John Waters Pt. 1

Shaun
Host
00:00
This is Off To Off Topic, a show where two men with the attention spans of a squirrel try and fail to stay on topic with the day's subject. Where will their oral meanderings take us? Well, stick around and listen, because today's Off To Off Topic Topic is John Waters, the Pope of Trash, the Sultan of Sleaze, the People's Pervert, the Baron of Bad Taste and now, in his older years, known as the Filth Elder. He's born on April 22nd 1946 to parents John and Partitia, waters and Nate. How much do you know about John Waters? He exists. Okay, that's it. 

Nate
Host
00:33
I mean, I know him, I know like, you know he's, you know quote-unquote weirdo and I hate using that, I hate that word, but you know it's just, he kind of embraces it. He, you know dry queens, he's gay hairspray. Yeah, I mean, he's like he's kooky, you know that's. You know weird. My question. 

Shaun
Host
00:54
That's kind of yeah, that's more or less what I knew. Basically what I knew about him is he was a director who did underground movies in the 70s and then I thought he went on to do like family comedies in the 80s and movies. And then during my research I realized I was kind of combining John Waters and John Hughes, two people who are both directors named John but are nothing alike. Right, not even close. No, not even close. Turns out he did not direct a bunch of John Candy movies. So, um, or, or Breakfast Club or Breakfast Club. Yeah, I thought that was John Waters' movie, breakfast Club or 16 Candles. 

01:20
Yeah, I know that's how far? Off-face. I was, yeah, that was a little bit way different. Yeah, well, that's why I was like, wow, he started as a sleazy guy and then went to family movies. That's kind of neat, he's got range. 

Nate
Host
01:30
Could you imagine John Waters Breakfast Club? Oh man, Debbie. Oh, I would kind of like to see that. That, yeah, to be honest, I would do That'd be funny. 

Shaun
Host
01:37
Yeah, it's also kind of made me realize that between John Hughes, john Waters, john Landis and John Carpenter there are too many directors named John in the 80s. We need to eliminate two. Yes, I am not a crackpot. 

Nate
Host
01:48
Well, john, like this seems to be, it's a very generic name, you know it's one of those things like okay, quick your name for this generic character John or Peter, John, yeah, John Doe, yeah. John or Joe, yeah, legitimately John Doe. 

Shaun
Host
02:01
Yeah. So research for this episode involved watching a lot of interviews with him and doing a lot of reading. So he's good at telling stories and randomly, in the middle of all of this talking, we're just going to pop in and just tell a quick little story that John Waters liked to share, that I found amusing and or funny, and also what the guy knows to doing this research. John, over the years, has talked a lot about people he would have loved to have been. Over the years he's like I would have loved to have been this person, or grown up. I always wanted to be this person. So I kind of made like a small list of just a fraction of the people he brought up, growing up and later in life. Even he wanted to grow up to become a beatnik, a greaser little Richard. He even said about little Richard he wanted to literally crawl up inside of his skin and wear him like a flesh shooting. Become little Richard, because it would freak out his parents and his grandma. Little Richard also the person who inspired his pencil thin mustache. 

Nate
Host
02:46
Let's say, like you know, what I thought, little Richard, I thought of the pencil thin the mustache. 

Shaun
Host
02:50
Because he was like hey, that is over the top and weird and I like it. 

02:53
They also wanted to be Captain Hook. You want to be Johnny Mathis, who he says is the exact opposite of him and that's why he wants to be Johnny Mathis. He also wanted to be the Wicked Witch of the West, Clair of Bell from the clown from the Howdy Doody show. And he also wants to be Don Knot and he's willing to fight Steve Buscemi for the role of Don Knot in a movie. And my brain has a hard time putting together John Waters and Steve Buscemi fighting in a steel cage. My brain is just like refusing to like be able to process that. I'd like to see it. 

Nate
Host
03:19
He might be too old. Now if they did Don Knot, I don't know, don Knot's got pretty old. 

Shaun
Host
03:23
Yeah makeup. 

Nate
Host
03:24
Yeah, I guess. Yeah, whatever happened to Don Knot, he's dead. I mean, yeah, he died. 

Shaun
Host
03:29
I mean I think they happened to everybody, but that was just one minute, he was everywhere and then he was like yeah, he was like a big staple of our childhood, and then, I don't know, like mid eighties, he just sort of disappeared when he turned to a cartoon fish at one point. Yeah, yeah. That's pretty much the last I remember of him. 

Nate
Host
03:44
Well, that of course always Andy Griffith. You know it's. 

Shaun
Host
03:47
Yeah, he was in a few movies, according to his daughter too, apparently he was quite the ladies man, quite the poon hound. Oh, I can see that. 

