“How many of you have been in group therapy?”
That was the first question writer and filmmaker John Waters asked when he sat down recently with a group of superfans in Brookline, Massachusetts. He had just received a prestigious industry honor called the Coolidge Award and concluded an onstage ‘conversation’ with arts journalist Jared Bowen before a large audience at the Coolidge Corner Theatre.
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Several dozen of his fans stayed after the award presentation to attend a more intimate gathering where they could ask questions and take socially-distanced photos with the entertainer. Waters has a similar arrangement after the 70-minute spoken-word shows he performs around the country, sessions he calls ‘Group Therapy.’ That’s what the tickets to the Coolidge gathering said as well.
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“I’ve never done it because I think people will tell what you’re saying,” Waters confided to his audience.
But even though he’s reluctant to take part in group therapy, that doesn’t mean he’s not willing to share some of what’s on his mind with others. And judging from his appearance in Brookline, Waters has a lot on his mind, starting with the makeup of the new Trump administration.
On the night of the Coolidge event, former congressman Matt Gaetz had just withdrawn from consideration to be President-elect Donald Trump’s attorney general, and Waters didn’t quite know what to make of it. “They must have found something really bad” about him, he said. “He doesn’t even wear eyeliner.”
His advice to Democrats and others who didn’t want Trump to win the election: “Stop whining. Just get ready, get ready.”
He’s perplexed by the rules regarding what people can say on TV these days: “You can say ‘f**k’ on national television, but you can’t say ‘fat’ on PBS.”
He’s not sure about a certain personal grooming product: “Anal bleach – who would do that?” he wondered. “What is the color you’re after? Do you have to do the roots?”
Not all of Waters’ musings were in the form of a question.
With Christmas around the corner, he knows what people should give as presents:
“Give every person on your list books,” he advised. “Don’t give them gift cards. They’ll think you’re stupid.”
He knows for sure that the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz was gay: “He’s butch and a coward. He’s a power bottom or a ‘blouse’ — that’s a feminine top.”
He asked Divine to do just one take of the final scene in his 1972 film Pink Flamingos where his character eats dog droppings: “Only one! I’m not a sadist!”
John Waters won the Coolidge Award for original, challenging work
This was the 20th year of the Coolidge Award, which recognizes an artist whose work is consistently original and challenging. The Coolidge Corner Theatre is an independent cinema and cultural institution with four screens and the capacity to seat more than 700 people. The original structure was built in 1906 as a Universalist church, transformed in the 1930s to an Art Deco movie palace and recently expanded.
Since 1989, Coolidge Corner Theatre has been operated by a non-profit organization, the Coolidge Theatre Foundation, known for its contemporary independent film, repertory and educational programming. Past recipients of the Coolidge Award include Meryl Streep; Jonathan Demme; Michael Douglas; Julianne Moore; Liv Ullmann; Ruth E. Carter; Jane Fonda; Viggo Mortensen and Werner Herzog, among others.
“We can’t think of a more brilliant artist to celebrate for the Coolidge Award’s 20th anniversary than John Waters,” said Coolidge Program Director Mark Anastasio. “His movies have long been a staple of our programming, and his filmography remains one of the funniest, filthiest and most subversive in cinema history.”
Waters, 78, has written and directed 16 films, from so-called “celluloid atrocities” such as Female Trouble and Multiple Maniacs to more mainstream fare such as Hairspray and Serial Mom. He’s written 10 books, including Shock Value, Role Models, and Carsick.
The ultimate multi-tasker, he’s also a visual artist, fashion model, voiceover actor, camp counselor and popular graduation speaker. Next spring, he’ll teach a masterclass on filmmaking as part of a college course on Film Directors and Authorship.
To celebrate the Coolidge Award, Waters took part in what amounted to three events in one at the Coolidge Corner Theatre, starting at 3 p.m. and ending just before 11 p.m.
First was a screening of his 2000 black comedy Cecil B. Demented, with an introduction by the filmmaker and remarks after the movie ended. Second was a fast-paced conversation with Bowen, followed by the presentation of the Coolidge Award. Third was the Group Therapy session with superfans who paid extra to meet with Waters in a smaller theater upstairs at the Coolidge Center. All of the proceeds went to the non-profit that runs and programs the arts center.
At another prestigious ceremony this year — the 74th annual American Cinema Editors Eddie Awards in Los Angeles, where he received the ACE Golden Eddie Filmmaker of the Year Award — Waters delivered a speech in which he discussed his approach to film editing, before an attentive audience of movie industry professionals. Speaking at the historic Royce Theater on the UCLA campus, he talked about everything from deciding when to cut a scene from a movie to the influence of a censor board and also the use of songs instead of narration to convey plot points.
