Iconography: John Waters

“John Waters by David Shankbone” by david_shankbone is marked with Public Domain Mark 1.0.

By Vivica Vial

To continue our ongoing series of cult film retrospectives and continue with our Pride Month celebration, who better to profile than John Waters? Deemed the Pope of Trash and Sultan of Sleaze, Waters’s muse was the Queen of all Drag Queens, the heavenly Divine. Waters’s transgressive cult gems are thought-provoking social satire, presenting caricatures of many facets of society. He’s made some of the most shocking films of all time. Where did it start? What inspired him? Let’s find out…

The Little Boy Who Liked To Play Car Accident

Screenshot from Divine Trash (1998).

 

John Samuel Waters, Jr. arrived on April 22, 1946. His parents, Patricia and John Waters, Sr. knew something was different about their child. Patricia said that her son was always more interested in the villains than the heroes in the Disney films he watched such as The Wicked Witch in Snow White and Captain Hook in Peter Pan. This fascination foreshadows his later focus on the underdog in his films, the misfits who are unapologetic in their deviation from the mainstream.

Besides a fascination with Disney villains, Waters loved to play car accident. “He would take perfectly good toy cars and ram them against trees and break them,” later collaborator and Dreamlander Mink Stole recalled. (Divine Trash, 1998)  Concerned, Patricia talked to her pediatrician about John’s macabre game. “I remember asking the pediatrician about it and he said if he wants to smash up cars let him. He was only about 6 years old at this point. You couldn’t just let him loose in a junkyard. So, I would take him by the hand and we’d walk around and look at the cars.” (Divine Trash, 1998) 

Waters’s childhood was also the dawn of the television age. When television was new, during the 1940s and 1950s, one of the most popular forms of entertainment were puppet shows with multiple shows airing such as The Howdy Doody Show (1947-1960), Kukla, Fran, and Ollie (1947-1957), Captain Kangaroo (1955-1992), and The Shari Lewis Show (1960-1963).

Waters was tuned in at his parents’ home in Lutherville, Maryland in time for The Howdy Doody Show host, Buffalo Bob to call out “It’s Howdy Doody Time!” Waters’s parents took him to NBC Studios in New York City to see The Howdy Doody Show. When Waters walked into the studio and saw multiple Howdy Doody puppets, he realized that it was all fake. He also realized he wanted to be in show business.

“My parents took me to New York to be on it at NBC Studios,” Waters said. “I think my uncle got the tickets. It was very hard to get tickets to that Howdy Doody Show to be on the peanut gallery. I walked in and saw that there were five Howdy Doody puppets, ten cameras, the stage was tiny. I couldn’t even see the puppets. Buffalo Bob was mean to me but still, I thought, ‘This is all a lie and this is what I want to do.’ I knew then that I was gonna be in show business.” (Divine Trash, 1998)

After his experience at the show, Waters became a puppeteer and produced his own shows. He did three to four weekly shows and earned $25 for each. Waters’s work as a puppeteer developed skills he later used in producing his films. He developed his own characters and wrote, and marketed his own shows. His mother described seeing his audiences entranced with her son’s puppet shows.

His early work in puppetry foreshadowed his later work in more ways than one. He was inspired by the late William Castle whom Merrick discussed in Friday’s Sinemastalgia on House on Haunted Hill. Castle used gimmicks to promote his independent horror films which Waters would do years later with barf bags for Pink Flamingos and his Odorama for Polyester. One of Waters’s puppet shows was based on Castle’s The Tingler, and he even incorporated Castle’s gimmick into the show in his own way. “He put on a puppet show called The Tingler after he had taken me to the movies to see it,” Waters’s brother, Steve, recalled. “It was a pretty interesting production to try to put The Tingler on as a puppet show which he did. A friend of mine and I had to hide under the benches and grab people’s legs at the key time just to add that little extra thrill to people.” (Divine Trash, 1998)

Waters broke the main rule of puppeteering and came out from behind the stage. He interacted with the audience, bringing out a dragon puppet. Waters made each child stick out their hand and he’d make the dragon puppet bite it for good luck. “Ninety percent of the audience–they loved it. The other ten percent of the children had nervous breakdowns,” Waters said.“They were the cowards. They were the ones that still live up the street from their parents and have boring jobs and reach their peak in high school.” (Divine Trash, 1998).

From Puppetry to Film

“Howdy Doody” by Thad Zajdowicz is marked with CC0 1.0.

When asked what his films mean, Waters said: “I’m not trying to say anything. I’m just trying to give people a good time, you know, make them laugh and give them a little shock value for their money’s worth.” (Divine Trash, 1998)

During his teen years, Waters was drawn to and entranced by film. He later recalled that he would sneak to the drive-in to watch movies such as Hershell Gordon Lewis’s classic gorefest Blood Feast (1963). He watched it with binoculars on a hill at a construction site. “If John watched my movies through binoculars at a drive-in with no sound he’s more of a masochist than I realized,” Lewis said.  (Divine Trash, 1998)

It was also during his teen years that Waters began experimenting with filmmaking. His grandmother gave him a camera for his 16th birthday. His parents’ home served as a set for his early films. At the time, he was already friends with those who became known as Dreamlanders, the cast and crew whom Waters would feature in many of his films, including Mink Stole, Mary Vivian Pearce, and Glenn Milstead aka Divine.

