‘He still lives today in so many ways’ … Divine and John Waters in New York in 1975. Photograph: Lewton Cole/Alamy View image in fullscreen ‘He still lives today in so many ways’ … Divine and John Waters in New York in 1975. Photograph: Lewton Cole/Alamy John Waters Interview ‘The minute I had success, I stopped taking drugs’: John Waters on 60 years of screen carnage Ryan Gilbey As Hairspray and his ‘angriest movie’ Desperate Living are rereleased, the ‘Pope of Trash’ reflects on dead dogs, dirty rats, ‘that lunatic RFK’ and why there are no novelty dances any more
Prefer the Guardian on Google John Waters still remembers the day his 1988 comedy Hairspray was awarded a PG certificate. “It was horrible,” he says.
Until then, Waters, christened the “Pope of Trash” by the novelist William S Burroughs, was notorious for filming the unfilmable. In Eat Your Makeup , he recreated JFK’s assassination only five years after the event, casting the boisterous Divine in drag as Jackie Kennedy. He invented a blasphemous sex act called the “rosary job” in Multiple Maniacs , which also featured a rape-by-giant-lobster. Most repulsively, in Pink Flamingos , he persuaded Divine to scoff a fresh dog turd on camera.
Now here he was making a bubblegum comedy about the teen heart-throbs on a fictional early-1960s TV dance show. Hairspray is not without its eccentricities: there are affectionate dabs of token ugliness (vomit on a fun-fair ride, a rat interrupting a moonlit tryst), the glorious sight of Debbie Harry smuggling a bomb under her beehive wig, and Divine in the dual roles of a Baltimore housewife and a racist TV boss. The result, in the words of Rolling Stone magazine, was a family film that “both the Bradys and the Mansons could adore”.
View image in fullscreen Scuzzy fairytale … Edith Massey and friend in Desperate Living. Photograph: Steve Yeager/courtesy Warner Bros Speaking from his home in the seaside idyll of Provincetown, Massachusetts, Waters shudders at the memory of that first and only PG: “I was scared. I thought my fans were going to turn on me.”
The 80-year-old provocateur has his camera switched off for our early-morning video call but the voice is sonorous enough to make it feel as if he is right here in the room: the languid drawl, the high notes of confected comic outrage, the disdainful purr suggesting an audible curling of the lip. I ask him to describe his appearance today, feeling a little like a phone-sex heavy-breather in one of his movies, and he helpfully obliges: “I have on a turtleneck, a pair of pants and Paul Smith socks”. Unmentioned but implied is the pencil moustache which he once said he hoped would give him the look of “a high-school principal who might be a child molester”.
Though Waters has kept busy writing books and touring his spoken-word live show (which is coming to the UK in February), he hasn’t directed a film since A Dirty Shame , his 2004 comedy about small-town sexual hysteria. He failed to raise funding a few years ago for an adaptation of his feel-bad novel Liarmouth, even with Aubrey Plaza attached, and there are no new movies in the pipeline. Thank goodness, then, for the old ones: the boutique label Criterion has given the bells-and-whistles Blu-ray treatment to Hairspray and the gloatingly scuzzy 1977 adult fairytale Desperate Living , which is set in Mortville, a miscreants’ ghetto ruled by the crazed Queen Carlotta (played by the goofy, grandmotherly Edith Massey).
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