‘The minute I had success, I stopped taking drugs’: John Waters on 60 years of screen carnage
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- Criterion issued a bells-and-whistles Blu-ray double-bill of Hairspray (1988) and Desperate Living (1977), an "odd" pairing Waters endorsed in a new interview
- John Waters was "scared" and thought his fans would "turn on" him when Hairspray became his first and only PG-rated film, the comedy that spawned a Tony-winning Broadway musical in 2003 and a John Travolta-starring remake in 2007
- Desperate Living is what Waters calls his "angriest" and "ugliest" film — the "runt of his filmography" and notably the first of his movies written without marijuana
- Waters hasn't directed since A Dirty Shame (2004) and has no films in the pipeline, having failed to raise funding for a Liarmouth adaptation even with Aubrey Plaza attached
- Divine died at 42 just three weeks after Hairspray's release; Waters credits him with single-handedly transforming drag culture by introducing "edge" to the form
- Waters draws parallels between Desperate Living's tyrannical Queen Carlotta and the current US administration, singling out RFK Jr.'s public health record with a chant: "Hey, hey, RFK / How many Covid kids d'ya kill today?"
Why it matters: Waters' Criterion reissues land as the 80-year-old filmmaker enters a creative lull — no new films in 21 years, a stalled Liarmouth project, and a self-imposed rule that "the people who win always follow: mind your own business and don't judge people." The double-bill deliberately reframes his most scatalogical work alongside his most commercial, and Waters himself frames both films as acts of resistance against racism, fascism, and tyranny — not just provocation.
