Subversive Baltimore filmmaker John Waters has been offending sensibilities since the release of his 1972 film “Pink Flamingos,” which gave the world the gleefully disgusting drag queen Divine.
On May 27, Waters released new versions of the screenplays for “Pink Flamingos,” “Desperate Living” and “Flamingos Forever.” The review blurbs on the books offer a range of takes on the films and Waters himself. Alan Cumming called Waters a “national treasure,” and contrastingly, a Variety review calls “Pink Flamingos,” “one of the most vile, stupid and repulsive films ever made.”
“I built a career on bad reviews,” Waters said. “I didn’t start getting good reviews until way later. I got all bad reviews, and we put them in the ad.”
9 questions with John Waters
Reading the script versus watching the movie felt like distinctly different experiences. Why is that?
“Well, [it’s] worse now than it ever was as far as political correct[ness]. You can’t even call anyone fat anymore. I never get hassled about any of that stuff because I think I’m joyous. I think I make fun of the things I love, including myself, including my films, including the genres that I make films in. So, I think as long as you have a sense of humor and you use that to change people’s minds, they want you to be startled, they come to my movies wanting to be startled and surprised.”
The original trailer for “Pink Flamingos” did not include a single second of footage from the film. Say more on that.
“No, we didn’t want to… and I named it purposely a very middle-of-the-road title… It said ‘an exercise in poor taste.’ That’s putting it mildly.”
In another interview, you said, “What parent would be proud their son made ‘Pink Flamingos’? How liberal can you be?”
“Well, it’s true! The point of ‘Pink Flamingos’ was people saying, ‘Can you imagine if my parents saw all this?’
“Now I would say one out of two people that ask for signatures on the book say, ‘my parents,’ or worse yet, that makes me really groan, is, ‘My grandparents told me to see these movies.’”
You had to go through these scripts to prepare them again for publication. What changes would you make?
“A few things I’d change, but no, not really, because the surprise of it is that it’s so ridiculous and so politically incorrect. In a way, though, I make fun of the values of extreme liberals, which I am. These days, I’m more in the middle, but still I made fun of hippie rules… I made fun of the rules my readers and movie fans go by, not the rules we rebelled from of our parents. And that’s…the key to it, I made fun of our own taboos.”
Do you think of your work as being political?
“All humor is political, yes, very much so… That’s how you change people’s minds; you get them to laugh. That is the most important political thing you can do. You get them to laugh, then they’ll listen, then you change your mind, then you have sex with them… We should have done that in the election.”
I wonder if you have different liberties now that you’re an elder statesman of the film industry.
“I don’t know either, because I… say completely outrageous things and everybody just laughs. But you know why? They’re not mean, and I make fun of myself first. I think that’s the most important thing.
“I’m not self-righteous, which is the worst possible thing you can do after pretentious. Well, there’s no, there’s worse things than that, like fascism, but I’m saying in the humor department, in the arts … I think being self-righteous is how people go vote for the other side when you tell them how they have to think.”
It’s interesting that you say that because, as odd as this sounds, reading through these scripts, they felt almost wholesome. They were just funny.
“Yeah, that’s the point…That’s all I was ever trying to do: make you laugh at your own limits of what can be funny. And I think that’s very important, and that’s liberating in a way with something that you might be upset about or uptight about or don’t feel like anybody should ever talk about it. If you can laugh about that, that thing has no power over you anymore.”
Do you think that sometimes artists can be outrageous for the wrong reasons?
“Oh yes, so many movies say it’s a John Waters-esque movie, and I hate the movie because all it is, it has a drag queen in it. Big deal. That’s hardly, you know, taboo-busting today. Or it’s disgusting without being funny. That’s easy to do.
“It’s much harder to use shock value and have people laugh and change their opinion. To just be disgusting or shocking is very simple and usually not very good.”
I find it ironic that two generations are embracing your work at the same time the American political world is going the other way, for example, banning drag queens from reading in libraries. How do you balance the growing love for your work on one side and this growing rejection of the very things that you celebrate?
“In a way, the movies, when they first came out, were celebrated for breaking the censorship rules and defying all the odds of good taste and what you’re allowed to do in the movies… I think my movies technically are politically correct, and many people might argue that point, but the right people win in my movie. They don’t judge people. They’re open to new ideas. They take what everybody hates against them and turn it into a style and win.
“That’s what we have to do today, and humor is how to do it because [President Trump] doesn’t care about protests, so what? He doesn’t care. The most ridiculous is when celebrities say, ‘I’m moving.’ Well, do you think he cares?… You got to stay.
“I don’t know the answer. I wrote a book called ‘Mr. Know It All,’ and I, for the first time, do not know it all, but I know that humor as terrorism is the answer.”
This interview was edited for clarity.
Book excerpt: ‘Pink Flamingos’
By John Waters
“Pink Flamingos” by John Waters. Published by Picador, May 27, 2025. Copyright © 1988, 1996, 2005 by John Waters. All rights reserved.
____
Emiko Tamagawa produced and edited this interview for broadcast with Todd Mundt. Tamagawa also adapted it for the web.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
Copyright 2025 WBUR