In an inspired double bill, two John Waters classics, 1977’s delectably filthy Desperate Living and 1988’s surprisingly heartwarming Hairspray, have now been added to the Criterion Collection in vibrant new director-approved 4K restorations on UHD and Blu-ray packed with enticing special edition features.
Following the unrepentant outrageousness of Pink Flamingos and Female Trouble, Waters brought his notorious trash trilogy to a fittingly twisted close with an antifascist fairy tale, Desperate Living. “Once thought to be my ugliest and angriest film”, Waters observes, “it’s now ludicrously but beautifully restored in 4K”.
Featuring Dreamland favorites, we follow hysterical housewife Peggy Gravel (Mink Stole) after she murders her husband with the help of her fed-up housekeeper (Jean Hill). The newfound “sisters in crime” escape to the bizarro shantytown of Mortville, a depraved penal colony presided over by a despotic queen (Edith Massey) whose tyranny pushes her subjects to shocking revolt. Deviant cops, death by dog food, DIY surgery: Waters unleashes all this and more in an at once relentlessly warped and oddly moral vision of queer rebellion. “I actually believe that time has made it now politically correct, when at one time it might not have been”, Waters muses.
In Stark contrast, after decades of pushing the boundaries of bad taste with his underground provocations, Waters found mainstream success with the infectiously irreverent rock-and-soul comedy, Hairspray, which went on to be adapted into a Tony-winning Broadway musical and hit movie musical directed by Adam Shankman.
Inspired by Waters’ memories of a real-life Baltimore dance show and mining his own record collection for the soundtrack, Hairspray immerses us in the early Sixties when the only things bigger than the bouffant hairdos were the popular dance crazes sweeping the nation. When hairhopper teen Tracy Turnblad (Ricki Lake) shoots to stardom on The Corny Collins Show, her radical self-confidence and support for racial integration launch a movement that takes the city by storm.
Costarring the inimitable Divine in the fiercely funny double roles of Tracy’s mother Edna and racist TV station manager Arvin Hodgepile, Hairspray saw Waters marry his wildly subversive sensibility with a newfound bubblegum sweetness leading to what may be his most irresistible film. For Waters, Hairspray is a “trojan horse that snuck into middle America without the public realizing it was my most subversive work”.
With the new Criterion editions of Hairspray and Desperate Living now available, John Waters speaks with The Queer Review’s editor James Kleinmann about working with Divine, Ricki Lake, and Edith Massey, the deleted scenes of “bad Tracy” included on the Blu-ray, how his parents viewed his filmmaker career, what turning 80 means to him, returning to Fire Island for a live show next month, and his new creative outlet as a poet. With exclusive photography for The Queer Review by Mettie Ostrowski shot on location at IFC Center, formerly the Waverly Theater, where Hairspray premiered on February 26th, 1988.
James Kleinmann, The Queer Review: Let’s start with Hairspray, which was my gateway drug to the wonderful world of John Waters when I first watched it at 10 years old on VHS.
John Waters: “Oh good! Ten years old, well, the other ones would be illegal at that age, but you’re okay to see Hairspray at 10. So that was a good place to start.”
What were your thoughts about the film nearly 40 years on as you watched this brand new 4k restoration?
“I’m amazed that the film has lasted so long and that it has had so many different lives. Watching it again, I thought, boy, the idea of a fat girl fighting for civil rights was a damn good one!”
How did the idea for the film take shape as you set about writing it?
“There was a real dance show in Baltimore that was very popular called The Buddy Deane Show. We never had American Bandstand or Dick Clark in Baltimore, we had Buddy Deane and he was hugely popular. The kids who were on it every day were like the Mouseketeers in Baltimore. They were so famous. There were people waiting for them outside the studio like the Beatles.”