He and Pearce went to see three or four movies a day. Waters watched all types of movies from Fellini to splatter films like Gordon Lewis’s Blood Feast and exploitation films like Russ Meyer’s Faster Pussycat. He prioritized underground films first such as films by artists Andy Warhol and Kenneth Anger, and the Kuchar brothers. Waters regularly read Film Culture magazine and the Village Voice to find out what underground films were playing.

Censorship prevented many movies from being seen. Filmmakers, eventually including Waters, were arrested for making content censorship boards deemed obscene. “There were censorship boards, I think, in all the states and you couldn’t say things, you couldn’t use certain materials and show things without the film being stopped and going to jail which is what happened to us and we actually took that risk every time we showed stuff that was improper,” filmmaker Ken Jacobs recalled. (Divine Trash, 1998)

The Birth of An Underground Filmmaker

John Waters in an early interview. Divine Trash (1998).

After graduating high school, Waters enrolled at New York University but didn’t stay long. He attended one class and was uninterested. For money, he stole books from the bookstore, selling them back to the store on the same day. While in New York, he saw three films a day and smoked a lot of marijuana with friends. Waters found himself in the center of one of the first drug-related scandals on a college campus. As a result, he and his friends were expelled. 

Back in Maryland, Waters decided to round up the Dreamlanders and make his own movies. Some Dreamlanders were friends Waters grew up with such as Mary Vivian Pearce and Mink Stole. Waters met his muse, and the most famous Dreamlander, Divine, when they were 17, which is how he met Dreamlander David Lochary.

“I’d always wanted to be a movie star. John Waters started to make films for our own enjoyment and to keep us out of trouble. It was just for us, for no one else,” Divine recalled. “We never thought that anything would ever happen with the movies. We were the only ones who thought they were funny at the time. They became quite popular much to our shock and amazement. Everything sort of mushroomed and snowballed from there and here I am today.” (I Am Divine, 2013)

Divine and Lochary were hairdressers. “David Lochary was a high school dropout and somehow had an English accent,” Waters said. “and his hair was dyed blonde with a heart-shaped root and long which really at the time was really radical.” Waters and his friends hung out in the underground scene. One of their hangouts was Pete’s Hotel, where they hung out at the bar. “We all started hanging out there with bums. It was us and truly Bowery bums with no teeth, dead drunk, passed out, and this is where these ideas were hatched really,” Waters recalled.

Waters’s group was diverse. “It was a mix of rich kids, poor kids, gay people, straight people, all together on LSD. Believe me–that’s a melting pot,” Waters recalled.“It was not like today where everybody was out and there was a gay scene. There was but it was illegal to be gay. It was kind of more fun then.”   (I Am Divine, 2013).  Pot and LSD were their drugs of choice. 

Drealander Edith Massey was a barmaid at Pete’s Hotel. Dreamlander Sue Lowe recalls that Massey made such an impression that she called Waters to come to the bar and see her. Waters was immediately impressed by her voice and kind demeanor. Massey’s first role was in Multiple Maniacs (1970) as herself, a barmaid at Pete’s Hotel. Audiences liked Massey. So, Waters gave her a larger role as Divine’s mother, Edie “The Egg Lady” in Pink Flamingos. 

Once again, he shot at his parents’ house. “I filmed the opening of ‘Hag in a Black Leather Jacket,’ ‘Roman Candles.’ In ‘Multiple Maniacs,’ the entire Cavalcade of Perversion was on the front lawn there. I shot ‘Eat Your Makeup,’ the whole Kennedy assassination right out front on Morris Avenue.” (Gunts, 2020). 

Waters did everything himself from writing to editing. The music came from his own record collection, mostly obscure instrumentals. He had some help with advertising from his Dreamlanders who would go around and tack up ads for movies at night, leave fliers on cars, and hand out advertisements at college cafeterias at lunchtime. Waters’s early films were shown in a basement at an Episcopalian church. His first encouragement and ally in filmmaking came from the most unlikely source, a priest. Reverend Fred Hanna opened up his church basement to screen Waters’s films because he was impressed by the young filmmaker’s creativity. When his mother expressed her concern to Hanna about the type of films her son was making he told her to encourage him.

From Church to Grindhouse

“theater seats – old” by menloparkplanning is marked with CC0 1.0.

Waters eventually graduated from church basements to grindhouse-type theaters. His movies drew a diverse and eccentric group, from hippies to the LGBTQ+ community to the members of Maryland’s more affluent communities. Pink Flamingos (1972) made a splash mainly for its controversial ending scene where Divine eats dog shit. Pink Flamingos is the first film in what is dubbed the Trinity of Trash with Female Trouble (1974) and Desperate Living (1977). With Pink Flamingos, Waters also attracted New Line Cinema (a newly established company at the time) as a distributor. At the time Pink Flamingos was released in 1972, porn chic had become popular. Pornographic films such as the 1972 films Deep Throat and Behind the Green Door gained mainstream popularity–a trend credited with contributing to Waters’s success.  With Pink Flamingos, Waters arrived and so did Divine.

