Established in 2004, the Coolidge Corner Theatre Foundation’s annual Coolidge Award “recognizes film artists whose work advances the spirit of original and challenging cinema.” Previous recipients include Liv Ullmann, Jane Fonda, Michael Douglas and Meryl Streep. This year, the award is being given to a man whose breakthrough movie ended with a shot of a drag queen eating dog feces.
“I’m getting so respectable, it’s scary,” John Waters laughed on the phone last week from his home in Baltimore. The Pope of Trash, as he’s sometimes called, is best known for his jaw-dropping, X-rated comedies celebrating freaks, perverts and other underground underdogs. Usually led by his cross-dressing, foul-mouthed muse Divine — who was larger than life in more ways than one — Waters’ appallingly funny early films have lost none of their ability to leave audiences aghast. Once banned for obscenity, his pictures are now canonized in the Criterion Collection, with his 1972 magnum opus “Pink Flamingos” part of the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry. These days, the delightful raconteur tours the country with his spoken word show, serving as cinema culture’s dirty uncle.
He’s honored by the Coolidge Award and tickled to be in such company, pointing out that his friend Werner Herzog was a recipient in 2018. “I’ll fit in somewhere around him. He’s pretty crazy.”
Waters, who spends his summers in Provincetown, has a long history with the Boston film community, noting that “‘Pink Flamingos’ played forever and ever at the Orson Welles [Cinema]” and called legendary local film bookers George Mansour and Connie White “my saviors. Those two have been my champions in the area for more than 40 years.”
And he’s a big fan of the Coolidge. “These are the kind of theaters that last,” he said. “They’re a center for film fanatics. They’re a part of the culture in the city. People find dates there. It’s sexy to go there! People see movies that surprise them.”
People were certainly surprised last Thursday night when the Coolidge’s six-film John Waters retrospective kicked off with a screening of “Pink Flamingos.” It was a treat seeing one of the shiny new Coolidge expansion auditoriums soiled by the picture, in which Divine tries to defend her title as the Filthiest Person Alive from a couple of deranged foot fetishists who run a stolen baby ring. Scored with peppy jukebox oldies, the film proudly features rape, incest, sodomy, cannibalism, castration, bestiality and an act of unsimulated coprophilia that never fails to leave audiences gagging and screaming. At last week’s show, during a scene in which a circus performer lip-syncs “Surfin’ Bird” with his rectum, a young college student in the front row who clearly hadn’t properly modulated his chemical intake for the evening began crying aloud, “What is wrong with that man’s butt?”
You’d think a 52-year-old movie wouldn’t be able to make such an impact anymore. “It’s worse now,” Waters cackled, wondering what must have been going on during the Library of Congress deliberations. “You’re trying to imagine what was the scene that made them think, ‘This is the one. This is it.’ Was it ‘Do my balls, Mama?’”
Upon initial release, the film was advertised with quotes from critics who hated the movie — the Detroit Free Press said it was “like a septic tank explosion”— and promotional barf bags were issued at auditorium doors.
“But for some reason, nobody ever gets angry at it,” the director mused. There’s nothing like attending a screening of a John Waters movie with a room full of people who only think they know what they’re getting into. These are celebratory experiences. His movies are ebullient, full of great if somewhat deranged fellow-feeling. They foster a sense of camaraderie, especially among outcasts.
“It is communal, the laughter. And you feel safe when other people are laughing. That’s why the movies are still playing. That’s why they find new audiences,” the director explained. “People come up to me all the time and say I saved their life, which is staggering for me to hear. But they just mean that wherever they were growing up, they didn’t think that anybody was like them. Then they saw these movies and realized there is another way. They found bohemia, they found a new way.”
The Coolidge retrospective includes cult classics like 1974’s notorious “Female Trouble” (Nov. 22) in which Divine plays a dual role, famously becoming the first performer in film history to rape themselves on camera. (In typical Waters fashion, we get a good look at the assailant’s skid-marked undies.) But it also includes a couple of his lesser-known B-sides. The filmmaker himself selected his 2000 box office bomb “Cecil B. Demented” (Nov. 21) which stars Stephen Dorff as an insane indie director who kidnaps a Hollywood star (Melanie Griffith) and forces her to act in his movie. Waters will do a Q&A with Coolidge program director Mark Anastasio after the screening.
