting out of character. And sometimes on the show, it does. Sometimes I get lazy and things slip by. But I wasn’t too worried.

EG: Besides Robert Stack, who were some of the other voices?

MJ: Unfortunately, we’re not allowed to say. I think one I can say is the old woman Martha on the plane and the bus is Cloris Leachman. There are three other very famous people in there. I’m told we could be in big trouble, which I think is ridiculous. I think it’s going to come out anyway.

EG: How about the songs, how did the soundtrack come together–and start with “Lesbian Seagull.”

“‘Lesbian Seagull’ was a song I heard like in ‘85, by Tom Wilson Weinberg, this obscure guy, and it stuck in my mind ever since. Usually in the show, whenever Van Driesen gets his guitar and sings he gets badly injured, and I wanted to do that in the movie. I was thinking of writing a song, but I got them to find the thing, so I thought I couldn’t possibly do better than that. And we wanted like a big “end of a date movie” type version for the closing credits. And we were able to get good old Englebert.

As for the rest of it, there was a lot of pressure on me to get music in the movie, and originally they wanted music videos, which I wasn’t too crazy about. The idea with the Chili Peppers, what I originally wanted was a Vegas lounge act playing, and that kind of evolved. I wanted to have a lounge band playing and have it be some famous band doing it, it wouldn’t look like them, but you’d find out later who it was. Then when they recorded the song, it sounded like the Red Hot Chili Peppers. But I think it kind of works, you see these union musician type guys. The only thing is, now there’s the video that’s got the Chili Peppers animated in it. It’s a little confusing. Kevin Lofton at MTV animation did it.

EG: Speaking of other animators let me ask you about the “peyote sequence.”

MJ: That was another way of satisfying the pressure of people who wanted videos. A lot of people saying, “Music, music, get music in there, B&B’s got videos.” That was a way to do that. And also the idea with that was Rob Zombie of White Zombie does that artwork for their album covers. And I always thought that stuff would look cool animated. I’ve never seen–only a few cases–that kind of animation style where there’s a hundred things moving all at once, because it’s really hard work. That was the idea, to make it insane, psychotic looking. He drew a lot of the models for it and worked with me on it.

EG: Tell me about your other project, King Of The Hill.

MJ: Well it debuts January 15th on Fox. It’s very different from this. You know the old guy, Tom Anderson, which I do the voice for also, it’s kind of like he could be that guy’s nephew. He’s a guy in his 40s, what they call a “bubba” in Texas. It’s kind of a suburban Texas comedy about this guy and his family. It’s a little bit Foghorn Leghorn, a little bit Archie Bunker. He’s a conservative guy. Greg Daniels from The Simpsons, he was a writer there for a long time, is running the show, it’s kind of like a collaboration between the two of us. I started with the drawings and a pilot and he rewrote it.

EG: Are you still doing TV episodes of B&B?

MJ: Yeah. It’s been busy year.

EG: How much longer do you think the TV show will last?

MJ: Boy, I don’t know. To be honest, I would like to stop doing the show and I think I’m going to pretty soon. We’ve done over 200 episodes. If the movie does well, why keep grinding away at a show that’s on at 11:30 pm? There are already enough reruns. I think we’ve had a pretty good run, and it might be time to stop the show.

EG: More movies?

MJ: Yeah maybe, if it does well.

EG: You’re not sick of the characters?

MJ: I’m sick of doing them, because this year I’ve just been ridiculously busy [he does both of their voices]. I’d like to take a long break from it [laughs]. And then, it would be nice to do another movie if this one does well.

EG: I’ve heard a sort of rumor, from a friend of mine, Mark Borman, that you are looking to do a live action movie, too.

MJ: Yeah, that’s what I want to do next, a live action movie. I mean, when I was doing my short cartoons, the next thing I was planning on doing was taking the money I made off those and making a live action short. Then the TV show happened, and I thought, “OK, 35 episodes, I’ll move to New York and do it and then come back and do what I really want to do.” Then I thought, “OK, when the show gets cancelled, then I’ll move back and do what I really want to do.” Then, “When the Beavis & Butthead movie’s over, I’ll do what I really want to do.” But of course, now, this is what I also really want to do.

EG: I’ve heard about several Web sites where people discuss the subtexts in B&B. Including one theory that Beavis is a closeted gay. Care to comment.

