By Vivica Vial
When John Waters set out to make Pink Flamingos, he may have been looking to stir the pot but he made a bigger splash than he ever could have imagined. Pink Flamingos is a cult masterpiece: bizarre, shocking, kitschy, and absurd. I would count it among one of the strangest films I’ve ever seen. However, we must remember it’s only a movie. If you aren’t too easily offended perhaps you can withstand the shock, the filth, and the horror of Pink Flamingos. Don’t say I didn’t warn you! Without further ado, let us commence our exploration of the most bizarre and filthiest cult film ever!
Filth is my Politics! Filth is My life!
“To me, bad taste is what entertainment is all about,” says John Waters in one of his memoirs, Shock Value. “If someone vomits watching one of my films, it’s like getting a standing ovation.” (Barber, N., 2020).
Pink Flamingos is one of the most outrageous films of all time. Bad taste is an understatement when you have the main character eating dog shit, plus incest, and extreme closeups of a person’s anal cavity—and this just scratches the surface. The story is over-the-top and the characters are caricatures of the worst society has to offer. As Waters does in many of his films he goes to extremes to show us the worst in ourselves and, at the same time, make us laugh at ourselves—once the shock wears off.
Pink Flamingos is a tale of disturbed people vying for the title of Filthiest People Alive. In the beginning, the title goes to Divine, who is living under the alias Babs Johnson in a mobile home with her family: mother Edie (Edith Massey), son Crackers (Danny Mills), and friend Cotton (Mary Vivian Pearce). After finding this out, Connie and Raymond Marble (Mink Stole, John Lochary) are furious. They believe they deserve the title. The Marbles set out to outdo Babs Johnson and her strange clan to prove they are the filthiest people alive.
Watching Pink Flamingos, I can’t help but think of how human beings are encouraged to keep up with the Joneses. Society becomes a relentless and vain competition of one-upmanship. In Pink Flamingos this most irritating aspect of human society is turned on its head with people competing to be the absolute worst people they can be.
Waters got the idea from a trip he and Dreamlander Lochary took out west. He was amazed by the communities of mobile homes he saw. He wanted to write a film about a family who lived in a mobile home. But Waters being Waters, of course, this would be the most repulsive and perverse family his twisted imagination could dream up.
Waters’s previous film, Multiple Maniacs, cost $5,000 but Waters had a much larger vision for Pink Flamingos. He estimated that he would need at least $10,000. Waters’s parents, who lent him the money for Multiple Maniacs, came through with the $10,000 and he made them promise to never see the film. In an interview for the 1998 documentary, Divine Trash, Waters’s parents said they still had never seen Pink Flamingos. They kept their word.
Wide Awake in Dreamland
Released on March 17, 1972, Pink Flamingos was produced on a $10,000 budget. Divine’s trailer was an old Caravan purchased for $100. Another $100 was used to hire Vincent Peranio as a production designer. Peranio previously worked on Multiple Maniacs. He designed the interior of the Johnson’s trailer complete with two pink flamingos to put at the entrance.
Usually, Waters did everything himself but decided to shoot in color and hire a cameraman. Since he was shooting in color, the film’s aesthetic would be more elaborate. “John’s very involved with the costuming in his movies,” costume and makeup artist Van Smith said, “They’re very important to him. Well, they are part of the role. She [Divine] becomes part of the costume at times.” (I Am Divine, 2013)
For Divine’s look, Smith had to come up with a look that was a cross between Jayne Mansfield and Clarabell the Clown, from Waters’s favorite show as a child, The Howdy Doody Show. Divine’s partially shaved head served a purpose—to allow for more elaborate eye makeup.“When we were making Pink Flamingos we couldn’t mix with the real world,” Waters said. “We were just in this vacuum of what Pink Flamingos was ‘cause of how he [Divine] had to look. He could never get the stain off his lips and there was no eyebrows and his head shaved back like that. People were like ‘What the hell is that!’” (I Am Divine, 2013)
Part of Waters’s vision for the Marbles was eccentric hair coloring. Lochary and Stole had to find a way to color their hair bright blue and fiery red. In a time before Manic Panic and Punky Color, this was no easy task. Stole recalled she bleached her hair white and tried the brightest red box hair coloring she could find. None of them gave satisfactory results. Then, she tried red ink which yielded the bright fiery red color seen in the film. Lochary bleached his hair white and colored it using a blue magic marker. Stole said he used the piece inside that holds the ink and rubbed it all over his head.