The Coolidge event was geared more to the general public than to film editors. There was no lengthy acceptance speech, just Waters’ brief, heartfelt, ‘Thank you so very much, it means a lot to me, with no irony, for real.”
He didn’t perform his holiday spoken-word show. He pretty much just graciously responded to questions and used them as a springboard to talk about a wide range of subjects on his mind, in the sort of stream-of-consciousness outpouring of wit and wisdom that fans have come to expect from him. Some of his remarks were about topics he’s addressed before; others pertained to news of the day or subjects he doesn’t usually address in his spoken-word shows, such as his admiration for the artist Cy Twombly.
For anyone who went to all three segments of the Coolidge celebration, and many did, it was like watching several of the sit-down interviews that Waters does with Bill Maher — unscripted, free-wheeling, bouncing from one subject to another. It was also a good look at a talented performer at the top of his game. That was his Thank You speech, essentially. His mix of facts and commentary was all the more illuminating because it was so wide-ranging and spontaneous.
During Waters’ appearance in Brookline, certain subjects came up more than once, including the holidays, films and filmmaking, his family, his obsessions, the old days, the future. And as the author of a book titled Mr. Know-It-All: The Tarnished Wisdom of a Filth Elder, he couldn’t refrain from offering a bit of advice.
With the holidays in mind, he had a suggestion for party hosts: If you want to know who’s snooping in your medicine cabinet, he said, put some marbles on the shelves and then close the door. When the snoop opens the cabinet, the marbles will roll out and make noise and then you’ll know. “If you have a party, you should do that,” he said.
For people going to see a movie on a date, he advised, choose the location wisely.
“This is a theater,” he said, looking around the Coolidge’s main auditorium. “This is a church, this theatre…If you go to a regular mall theater, you’re not going to get laid – but you might here.”
He doesn’t advise young people to take acid, even though he wrote in Mr. Know-It-All about doing so at age 70. “I don’t tell young people to take acid. I tell old people to. They can say it’s not dementia, I’m tripping!”
Waters also had plenty to say about filmmaking
“My films were never mainstream,” he said, “but they always had an audience…Even in church basements we sold out.”
He had a good reason for showing his early films in a church: “I knew I couldn’t get busted in a church.”
He knows who came to see his early films – and still come: “Minorities that don’t fit in with their own minorities. That’s my core audience.”
He believes there’s a fine line between bad taste and good taste: “Bad taste and good taste are very close. And sometimes they’re exactly the same.”
Two celebrities with whom he’d like to make a movie: Meryl Streep and Eminem.
Hairspray, the 1988 movie in which a ‘pleasantly plump’ teenager teaches a whole city about integration, was “the most radical thing I ever did…It’s a Trojan horse…Even the racists like Hairspray,” he said.
There’s no such thing as bad publicity except when you have to go to the doctor’s office and others in the waiting room ask what’s wrong with you: “As Gore Vidal once said [about bad publicity], You know what is worse? When it stops.”
As for the status of a possible movie version of his 2022 novel, Liarmouth: A Feel-Bad Romance: Waters has written the script for a film adaptation of his book and confirmed Aubrey Plaza as the potential star, but it hasn’t been funded. He’s exasperated that audiences keeping asking about it when there are no new developments.
“There is not one new thing to say about it,“ he said in response to a question from the audience. “I said it six months ago and nothing’s changed. We don’t have the money to make it now. Could that change tomorrow? Maybe.”
The film industry is going through a period of uncertainty, he said: “Right now it’s very hard to get a movie made. There’s no one who can say ‘yes.’ Everyone is in panic mode right now.”
Waters anticipated that historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. was going to discover a slaveowner among his ancestors when he agreed in 2021 to appear on the PBS genealogy series, Finding Your Roots: “I knew they were going to find slaves. I grew up in the South.”
Gates often finds slaveowners in the backgrounds of celebrities; it seems to be a running theme of his program. But Waters arguably didn’t come across as badly as the other person who appeared on the same program that he did, actress Glenn Close. “They found more slaves in her family,” he noted. “I was relieved.”
Waters thinks his late father had reason to regret naming him John Waters Jr. After he began making movies, he said, “My father got all the phone calls in the middle of the night.”
He’s grateful his parents supported him the way they did.
“Did I ever think that the Academy [Museum of Motion Pictures] would give me a show of 12 rooms to myself? No. But did I ever think that was impossible? No. I was raised to believe that anything I could do, I could. My parents did give me that. They made me feel safe. That’s all I asked,” he said.
Waters doesn’t like it when reporters ask at the end of an interview: Is there anything else that you’d like to say that I didn’t ask about? “No. That’s not the way it works.”
If he has to tell a reporter what questions to ask, he said, “I should get part of your salary.”
He won’t hire anyone who says certain words in an interview: “If an actor ever uses the word ‘journey,’ I don’t hire them.” He feels the same way about the word ‘humble.’