“I went and covered The Buddy Deane Show reunion 30 years later for Baltimore Magazine and I remembered it all and wrote about it which led to me thinking this up. I wanted to give Hairspray a happy ending though because in real life the show went off the air because they didn’t know how to integrate it. They did really have a “Negro Day” once a month and Fat Daddy—the greatest DJ in Baltimore who everybody listened to, white and Black kids—hosted that. But there were no Black regular kids on the show. What really happened was that the white kids snuck onto “Negro Day” trying to integrate it—it wasn’t the other way around—but that’s when it went off the air.”
“The other complete fiction in the film is that there was never really a big girl on The Buddy Dean Show or on American Bandstand. Everyone I know who was on the show said that not one big girl even applied, ever. It was never even a thought that a big girl would be on. Which is completely different today, where big girls are everywhere and celebrated. They have their own sex websites.”
“Now when they cast for Hairspray the musical, millions of big girls turn out for it. We didn’t have many audition for the film, but thank God that Ricki Lake was one of them because none of the other ones were really right for the role. We only had five or six girls that even tried out for it.”
Ricki is amazing in the film and her performance really stands up today. What guidance did you have for her in playing Tracy?
“My guidance was the same as it is to everybody I’ve worked with: say the lines as if you believe it. But Ricki Lake almost was Tracy, she was really close to her. The only thing I kept telling her is to keep eating because she was losing weight from all the dance rehearsals. So we would feed her candy and everything between takes. It was fat continuity because you don’t shoot a movie in order and she couldn’t come around the corner and weigh 30 pounds less than she did in the previous shot!”
There are 15 minutes of deleted scenes on this new Criterion edition which allows us see a meaner side to Tracy doesn’t it?
“Yeah, she’s the opposite of how she is in the version that we put out. She was like a terrorist! She breaks into Amber’s house, dyes her hair there and reads Amber’s diary. She’s mean to customers in her dad’s joke store and does all this nasty stuff. She’s sexual too. She’s got a hickey and she says, ‘I hope he doesn’t have blue balls!’ So all of that would have made the film so different. It was wisely cut out and to look back on it and see those things you realize that sometimes cutting things out is the right idea.”
Music is a really an important element in all of your films, but it is especially so here.
“All those gimmick dances that are in Hairspray I did with friends drunkenly in my apartment for 20 years after going to the bar. So, why not put them in a movie?!”
So those records in the film were in your own record collection?
“Oh, yeah. Every one of them was.”
Sadly this was your final film with Harris Glenn Milstead, better known as Divine, who is amazing in dual roles. How do you reflect back on your years of working with Divine?
“I miss him. People always say, I guess Divine would have played the grandmother in A Dirty Shame. I don’t know what he would have played in each movie. He still would have been in them, but he might have played a man because Divine liked playing men too. Divine wasn’t trans, he didn’t want to be a woman. He was probably a drag queen, but Divine would have played the dog in Pink Flamingos if I had let him. I’m all for that. I don’t think an actor has to be gay to play a gay part. It makes me crazy when they say that because they’re always saying how brave it is for a straight actor to play a gay character, but gay actors have been playing straight characters their whole life and nobody says they’re brave for doing that!”
Talking about Divine playing a man, of course he does so in Hairspray, as the station manager Arvin Hodgepile.
“Yeah, he plays a man in Hairspray and he also did in Female Trouble. He has sex with himself in that film.”
What do you make of his performances in Hairspray in particular?
“I love that he played such a racist, horrible man. He liked to play male villains. He usually played butch ones. He never played a twink, let’s put it that way, and he never played a bear. I don’t know what Divine would have thought of the bear movement. I’m not sure he would have embraced it. I don’t know. I remember people used to yell ‘orca’ at him and he took offense at that!”
His portrayal of Tracy’s mother Edna Turnblad is such a great character performance. He’s playing a character that happens to be a woman, but there’s no drag in it.
“That’s why he got all great reviews for the first time because, as he even said on the set on the first day, ‘what drag queen would ever allow themselves to look like that?’ Which is true. Even today, in all movies, when drag queens have the part they never play a normal person like Divine did in Hairspray.”
