Kevin Lally on Film

I met John Waters at Manhattan’s St. Regis Hotel in 1988 at a high point in his career: the release of his crossover hit Hairspray. While waiting in the lobby, I heard that another celebrity, Lana Turner’s notorious daughter Cheryl Crane (Google her for the sordid details) was staying at the hotel to promote her new autobiography. In retrospect, I wish I had given that intel to Waters, who adores celebs with an infamous past. No surprise, the two were photographed together years later at the Palm Springs Film Festival.

Tragically, Waters’ unforgettable, outrageous star Divine died just nine days after Hairspray opened in theaters. Divine was a huge (in every respect) part of the success of the movie, which was transformed into a Tony-winning Broadway musical in 2002. The musical then became a film starring John Travolta in 2007.

In October 2022, Waters announced plans to make his first feature in 18 years, an adaptation of his novel Liarmouth: A Feel-Bad Romance. I was honored that the interview below was chosen to represent Hairspray in the University Press of Mississippi collection John Waters: Interviews.

Last month, movie history of sorts was made when John Waters’ new film, Hairspray, was awarded a PG rating by the Motion Picture Association of America. “I was shocked!” gasps the writer-director of such of such impudent cult comedies as Mondo Trasho, Multiple Maniacs, Female Trouble, Desperate Living, and the notorious midnight hit about “the filthiest people alive,” Pink Flamingos. A self-proclaimed connoisseur of “shock value,” Waters is perversely pleased by the MPAA benediction, though. “It’s great to be able to shock in reverse,” he says, flashing a grin accented by his familiar, pencil-thin, Little Richard mustache.

Still, Waters fans will be comforted to know that Hairspray retains plenty of the outlandish, lowdown, Baltimore white trash elements they’ve grown to love. Loosely based on the director’s memories of an “American Bandstand”-style Baltimore TV dance program called “The Buddy Deane Show,” the New Line comedy concerns the rivalry between a stuck-up, nouveau-riche blonde and a chubby but high-spirited, lower-class newcomer on the rockin’ “Corny Collins Show” in the year 1962. “It’s a time I remember because of the hairdos—it was such a bizarre look,” says Waters of the massive beehives that crowd the film.

After pioneering the use of “Odorama” (actually scratch-and-sniff cards containing aromas ranging from a bouquet of flowers to dirty sneakers) in his 1982 release Polyester, Waters says he has no need for such revolutionary breakthroughs in Hairspray. “The cast in itself is weird enough—if there’s a gimmick, that’s it.” Among those turning up in Hairspray are rock star Debbie Harry and former Cher-mate Sonny Bono as the parents of haughty Amber Von Tussle, Pia Zadora and The Cars’ Ric Ocasek as a beatnik chick and beatnik cat, and, in his eighth role for Waters, 300-pound comic actor Divine (real name: Glenn Milstead) as the harried mother of the dance show’s obese new star, Tracy Turnblad. And nearly stealing the film with her unabashed energy and cheerfulness as Tracy is newcomer Ricki Lake.

“I was terrified about who was going to be Tracy,” Waters recalls, “because if you don’t like her you won’t like the movie. Ricki was almost like Tracy for real. And she was never uptight about being fat. She said she hated that the only roles offered to her were sensitive, unhappy fat girls—she was sick of playing them.”

Aside from the novelty of having a pudgy heroine who gets the good-looking guy and whom everyone loves, Hairspray also tackles an issue you won’t find in Where the Boys Are, Beach Blanket Bingo, or even American Graffiti—segregation. As Waters tells it, the downfall of “The Buddy Deane Show” was its inability to deal gracefully with the different racial elements in Baltimore: Integrated dance floors were taboo, and every so often the show broadcast a token “Negro Day.”

“I really wanted to bring that in because nobody makes comedies about that subject—it’s really a touchy subject. But all that stuff did happen. To ignore that would be untruthful about that period—they just didn’t have Blacks on those shows… It’s a very unpleasant subject, an embarrassing subject for the people who are from that period. Ruth Brown [who plays rhythm-and-blues DJ Motormouth Maybelle in the film] said, ‘This is all true. I used to appear at dances where they had a rope down the middle and whites danced on one side and the Blacks on the other, and as the music got better and better the rope finally came down.”

