A conversation with the Pope of Trash following new restorations of the upbeat/downbeat duo, Hairspray and Desperate Living.
The Criterion Collection has been a great home for restorations of some of John Waters’ most cherished films: Pink Flamingos, Polyester, Multiple Maniacs, and Female Trouble. Now, as they add dazzling 4K restorations of Hairspray – the exuberant 1988 dance comedy that would emerge as Waters’ greatest mainstream triumph – as well as the 1977 antifascist fairytale of queer rebellion Desperate Living to the collection, the Pope of Trash passionately reflects on Baltimore’s colourful beauty salons, staying optimistic, and being a ‘les bro’.
LWLies: We recently screened Serial Mom at one of our favourite historic cinemas in London, the Rio, which is celebrating its 50th birthday this year.
Waters: Great, that’s my best movie! I’m glad you showed it. Kathleen [Turner] is great in the movie. Everybody is. It’s my best movie.
Hairspray is your most successful. Did returning to the original through the restoration process feel any different after decades of seeing the story reinterpreted and take on many different lives?
It’s been reinterpreted in many forms but it’s still the same movie. Even in bad versions of the play, local versions that are poorly done, you can’t kill Tracy Turnblad. The characters still come through. That’s why it wins. That’s why it sneaks in. That’s why it is the most devious movie I ever made – because no-one complains about it. Even in Florida grade schools when you had someone in drag singing a love song to a man, or something that encourages interracial dating, nobody gets mad! Even racists like it, they’re so stupid.
You call it your Trojan Horse.
Yeah, it is, definitely. When I kick the bucket, will that be first in my obituary or Pink Flamingos? I think they’ll be in the same paragraph. What was funny is that after Hairspray came out and became more of a mainstream hit, people who had never seen my other movies saw Hairspray and said ‘Oh, let’s see another John Waters movie’ and then they watch Pink Flamingos and are completely horrified. That could happen today even, because all my early movies are worse now. They’re more shocking today than they were even when they came out, but they’re accepted today, amazingly. It’s truly amazing how hard Pink Flamingos has wormed its way into the general public in America and all over the world.
When Cry-Baby got a 4K restoration, you commented on the fact that it finally looked like the 50s Technicolor movies you had always wanted it to look like. Do you feel the same about Hairspray? Were there details that suddenly came alive in a way they hadn’t before?
Criterion does such great restoration work, and it’s a thin line. You want to make it as good as you possibly can but you don’t want to make it look like something it never was. So I’m all for fixing mistakes I didn’t want in the first place, but even more so in Desperate Living. Who would ever think that would ever be released in 4K!? It’s almost a parody that it is. I saw detail in that movie I never, ever saw before. You see costume detail and production design detail from Van Smith and Vincent Peranio that you never saw before. I saw new things in it. It’s still the same movie, but why not watch it the best way you can? I believe the Criterion release is that.
Do you remember sending the cast, maybe it was just Ricki Lake, but you sent them a VHS tape demonstrating some of the Hairspray dances, the Mashed Potato… Do you remember making that tape?
Oh yeah, I made it with the real people who were on the committee of The Buddy Deane Show. The real people, they helped with this movie. It was based on a real local show in Baltimore that was our local version of American Bandstand. We never had Dick Clark in Baltimore, we had our local version where the girls’ hair was higher, the boys’ pants were tighter! I think they are on that tape with me, doing the dance. I totally remember it. I can still do those dances, gimme a couple of drinks late at night in my apartment and I’ll do the Madison for ya!
It was important to you that the dances felt authentic to Baltimore teenagers of that era.
The time period here was the early ’60s, right between the ’50s of Elvis and right before The Beatles happened, so there was this weird little pocket of time, and the authenticity was very important to me. I remember being so amazed when the people that were on The Buddy Deane Show saw the movie and they said, ‘God, I feel like that was a flashback’, it was so close to the real thing. It was such an influence on me that I wanted to make it real. Just imagine, there were so many gimmick dances. Why wasn’t there a dance about Covid? The song ‘The Bug’ at the end of this movie, when you catch a disease and throw it to somebody else and they catch it – that certainly would’ve been a good one for that time.
With Debbie Harry and Sonny Bono, I wonder whether their individual public personas at the time factored into their casting?
Sonny Bono was running for mayor of Palm Springs and played a racist, which he was most definitely not! He worked for Specialty Records before he was famous for Cher or anything. He was one of the few white men that worked at Specialty Records which was an era where he discovered Little Richard, he knew Ruth Brown… Sonny Bono very much knew the time period, and I think that’s why he did the movie. Debbie Harry I had known because she helped with the music in Polyester, and she loved Tab Hunter. Debbie and I certainly had the same taste and sense of humour, so I just thought that she would be great as the evil hair hopper mother that was jealous of Divine. I think she was brilliant casting. Debbie’s a really good actress, I’ve seen her in a lot of movies! And she was thrilled it was gonna be Sonny. She loved the idea. Sonny did too. He was a little more apprehensive because he heard about Pink Flamingos and he did ask me ’nobody’s gonna run in and eat shit in this right?’, but he knew Debbie and liked the idea too. Even though they were from very different worlds at that particular time in music history, they both were already icons and they wanted to work with each other.
