Staying Fit
Happy 50th birthday, Pink Flamingos. Director John Waters, 76, is enjoying the once-shocking film’s newfound respectability — acceptance last year into the National Film Registry, alongside Casablanca and Citizen Kane, and its new Criterion 4K restoration. And he’s also making news for the release of his recent novel, Liarmouth, and the “The Pope of Trash,” a major exhibition coming next year to the new Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles. In fact, Waters is moderately shocked at trading notoriety for mainstream adoration at this stage in the game.
The nattily dressed so-called Pope of Trash (aka Duke of Dirt and Prince of Puke) told AARP all about it during Massachusetts’ Provincetown International Film Festival, which showcased the still shocking Pink Flamingos, a tale of murderous Baltimore mayhem starring the legendary late drag queen Divine. His reaction to his “new respectability” is bemused, considering that “the film is probably worse than it’s ever been, in today’s standards.”
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A film that’s still subversive after 50 years
While it’s wonderful to be considered the elder statesman of filth, Waters is genuinely moved. “I’m greatly honored that all these things have happened with no irony. But the movie itself — with all of today’s political correctness and everybody being so touchy about everything — is probably even more hideous than it ever was.” He’s been touring with the film, where the audience is the youngest it’s ever been, he says. He often asks: “How many people here are seeing it for the first time?” More than half always raise their hands.
Divine stars in "Pink Flamingos."
Courtesy Everett Collection
Waters finds this — and the fact that the movie still plays to an audience — amazing in a good way. “Pink Flamingos wasn’t ever supposed to just shock. It was supposed to make you shocked — and to make you laugh about it. And people still do laugh.”
Although it may sometimes feel that the movie rose out of the 1970s pop cultural ooze, like Venus from her shell, the filmmaker says he “was influenced by art films and, because they broke all the censorship laws, by Federico Fellini and Ingmar Bergman and all that. And by underground movies like those of Andy Warhol. I made exploitation films for art theaters. That’s what mine were, and they still are.”
