“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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Copyright 1997, ECG

John Waters and Bob Shaye
by Eric Gladstone

Q: One of my favorite Sundance stories is once when I was walking up Main Street, a guy was posing over a pile of dog shit, and his girlfriend was taking a picture. Do you have any memories of Sundance years past?

JW: I think the most bizarre was, the last time I was at the festival they gave me a car and somebody to take me to screenings. At the same time there was a mass murder about an hour from here, a Mormon stand off, and the press had been waiting for two months to get the shot of the police raid. And I went to that instead. It was in the middle of a blizzard, and the press said “You’re here?!” That was the year Hairspray played here. Accidentally, I made a family movie.

Q: Have you seen any films here this year that impressed you?

JW: I saw Gregg Araki’s movie [Nowhere], which I liked very much. He’s a filmmaker that has the quality of … it’s definitely a “Gregg Araki” movie when you see it. David Lynch’s movie I saw [Lost Highway]. Those are the kind of directors I like. They take you into their world, even if you don’t want to go!

Q: Have you been to any murder trials recently?

JW: Not any more, OJ ruined it. I made Serial Mom and once I make a movie about one of my obsessions it’s used up, I’m over it. I tried to go to a murder trial in Baltimore, and they all recognized me and thought I was making a movie about it, so it wasn’t fun any more.

Q; What’s your current obsession?

JW: Hmm, I’ll have to think about that…I’ve always been interested in behavior I can’t understand. That’s the one thing that interests me more than anything. As soon as I can understand it, I lose my obsession. Certainly, my current obsession is always whatever I’m writing about, and in a way, the art world was a new obsession.

Bob: As you possibly know, John has evolved his creativity into being a fine artist.

JW: What I do is take pictures off the TV screen of other directors’ work and redirect them in storyboards the way I think they should be.

Bob: What was interesting to me was that I saw many people [at the screening] last night turning to each other and asking who Tex Watson was.

JW: Oh, God. I made this movie two months after attending the Manson trial, and you can certainly see the influence in this very much. I can. And since then, I sort of cringe when I see that, because I’ve taught in prison since then. It was something that was very radical at the time. And nobody else did Manson imagery then — until 20 years later, when Guns ‘N Roses got in trouble for it! It was something that was very much in the news at the time. The whole murder scene that was cut out [and now featured in the newly restored outtakes] was a subplot where they get revenge.

Continued at Pt. 3

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Copyright 1997, ECG

John Waters and Bob Shaye
by Eric Gladstone

Q: Why did you cut it out?

JW: I thought it was a little too weird, made them too violent. Also it was too long. That’s one thing I learned with ‘Pink Flamingos’, the first cut of it was an hour too long. Not shortening things, whole subplots! [What's restored now] isn’t even all the outtakes, there’s a lot more. That’s going to be the 50s anniversary!

Q: Any plans for a sequel?

JW: Well, I wrote a sequel called Flamingos Forever, it’s published in a book of mine called Trash Trio. I worked for a while to get it going, it never happened, and I doubt very seriously it will now. Though I think Anthony Hopkins should play the Divine part in drag. Eddie Fischer as the Egg Man. I cast the whole film in the new introduction to Trash Trio, who I’d want to play in it now.

Q: What are you doing for your next movie?

JW: I wrote a new one, that I just finished, called Pecker about a small bird — no, about a 17-year-old kid that works in a sandwich shop in East Baltimore and takes pictures of his loving and peculiar family. Nobody thinks much of it until he’s accidentally discovered by an art dealer and turned into an art star in New York, much against his will. He picked at his food when he was a child, that’s how he got the name Pecker. It’s in development, a development deal with Fine Line. They just got the budget yesterday and they haven’t even seen it yet!

Q: You were talking about things you don’t remember shooting. What are your strongest memories about the shoot?

JW: How cold it was. You can see people’s breath throughout it. After every scene we’d wrap Edie in blankets and she’d say [in whiny Edith Massey voice] “somebody rub my feet.”

Q: With the discovery of the new footage, did you find you could put a whole new movie together?

JW: Well, I didn’t want to do a “director’s cut,” I think those scenes should’ve been cut out. But if you know the movie and the characters, it’s nice to see some new Divine and Edie scenes, and some Mink Stole scenes. I didn’t want to put them back in.