Nate
Host
03:54
Yeah, actually I can't. I mean no, no, no, no. But like with a face like his and all of a sudden you get super famous and all of a sudden you look like you don't have to really try anymore. Yeah, he's got time to make up. Because, let me, if you go from like striking out right and left and all of a sudden you're hitting nothing about homers, you probably get this lucky train rolling. Yeah, until it stops happening. 

Shaun
Host
04:18
So oh yeah, also John Waters says he gets confused by flight attendants all the time for being Steve Buscemi. Oh hello, mr Buscemi. He's like sure I don't think they look that close. I mean, neither do I actually. I mean they're just small and scrawny kind of guys Skinny, yes, kind of like little mustaches. Occasionally, occasionally, I've seen Buscemi kind of have a pencil thin mustache, but that's not very often. 

Nate
Host
04:40
No, but she was. The thing that stands out to him is his eyes and his teeth and I, just when I think John Waters, I don't think eyes, I like, yeah, I know he has them, but I don't like, I'm not, those don't stand out. 

Shaun
Host
04:52
So what we can assume is flight attendants might not be that smart sometimes. Yeah, Okay, cool. Do not rely on them for eyewitness testimony. 

Nate
Host
05:00
Yeah, that disparages you know flight attendants? Yeah, because I mean that's the hell of a job. I wouldn't do it. You're up there like every day shooting a blue cannon through the star. Not stars Do the sky. And you know. Deal with people. You know of all types and you know you know, deals with people all types. 

Shaun
Host
05:19
John Waters back to him. He grew up in the town of, or the suburbs of, baltimore called Lutherville and he loves the city of Baltimore. It's his home and he understands why other people love Baltimore, but he cannot understand why anyone would ever move there willingly. He says it's a place where everyone thinks they're normal, but they are extremely weird. He likes to tell stories about Baltimore too, and here's a couple of them that I actually found kind of amusing. One of them, he said that actually sums up Baltimore and its redneck in this really well. He said he was walking down an alley after a rainstorm one day when he came across a little redneck girl in a tattered red dress playing in a mud puddle. As he walked by the girl, she looked up at him with a joyous, with a joyous look on her face and proclaimed to him I just drowned me a worm. John looked down at her and was just like oh you, sweet, sweet young thing, your story is just beginning, you little psycho. 

Nate
Host
06:06
Well, she, yes and no, you can't drown worms. 

Shaun
Host
06:10
Well, yes, okay, cool, you were a lot of fun at parties. Another story this story told about a Baltimore Just kind of made me laugh because this seems like something had happened to one of the weird bars around here it's just minding his own business having a drink when somebody just wandered up to him and unprovoked stated you know, people think I'm a 30 year old drug addict, but I'm really just a 40 year old alcoholic and John was just like that's the weirdest thing to say to a stranger who? 

Nate
Host
06:36
are you? 

Shaun
Host
06:36
Yeah, who are you and why are you saying that? I guess the conversation just kind of ended there. But his upbringing in Baltimore was actually pretty good. He was raised in a pretty strict Roman Catholic household, his parents constantly telling him all the ways to be good and prim and proper in society. And he said this was probably the best thing for his career and for him developing because his parents had taught him how to properly behave in society and because he learned those rules, he knew exactly how to freak people out and how to break those rules. Nice, and I went on to say that yeah, you need to know the rules of taste before you can break them with wit. He said and he's 100% correct on that you get brought up prim and probably like I know how to freak these people's out. And although his parents were pretty strict as far as like manners and rules and bring him up in society kind of thing, they were actually very supportive of his weirdness and his movies. They didn't like his movies, but they were supportive of him. 

Nate
Host
07:24
Well, also, I mean, let's be real, you know, with I mean I would think the same through it was like oh, I don't support you, but how much money you're making? Okay, well, I guess I'll. I guess I'll forego by a. 

Shaun
Host
07:37
Well, in all honesty, he did not make a lot of money until, like, hairspray came up. To be honest, he was kind of. He said his early movies all the way up, like through Pink Flamingos, he didn't become rich, he was being a hundred air by that point. Yeah Well, we'll actually get into how broke he was kind of at times, because it turns out they had to actually steal a lot of their stuff to shoot some of the early movies. 

Nate
Host
07:58
Yeah, I can see that and I will say that I'm making that. I made that claim thinking about later John Waters, not, you know, earlier John Waters. Yeah. 

