From reviled underground filmmaker to widely revered, self-proclaimed “filth elder”, John Waters was honoured for his six-decade career with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame last year just as a major exhibition and retrospective screening series, John Waters: Pope Of Trash, opened at the prestigious Academy Museum in Los Angeles. The latest title from his subversive, colourful and distinctly queer oeuvre to be restored for an upcoming 4K Ultra HD and Blu-ray release is 1990’s Cry-Baby starring Johnny Depp, Waters’ take on the Elvis and juvenile delinquent movies of the 1950s. The musical, which spawned a short-lived but multiple Tony-nominated Broadway adaptation in 2008, features an eclectic all-star cast including Amy Locane in her big screen debut, Ricki Lake straight from her collaboration with Waters on Hairspray, Susan Tyrrell, Iggy Pop, Kim McGuire, Troy Donahue, Joe Dallesandro, David Nelson, Willem Dafoe, Traci Lords, Patricia Hearst, and original Waters Dreamlander Mink Stole.
Ahead of the release of the 4K Ultra HD and Blu-ray editions of Cry-Baby in their original theatrical and director’s cuts from Kino Lorber Studio Classics on May 28th, John Waters speaks exclusively with The Queer Review’s editor James Kleinmann about the influence of Bob Mizer’s photography on the look of the film, how gay sex clubs inspired one of its most memorable dance sequences, shooting in the courthouse where he had faced charges of “conspiracy to commit indecent exposure” in the late 60s while he was making Mondo Trasho, and why he is a “lesbro”.
James Kleinmann, The Queer Review: I loved revisiting Cry-Baby. What was it like for you to return to it 35 years after making it and what do you think about the way that it looks now in these Ultra 4K and Blu-ray restorations?
John Waters: “I was revisiting it too because I hadn’t seen both versions—especially back-to-back—in quite a while. It’s perfect, it looks like its 50s Technicolor, which is what I always wanted all my movies to look like. It looks like an Elvis movie now, which is exactly what I wanted. They did a great job restoring it and I think Dave Insley who shot it gave them great material to work with.”
What impact did the test screening process have on these different versions?
“I couldn’t remember which version was which because we had so we had so many different versions of it after the test screenings. To be honest, none of them made a difference, even after we did all the different cuts and spent a million dollars and did reshoots and everything, it tested exactly the same. The changes did make some things better though. There were plot points that were unclear that we simplified. But would the movie have done exactly the same without those changes? I think it would have. If test screenings really worked then every movie would be a hit.”
Is the director’s cut the original version before the test screenings?
“No, the version of the film that was originally shown when we first did test screenings has never been shown since because we made changes to it. There were a few things that we did in the reshoots that did make it better, but overall it was the same movie. It wasn’t going to suddenly change someone from hating it to loving it. When they’re doing test screenings they always ask, ‘What character did you least like?’ And they’ll say, ‘The villain’. You’re not supposed to like the villain! Although in my movies that’s complicated because the villain is often the heroine.”
“In a real 50s movie, Mrs Vernon-Williams and Alison would have been the heroine and Cry-Baby would have been the villain. Now that I think about it, if Cry-Baby had married Hatchet Face it might have been a bigger hit. Even though Amy Locane does a great job in it and it’s a thankless role to be an ingénue in a John Waters movie, she may be the only one ever. Amy lip-synchs so amazingly well. She’d never even made a movie before that and her performance is pretty amazing in it if you watch it again.”
You’ve said that the most fun part of filmmaking is the writing.
“No part of filmmaking is fun! It’s fun when it’s over and it’s a hit and you’re out to dinner. 20-hour days with people looking at you saying, ‘So are you gonna get this shot?’ ‘Do you have coverage?’ ‘Is it gonna rain?’ That’s never fun. When you’re making a movie, if you’re awake you’re at work!”
But before you get to that stage there’s the writing, what about that part?
