John Waters on 60 years of film carnage
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- John Waters, now 80, spoke from Provincetown about Criterion's new Blu-ray releases pairing his 1988 mainstream breakthrough Hairspray with the 1977 underground shocker Desperate Living — a film he calls "my angriest movie. And my ugliest."
- Waters confirmed Desperate Living was the first of his films written without marijuana, saying: "The minute I had success, I stopped taking drugs. I wanted to keep going and not be distracted."
- Waters drew a direct line between the Trump administration and Desperate Living's tyrannical Queen Carlotta, and launched a chant mocking RFK Jr.: "Hey, hey, RFK / How many Covid kids d'ya kill today?"
- Waters revealed he hasn't directed a film since A Dirty Shame (2004) and failed to fund an adaptation of his novel Liarmouth even with Aubrey Plaza attached — but is touring a UK spoken-word show in February.
- Hairspray earned Waters his first and only PG rating, which he initially feared would alienate fans; the film later spawned a Tony-winning 2003 Broadway musical and a 2007 movie remake starring John Travolta.
- Waters said he draws a line at joking about the Israel situation ("a lose-lose for me to even try") but maintains his core rule: "I make fun of things I like, not things I hate. That's why I've been getting away with this for 60 years."
- Divine, Waters' longtime collaborator and the star of Pink Flamingos and Hairspray, died at 42 just three weeks after Hairspray's release in 1988; Waters credits him with transforming drag culture into something with "edge."
Why it matters: The Criterion double-bill surfaces a 1977 film Waters calls his angriest alongside the 1988 film that broke him into Hollywood — giving viewers a chance to compare his extremes back-to-back, including a dog-killing stunt sourced from a hospital lab freezer that wasn't fully defrosted. His willingness to map Queen Carlotta onto Trump and to chant against RFK Jr. confirms the political bite in his work is deliberate, not accidental, even as he acknowledges some current lines can't be crossed for comedy.