“Also, ‘Pecker’ is showing, which I really like,” Waters said. “Not many people have seen it. I guess it’s my ‘nice’ movie?” Indeed, it’s hard not to spot an autobiographical angle in this affectionate 1998 comedy (Dec. 5) starring Edward Furlong as an amateur shutterbug who takes snapshots of his oddball Baltimore neighbors. The young man — nicknamed Pecker because he eats like a bird — briefly becomes the toast of the New York art scene, only to realize there’s no place like home.
This critic was managing a movie theater in Waltham back when the film first came out, and I proudly put “John Waters’ Pecker” up on the marquee. (My boss made me take down the possessory credit.) The double entendre title led to yet another of the director’s many tussles with the Motion Picture Association ratings board, culminating in a hearing during which Waters acted as his own attorney. “The MPAA said I couldn’t call it ‘Pecker.’ So I said, ‘How about ‘Shaft?’ How about ‘Free Willy?’ I won.” Waters relished the experience. “If I wasn’t a filmmaker, I’d be a defense lawyer. My films are defense lawyers for certain types of people, in a way.”
If “Pecker” is his “nice” movie, Waters describes “Desperate Living” (Nov. 29) as “my most despairing.” The 1977 film follows a housewife (Mink Stole) who murders her husband and is exiled to Mortville, a poverty-stricken shantytown where citizens debase themselves to curry favor with the mad Queen Carlotta (Edith Massey), an oversized, orange-haired despot who governs according to psychotic whims. Watching it today, one has to wonder, has America become Mortville?
“We became Mortville right after COVID-19,” the director concurred. “Many towns are exactly like Mortville now. Worse, actually. Mortville did come true, definitely. Everywhere is Mortville.”
Does Waters see any way out of this?
“There’s so many this-es. Which one? I say about Trump, stop whining as of yesterday. He won, plain and simple. By a lot,” Waters said. “It is shocking to imagine that, but all this humorless political correctness makes people vote the other way. We’ve got to pick our battles. I think maybe we didn’t.”
Waters has little time for cultural hall monitors and the scolds on social media. “The new censorship comes from the left, not the right. You can’t even say ‘fat’ anymore. Although, they don’t hassle me,” he said. “I make fun of myself first, which is one of the reasons I get away with it. I make fun of things that I like. It’s politically incorrect in a way that isn’t mean. I make fun of the rules that so-called outlaws believe they live by. And today, the rules of that community are even [stricter] than when my parents were growing up.”
The filmmaker said he’s always believed in “using humor to be political, to change people’s minds. I think humor is the way to do it. As we just found out, you don’t make people feel stupid. You don’t win when you do that. You make them laugh, and then maybe they’ll listen.”
It’s been 20 years since his last film, 2004’s “A Dirty Shame” (Dec. 2), and while Waters has busied himself with his books and speaking tours and plenty of other enterprises, one wonders if we’ll see the 78-year-old director behind a camera again. His children’s Christmas adventure “Fruitcake” fell through three times. An adaptation of his hilarious 2022 novel “Liarmouth” was recently announced with Aubrey Plaza in the lead, but Waters told me “it looks like that’s not happening, either.” But he doesn’t have any hard feelings.
“That’s what Hollywood is. I don’t know anybody who can get a movie made in Hollywood right now. I’m not bitter. That’s the way it works,” he said. “The movie business as I knew it is over. But that’s alright, I’ve got 50 backup plans. I’ve got more jobs now than I’ve ever had. Nothing bad has ever happened to me in show business. Except when you’re sick and you’re recognized in hospitals. That’s the worst. That’s the only time you sink in your seat praying not to be noticed. When you have a kidney stone.”
John Waters will accept the Coolidge Award during “An Evening with John Waters” on Thursday, Nov. 21. The Coolidge Corner Theatre’s retrospective of his films runs through Thursday, Dec. 5.
