Just as Nixon had to go to China and Dennis Rodman had to come to the Bulls, John Waters had to visit DisneyQuest.
“Oh, my God,” the lanky, pencil-mustached outlaw director muttered
as he stepped off the elevator ride/rocket blastoff hosted by an animated Aladdin.
There are those who accuse Waters of having gone mainstream, mainly because no one eats real doggie-doo on screen anymore, he hasn’t found another 300-pound transvestite to replace the late Divine (the aforementioned poo-muncher of 1973’s “Pink Flamingos,” and the De Niro to Waters’ Scorsese), and actual marquee actors have been appearing in his campy comedies, such as Kathleen Turner in 1994’s “Serial Mom” and Melanie Griffith in “Cecil B. DeMented,” which opens Friday.
Yet anyone who needs a reminder of just how far outside the mainstream this Baltimore native (and booster) remains should have seen him at DisneyQuest, downtown Chicago’s aggressively themed cyberamusement park/video arcade where he was coerced to conduct an interview for the highest of purposes in the Waters universe: irony.
“I feel like an old white lady in Harlem,” the 54-year-old director drawled, visibly shrinking from the all-out sensory assault of cheery Disney synergy.
Waters’ latest movie hero, after all, is a film terrorist played by Stephen Dorff who kidnaps a famous actress (Griffith) and declares an explosive war on all things Hollywood.
“This place, I almost feel hypocritical being here,” Waters said. “I have nothing against this place, but it is the opposite of Cecil B. Demented. Cecil B. Demented would torch it, you know what I mean? He says, `I’m the enemy of family films.’
“This ain’t my world. Coming here I am scared. I really think I’m going to get mugged in here. And I could, because this is against every value I’ve pushed for 20 years.”
That’s not to say that there hasn’t been some genuine intersection of the wonderful worlds of Disney and Waters. He has long cited Disney cartoon villains as one of his earliest, strongest influences.
“When I was very young, a Disney villain was who I wanted to be,” he said. “I mean, this mustache, I look like a Disney villain in a way. The Stepmother in `Cinderella,’ the Wicked Queen [in `Snow White’] and Captain Hook [in `Peter Pan’] were the three villains that I wanted to be as a child. And the Wicked Witch of the West in `The Wizard of Oz.’
“I knew something was wrong in the beginning because I always rooted for the wrong character. All the other kids would cheer when they died, and I would be sobbing. And Disney does have great villains. I think it does the best.”
He glanced around.
“But there are no villains in here.”
There is, however, a large cutout of the fat, heavily rouged octopus of “The Little Mermaid,” who bears a suspicious resemblance to none other than Divine.
“It is him,” Waters said. “Blatantly. You can’t look at it and say it isn’t. It’s the same makeup and everything. When that came out, he had been dead, but if he had been alive, he would have wanted money.”
Money, by the way, is one of the key elements that separates Waters from the big Hollywood players. His most expensive movie, “Serial Mom,” cost $13 million to make, a fraction of what most studio films cost to market. The budget for “Cecil” was $8.5 million.
Just as it does for Woody Allen, the international community generally helps Waters finance his films, and the international audience ensures that Waters earns his money back. So even though Waters has never scored a so-called blockbuster, he continues to have the creative freedom to make his eccentric, irreverent, sloppy satires more than 30 years after he started.
“If you like my movies or hate my movies, they are a genre,” Waters said. “I think they are just `a John Waters movie.'”
Meanwhile, he’s been hearing that “gone Hollywood” rap for 25 years.
“When `Female Trouble’ came out, they said, `Oh, he’s trying to cross over, trying to go mainstream,'” he said of his 1975 movie; it cost $25,000 to make and at one point features Divine simultaneously playing a rapist and victim. “The most commercial movie I ever made was `Pink Flamingos.’ It cost $10,000, and it’s still playing and playing and playing. I knew eating [excrement] was a very commercial idea, the most commercial idea I’ve ever had, ’cause you had to talk about it.”
That said, he’s tickled by the idea of being a mainstream director.
“I’m not offended when they say that,” he said. “If I can in any way be mainstream, it’s irony, isn’t it? That’s what the whole thing is, that somehow I am the establishment now, which is really funny that that could have ever happened.”
If anything, it’s the mainstream that has gone John Waters. Waters, after all, considered “Pink Flamingos” to be a surrealistic joke, what he said was an answer to the question, “What could you do after pornography was legal? What was left?”
Now you have a guy being impaled through the head by a penis in “Scary Movie” and Eddie Murphy appearing to perform oral sex on himself as a grandmother in “Nutty Professor II: The Klumps,” and those are two of the summer’s biggest smashes. “Me, Myself & Irene” and “Road Trip” also owe much of their commercial success to a level of gross-out humor that Waters was confined to the fringes for delivering in the ’70s.
Waters said it’s “great” that “Scary Movie” earned more than $42 million in its opening weekend, as well as an R rating instead of an NC-17, because “it gives me more freedom to come up with the next thing I do.” But he doesn’t feel like the trend has any connection to him.
“To be honest I don’t feel a part of it,” he said. “I make art movies that are weird. My movies are not made to play in 3,000 movie theaters. I’m not against [those movies]. I’m happy all these movies are a hit, but I retired from that in `Pink Flamingos.’ I’ve never tried to top myself.”
To Waters, the gross-out movies’ success just supports the complaint of his latest anti-hero, Cecil B. Demented: “Hollywood has co-opted sex and violence. There are no more exploitation movies.”
The days of sexploitation, blaxploitation, midnight movies — they’re over. The studios have taken over.
“There isn’t anything they wouldn’t do now,” Waters said. “Before they wouldn’t do gore, they wouldn’t do frontal nudity, they wouldn’t do black movies, but now they do all of them. It’s what American humor is all over the whole world. Hollywood’s the terrorist. We put every national film business out of business.”
Yet Waters is careful to note that he doesn’t blame Hollywood; the people in the other countries are buying tickets to American movies, after all. As a rule he tries not to be too negative, he said, noting, “I never trash things in my life. My specialty has been praising things that other people hate.”
So although he remarked of DisneyQuest, “I would never in my life think of coming here,” he quickly added, “That’s not bad. That’s my tastes. Every person in here probably never has seen a John Waters” movie.
So what would WatersQuest be like?
“If I was ever going to do this, God knows what we’d serve,” he said, giving the question serious consideration. “I guess scrapple from `Pecker’ [1998], pit beef, all the Baltimore stuff, oysters. Even though Cecil kills marketing departments, [it could sell] Divine dolls. With `Cecil B. Demented’ they could have action figures . . .
“If I had this world, it would cater to a different audience,” he added, as if such a statement were necessary. Instead of opening at 9 a.m., “it would open at 9 at night. It would serve absinthe. We’d bring that back, because it’s legal again, I think.
“You could do it,” he continued. “It would be on a smaller location. How much does it cost to come here? A lot, right? It would cost probably less. If I was going to do that, it would be the same [idea as DisneyQuest]. You take what your audience likes and exaggerate it and try to sell it. I’m not against trying to make money. Cecil is. Cecil says, `I’m a prophet against profit.’ I’m never saying I was this.”