MJ: [chuckles a bit like Butthead] I’ve read a couple. Oh yeah. It’s one of those things that I figure you just don’t know but you’ve gotta wonder. There are always guys like that in junior high, two guys together all the time, acting homophobic to the point of being suspicious. Sometimes I don’t know who I base a character on until years later. One of the people I think, there’s a guy that used to hang around the band I was in, who’d been friends with the lead singer since they were kids. One of those guys who never looked at you. He used to sit there while we were playing with headphones on. And one day we found him in the back seat with our keyboard player guy. So maybe, who knows? Nothing wrong with it if he is.

EG: Ending on that strange note… thanks!

-FF-
copyright 2000, ECG

“So I thought, if this is a movie, shit, I could make one of these!”

Kevin Smith Interview, August 1995
By: EC Gladstone

The movies of Kevin Smith resonated with me immediately. I was living in Central New Jersey the same time he was coming up, so the personal experience that he documented in Clerks and Mall Rats hit very close to home. As it turned out, we had several mutual friend and acquaintances, as well as shared touchstones (it’s entirely likely he saw my band perform in Asbury Park or Brighton Bar, though I never asked him), though we never knew each other at the time. This interview took place days after Smith’s 25^th birthday, as Mall Rats was about to be released and Chasing Amy was in pre-production. It got very Jersey-centric–because few other interviewers had the opportunity to talk about those elements which were clearly important to him.

EG: I know this is going to seem like an obvious opening question, but I haven’t seen you talking about this much yet: How did you get into filmmaking?

KS: Well, I used to work at that convenience store [where Clerks was shot], and then I went to see Slacker on my 21st birthday, and it was something I wasn’t used to–I wasn’t really into independent film before–there’s no plot, it’s not really about anything, it was made by a guy I’d never heard of, and the budget was like 25,000. So I thought, if this is a movie, shit, I could make one of these! So I went to film school up in Vancouver for a while, that’s where I met Scott [Mosier, producer] and David [Klein], my cinematographer, and I dropped out. Then I went home and wrote the script, and they came out and we shot it.

EG: Did you think you’d be doing this with your life?

KS: When we were making, it of course we had hopes in that direction, but that was like a “wouldn’t it be great” type thing. We never planned for it to go to Sundance and Cannes and that shit. I went from having a job to having a career.

EG: Was it a mindbender to go from a production like that to Mall Rats?

KS: On paper, at first it was. They told us our budget was 6.1 million and I was like “For what?” ‘Well, you’ve got to pay the actors, and the crew…Okay…and you’ve got to put them up at a hotel” Why? They can just stay at my house. “And what about feeding them?” I got cereal. Then when we decided not to shoot in Jersey, the hotel thing made more sense.

EG: Is it important for you to be both writing the script and directing your movies?

KS: Yeah, I’m not nearly as confident as a director. It’s nice because they pay you more to direct than to write–I wish I could get paid more to write than direct. It could be the same amount of money, they could just split it differently to placate my ego. I could never direct someone else’s script–that’s where the confidence to direct comes from, because I’m writing it, so I know exactly how it should play out and how it should look.

EG: Even though you’re making comedies, it seems like you take the writing very seriously–your dialogue is almost dramatic, more like a stage play.

KS: It has that theatrical feel to it. A lot of people said Clerks could have easily been a play, one location almost, and a lot of dialogue. I appreciate that. It’s not for everyone…. It’s very unnatural, but I think it’s how people think. It’s how you wish people would express something. It takes people a while to get into the rhythm. But by the end of the film you’re like ‘Oh, everybody talks like this.’

It reminded me of of New Jersey, in that your characters are almost too intellectual for their own good…or they’re super underachievers.

KS: Right[laughs] Don’t fucking print that, the state has enough things against it. It’s so fucking true though. The model for Clerks was my friends and I sitting around bullshitting, working stupid jobs and talking about stuff as if it really mattered.

Do you do a lot of pre-production and rehearsals with your actors?

KS: Yeah, a month, because otherwise the dialogue comes off punchy and fake.

Were you writing before you starting making movies?

KS: Not really, just short stories, to amuse my friends.