What do you make of the way that Hairspray has gone on to have such a life of its own with the stage musical, the movie musical, and the NBC live musical?
“I’m thrilled with it. Keep going, baby! I didn’t like that they made Motormouth a showgirl. It didn’t make sense that she was no longer heavy because she sings the song “Big, Blonde and Beautiful”! And I’m against fat suits in any movie. Well, it was all right with John Travolta because John Travolta got that movie made completely and audiences loved him in it. He was great to work with. I had no trouble with John Travolta.”
You mention on the commentary track that when Ruth Brown saw her costume and blonde wig for Motormouth Maybelle for the first time she cried initially, but then she came around to it. Did that kind of reaction happen with other actors on any of your movies?
“Oh, yes, with Van Smith’s designs they always cried when they saw their costumes. It was a ritual. But they always ended up liking them in the end.”
Let’s move on to Desperate Living which has also received a 4K restoration, what were your thoughts as you revisited that film in this new Criterion edition?
“That movie is extremely confusingly politically correct or incorrect. I actually believe that time has made it now politically correct, when at one time it might not have been. The young hip trans people that I know love it and they love its excess. Susan Lowe as Mole says, ‘I want a wang and I want it now!’ What’s the matter with that? That’s just being militant.”
Last time we spoke, you described yourself as a lover of lesbians, a “les-bro”, but when Desperate Living first came out some lesbians didn’t want it to play in Boston did they?
“Yeah, that’s right, the Orson Welles Cinema in Boston canceled it because of that. I was always mystified by that and I’m still mystified why some gay men don’t get along with lesbians because I love them. I also think drag kings are more interesting than drag queens because they look like people I’d like to sleep with.”
Over the years, a lot of lesbians have come to embrace the film though.
“I think that’s happened with the younger hip ones. Like any movement, there are some people that have no humor about it. Some people say integration isn’t funny, but if you make it a little funny then you might change people’s minds. The same way with the trans movement. You have to have some sense of humor.”
“I mean, are people really shocked that someone’s upset about drag queen kindergarten storytelling? I’m really amazed that people are surprised that anyone objects to that? Of course they’re going to. That’s the kind of thing you do after we win. You don’t run on that and say we have to fight this. It’s obvious that you’re going to make some people nervous with that.”
What influence did the Theater of the Ridiculous have on Desperate Living?
“A huge amount of influence. I bought a poster online the other day that I just framed and put up in my bathroom for a play called Turds in Hell by Charles Ludlam and Bill Vehr that Candy Darling was in. Those experimental, avant garde theater companies were very important to me. That was the Theater of the Ridiculous, with Ludlum and Jack Smith. Then there was the Living Theater and Antonin Artaud’s Theater of Cruelty. I’m not trying to sound intellectual, but secretly all that stuff was a really big influence on me.”
On the commentary track for Desperate Living, you talk about using your parents’ home for the interiors as well as the exteriors of Peggy’s house at the beginning of the film. They even let you smash their bedroom window.
“Which was an antique glass window too. I wouldn’t have let me do it!”
How supportive were your parents of your filmmaking?
“They were both horrified and supportive. They didn’t even see the early films and no one liked them then. I mean, audiences did, but in the newspaper all they read about was me getting arrested and reviews that were violently negative. So it wasn’t like they were proud at the time I made Pink Flamingos, but they were in a way that I somehow got the films shown everywhere and started going all over the world with them. They encouraged it, even though they were horrified by it. Which is something that is hard for parents to do. When I look back on it, I was very lucky that I got parents that could do that because it’s not easy to do. You don’t get to order up your parents and you don’t get to order up your kids. At the same time, if your kid is doing something and having success with it, but society is horrified by it, that’s a confusing thing for a parent. I understand that.”