I wanted to ask you about Chris Mason, there’s really not much out there about her, but she was the visionary behind all the amazing hair design.
Chris Mason was a huge part of the success of my movies. She did the hairdos in Hairspray and they were all real, except for Debbie’s. Chris was something! She was quite a character. She was a very, very out gay woman who was quite upfront about it, and scary! Ricki Lake always said to me ‘usually the hairdresser’s the nice, motherly figure…’ Chris Mason was scary but I got along with her great. She had a great heart, she was wonderful. She did Cry-Baby too. The hairdos in those movies are really truly amazing. She was a hairdresser in real life before getting into movies and she did those hairdos for real in East Baltimore beauty salons. In Baltimore those hairdos in working class communities were not considered rebellious. Your mother had the same hairdo. That’s what people actually looked like, which is amazing to imagine today when you see it. There’s still people that look like that in Baltimore and they always say: ‘you find a good look and you stick with it’.
Hairspray is this classic good vs evil tale that feels quite utopian in terms of race, weight, and having social progress be possible. Desperate Living is a lot more negative and misanthropic. Everyone is compromised in some way. They present two poles of thinking about the world. Did your own outlook shift between making those films?
Desperate Living was my angriest film, but it does have a happy ending. They take over the fascist queen and they cannibalise her. That’s a happy ending in a John Waters film. For a long time, the movie was the one that did the worst because people didn’t know how to take it. Today the young transgender kids go and laugh and hoot on all the excesses of the movie. I feel the same. I’ve not ever looked back on my films saying ‘I wish I had changed that’. I think Desperate Living was ahead of its time in the subject matter but now it’s right back. When Mole says ‘I want a wang and I want it now,’ well, there’s nothing the matter with that. That’s being very trans-positive. I would stick by both those movies. I am an optimist in real life. That’s why Hairspray did way better at the box office. Nobody yet has asked to make Desperate Living a musical, but maybe it would be a good opera! It’s my political movie. It’s my Battle of Algiers.
You’ve described yourself as a “les bro”. Do you still identify with that?
Yeah, I’m a les bro! I was hanging out with all lesbians. Chris Mason and her gang opened a bar called Sappho’s and they wouldn’t let men in, but they let me in. They had a newsletter called Desperate Living and they were mad that I stole the title. I get why they were mad but at the same time I was doing it in an ironic way. Why would you, if you’re trying to convince somebody politically, call what you’re doing ‘Desperate Living’? When that first came out, some lesbian groups said ‘how dare a man make a movie about lesbians?’, but I always got along with lesbians. I don’t understand gay men that don’t. They helped start ACT UP with us when it wasn’t their girlfriends dying of AIDS, so they were warriors with gay people right from the beginning. I’ve always been a les bro. Chris Mason had a huge influence on us making that movie because we hung around in her bar at the time we were making it.
Did the connection end with the title? I’m thinking of the breast glory hole – did that idea come from anywhere?
There was no real breast glory hole in Sappho’s or in the best gay women’s bar in Baltimore – I forget what it’s called now but it was really scary, that bar. There were no glory holes in either of those where breasts came through. Today there might be! Today that could probably happen and maybe it has. At my summer camp one year someone came dressed as that glory hole with their breasts through a hole. And by the way, those breasts in the movie were Liz Renay’s. She said ‘I’ll volunteer, you can use mine!’, and it was Pat Moran, the Emmy award-winning casting director, in that bathroom that turns around and is horrified when she sees those breasts come through.
This was your first film without Divine.
I wrote it for Divine in the beginning, and that would have been confusing, to have a male gay drag queen play a butch lesbian. Sue Lowe did a great job. In real life she’s a straight woman and I’ve said this before but when she had to look like that, her children ran from her, her boyfriend broke up with her. It was tough to live looking like Mole, but she did a great job.
You’ve said in the past that the one artwork you wish you’d made was Pasolini’s Salò, but comparisons have been drawn between Salò and Desperate Living.
Salò came out right after Pink Flamingos. I think it might be closer to that. Salò is a beautiful art film. It really could be remade today with what’s going on, but the kids that were in that movie, some of them were underage, nude, eating fake shit. We had, at least, real shit! I’ve read interviews with them where they said ‘we had the best time, when they yelled “cut” we’d start laughing and Pasolini had such a great time with us’, so that movie could probably never be made today, in any country. But if you see it today, it still has the same shock value as Pink Flamingos, more than Desperate Living. At the same time, it does have a great beauty to it. I have presented Salò many times. Once during Covid, MoMA had me do a drive-in outside of the Bronx Zoo and we showed a double feature of Salò and Climax by Gaspar Noé – quite a night!
Hairspray and Desperate Living are on Criterion Collection 4K UHD from 20 July.