Shaun
Host
08:06
Yeah, early on. It was pretty rough for him, as most kids did back then, when he was a wee little one. He loved himself some. How do you do to? You Talk to anybody from that generation? Everybody watched how do you do you? Cause it was like one of two shows you had an option of watching back then. Right, that terrifying puppet, yeah, oh yeah. Actually, clair Bel and Flubba Dub the puppet, or Flubba Dub the puppet, was one of his favorite characters, as was Clair Bel the clown, and said those two were big fashion inspirations for him because they just wore big, bright, colorful clothes and you know big eye catching ensembles. And fun side fact, the original Clair Bel the clown went on to become the original Captain Kingaroo after a labor dispute. Let it go. Yeah. 

08:44
John Waters loved how do you do so much that his parents would actually drive him from Baltimore to New York to see the how do you do live as part of the studio audience. And he remembers the first time going there and he was all excited to see puppets wandering around and you know all the magic and strange funny things that'd be happening. And he walked in there and his mind was blown when he realized there was nothing but cameras and cranky old teamsters walking around, chain smoking and yelling at people. He looked around and he's like, oh my god, this show is all a lie and this is glorious, a glorious, glorious lie. I must be part of this process to lie to people and create imagination and yep that having the veil of how do you do? 

09:19
Delifted is what got him going and interested in Hollywood. He also remembers from the recordings too, buffalo Bob being really mean and yelling at the kids and telling them to shut up or they wouldn't get their Milky Way bar. They bribed the kids with candy. Wow yeah, apparently the kids were not treated that great. It sounded like on a set. They were like hey, if you don't do exactly what we're talking about, we will not give you your candy and we will kick you out and scream at you for a while, probably even paddle your butt. 

Nate
Host
09:42
Well, back then I mean they'd be like a dead child. Let's do that, kick it aside. This is true. Let's be real, like the children were exactly like you know, was this kid orphan? 

Shaun
Host
09:51
We got her into. Yeah, parents, it was an orphan. All right, we're fine, just leave him. 

Nate
Host
09:55
There Is this age where, like I mean maybe I'm complaining like the the World's Fair they gave way a baby because either with a raffle and no one knows what happened to it, I mean, I never heard that story. Oh yeah, totally, that actually happened. And I believe that it was only within the last 30 years. You weren't allowed to like ship children through the mail. 

Shaun
Host
10:13
I actually. Yeah, I did hear that it was kind of common to ship kids through the mail sometimes I forget. 

Nate
Host
10:19
This is not the 90s, probably less 50 years. Let's say it's 2023. It's not. 

Shaun
Host
10:25
I was thinking when you said like 30 years, I was like it sounds wrong, but I'll just go with it. Yeah, Also to my brain when you said 30 years, my brain popped back kind of like the 50s or 40s, because we're talking about like the 70s right now. 

Nate
Host
10:36
I mean, there's like this show in Netflix where we're talking about oh man, what is it? It's the Japanese show about little kids going off on their own Like oh yeah that's what it is, and actually it's kind of interesting. 

Shaun
Host
10:47
Yeah, japanese show, I hope my kid comes back. 

Nate
Host
10:48
I think it's pretty well they're being followed by a camera crew. But yeah fucking three year old. Three to five year old kids going off like a mile away to the store and pick up stuff. I'm just like good Lord. And they're like this show's been going on 30 years. I'm like that's crap. And then there's also like wait a minute, there's a reason for this. That's the 90s, yeah. 

Shaun
Host
11:09
All I do think of, too, is the kid does get kidnapped. They're like the camera crew is there, what were they doing? Hey, we caught the whole thing on camera. They pulled up in a van, grabbed the kid and took off. It was awesome. 

11:17
John Waters continued attending as many Howdy Doody showings as he could just because he loved puppet hearing and puppets. Also, 1953 movie Lily gave him an even bigger love of puppets. In fact, by the age of 12, he was doing puppet shows at birthday parties in the neighborhood for other kids and basically he started out with a kind of a little Punch and Judy routine note to argue back forth, hitting themselves with sticks. And as he got more and more gigs and people more and more showed up for his shows, he started getting them more and more violent too and started to push the envelope. And this started getting parents slightly concerned. And eventually, when he started putting fake blood into his little plays and I mean like a lot of fake blood, like spraying fake blood everywhere, yeah, the neighborhood kind of put a kibosh on his puppet stories. 

12:01
I guess it was like where he was like spraying kids with fake blood kind of stuff and get away with it. That's fun, yeah, yeah, yeah, because he was just like, hmm, I was able to spray this much blood and get away with it, what if I double the amount of blood? And yeah, he only got away with it for so long, but good time. And I'll say I don't know if I mentioned, but he was getting paid for this too. Actually, I mean a little bit of money on the side. It's like Gallagher with blood. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Oh, that'd be awesome. Plot that just set the puppet down the ground, pull out a big hammer and just smash it blood everywhere. 