Another factor that figured into Waters’s early success was a midnight movie house in San Francisco, called The Palace Theater. The theater’s manager, Sebastian, searched for the most bizarre films he could find to show as part of the theater’s Nocturnal Dream Show. The Palace showed Mondo Trasho and Multiple Maniacs. The Palace Theater’s midnight showings also featured performances by a troupe of drag queens, The Cockettes, who wanted Waters and Divine to join the show. Waters was out west with Lochary at the time. He contacted Divine who flew out to San Francisco. Divine’s arrival was a major media event that Waters credits with altering the course of Divine’s career.

Divine Inspiration

Divine in Pink Flamingos (1972). Screencap from Divine Trash (1998).

Harris Glenn Milstead, the future Divine, lived down the street from Waters. The two attended different high schools and didn’t meet until they were 17. Divine first appeared in footage Waters shot at a birthday party Divine threw for a friend. Waters went to the Milstead home with his first camera, presumably the one his grandmother gave him for his 16th birthday. He shot footage that he later used in one of his early shorts, Roman Candles (1966).

Waters recalls where the name Divine came from: “They say everywhere that Divine was named from the Jean Genet book [Our Lady of the Flowers] but I remember it being named Divine because it was a Catholic word they always used in high school: This is divine and this is divine and that’s where it came from for me. I didn’t remember the thing in Our Lady of the Flowers, although that must be impossible because I did read that book around that time.” (Divine Trash, 1998)

Both Waters and Divine adored Jayne Mansfield on whom the character Divine is based. Waters has described Divine’s persona as “an inflated, insane Jayne Mansfield.” (Divine Trash, 1998)

After Pink Flamingos

The Turnblads, Edna (Divine) and Wilbur (Jerry Stiller) in Hairspray (1988).

Waters has had a long and impressive career as a multi-talented artist, working as a writer, director, actor, and visual artist. He started in the late ‘60s, making an indelible impression on cinematic history with his early transgressive cult films, including Multiple Maniacs (1970), Pink Flamingos (1972), and Female Trouble (1974). In 1988, Waters released the musical film, Hairspray, starring Divine, Ricki Lake, and Deborah Harry. The film was a hit which brought both Waters and Divine into the mainstream. Hairspray was adapted into a Broadway musical and was remade as a musical film in 2007 with John Travolta stepping into the late Divine’s shoes. Waters also wrote and directed Desperate Living (1977), Polyester (1981), Cry-Baby (1990), Serial Mom (1994), Pecker (1998), and Cecil B. Demented (2000).

Waters also appeared as an actor in Sweet and Lowdown (1999), ‘Til Death Do Us Part (2007), Mangus! (2011), Excision (2012), Suburban Gothic (2014), and has appeared in the Child’s Play franchise in Seed of Chucky (2004) and Chucky (2024). He hosted and produced the television series John Waters Presents Movies That Will Corrupt You (2006). He most recently toured in his one-man show, This Filthy World.

Waters also creates visual art using different media including installations, photography, and sculpture. He’s also written books and earned two Grammy nominations in 2015 and 2020 for his narration of the audiobooks for his books Carsick and Mr. Know-It-All. The Order of Arts and Letters in France named Waters an officer in 2018. In 2023, Waters received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures also opened a full-scale exhibition, “John Waters: Pope of Trash,” a retrospective of Waters’s work, exploring his “filmmaking process, key themes, and unmatch styles.” (Schulman, 2023). The exhibit includes restorations of his obscure earlier films, including “Hag in a Black Leather Jacket,” his first short plus loads of costumes and props including the leg of lamb Kathleen Turner used as a murder weapon in Serial Mom and Johnny Depp’s leather jacket from Cry Baby.

All of Waters’s films are set in and shot in Baltimore where Waters still mainly lives.  He also has an extensive collection of 8,000 books and enjoys collecting and displaying fake food.

John Waters, the child who loved to play car accident, has come a long way. From transgressive filmmaker to the Hollywood Walk of Fame, he’s done it all and is still going strong. When he first picked up that 8 mm camera, I doubt he foresaw the impact he’d make on the cinematic world.

Sources: 

Yeager, S. (Director). (1998). Divine Trash. [Film]. Fox Lorber.

Gunts, E. (April 22, 2024). Turning 78 today, John Waters recalls his show business start as a puppeteer. Baltimore Fishbowl. Read here.

Gunts E. (July 17, 2020). Filmmaker John Waters’ boyhood home goes up for sale. Baltimore Fishbowl. Read here.

Schulman, M. (September 17, 2023). John Waters Is Ready for His Hollywood Closeup. The New Yorker. Read here.

Lodi, M. (October 4, 2023). ‘I’ve always made fun of the rules.’ John Waters has only ever been himself. CNN. Read here.

Mesirow, T. (June 7, 2022) John Waters’ Tour of His Baltimore Apartment. YouTube. Watch here.

Schwarz, J. (Director). (2013). I Am Divine. [Film]. Automat Pictures.