“Writing isn’t fun either! With writing you have to get in there every day and think, ‘Can I get away with this?!’ Are they going to go for it?’ Because I had a development deal for this film. None of the process is fun! I hate it when I’m in a movie as an actor and the director says, ‘Just have fun with it’. What does that mean? ‘Haha, loo-la-lee-la-loo! Hand me a joint, I’ll have a drink!’ No, to me, fun is after you have a hit. That’s fun. It’s hard work to write and to make a movie. Everything about it is hard. It’s satisfying, I’m proud of it, and it’s the best work in the world, but it’s not fun!”
How did the idea for Cry-Baby take shape?
“I had made Hairspray, which was about the time right before the 60s started and the only thing I remember before that was right before rock and roll started. So I decided that I wanted to make a movie that took place in another closeted year that nobody wrote much about. I knew about juvenile delinquents because I always wanted to be one, but even then my hair wouldn’t comb properly into an Elvis Presley hairdo! I wanted to make a movie about the first rebellion I ever knew.”
You were a younger than your lead characters during the period when Cry-Baby is set.
“A lot younger, I was like eight years old.”
What were you like as a teenager and as you were discovering your sexuality?
“As teenager I was always a rebel, then in the hippie years I took LSD in 1964. It wasn’t even illegal until 1968. I quickly embraced the freak lunatic culture, even though we made fun of hippies in all my movies. The first time I went into a gay bar I thought, I might be queer but I’m not this! It was so square. I wanted bohemia and I found bohemia and that had the kind of gay people who I wanted to be with in it, but it also had straight people, it had all races, and it had all different ways to rebel.”
Bob Mizer’s photography was an influence on the look of the film. When you were pitching it to potential producers you took around some of his photographs as reference images didn’t you?
“Yeah, that’s right. The shot of Iggy Pop when we first meet his character in the film and he’s naked in the barrel, there’s an exact shot like that in the Bob Mizer book of photographs that I had. I cut the pictures out of my book and didn’t show the executives any of the ones that showed dicks or anything. I only showed them the ones where the men looked like juvenile delinquents or bikers. The executives didn’t know where the photographs were from though. I used them as a visual to show what the kids would look like in the movie and it worked.”
One of the early thrills of watching Cry-Baby is seeing the eclectic list of names in the opening credits. You’ve said that there was “a certain anarchy” to casting this film with your casting director Pat Moran, what was that process like?
“I think this movie invented stunt casting. We made fun of casting with this movie, but I think everybody in it is really good, I didn’t pick anybody to be in it that I thought was so bad that they were good, they were all so good that they were great. But it was a ludicrous cast. Imagining David Nelson married to Patricia Hearst with Traci Lords as their daughter or Iggy Pop married to Susan Tyrrell. Though that’s kind of believable. I was thinking about movies like It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World or Around the World in 80 Days which would have that all-star cast, I wanted to do a satire on that by casting people you would never expect to be in the same movie.”
Willem Dafoe really makes the most of his one scene as the prison officer who spanks Johnny Depp and makes all the prisoners say a prayer for Richard Nixon and Roy Cohn.
“Yes, he’s so great in it. There’s a story about that scene. I was in Poland doing my show and in the question and answer part of it an old man stood up who looked like Nikita Khrushchev. He said that he was in Poland when he was a communist and they got some pirated print of Cry-Baby. From looking at him you’d never expect that he would say this, but he said, ‘When Willem Dafoe slapped Johnny Depp on the ass I knew I was gay” and the whole audience went crazy.”
Is it true that Brad Pitt read for a role in Cry-Baby?
“Yeah, Brad Pitt read for the part that Darren Burrows plays, Hatchet Face’s boyfriend Milton. He’s the sidekick to Johnny Depp’s character. Brad Pitt can’t play the sidekick to Johnny Depp, it just wouldn’t work. He wasn’t famous yet and when he left the room we all went, ‘Wow, that person is going to be the hugest movie star’. He’s very nice, I know Brad a little bit now and he’s always lovely when he sees me. We haven’t brought that up. It was so obvious when he walked into the room that he was going to be a giant movie star, but he wasn’t right for this part.”