Down on the Farm in a Little Pink Trailer…
The trailer set was on a farm in Phoenix, Maryland, owned by Bob Adams, a friend of Waters and Divine. The Dreamlanders set up a commune at the farm which had little hot water and just enough energy to keep the lights lit. Divine stayed at friend and fellow Dreamlander Susan Lowe’s house, waking up early to have the elaborate makeup applied and be driven to the set. John Waters and Mink Stole rented a house that served as the Marbles’ house with interiors filmed in Stole’s part of the house.
Filming took place on weekends while Waters raised money during the week. The actors still had to work at their day jobs. Mink Stole recalled having to cover her fire-engine red hair with a wig. Waters devoted his full time to the film, working during the week to be sure everything was ready to shoot on the weekends.
Pink Flamingos was shot from October 1971 to January 1972. The outdoor set in Phoenix was freezing and there was little to no food. Waters is known for his strong work ethic, obsessively working 20-hour days with the cast and crew until everything was as he wanted. “That movie was hell to make,” Waters recalled. “We would shoot in the middle of nowhere. It was cold.” (I Am Divine, 2013). Divine spent most of the movie clad in skimpy outfits. “You could see his breath and his gooseflesh,” Pearce said. (I Am Divine, 2013)
Rehearsals took place with Waters acting out all of the parts for the cast and crew. Pearce recalled that, during filming, her goal was to emulate Waters’s performance. All of the dialogue was hand-written. The cast had to memorize pages of dialogue and deliver it strictly adhering to Waters’s instructions–there was no improvising. “Divine was frustrated with Edith because she didn’t know her lines,” friend and film critic Dennis Dermody recalls. “Divine was a true professional and could do this stuff.” “Edith was difficult to carry on a conversation with she was kind of on a different planet,” Dreamlander Pat Moran said.
Waters fired the cameraman after he objected to filming some of the scenes and shot the remainder of the film himself. The $10,000 soon ran out and the cast and crew resorted to stealing. Peranio and Divine both stole props for the set. Divine was arrested and his defense was that he was a Method actor playing the role of a criminal.
Drag-Walk
The scene where Divine walks to the store in full drag wasn’t staged. Waters shot the scene from a car as Divine walked down the street in full drag. The reactions of the people on the street are genuine reactions from real pedestrians.
“People just didn’t believe it. These men across the street were screaming all kinds of things at me,” Divine said. “The whole city was just filled with laughter and screaming and people were going absolutely out of their minds. They didn’t know what I was.” (I Am Divine, 2013)
Another scene that was authentic in the film was the scene where Divine receives a shitty birthday present from the Marbles. She opens the box and exclaims that someone sent her a bowel movement. In real life, the turd in the box was actually Divine’s. “He shit in the box the night before,” Pearce said. “It really did stink and it did enhance everyone’s performances.” (I Am Divine, 2013)
Walking the Dog
Now, we come to THE scene. The scene that would make Pink Flamingos infamous. If you’re a fan of cult films, you must already know the ending. So, here’s the story behind one of the most controversial scenes in cult film, or maybe even cinematic history.