EG: You shot Mall Rats in Minneapolis [to get around union regulations, f.y.i.], but set it like Clerks, in Red Bank, including references to the Menlo Park Mall, and an exterior shot of Route 1 Flea Market…

KS: I wanted to keep the continuity from Clerks–Brian plays Gil again, and Jay and Silent Bob were in Clerks. Once the characters were there, I wanted to use them again, because I didn’t use them as well as I wanted to in Clerks. They’re more as comic relief now.

EG: Clerks really resonated with me because I lived for a number of years in Central New Jersey. You set it there because–

KS: It was the only place I ever really lived.

EG: You’re from Red Bank?

KS: Atlantic Highlands, originally. Now I’m in Red Bank.

EG: What’s your favorite Jersey mall?

KS: Eatontown, and then once I could drive, Woodbridge. A lot of people say our state is the Mall capital, which I don’t necessarily agree with.

EG: Do you think that the mall experience is particularly unique in New Jersey?

KS: I think it’s basically the same everywhere, except in Mall of America. I saw the same things in the place we shot it, kids just hanging out… It’s just mall as setting, as a backdrop for the quote-unquote pseudo-plot [in the movie].

EG:  So tell me some dirt about your notorious bad girl leading lady, Shannen Doherty.

KS: She was such a bitch. She slutted around the entire set… I wish I could say shit like she tied me up and made me direct naked, but there was nothing. She read for the part like everyone else, and then for call backs she read with several Brodies. She wants to get serious and get in to film, so she knows she has to keep a clean nose.

EG: Both of your films are “buddy pictures.” Was that intentional?

KS: With this one, yeah, I wanted to do a commercial film with a pseudo-plot. But the next one is more of a romantic triangle.

EG: And, to put on my film critic hat, would you care to comment on the seeming homosexual undercurrent between Jay and Silent Bob?

KS: Even in Clerks, people wondered if Randall was gay because he was so close to Dante. I don’t know, it makes them kind of sweet, I think. Jay, more in Clerks than Mall Rats, is really chick-fixated.

EG: Talk about the Stan Lee cameo—it kind of became more than a cameo, really.

KS: Yeah, it’s like the Wolfman Jack thing [in American Graffiti]. When we were casting, John Waters called and he wanted to play Stan Lee. But Jim Jacks, one of our producers said “What about Stan Lee?” and I said, yeah, in a perfect world, and he said “Well, I know Stan Lee.”

EG: Were you a comic book collector yourself growing up?

KS: I sold my collection to pay for Clerks. And then once the film took off, I went and started buying it back. Which was kind of liberating, you start from ground zero again.

EG: That comics store on Broad Street in Red Bank—Dave Wyndorf from Monster Magnet used to work there.

KS: Yeah. Small fucking world. The View Askew production company offices are right across Broad Street from the mall where the comics store used to be.

EG: Do you see yourself continuing to revisit these characters, and use the same actors, like something of a reperatory?

KS: Yeah, in the next film, Brodie comes back and Jay and Silent Bob come back. There’s two films I’m doing back to back–one’s called Chasing Amy, that’s going to be my stab at doing a PG-13 movie. It’s going to euphemisms all over the place. It’s set in high school. The idea of doing a PG-13 really intrigued me, especially after seeing Clueless. And then the one after that, we’ll go back and make a more adult film [Jay And Silent Bob Strike Back]… With Mall Rats I was trying to approximate a John Hughes [The Breakfast Club, Home Alone] or John Landis [Animal House] type movie, the shit I saw growing up.

EG: Watching it, I thought it was almost a spoof of that.

KS: Yeah, exactly. As long as your budgets are reasonable, they’ll let you try a bunch of crap. And I’d rather diversify than keep making the same movie over and over.

EG: You just did that piece in Entertainment Weekly with all those other young directors. Do you take any inspiration from any of them in particular?

KS: Independent film has really taken off in the last few months, because of Sundance, and because the budgets are so cheap. Like the norm now is even a 20 to 30 thousand dollar budget. And with the possibility of high yields, you can’t really go wrong. The worst that can happen is that you’ll break even. Studios, while they’re still making movies, they have to replenish constantly.

EG: Were you scared by what a flop SFW was?

KS: No, because it was such a Gen X movie, and I didn’t go out to make a Gen X movie. I was just trying to make a comedy. Anything that’s trying to be something, people will stay away from.

Copyright 2007, ECG