FEMALE TROUBLE
John Waters on his trash classic.
WHEN YOU LOOK at the perversions director John Waters has committed to celluloid over the last 56 years, you can see how he earned his monikers: King of Filth and Sultan of Sleaze, among others. There was the chicken penetration scene (exactly as it sounds), the lobster sex attack (exactly as it sounds), the eating of dog shit (yep, exactly as it sounds). The last was the final act of Pink Flamingos, John Waters’ transgressive 1972 hit, when Divine — the centre of his acting ‘troupe’, ‘the Dreamlanders’ — in drag, crouched down next to a dog and chewed the warm offering. When his next film, Female Trouble, arrived just two years later, the question was: how could John Waters shock us even more? But something had changed. Waters had got serious(ish). He had double the budget, an actual crew and a film that had something to say about notoriety and celebrity, and maybe even the criminal justice system, with this story of a young suburban woman Dawn Davenport (played by Divine) who has a kid and becomes entangled in a deranged world of crime (this barely does the crazed plot justice). More than four decades on, as the film is released by the very respectable Criterion Collection, the Baltimore filmmaker remembers the making of a filthy classic.
Criterion has restored Female Trouble — can you talk about the process?
Well, Female Trouble was originally shot on 16mm and then blown up to 35mm, in the old days before digital. So on every shot you had to pick whether you lost the top third, the bottom third, or both thirds and kept it in the middle. And it was done fairly quickly and cheaply. But now they’ve corrected it all. Some people say, “Why don’t you leave Multiple Maniacs or Female Trouble with all those scratches?” Why would I do that? It seems like a really dumb idea. No, they made it look beautiful. Female Trouble is my favourite of the
Divine vehicles, even though when it came out it was not a hit. It opened [in] the one theatre in New York on the Upper East Side — a hideaway — and in a blizzard. I remember we got a great review in Variety, but most of the other ones were just confused. They didn’t know quite how to take it. After Pink Flamingos, I realised, “If I ever try to top this, my career will be over.”
Were people expecting you to up the ante? The only thing left I could do would be a snuff movie! The whole movie cost $27,000. People say, “How could you do it that cheaply?” That was a lot for us. Pink Flamingos was $12,000. So to me, I felt like it was big-budget at the time. The film’s reputation grew — after ten years, even — and people started to like it more. And I think actually it’s a better movie than Pink Flamingos. Divine gives a great performance and everybody does — all the people that were in my early movies are in it. So it’s quite a snapshot of a certain era.
And what do you remember about the shoot itself ? Which was either ten days or 20 days, depending on what you read. That I have no recollection of — how many
days it was — because we shot one day here and then one day or ten days later, when I had the money or we could do it. It was never continuous. My headquarters were around two shops that Pat Moran [production manager on Female Trouble] and her husband had on Read St in Baltimore. Which was also the corner where Divine ate the dog shit! It was kind of like the studio lot.
You were producer, director, screenwriter, cinematographer and co-editor. Was that how you liked to work — being across everything?
When I took the camera away from me, they [the films] looked better. I can’t do all that. I’m a writer. I can direct people — I know how to do that, but I certainly am not a cinematographer. Even though I shot Female Trouble, I had a good crew for the first time. I had a crew, period!
As well as a crew, was this also the first film utilising more conventional techniques?
Yes. Pink Flamingos was shot on a camera that had single system sound. The sound was recorded right on the film. You’d have these long, long shots and for every time you had a cut, the sound had to overlap. Female Trouble was shot with what they used to call A- and B-rolls, which basically means you could edit, cut back and forth and do coverage. I could never do coverage when I was making Pink Flamingos and Multiple Maniacs. Not that I knew what it was, but I couldn’t have done it anyways!
Pretty much all of the Dreamlanders were in the film. So many of them are no longer with us. Does that make it an emotional experience, looking at the film now?
There are a lot of ghosts in Female Trouble. I even know the extras that are dead that are in it.
Gater [played by Michael Potter] is still alive. He wasn’t an actor, was he?
No, Gater was walking down the street. We just saw him and said, “Come in here. Can you act?” I think we made him take his clothes off — to make sure what he looked like because we knew he had to be naked in it. And he just said yes. And I think he didn’t know what he was getting into. I liked him in it. Johnny Depp [who later starred in Cry Baby] told me, “I worked with you because of Gater.” I think halfway through it, he realised that he was in it deeper than he wanted to be.
There’s the infamous scene in the movie where Divine, playing a man, has sex with Divine, playing Dawn Davenport…
The “go fuck yourself” scene, when Divine was Earl Peterson, was the very first thing we shot because he had his hair grown out, a beard unshaven, eyebrows and everything. Then we shot the double doing it at the same time. And then Divine shaved everything off and was Dawn Davenport.
And when Divine’s Earl, he also throws up on Dawn’s daughter, Taffy.