Q: I’ve heard there’s a documentary about ‘Pink Flamingos’ being completed?

JW: Yeah, a friend of mine in Baltimore named Steve Jaeger, who plays one of the new men in the trial scene at the end, shot us making this movie. He never did anything with the footage — I’ve never seen it until recently — He has ten hours of documentary footage of us making Pink Flamingos, of me showing Divine how to eat dog shit. It really took my breath away when I saw that! He’s still working on it and it’s about halfway done. It’s called Divine Trash.

Q: Was Divine as eccentric off screen as he was on?

JW: No, Divine was a very gentle man in real life. He never went in drag except when he was making a movie or getting paid to do it for his recording career. I met Divine when he lived up the street from my parents, and I always joke that he was “the girl next door.” And I knew him in high school. And in films, for me, he was a great mouth to speak through. He had a lot of anger because he was hassled in high school.

You have to remember then, drag queens were really square. They all wanted to be Miss America wearing a mink coat. Then Divine came along with fake scars on his face and carrying an ax. They hated him! So it was a great release for Divine. The day he showed up for his role in Hairspray, he said, “No drag queen would ever look like this.” He told me later in life that he’d be doing appearances and the people who used to beat him up in high school would ask for his autograph. You know, it really could still cause him great pain. I think he used that pain for the anger in the Divine character and it made him a star. He was a character actor, that’s what Divine was.

Continued at Pt. 3

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Copyright 1997, ECG

John Waters and Bob Shaye
by Eric Gladstone

Q: You sort of broke into the mainstream with Serial Mom? Has that affected your creativity since then?

JW: Well, I definitely think the independents and the studio system are not as far apart as they used to be, you know what I mean? The executives are younger, a little hipper than they used to be. I remember in the old days when I used to go to Hollywood to pitch, the worst thing I could say is that I’d made Pink Flamingos, because they had heard of it but hadn’t seen it. And their wife would go rent it and they’d watch it in a Beverly Hills screening room and have a heart attack! Now, the people that run the studios, a lot of them saw it in college. So it’s easier for me there.

Bob: Also, it is a very salutary dichotomy for American culture to have an independent sector so viable. Because so-called major companies –I won’t say old-timers–first of all are unable physically to make a film that is inexpensive because of the union rules. And the other thing is the subject matter, and to some extent economic viability, which is one of the reasons we created New Line. Very few people know this, but just after we formed the company, we were about to lose our bank line [of credit] because of the title. The film was originally released by “Saliva Films.”

JW: I thought you were hiding.

Bob: Even then I was trying to protect New Line, which had already been reprimanded, wasn’t pristine itself. There is kind of a hubris factor, a political factor. We were just laughing about the fact that the MPAA is reviewing this movie Tuesday…

JW: I’d love to be a fly on the wall at that screening!

Bob: It may create a new rating altogether! NC-absolutely no children. I think they’re going to regret that New Line ever joined the MPAA.

JW: I go tonight to the screening in Salt Lake City. I told Bob, I’m nervous because it’s Friday night. On Friday, you don’t get out of jail till Monday–on a weekday you get out the next day.

Q: How do you feel personally about Pink Flamingos in comparison to your other films?

JW: Well, I certainly have made technically better movies. I was still learning what to do then. I never went to film school. It was filmed with magnetic sound that came right into the camera, what they used before video, so that you could never cut. Every cut, the sound had to overlap 24 frames over the beginning of the next shot. So it was basically like filming a play, no MTV cutting here! I’m proud of it, though. It was like having a juvenile delinquent child who keeps committing crimes, but you still love it.

Q: How about how you’ve grown as a director?

JW; Well, I know now I guess I wouldn’t have asked Kathleen Turner to eat dog shit! But then, I asked Divine right in the beginning of the movie innocently, “Would you eat dog shit?” And he said “Sure.” I didn’t really talk about it that much, and it wasn’t that big of a deal. The day came and we just did it. There were problems–the dog wasn’t cooperative–but don’t make me tell that story again. After he did it, Divine’s first words were, “Now I know I’m insane.” Everybody was laughing, and I think a lot of the guys were smoking pot, and he said, “Really, I think you could get sick from that.” So he called the hospital and said, “My son just ate a dog turd.” And the nurse said, “Well, you might get the white worm.” But nothing ever happened. He was a strong man.

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Copyright 1997, ECG