John Waters on how he stays shocking
February 11, 2015
As the legendary director and author John Waters prepares to head down to South Florida for a new version of his monologue “This Filthy World” now called “This Filthy World, Filthier and Dirtier,” many have wondered how much filthier the director of Pink Flamingos can get. The question of what one can do when nothing’s shocking anymore has long followed Waters, who famously capped off Pink Flamingos with a shot of his longtime friend and muse the drag superstar Divine chowing on genuine dog poop.
If that stands as the high-water mark of shock when you think of Waters, you are doing a disservice to much of his later career. In the nineties, during the rise of political correctness, Waters excelled at pushing the standards of what’s offensive with films like Serial Mom (1994) and Pecker (1998). Speaking via phone from his San Francisco home, the 68-year-old Waters brought up his last film, 2004’s A Dirty Shame, as an example that he never stopped challenging the limits of good taste. “I mean my last movie got an NC-17,” he said, “and I lost the appeal, and I was fighting censorship once again with the MPAA [Pink Flamingos received an X-rating when it was released in 1972].”
One thing that became apparent in talking with Waters is that he has a witty and profound grip on what it means to be shocking. Subversion is this man’s stock in trade. “You know, I never tried to top Pink Flamingos,” he noted, “but yet I just did a kiddie version of Pink Flamingos [Kiddie Flamingos]. It was an art piece, but it may be the only way left to surprise people, to make something thought of as very transgressive, which I’m thankful Pink Flamingos can be called that, to become completely innocent, and then the audience is the perverted one, not the people in it.”
Asked whether he feels younger filmmakers are pushing the boundaries of good taste the way he might have as a young filmmaker, he replied coyly, “That’s not the only thing they’re doing. I think Hollywood — not that I’ve been an influence — but now Hollywood makes $80 million gross-out comedies, which usually aren’t funny. So if it’s trying too hard, it never works. If that’s the only thing you’re trying to do, is shock somebody? I always try to surprise people and make them laugh, and after Pink Flamingos, I never tried to top that in the gross-out thing, you know, with the ending of Pink Flamingos. I won. I still won. I don’t think anything has unseated the end of Pink Flamingos, which Variety called the most vile, stupid, horrible film ever or whatever, so I think I still have that title.”
For much more on my conversation with John Waters, including what he thinks of gay marriage, his “crazy” decision to hitchhike across America and the comicon crowd who he will perform to at Shock Pop Comicon, jump through the logo for Pure Honey Magazine below:
I also wrote this when the Oscar nominations came out:
John Waters on his quirky Oscar noms as “an old white man”
John Waters will perform “This Filthy World, Filthier and Dirtier” at Broward County Convention Center, 1950 Eisenhower Boulevard, Fort Lauderdale, Florida, as part of the Shock Pop Comicon on Feb 14. Tickets (that’s a hot link).
John Waters on his quirky Oscar noms as “an old white man”
January 17, 2015
Credit: Greg Gorman
Yesterday, the news was full of analysis of the Oscar snubs and simplistic assumptions about the members who make up the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences. The go-to numbers cited were 94 percent white, 77 or 76 percent male, and an average age of 63 years old. There was this essay in the Daily Beast the day before. Friday morning, CBS offered this report. Numbers make for nice television, but they can be deceiving. Sometimes they invite too much speculation and those interpreting them in knee-jerk fashion can project a lot of speculation. Some have gone as far as accusing AMPAS members as racist because of the Selma snubs in the major categories. We said good things about that film in this blog (50 years after the Civil Rights Act, Selma remains a timely film — a film review). Individual rights no matter race, sex or religion is important to us, and it’s a fine film, indeed. However, even we agree the movie creaked with some faults in craft and storytelling. This writer’s issue was with its overwrought film techniques, especially involving abuse of slow-motion for emphasis that condescends to the audience. I wouldn’t be surprise if some voters were turned off for the same reason, and it has nothing to do with race. However, the best explanation comes from the longtime great Oscar analyst and film historian Mark Harris in Grantland.
