John Waters on restoring Hairspray and Desperate Living: “The mistakes are part of the charm”

When his films first shocked, charmed, and terrorised theatres in the 70s and 80s, John Waters was an unlikely candidate for mainstream canonisation. But here we are, with six of his feature films now released in lovingly restored Blu-ray editions from The Criterion Collection – joining this month are Hairspray (1988) and Desperate Living (1977).

Waters’ most mainstream success, PG-rated dance comedy Hairspray found an audience on home video and went on to spawn a successful musical – which itself spawned a film version. Desperate Living, meanwhile, remained comparatively overlooked and unavailable. A dark comedy even by Waters’ standards, this Alice in Wonderland-esque odyssey stars Mink Stole as a neurotic and murderous housewife, exiled for her crimes with her maid in tow to a bizarre, matriarchal shantytown, inhabited by a cornucopia of strange characters. The film is notable for its early and unusual transgender representation.

Ahead of the UK re-releases, the Pope of Trash reflected on these disparate films’ making, restoration, and canonisation.

Blake Simons: These new restorations were supervised and approved by you – what does that look like in practice? 

John Waters: Before this, they did Polyester [1981], Female Trouble [1974], Pink Flamingos [1972] and Multiple Maniacs [1970]. I was there for all that. They do a great job of making it look as good as possible without taking away the original flavour. The very fact that Desperate Living is in 4K is funny – like a parody almost.

Lee Kline is the guy that does all the restoration there, and he’s brilliant. I trust him so much. He sits there with me, and we go through: Do you want this? Do you want this? Then we send it to the original cinematographer.

Could you expand on Desperate Living being almost parodic in 4K?

I think it’s funny because Desperate Living was grainy 16mm. People say “I don’t like people watching my movies on their cell phones.” I don’t mind. I wish some of them were! You don’t notice all the mistakes! But the mistakes are sometimes part of the charm. In Cecil B. Demented [2000], I gave him a line where he said “technique is nothing more than failed style”, and I believe that a little. I think Lee also understands. We keep the original flavour of how the film looks, but make it look as best as it can, under those weird underground rules.

Tell me about revisiting Desperate Living. It’s a comparatively underseen outlier in your filmography. There’s no Divine – Mink Stole takes up that histrionic mantle and really shines.

Well, I promise you that Desperate Living and Hairspray have never been – and will never be – on a double bill together. They’re opposite ends of my movies. And Desperate Living is maybe even harder to like than Multiple Maniacs or some of the more extreme ones, because it’s subject matter that certainly had never been done comedically.

The Christine Jorgensen Story [1970] had some comedy involved, but in a politically incorrect way. When her first case came out in the ‘50s, she was the first transgender person I ever knew about. She was incredibly famous. In America, the headline was “G.I. Goes Abroad and Comes Back A Broad”. I was obsessed. We tried to get her to play the mother in Polyester. She was very sweet, and just said that she wasn’t doing any acting and had retired. But I’ve always been drawn to the subject matter. Now, trans has been accepted in America by young people way faster than gay rights was. It’s a whole new sexual revolution. When I made Desperate Living, it wasn’t a talked-about subject. Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore was one of the first hospitals that did [reassignment surgery]. I’d met Elizabeth Coffey, the first trans I ever worked with, who was in Pink Flamingos and now works in transgender senior citizen rights. So the subject was always kind of there.

I made Desperate Living in my years when I hung around in lesbian bars a lot. We had one in Baltimore called Port in the Storm. I took Debbie Harry there, and she said it was the scariest bar she had ever been in. It was total white, redneck, with Johnny Cash-lookalike lesbians. The entertainment were Elvis imitators at night and phone operators by day. It was a great place. It really influenced me – all those things came together.

At the time, people were angry. How can a man make a movie about lesbians? I think that a man, or a woman, or a them can make a movie about anything. They say straight people are so brave when they play gay people. They don’t say that when gay people play straight people, and they’ve been playing them for years.

Tell me about the Italian dub of Desperate Living that’s included on the Criterion disc.

In Italy, they always give my films the worst titles. Hairspray was called ‘Fat Is Beautiful’. Serial Mom [1992] in Germany was called ‘Why Can’t Mama Stop Killing?’ But in Italy, they used to dub everything. It’s funny to see my Baltimore characters, some of whom have Baltimore accents, talking in Italian – and what’s amazing is that in each of the countries that dub, there is a star that always does Divine; there is a star that always does Kathleen Turner.

The only time I like dubbing is for my own movies – because in Baltimore, we can’t even speak English. It’s fun to hear this ludicrous dialogue coming out of mouths in a foreign language. Every movie, I send in a glossary of dirty terms and what they mean. They never use them, they always just put in the word ‘shit’. They put that in for any cuss words, because they’re too embarrassed to put in some of the other ones.

Hairspray grew beyond you, receiving a musical and a film version of said musical – indeed you’ve called it “the gift that keeps on giving”. What’s it like to look back on your original and return it to the spotlight?

I’m proud of the original. It’s been through so many different versions, and you can’t really screw it up. I’ve seen it in grade schools; I’ve seen it all over the world. I even saw it once – I don’t know the politically correct term – but it was mentally-challenged children. And I thought, please, I don’t want to watch. They did the whole show for just me. But it was incredibly moving. They understood it too. I was really proud of the script, that it played everywhere. Everybody could understand it.

Did it feel like a far cry from your previous work that you were being more widely understood?

I think I was always understood. I think Pink Flamingos was understood from the day it came out for exactly what it was: a provocation; an exploitation film made for art theatres. I was never misunderstood in my career.

It must be curious though, to have once been decried and counter-culture, and now sit in the Criterion Collection – arguably as mainstream arthouse canon. How does that sit with you?

It’s great. There’s no irony, I’m happy about it.

The most amazing thing: Pink Flamingos got picked by the National Film Registry as a ‘Great American Film’. And I’m trying to think, what scene did they decide that on? The singing arsehole? I’m trying to imagine the screening.

I always ask my audience when I do my show: what do you hope Criterion does next? They picked Desperate Living a lot, but I always thought Hairspray would probably be the first one they would do. There was a whole lot of Hairspray that was wisely cut out, where Tracy was nasty and a bad girl. You can see those as deleted scenes in the new release, and it’s kind of amazing. Sometimes producers are correct. The movie would not have been the same at all if we had left those in.

What do you feel the current state of play is with ‘trash’ as a label or mode? Do you feel it’s still alive?

It’s alive, but the people that try to do it try too hard. It’s easy to be disgusting and gross, but it is not easy to make people laugh and change their opinions. I was in a No Kings march recently against Trump and my sign said ‘Trump ruined bad taste’. He did. That’s not even fun anymore.

Is there an exploitation film anymore? The last one I can think of might’ve been Cocaine Bear [2023]. There really is no such thing, because all the things that were in exploitation are in every Hollywood movie now. But horror movies are still the genre. There’s going to be a billion of them now since the last few made all this money and cost nothing, believe me. Move over, Sight and Sound, Fangoria is going to take over.

Hairspray and Desperate Living are on Criterion Collection 4K UHD from 20 July.