Nate
Host
12:27
Man, I used to be like really fun at Gallagher, but also now nowhere else. He's disappeared and then come to find out, like you know, he had a twin brother who's doing acts pretending to be him. 

Shaun
Host
12:36
Yeah, he like licensed out his name to a couple people and yeah, it's weird. And then he like kind of went full Trump derangement syndrome at one point, I think yeah. 

Nate
Host
12:44
I think I remember you telling me about that. 

Shaun
Host
12:45
Yeah, or something weird. And then you go back and watch his comedy and you're like, oh, this wasn't that funny. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I don't know. But like you, I kind of liked him back when I first saw him and I don't know, 88 or 90 or whatever, it was way back when. 

Nate
Host
12:57
Well, it was one of those things, like you know, when you're starving and also get someone who gives you a cracker, like oh my God, this is true, yeah, yeah. 

Shaun
Host
13:05
But then when you have like actually you know you eat a lot- Also, you got like Netflix and you look up all sorts of comedians or YouTube like oh wait, a minute, that's trash. Another story about John being a weird, awkward child is one of his favorite pastimes to do was his have his mom drive him to the local auto wrecking yard where he'd greatly track down cars that had been in accidents and try to come up with how and why is it these cars got directs, if anybody died, and all the possible trauma that happened all around. Sometimes even he would take a hammer and smash up car a little more to suit his story. Break out all the windows. They'll be like this is where she flew out the window. Ha ha ha. Smash, smash, smash. Yeah, honestly, that sounds like something I would have done if I'd been able to get away with it. 

Nate
Host
13:46
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah yeah. 

Shaun
Host
13:49
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah yeah. 

Nate
Host
13:53
Yeah, like a trash yard where this car is and you can smash what you want. Yeah, a Garry, I do that now. 

Shaun
Host
14:00
Yeah, yeah, on the sky, I probably wouldn't do it now. They will yell at you wrecking yards if you do it. But yeah, he'll put me kind of punch you back. Ha ha ha, I'm gonna go Street Fire 2 on this car. Yeah, his parents were a little bit concerned because he remembers them asking his pediatrician if it is normal and the pediatrician just responded who wants to smash up a car, just let them. That's a response John Waters remembers. Honestly, if you kind of like flip the way that's phrased, it almost sounds like a pediatrician who's just exasperated with too many questions and just like ugh, if he wants to smash up a car, just let him. Stop asking me questions. Your kid's weird. Go away, right I? 

Nate
Host
14:33
mean what a hell of a response. If your kid was to smash up cars, just let him yeah right and John Waters was afraid. 

Shaun
Host
14:38
he was like the pediatrician was just like. It's okay, but I picture him more like the pediatrician just be like I don't know, your kid's messed up, go away, stop asking me questions. And this actually so the parents just kept letting him do this and just kind of stoked the fires of weirdness. Yeah, and weirdness, yeah, as a bad guy also too. Kind of like you and me, he was a fan of the bad guys in cartoons and movies. He did not like the good guys. He said the bad guys seemed like they had so much more fun and also had better fashion sense. I agree with him on that. 

Nate
Host
15:06
Both of that, bad guys always seem to have more fun. They did. 

Shaun
Host
15:08
Good guys are always just so uptight and uh-huh. His holy trinity of characters from his youth. Rhonda Pinmark, the psychotic child who murdered people in the 1956 movie the Bad Seed, which I actually vaguely remember that movie, captain Hook. He loved Captain Hook so much he actually jammed a coat hanger up his sleeve one year and for the better part of a year, just like would walk around with the coat hanger poking up, pretend to be Captain Hook. His parents also not impressed, but supportive of that as well. Finally, the wicked witch of the West from the Wizard of Oz, who he thinks is one of the best villains of all time and loves her fashion sense. And in fact at the age of 10, he dressed like her for a party and he says that's the only time he's ever dressed in drag. He likes drag queens, but apparently that's the only time he dressed in drag. It's, I don't know, when you're 10, does that really count as a drag queen? 

Nate
Host
15:55
Oh, I don't think so. 

Shaun
Host
15:56
Is that just kid dressing as a? 

Nate
Host
15:57
yeah. 

Shaun
Host
15:57
That's kid dressing up. 

Nate
Host
15:58
Yeah, that's what. 

Shaun
Host
15:59
I thought and he said he didn't even want, it wasn't even dressed like a girl, he just wanted green skin and to wear a nice outfit. 