“You know who else read for this movie? Carol Channing read for Susan Tyrrell’s part. She said, ‘I want to pay it as a Native American Indian’, I don’t know why. Most astonishing of all though, Cyd Charisse came in to read for the movie. I thought, what are her agents doing? Are they crazy bringing her in here? She had no idea what she was getting into.”
Are there any actors you’d still like to work with?
“Meryl Streep and Eminem. They could play a couple.”
Well, it could still happen. Is there any update on your new film Liarmouth?
“Yeah, that nobody has said yes.”
We need to crowdfund it.
“I own three homes, I can’t be begging the public.”
Going back to Cry-Baby, Johnny Depp was a real-life teen idol at the time. Can you talk about casting him and playing with that teen idol image that he had?
“At the time he was like Justin Bieber, he was at the height of his career. At the set there were thousands of girls outside. They tried to buy the sewage from his trailer. I said, ‘Get a cold, we’ll make more money, we can sell your snot!’ But he hated that, he did not want to be a teen idol and so that’s why he made the movie with us. And it worked. It wrecked that image because we made fun of that image, but it didn’t hurt him because he embraced making fun of that image. Then Tim Burton came in and looked at our dailies and cast him in Edward Scissorhands. So I think he made the right decision to do the movie and he always used to say to me, ‘You got me a million dollars’, because he did get a million dollars for Cry-Baby and he was so amazed by that. But he was a giant star at the time and he’s still a star in my book. He looks great in the movie. You watch it today and you think, oh my gosh, no wonder he was that kind of star.”
How did the idea for the single tear drop running down Cry-Baby’s cheek come about?
“We always called that the cum shot! I mean, it was. It was just glycerin. But just one, single, salty tear…I mean, come on, it was a joke of a cum shot.”
Then he has two tears by the end of the movie.
“Yeah, at the very end it was a double load!”
What guidance did you give Johnny for approaching the character?
“The only guidance I gave him, and to all the other actors as well, was to say every line like you believe every word of it. Never wink. If it’s funny then the audience decides that. Don’t tip your hand, just say it like you believe it and it will be funnier and I think he did that. Some of those lines that he has are tough to say seriously, like “Electricity killed my parents”. And he did the jokes in it so well too, like when he went out through the manhole in his underpants because his pants came down. He knew that we were satirizing the whole teen idol thing and he went happily along with it. He knew that scene was ridiculous. It was the kind of thing he would have said absolutely no to if it was on 21 Jump Street, but to do it with us was obviously a joke about exactly what he feared he’d be made to do and that’s why he did it, to make fun of it. He was a real team player on that movie.”
Music was how teenagers defined themselves in the 50s, can you talk about the role of music in the film with its mix of original and period songs?
“All my movies have a lot of music in them, it’s always the narrator, it tells the story. At that time it was the war of what kind of music do you like. You either liked rock and roll or you liked what was on the hit parade, white groups. They were popular too. I like both those kinds of music. But it was a war, and every day was like a battle of the bands and I wanted to tell that story. The explosion of that battle is what made rock and roll happen.”
When it comes to the choreography in the movie one of my favorite scenes is the prison sequence when they are writhing up against the glass and licking it and singing on the phones.
“Yeah, that’s great, that’s from the glory hole. That’s my memories of the sex clubs. It’s very much like what the glory hole bar used to be like. That scene is really sexy. My other favourite musical number is the jailhouse rock scene where Johnny is in the license plate factory. I couldn’t believe that the prison where we shot actually had a license plate factory, I thought that was just a cliché, but it was real.”
As well as shooting in a real prison, you also shot in a real courthouse which you had a personal connection to, why did you want to shoot there?
“I wanted to shoot in that courtroom because I wanted to show Patty Hearst my courtroom. That’s where we went to trial for conspiracy to commit indecent exposure while we were filming Mondo Trasho. I’d gone to Patty’s trial, so I needed to show her my courtroom.”