Waters on artistic influences, cancel culture, & staying in one’s hometown
Waters greatly admires the late Andy Warhol, saying he was a “huge influence” on him.
“Of course he was an influence. He’s an influence on every artist that’s working in America today,” Waters said. “He was brilliant…Andy invented branding, almost.”
Among other feats, Waters said, Warhol “brought drugs and gay people together at last. That was very important, because gay people were square before Andy.”
Warhol offered to pay for the filming of Female Trouble, but Waters declined: “I said no…because it would have been ‘Andy Warhol’s Female Trouble’…I knew enough to say no.”
Despite that, Warhol put Divine on the cover of Interview magazine. “He was supportive of us, always,” Waters said. “He was a friend to me, and I have very good memories of him.”
Waters said Twombly, known for his bold brushstrokes, squiggly lines and shaky handwriting, is “definitely my favorite artist.” Waters once took the corner of an envelope on which Twombly had written his return address and hung it on the wall as a work of art.
“I got to know him and I love him because his first scribbles were so shocking that people would throw them away, those first blackboard paintings. They would be worth millions of dollars now.”
Twombly’s abstract art “made people…so mad, which I love,” Waters said. Some people thought his art was nothing but scribbles, but “try doing them. It’s impossible to imitate him…All good art ruined what came before…That’s my view on art.”
A visual artist himself, Waters said he also respects Maurizio Cattelan, the Italian artist who sold a banana duct-taped to a wall at auction for $6.2 million. (The buyer, Hong Kong-based crypto entrepreneur Justin Sun, later ate the fruit, saying, “It tastes much better than other bananas. Indeed, quite good.”)
“Good for him,” Waters said. “It’s conceptual art, and I don’t understand why that pisses people off…I think whoever bought it is brave and smart and I think it’s great. That’s what art is – an idea.”
Waters always puts in a good word for his hometown of Baltimore, where he still has his main residence. But he thinks the city is missing an opportunity in the way it markets itself.
He once proposed a bumper sticker that acknowledges the city’s quirks and foibles: ‘Come to Baltimore and Be Shocked!’ Now he has a suggestion for two more slogans that acknowledge the less-than-inviting reputation it got as the setting for HBO’s crime drama series, The Wire.
“It’s still like The Wire,” he said. “I think we should have bumper stickers that say that: ‘The Wire: It’s Still Like That.’ Or: ‘I’d Turn Back If I Were You.’”
Waters told the audience that Baltimore is still “a cool place to live.” He calls it ‘a new Bohemia.’
“First of all, the young cool kids don’t leave, and If they do, they come back,” he said. And second, “it’s cheap. So there’s dangerous streets that are opening good restaurants. There’s bad neighborhoods where gay people can move in and make it better…You can buy a manor in Guilford, the fancy neighborhood, for what an efficiency apartment costs in New York. And it’s easy to get everywhere.”
Waters said he thinks that everybody should stay where they were born and never leave, that they should embrace where they came from.
It would be “the greatest country ever,” he said. “You just stay where you are and make it better…It used to be you had to go to New York,” especially to see certain movies. But now, “you can live anywhere. You can live in Des Moines, Iowa. Nothing against that either.”
Cities are “very different today, with the internet and everything,” he said. “There is less local color because everywhere is more like [everywhere else]. I live in airports, so when I come to a city, I could be anywhere. The hotels are the same. The stores are the same, everything. Maybe that’s good. Then every person in that town can maybe watch a weird movie, see a Gaspar Noe movie. You don’t have to go to New York to see it.”
Looking back on his career, Waters insists his sense of humor hasn’t changed — “I’m exactly the same” — but over time other people’s sense of humor “got pulled in my direction.”
He thinks he knows why he hasn’t been canceled the way some entertainers have: “I always tried to make people laugh,” he said. “I’m not mean-spirited. I think that’s why I’ve lasted this long.”
Having a sense of humor is the key: “If…you have a sense of humor about yourself, you’ll be accepted eventually – through humor.”
Several days after the award ceremony, Waters embarked on a coast-to-coast tour of holiday shows, called A John Waters Christmas. The tour is taking him to more than dozen cities between December 1 and December 19.
Waters told the audience he’s not slowing down largely because he keeps getting job offers — a fashion campaign for Saint Laurent here, voiceover work for Nordstrom there, a gallery show on the West Coast, his year-end 10 Best Movies list for Vulture.com. Many of his stage appearances are pegged to anniversaries of his movies. He said he’s a carny like his idol, the director William Castle. He dreams up ideas in the morning and sells them in the afternoon.
The last questioner of the night asked Waters what his secret is, how he finds the energy to keep going.
“I don’t know how I can’t NOT do them,” he replied, “when they’re offered and I’m alive.”
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