But looking beyond the numbers, one of probably an array of other arguments against all these protestations comes from a gentleman I interviewed yesterday morning: legendary cult film director John Waters. He’s about to visit South Florida to perform “This Filthy World, Filthier and Dirtier” at the Shock Pop Comicon in Fort Lauderdale. After we spoke about his one-man show (the full story is coming in a few weeks to Pure Honey Magazine, another publication I write for). I had to ask him about his role as one of those men in the numbers noted above. “Yeah, I’m an old white man,” he said speaking over the phone.
Though he warned me that the Academy is strict about members talking about their nominees and I said I would never ask him to break the rules, he laughed it off, telling me incredulously, “Why not? I would!” Then he offered some films he put his singular power behind without skipping a beat. No surprise: all of his picks feature directors known for controversy and pushing boundaries.
“I nominated movies like Mommy [Xavier Dolan] and Abuse of Weakness [Catherine Breillat],” he admitted. “I don’t think I’m picking the easiest ones to like. I’m tellin’ ya, of all the movies that were nominated, my favorite is this thing called Wild Tales [Damián Szifrón], which I was thrilled got nominated for best foreign film from Argentina, so I would urge everybody to see that movie. It’s a great movie.”
This is but one version of the vote by one of the majority members. Waters, of course is a unique case. William Burroughs, a man who understands genuine shock value and its place as representing reality, hailed him as “the pope of filth,” after all. But it provides an important lesson against generalizations, not to mention the futility of it. The take away: it’s pointless to assign generalized assumptions to a set of numbers, especially if you don’t know who’s behind them.
We’re not gonna defend the Oscars, ever. We’ll ride their coat tails to hype movies we like and dismiss them when its merited, but we’ll always argue against generalizing. There is an individual behind every thought and decisions like Oscar contenders. That’s why we have always aimed to celebrate the independent ethos. Pick your own favorites.
John Waters will perform “This Filthy World, Filthier and Dirtier” at Broward County Convention Center, 1950 Eisenhower Boulevard, Fort Lauderdale, Florida, as part of the Shock Pop Comicon on February 14 (go here for tickets). Also, the Miami International Film Festival recently announced that Wild Tales will open this year’s festival on March 6. Ticket information can be found here. And here’s the trailer:
‘Blank City’ celebrates the art of “No Wave”
June 17, 2011
With Blank City, first-time director Celine Danhier offers a celebration of the influential art scene of New York City during the late seventies and early eighties, which explored everything from music to movies to art with an almost nihilistic attitude. The movement earned the name “No Wave” because it went against the notion of art. It was the perfect complement to the attitudes in London that spawned the punk scene headed by the Sex Pistols during the same time. One of the many denizens of run-down East Side NYC Danhier interviews notes that her peers of the No Wave movement had felt art had ceased to exist in a “culture of blandness.”
Among those Danhier interviews are: Amos Poe, Ann Magnuson, Becky Johnston, Beth B, Bette Gordon, Casandra Stark Mele, Charlie Ahearn, Daze, Debbie Harry, Eric Mitchell, Fab 5 Freddy, Glenn O’Brien, Jack Sargeant, James Chance, James Nares, Jim Jarmusch, JG Thirlwell, John Lurie, John Waters, Kembra Pfahler, Lizzie Borden, Lung Leg, Lydia Lunch, Manuel DeLanda, Maripol, Michael McClard, Michael Oblowitz, Nick Zedd, Pat Place, Patti Astor, Richard Kern, Sara Driver, Scott B, Steve Buscemi, Susan Seidelman, Tessa Hughes-Freeland, Thurston Moore, Tommy Turner and Vivienne Dick.
Danhier assembles quite a colorful cast characters from the scene, and the film never falls short on illustrative anecdotes that typified the aesthetic of the No Wave scene. Lurie, a saxophonist credited for founding the Lounge Lizards in the late seventies, notes his contemporaries held disdain for any artist who did anything with any skill. Technical proficiency at anything was “not cool,” he says. If you were a musician, you tried your hand at acting. If you were a filmmaker you played in a band. Lurie even expresses his embarrassment about his ability to play the saxophone, saying he felt so ashamed of his skills he hid it from others. He instead tried directing films and acting, famously starring in Jarmusch’s breakout feature Stranger Than Paradise (Support the Independent Ethos, buy the movie on Amazon.com).