There is another great moment in the movie when the prisoners are sitting calmly watching Creature from the Black Lagoon and then Hatchet Face suddenly bursts through the screen and they are all terrified!
“That’s the biggest laugh in the whole movie! That’s the number one laugh, every time in every country that gets the biggest laugh. They’re watching a 3D movie and then Hatchet Face jumps through the screen and she’s worse than the Creature From the Black Lagoon!”
I’m sure you didn’t have many screens to use for that scene so you had to get it right in one take.
“Exactly, we only did that once. We might have done the reaction shot a couple times.”
I saw the stage adaptation of Cry-Baby on Broadway in 2008, which I loved and it received four Tony nominations, but it only lasted for 68 performances. Why do you think it wasn’t a hit?
“It was big failure. I think the musical is really good, I love it, and it maybe captures my movie even more than Hairspray the musical does. I think it’ll come back one day, I hope that it does. The reason for its failure is because it was a musical for the whole family with frontal nudity. But I liked it, the music is great in it and it’s hilarious.”
Cry-Baby has a tattoo of an electric chair on his torso in tribute to his dead parents, which is quite a statement. What memorable tattoos inspired by your movies have fans shown you?
“Oh, my God! I saw one that was a page of the script from Female Trouble on someone’s leg, that was shocking. I’ve seen so many staggering tattoos. Mink Stole showed me one recently where someone had a line from Pink Flamingos tattooed on themselves: ‘There’s just two kinds of people, my kind of people and assholes!’ I’ve seen lots of them over the years and it’s always amazing to me and complimentary, even though I try to talk them out of doing it.”
The leather jackets that Cry-Baby and the little kid Snare Drum wear in the movie are on display at the Academy Museum in Los Angeles as part of the excellent John Waters: Pope Of Trash exhibition which continues until August 4th. What was it like to see an entire floor of the museum devoted to your career?
“It made me cry. There were so many memories and so many people that helped to make all that happen. It was like being on that old 50s TV show This Is Your Life. It was amazing. They did a phenomenal job and I’m still astonished.”
What influence did the underground filmmakers of the 60s have you?
“A huge influence. I was at home living in Lutherville, Maryland, and somehow getting The Village Voice and reading Jonas Mekas’ column Movie Journal that told me about these movies. When I wanted to see them I’d go on the Greyhound bus to New York. I’d make up fake fraternity weekends and have my parents sign papers that I’d typed myself just so I could get out of the house and go up there and watch the Kuchar brothers and watch the early Warhol films and Kenneth Anger and then later Robert Downey Sr., not Jr. These movies gave me the belief that I could do this. I made my first movie, Hag in a Black Leather Jacket, in 1964 all because I had read about those films and seen those films. They are what inspired me to do it.”
What’s your favorite piece of LGBTQ+ culture or a person who identifies as LGBTQ+; someone or something that’s had an impact on you and resonated with you?
“ONE: The Homosexual Magazine, the first gay magazine in the 1950s, and the protestors who all wore black suits, black ties, and white shirts and marched saying, ‘I’m proud to be homosexual’. They were so radical and so brave. They were ACT UP before it was even possible to think of ACT UP. So I would say them. They were so amazing to me. I really like lesbians. I’m a lesbro because they helped us start ACT UP. Their girlfriends weren’t dying of AIDS, but they joined us in the trenches. We owe lesbians big time.”
By James Kleinmann
Kino Lorber Studio Classics will release 4K UHD + Blu-ray and standalone Blu-ray editions of John Waters’ Cry-Baby (1990) on Tuesday, May 28th, 2024 featuring the Theatrical Cut in Brand New HDR/Dolby Vision Master (4K UHD) and Director’s Cut in Brand New HD Master (Blu-ray). Bonus features include a new audio commentary by John Waters, new cast and crew interviews, new “Bringing Up Baby” featurette, 1990 documentary It Came From…Baltimore!, deleted scenes and trailer.
For full details on the release and to pre-order, head to KinoLorber.com.