Waters wanted the last scene to be the most shocking in the film. The documentary I Am Divine includes footage of Divine talking about the scene. Divine said that when Waters asked him if he would eat a dog turd, he assumed Waters was kidding and agreed. Then, one year later, Waters turned to Divine and said “Ok, now tomorrow you have to eat the dog turd.” Divine thought Oh, this is great, he wasn’t kidding. ”He said, ‘listen, do you want to be famous?’” Divine recalled in an interview. “What do I care? I was very young and you don’t think about all these things and I really didn’t think about it until I had to follow that dog around for three hours.” (I Am Divine, 2013)
In preparation, the dog was fed raw meat for three days. On the day of filming, Waters and crew followed the dog for three hours waiting for the dog to defecate. After following the dog around for a while, they gave it an enema. The dog finally pooped just in time before they ran out of natural light. Waters got a shot of Divine devouring the dog excrement in one take — to prove there were no tricks. “I didn’t make him do it twice,” Waters said, “I’m not a sadist.” (I Am Divine, 2013)
Afterward, Divine called a hospital and said that he had a child who ate dog feces. He wanted to know what possible side effects result from eating dog feces. The nurse said the worst that could happen is that the child may get worms. Divine didn’t have any physical side effects but did have to answer questions about the scene for many years to come.
Waters edited the film himself. The story was supposed to have a voice-over narrator. Waters wanted Mr. Ray, a well-known Baltimore presenter. Ray turned Waters down. So, Waters decided to do the voice-over work, using the alias Mr. J.
The music came from Waters’s record collection. He said he often used obscure instrumentals and didn’t consider purchasing rights and licenses. He later did and put together a CD for the film’s 25th anniversary. He advises young filmmakers to look into purchasing rights to avoid any headaches.
Lovely Trash
Pink Flamingos premiered at the third annual Baltimore Film Festival on March 17, 1972. The three screenings were packed. From Baltimore, the film premiered in Boston in a grindhouse theater that showed low-budget horror and gay porn. Distributor and creator of the concept of Midnight Movies, Ben Barenholtz chose it to be part of a repeated screening in New York. The film was a success as audiences embraced the decadent film. However, the censorship board was not pleased. Waters was accused of obscenity and had to go to court. Several copies of Pink Flamingos were confiscated. Waters always pleaded guilty, preferring paying a fine to a lawyer’s fee. Plus, the controversy gave him free publicity. As they say, there’s no such thing as bad publicity.
The shocking ending continued to bring movie-goers out to see it. Waters and Divine became an underground sensation and even Andy Warhol wanted to meet Divine. “It was done for anarchy and it worked as anarchy,” Waters said. “The word of mouth spread, and then it spread all over the country, as my father said,‘Yeah, like cancer.’ Even if you hated it you had to talk about it.” (I Am Divine, 2013)
The Library of Congress selected Pink Flamingos for preservation in the United States National Film Registry in 2021 as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.” Pink Flamingos established Waters and Divine as icons of underground cinema. Waters and his Dreamlanders took an outlandish vision and made it a reality. Several countries banned the film and the censors tried to keep it from the public. Fortunately, it made it and is still screened at film festivals today. Hopefully, Pink Flamingos will continue to repulse, intrigue, and inspire for years to come.
Sources:
Film Perception. (April 5, 2022). Pink Flamingos: The most controversial film in history. YouTube. Watch here.
Yeager, S. (Director). (1998). Divine Trash. [Film]. Fox Lorber.
Barber, N. (June 23, 2020). Pink Flamingos: The most outrageous film ever made? BBC. Read here.
Grindhouse Cinema Fun Facts. Pink Flamingos/Fun Facts. Read here.
Schwarz, J. (Director). (2013). I Am Divine. [Film]. Automat Pictures.
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One response to “Sinema Obscura: Pink Flamingos (1972)”
[…] “Divine would tell you about someone that she was in love with,” recalled Cockette Fayette Hauser, “and then when it didn’t end well then Divine would come over and there would be a lot of weeping. When you were with Divine, it was a grand moment of excess and you would plunge in.” Soon, Divine would leave San Francisco to return to Baltimore to film Pink Flamingos. […]
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