Though Blank City touches on musicians like the Ramones and artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat, Danhier focuses on the filmmakers of the era and offers tantalizing clips of an array of historic and obscure films featuring Buscemi and Vincent Gallo that are hard to find on DVD, if at all. 
The films of the No Wave scene, which are mostly shot in back and white, are best described as primitive. Danhier does an illustrative job at getting into the directors’ processes: from what equipment they used (more often than not rented Super 8 cameras) to a glimpse at their scripts, which invited improvisation from the actors and sometimes had child-like drawings as directions. Not only did these filmmakers shoot their movies without permits, they often trespassed into unoccupied buildings. Lurie noted how he set out to fund one picture by staging a robbery at his apartment and collecting the insurance money on his saxophone to budget the picture.
Blank City is filled with many great anecdotes like that, and anyone with an interest of a snapshot of the milieu that spawned the No Wave scene will delight in the information packed into this documentary. The only fault I might find in this exploration is that Danhier seems so fixated on the era, she fails to ask the deeper questions of how it fits into the expanse of art history. There is one point where she touches on the appearance of art galleries everywhere, including someone’s bathroom, and how it seemed to bring money into the scene but offers no further detail.
At least she spends a good chunk of the movie highlighting another art movement spawned from the scene. After Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise began appearing in the movie theaters to much critical praise, it seemed like the alternativeness and independence of the artists was over, as they had seemingly sold out. 
Then comes the sub-underground movement of the “Cinema of Transgression” where drugs and sex take center stage. The directors of these films usually eschewed story lines in favor of offering shocking scenes where some actors would act out their sexual fetishes and/or get high on camera. The filmmakers of this scene emphasized a desire to shock and repulse more than anything.
This post-No Wave scene featured filmmakers like Nick Zedd and Richard Kern whose movies are hard to find nowadays possibly because of their lack of relevance in today’s post-torture porn culture, a commercial Hollywood movement lead by filmmakers like Eli Roth and his Hostel series. Kern has a compilation of his short films from the era covered by Blank City simply titled Hardcore Collection (Support the Independent Ethos, buy the movie on Amazon.com). Zedd’s compilation, however, Abnormal: The Sinema of Nick Zedd, seems out of print but seems to be going for a hefty price on the secondary market, at least on Amazon, so there still might be some curious interest in these films, but it would have been interesting to see Danhier explore the relevance of these filmmakers now. Supposedly Kern is still working mostly as a photographer but he also directed some erotic voyeur pictures. Zedd, meanwhile, seems to still be at work in the same lo-fi aesthetic that defined his films, but, from what can be gleaned from the ratings and information on his filmography on the Internet Movie Database, still seems to be working for a small audience with little appreciation for his work.
Danhier sums up the demise of this counter-culture movement with the rise of MTV and its “co-modification of downtown.” If these guys thought MTV was bad in the early eighties, I would be curious what they think of it now. Lord knows I have bemoaned the hypocritical dictates of MTV and its role in the stupefying of today’s youth (see this post). It is for that reason that it would have been interesting to see how the No Wave aesthetic fits into today’s world. Blank City ends with Jarmusch declaring filmmaking has become more democratic now with the Internet and affordable digital cameras. But it would have been even more interesting to explore the “truthiness” of that notion further instead of end the film at that.
In the end, Blank City indeed offers an exuberant look at artists who can care less about culture while creating vibrant works of art. For these people to have existed in the gloom of late seventies, run-down New York City, nonchalantly dealing with routine, sometimes violent muggings and battling rats for a place to sleep, while still producing vibrant art that celebrated living in the moment, offers a testament in itself.
Blank City has one last screening at the Cinema Paradiso in Fort Lauderdale on Sunday (June 19), at 8 p.m. It then opens at 9:15 p.m. Friday night (June 24) at the Miami Beach Cinematheque where it will play through June 15. The MBC invited me to a preview screening for the purposes of this review. If you live outside of South Florida check Blank City’s website for its screening schedule.
Independent Ethos 