But there’s a double-edged quality to Hairspray’s integration theme. “How serious is it to come out for integration in 1962?” Waters laughs. “Who would say, ‘I was really against it in ’62?’ It’s a joke on message movies. That’s what happened, I lived through it—Baltimore was the South, and there was a lot of segregation there. But I’m not coming out as this flaming liberal.”

Waters says he grew up listening to Black radio stations, and the music of that period was his main inspiration in writing Hairspray. When asked to defend his claim in his book Crackpot that The Beatles subsequently ruined rock ‘n’ roll, he sneers, “Oh, I hate The Beatles. They did, they killed rock ‘n’ roll. Great girl groups were big then, like The Ronettes, and when they came out—bang!—everybody was out of business and you had the white sound. Herman’s Hermits, The Dave Clark Five. That’s why I put Little Peggy March [on the soundtrack]—for shock value. She couldn’t be whiter.”

Ironically, securing music rights for Hairspray cost more than the entire budget—$320,000—of Waters’ last film, Polyester. The director says that working for the first time on a $2 million-plus project wasn’t a vastly different experience for him (“We had espresso in the editing room,” he jokes), but he acknowledges, “It made it easier. I didn’t have to do every little job. The days were fifteen hours instead of twenty. We filmed five days a week instead of seven. I can’t imagine going back and doing a movie on that scale, but the next time this will probably seem really under budget.”

The director’s breakthrough came in 1972 with Pink Flamingos, his $21,000 comedy about two families competing for the title “The Filthiest People Alive.” Billed as “an exercise in poor taste,” the movie capped its parade of cinema outrages with a display of coprophilia that set the midnight circuit buzzing. Pink Flamingos ran for eight consecutive years in New York and Los Angeles, creating a wider audience for Waters epics like Female Trouble (1974), with Divine as career criminal Dawn Davenport, and Desperate Living (1977), which the director has described as “a monstrous fairytale comedy dealing with mental anguish, penis envy, and political corruption.”

“I’m proud of Pink Flamingos,” Waters says of his landmark film. “It’s offended three generations, which is very hard to do. But I don’t want to make Pink Flamingos again. It’s reverse snobbism—some people say, ‘Oh, we miss it when it was as raw as Pink Flamingos,’ when they mean ‘as bad.’ I didn’t try to make Pink Flamingos look technically bad—it was just the best I could do on that amount of money. I think it worked with that film because it made it look almost like a scary documentary. It certainly wouldn’t work on Hairspray.

“I never just wanted to shock. I always wanted to make people laugh first. And how I got my original laughs was by shock. I didn’t want to make Ilsa, She-Wolf of the S.S. I like that movie, but for me humor is first and shock is second. On Hairspray, I totally rely on humor. There’s none of those things that I know would get a shock reaction in any country in the world. I don’t want to be predictable, and if I kept doing the same thing it wouldn’t have worked anymore.”

The director credits much of his success to his leading actor Divine, whose sly, uninhibited delivery makes Waters’ eccentric universe easy to enjoy. “Divine is always the best thing in my movies,” Waters observes. “Sometimes I still have to fight—not so much with New Line—to use Divine, and I don’t understand it. He’s obviously such a big part of it. They think, ‘Oh, if you use Divine, it’s going to be another John Waters movie.’ Well, yes, what do you think you’re hiring? What do you want me to make? He still scares some executives—but Divine is a character actor. Also, the initial images of Divine in my early movies were so horrifying and strong to people that they can never forget them, which is good and bad for him. It’s a mixed blessing.” When it’s suggested that it might be fun to see Divine in one of New Line’s massively popular Freddy Krueger movies, Waters boasts, “Divine would win! He’d break those nails right off!”

Of late, Waters has attained high visibility and a certain respectability through his frequent appearances on “Late Night with David Letterman” and his two best-selling books, Shock Value and Crackpot, acclaimed by the likes of The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, Fran Lebowitz, and William Burroughs. “When you’ve been around and they can’t get rid of you, they end up having to like you,” Waters asserts. “My mother says people come up to her and say, ‘Oh, you must be so proud,’ and those are the same people that said ten years ago, ‘You must be so ashamed’—for the exact same movies. That gets on her nerves.

“I also think the public’s sense of humor has gotten a little towards me more. Not because of me, but sometimes when things get so terrible and you can’t change them, all you can do is laugh. If there’s ever a message in my movies, that’s it… All my career has been irony—it’s what delights me the most in this world.”

Pictured: Ricki Lake in Hairspray. Photo ©Everett Collection. Hairspray is available to rent on Prime Video and iTunes.