Yeah. I guess, because I was doing a little bit like
Pink Flamingos — since Divine really did eat dog shit — that we were trying to have him vomit for real. And he couldn’t. He was pukeshy and we gave him that medicine that [causes] gagging. And finally, we used creamed corn.
And how long did you wait for Divine to be able to throw up?
We only had an hour or so. Then we had a nurse for when Divine shot up liquid eyeliner — it wasn’t liquid eyeliner; it was the kind of stuff they shoot in you medically to trace your blood or something. So we had a real nurse on the set that that did shoot up Divine.
The other famous scene is the cha-cha heels…
Yeah — though drag queens even get it wrong. A cha-cha heel is a short, squat heel. It’s not spike heels. Drag queens always say, “These are cha-cha heels!” No, they’re not cha-cha heels!
A lot of your dialogue and characters have ended up on T-shirts and as memes.
I know, it’s amazing. It is truly a great compliment, though, because you know, standing the test of time is the hardest thing to do. Each generation usually says, “I’ve seen that, I’ve seen that.” But these films seem to still be working with young people. When I do my shows, about half the audience, I’m pretty sure they weren’t even alive when I made my last movie, much less my first. I think that just means the crazy sense of humour can pass down to every generation.
But the ‘outsider’ culture isn’t the same anymore.
Now everybody wants to be an outsider. The point of being an outsider was no-one wanted to be one, that’s why they so-called ‘made trouble’! I said, “I want to be an insider.” Now it’s much more rebellious to be on the inside and change things, which has weirdly happened to me.
Female Trouble has played at your big retrospectives — at the Lincoln Center in New York and the BFI in London. Could you have ever imagined, back in 1974, that you would have had that kind of respectability?
Well in a way, I’ll be honest, yes, I could. My films always did the best in the fanciest neighbourhoods with the most intellectual audience. When we tried drive-ins or grindhouses, they bombed — because the audience knew that we were making fun of the genre. They thought they were sexy; they didn’t
think they were funny. My movies, even when there was nudity, I don’t think anyone was masturbating in my movies, to my movies. They might have played in theatres where people did that, no matter what was playing.
What do you think is Female Trouble’s legacy?
I think it will always be the most popular Divine movie I ever made. I think it just has funny lines in it, that are pretty politically incorrect today, but political correctness will go in and out of fashion over the years. It’s kind of beautiful, in a warped way. It’s hard to get laughs from child abuse — basically Divine is a terrible mother — but everybody laughs at the stuff she says. Like, “Do you want another whipping with that car aerial?” Now there is a dated line. There is no such thing as car aerials anymore. I knew about that because my sister used to be a social worker and she said people beat their children with the car aerials because it didn’t leave marks. So I always remember unsavoury information that people tell me, then try to turn it into humour somewhere. And of course, no, it would never be funny that a child’s beaten with a car aerial. But when Divine’s saying it to her defiant daughter, and then she says it’s hard being a good mother, there’s a certain humour. We used to call it sick humour when I was a kid. Now it’s black humour. Now it’s American humour.
You’ve talked a lot about good bad taste. Is that what you’d call Female Trouble?
I guess then I would have called it that. I think bad taste was always a thing we embraced, and made it good taste by the very fact we embraced it.
Do you think good bad taste still exists?
No. I think Trump has ruined bad taste — nothing’s so good it’s bad anymore because of him. And maybe your leader too! The hairdo fascists — and we’ll throw in North Korea. Why is it the most insane leaders have ludicrous hairdos?
We’re probably in no position to talk about Trump, really.
Yes you are, nobody is as bad as him. North Korea might be.
I saw you recently in Law & Order: SVU.
Oh, yeah. I like to be in big hit TV series that no-one’s going to expect to see me in.
You did play a pornographer.
Yes, big stretch!
Do you like those procedurals?
I like to do things to reach all audiences. When I’m on the subway in New York, people recognise me because I was in the Chucky movie. Children recognise me because I was in the Alvin and the Chipmunks movie. You have to cover all your bases.
You’ve long been interested in crime and the justice system. You used to spend a lot of time going to trials.
I don’t anymore — I write about it now — but yes, I did. And I taught in prisons for a long time. I still curiously try to get people out of jail, some of them.
And you shot the final scenes of Female Trouble in Baltimore City prison, right?
Yeah. And we walked through the prison yard, carrying the electric chair with Divine in drag. That the warden allowed us to do that, it’s pretty amazing.
Didn’t he love Pink Flamingos and Multiple Maniacs?
The warden was a fan, yes. Later, he was in Polyester. He plays one of the cops that raids the house. I did show my movies in that jail 25 years later.
How did Female Trouble go down?
They said: “You’re allowed to show us this?!” TERRI WHITE
FEMALE TROUBLE IS OUT ON 13 JULY ON CRITERION COLLECTION BLU-RAY