Desperate Living has some of my favorite John Waters dialogue. Did you make yourself laugh as a litmus test while you were writing it?
“Yeah, when I’m writing it, if I laugh that’s a good sign.”
You actually read the audiobook version of your screenplay didn’t you? So you played all the characters for that.
“I played every single one of them and that makes it really shocking because the dirty parts sound so much worse when you have to read them aloud in front of technicians in an audio studio. With Desperate Living, the sex scenes were the most embarrassing thing to do.”
Edith Massey is incredible as Queen Corolotta. Did you write the character with her in mind?
“Oh, completely. Yeah, I wanted to give her a part where she was in control, where she was the villain, because usually she was not the villain. She was usually the character that audiences really identified with and liked. Even the Egg Lady. She loved being the villain and she loved getting to wear costumes that covered her up and made her look good.”
On the commentary track you mention that she ad-libbed, ‘get it, get it’, in the sex scene.
“Yeah, which I now use all the time. After that, nearly every one of my characters says, ‘get it!’ Someone once asked me, ‘do you say ‘get it’ when you’re having sex?’ I was shocked at that question. No, and no one has ever said that to me. ‘Get it, get it!’ But I always have characters say it now and when I’m on the road I yell it out and audiences yell it back to me which really makes me laugh. So that’s from Edith saying, ‘get it, get it!’ I don’t know why she said it, but if you ever said that aloud when you really were having sex, I think it would be a mood killer. Get what?!”
My husband quotes the movie and says, ‘Get it, Peggy’ all the time, but he hasn’t said it in bed yet, so we’ll wait to see if that happens.
“In America they used to say, “Oh, Mary’. In Germany, they used Peggy in old-fashioned gay talk.”
What’s the appeal for you of using outsider actors like Edith Massey who wasn’t a trained actor but is completely compelling in this film?
“I think Edith was the only one who you could call an outsider actor. All the others weren’t actors to start with, but God knows they became actors. They made 10 movies with me. I think Edith was the only one who was maybe still confused about why she was popular, but she loved being famous. She loved her fans and she was great with them. I think being in the films made her life much nicer and better.”
I love Queen Carlotta’s insult lines to the citizens of Mortville like, ‘hi stupid, hi ugly’.
“That’s a great line! “That’s a line that our friends say to each other all the time when we see each other. ‘Hi stupid, hi ugly!’ The worst line in that movie is when the cop says, ‘I’d like to stick my whole head in your mouth and let you suck out my eyeballs!’ I also like the line, ‘Mount me if you must, but not a kiss!’ Try saying that to somebody on a first date.”
The way that Queen Carlotta behaves and the awful things that she says look quite quaint and polite compared to what we’ve become used to with our current president and the things he comes out with like, ‘quiet piggy’ and much worse. Did that occur to you when you when were rewatching it?
“When I rewatch it now, I just think how apropos it is when Peggy screams, “I hate the Supreme Court!’ There’s no reason that she says that in the scene, which I love. I have said to people on the phone when they have the wrong number, ‘you’ve stolen 10 minutes of my life!’ Try saying it if you get a wrong number call, they get really angry when you say that. Peggy overreacts to everything a lot. I like the way her husband tries to understand her.”
“This was the first film we had Jean Hill in who became a really great part of Dreamland. She was the only African American star I ever had who was in all the movies and she was so great. Audiences loved her right from the beginning too.”
She’s fantastic in it as is Mink Stole as Peggy. They make for a great double act.
“That sex scene they have looked so hilarious. Neither one of them are gay in real life.”
Well, it looks beautiful now in 4K.
“It looks great, doesn’t it? They did such a beautiful job thanks to Lee Klein, the technician who did the restoration. He made it look just amazing.”
I enjoyed your poem, Catch, which was recently published in The Atlantic, which I completely related to. Why do some gay kids and adults have such a fear of rubber balls being thrown at or near us do you think?
