John Waters by James Egan

Author:James Egan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
Published: 2011-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

The Domestication of John Waters

Pat Aufderheide / 1990

From American Film 15, no. 7 (April 1990), 32–37. © 1990 American Film Institute. Reprinted by permission of Pat Aufderheide and the American Film Institute.

John waters looks up from the couch in his book-lined living room to glance fondly at his latest Christmas gift—a collection of tree ornaments bearing portraits of the Manson family. Then he gets back to business.

Business for now is in Waters’ native Baltimore but only for a few days. He’s between Los Angeles editing sessions on his latest film, Cry-Baby, scheduled for an April release. And besides being the proud father of a new movie, he’s also the proud owner of a new home.

“Come on,” he says, uncrossing his lanky legs and bounding up the stairs of the genteelly outfitted middle-class castle he just purchased. “I’ll give you a tour.” It’s hard to keep up as we rattle through three floors; whatever Waters does, he does with the air of a schoolboy adventure. This is a man who can make a house tour seem like a prank.

The previous owners—who went more for a Tudor look, with fanciful nooks and crannies—might not have appreciated the huge wall posters celebrating the gorier aspects of Waters’ earlier films. And maybe the plastic Japanese-food replicas are not what they expected to festoon the bookcases, although they fit in the house of a man so tall and thin, he seems to subsist on air. His elegant, almost courtly manner is highlighted by his pencil-thin mustache and a secret amusement about life he is more than willing to share. His conversation is punctuated by a deep, conspiratorial laugh. He seems normal to a fault, yet in the bedroom, a grim portrait of a grisly murderess—Waters has a particular fondness for horrific criminals, whose life histories he seems to adopt like pets—looks balefully toward the bed. Waters’ office, on the other hand, is meticulous, brightly lit and electronically au courant.

“And look at this,” he says almost shyly in the kitchen. It’s a still from The Wizard of Oz, autographed by Margaret Hamilton—who played his favorite character in the movie, the Wicked Witch of the West. (She signed it “WWW.”)

Finally, we settle on the couch in the living room, and I look around for the ashtrays that have been the constant companion to Waters’ three-pack-a-day habit.

“I gave up smoking,” he says casually. It takes a minute to sink in. Is this the same man who once said that his dream would be to advertise Kool cigarettes on TV? The man whose portrait in his autobiography, Shock Value, features him inhaling his own smoke? “It’s horrible,” he goes on with mock solemnity. He peers at me. “I don’t advise you to ever do it.”

“This is the last period film for me,” he continues, getting back to work. “The next one’ll be set in the present—in Baltimore and Hollywood.”

Waters has been on the Baltimore-Hollywood axis for a year because of Cry-Baby. The film is produced by Imagine and distributed by Universal, although the movie still has the flavor of Waters’ own Dreamland productions.

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