“I don’t know if I had a fear, but why would you throw me a ball? When I go to the beach here in Provincetown, I still don’t understand why they have to be near me throwing balls? Why do they have to do that?! Can’t you just sit there and read?”
Have you got more poetry that’s ready to be published?
“I do. I have a lot of them. I wrote three this morning. The first drafts anyway.”
William S. Burroughs proclaimed you as the Pope of Trash and the Academy Museum used that as the title for their expansive exhibition of your work. What do you think of that honorific now?
“Oh, I think it’s great, because William Burroughs is the one who gave me that and you cannot get a better blurb in the history of blurbs than to have William Burroughs call you the Pope of Trash. I’ve been called the Prince of Puke, the Anal Ambassador, the Duke of Dirt, and lots of other good ones like the Ayatollah of assholes. That was one I remember. But nothing has the same ring to it as the Pope of Trash and I thank William Burroughs so much for that. I recently went to the memorial for James Grauerholz who was his partner and reintroduced William into the punk world in the 80s and made him famous all over again.”
You celebrated your 80th birthday on April 22nd, congratulations on that. Has turning 80 got you reflecting on your life and career?
“Well, I did nine birthday shows, so it wasn’t like it slowed me down. It’s always amazing to me when people ask me, ‘why do you continue?’ Or ‘aren’t you going to retire?’ No, I’m afraid I’ll drop dead! I want to keep doing this and doing new things. I want to keep meeting my audience. Unfortunately, I only believe in one life. I don’t believe in an afterlife. So I want to do every single possible thing I can do. I want to read every book, I want to meet every person, and I want to go to every country, but I’m running out of time. Though not really, I plan to live to about 110.”
I hope so too. I’m looking forward to your show at the Ice Palace on Fire Island in July. I’m going to be there for that.
“Good, come along! I’m looking forward to it too. One time I went to Fire Island on a little plane and it landed in the water and we had to wade ashore with our luggage.”
Are you coming by boat this time?
“Yes, I’m skipping the sea plane this time and catching the ferry!”
By James Kleinmann
John Waters’ Hairspray and Desperate Living are available now on Criterion Collection 4K UHD and Blu Ray.
DESPERATE LIVING
1977 • 90 minutes • Color • Monaural • 1.66:1 aspect ratio
DIRECTOR-APPROVED SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES
- New 4K digital restoration, supervised and approved by director John Waters, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
- In the 4K UHD edition: One 4K UHD disc of the film presented in HDR and one Blu-ray with the film and special features
- Audio commentary featuring Waters and actor Liz Renay
- Optional Italian dub track
- New conversation between Waters and film programmer Cristina Cacioppo
- Back to Mortville, a tour of the film’s main Baltimore location, led by Waters,
- New interview with actors Susan Lowe, Mary Vivian Pearce, and Mink Stole
- Interview with production designer Vincent Peranio
- Trailer
- English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
- PLUS: An essay by critic Grace Byron
HAIRSPRAY
1988 • 92 minutes • Color • 2.0 surround • 1.85:1 aspect ratio
DIRECTOR-APPROVED SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES
- New 4K digital restoration, supervised and approved by director John Waters, with 2.0 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack
- Alternate 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack
- In the 4K UHD edition: One 4K UHD disc of the film presented in Dolby Vision HDR and one Blu-ray with the film and special features
- Audio commentary featuring Waters and actor Ricki Lake
- New conversation between Waters and WFMU DJs Dave “the Spazz” Abramson and Gaylord Fields
- New interview with Lake and actor Colleen Fitzpatrick
- Reflections from actors Debbie Harry, Jo Ann Havrilla, Leslie Ann Powers, Clayton Prince, Shawn Thompson, and Pia Zadora
- Deleted scenes
- Behind-the-scenes documentary
- Get to Know John Waters (1987)
- Interview with production designer Vincent Peranio
- Trailer
- English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
- PLUS: An essay by critic Jessica Kiang