Nate
Host
16:05
Well, let me amend that If a child is dressing up like I want to be dressed in like a woman, with the intent of like this is me in a dress as a woman, then drag sure. 

Shaun
Host
16:15
Yeah, yeah, it's true. 

Nate
Host
16:16
If it's me dressing up as a character, I like that happens to be a woman, eh. 

Shaun
Host
16:22
Yeah, and I think the key word here is for a party. So it's not like he was just like I'm going to go to the store dressed like this because this is my new look, right, right, yeah. He also said thanks to. Wizard of Oz is one of the greatest movies ever made, with one of the worst endings ever. He calls it a very depressing ending where poor Dorothy goes back to your crappy home in Kansas instead of living in the wonderful land of Oz where she could have a pet monkey and a gay lion friend. Right, I'm with him on that too. I was in the first time I saw that. I'm like why are you going back to that shithole where you're going to live in poverty on a dying farm and probably get polio? You go back to Oz where you live like a hero, have pet monkeys and probably die of polio. They might have polio in there still, I mean why would you go back there? 

Nate
Host
17:02
They didn't. I mean, I'm not going to say they were abusive to her, but they were very dismissive. 

Shaun
Host
17:06
Yeah, everybody at Oz treated her better, Even the Wicked Witch, I think, treated her better than her parents did. It felt like yeah, honestly. 

Nate
Host
17:12
Yeah, I mean because at least the Wicked Witch treated her like you know she had. She might not have been on our side, but she definitely was treated like a person. 

Shaun
Host
17:21
Yeah, and at the beginning she kind of did give her a chance to like join her side and give her the shoes and stuff, sort of-ish. I mean, she could have been a horrible villain in that world if she wanted to. Another massive influence for John Waters was remember those old schlocky horror movies from the 40s and 50s where they'd hire all those actors to do weird stunts and stuff. You know, director, would show up in a casket in the back of a hearse and pop out and be like it's me, mario. Yeah, exactly, it's me, mario. And you're like who's Mario? And they're like you'll know in 30 years, kids. 

Nate
Host
17:49
But real quick segue. You know the phrase it's a me Mario. 

Shaun
Host
17:54
Yeah. 

Nate
Host
17:55
Apparently. That's actually. That's our dumb like not human, our dumb like English speaking brains. You know because we think Italians, it's like it's a me, mario. You know because it's a me, actually, it's, it's to me, which is I am in Japanese, so he's saying I'm Mario. 

Shaun
Host
18:12
It's like yeah right, oh, I did not do that. That totally makes sense, though. Yeah, it totally does. 

Nate
Host
18:17
But it's a me, Mario. 

Shaun
Host
18:18
It's a me. Oh yeah, ok Now I know, that I like that fun fact. More learning today. 

Nate
Host
18:26
That makes sense. If anybody's listening to this and they're like, that doesn't mean that then feel free to write in. I saw on TikTok I could be completely wrong. 

Shaun
Host
18:31
Optoptopic at gmailcom. Right, because, yes, sometimes we are wrong and we actively want to be corrected. 

Nate
Host
18:38
Do any of this, engage with us. If you listen to this podcast, you've noticed multiple times I'm like I could look something up, but I won't. 

Shaun
Host
18:44
Yep, we'll just run with this plan. So there is this one movie that was making the rounds back then. That was when you showed up. You had to sign a release because you might die of fear in the theater. Remember those stories about that thing? Yes, I remember those. 

19:01
With John Waters. He's young and naive. He saw that coming to town. He got super excited because his thought was hey, if they're making people sign releases, obviously people are dying during these things. Maybe not every showing, but people are dying. So he went to every showing and would just sit there and just stare at everybody in the audience and make bets with himself on who's going to die this time, and it would be very disappointed when people would not die. 

Nate
Host
19:21
Yeah, that's great marketing, but also stupid. 

Shaun
Host
19:25
Yeah, also kind of stupid, but some of these things did have actually pretty clever stuff, like you remember one where a certain scene a skeleton on guide wires would come swoopy out from above the screen and shoot back to the projector room. Apparently. That would actually scare some people because you're not really expecting it. 

Nate
Host
19:39
Well, yeah, fair enough. I mean, that's not coming from the screen, that's like a jump scare from inside the theater. Yeah, that's what haunted houses work, yeah. 

Shaun
Host
19:48
And then the tingler came to town and that was the one where they installed literally a buzzers and shockers in the seats. John realized early on because his theater in his local town was really po-duck and small, they only installed buzzers in every seventh or eighth seat, so he would just get there ahead of time and go crawling around on the floor trying to find one, trying to add a buzzer, so he knew he'd get the full experience, I must know. And he said that he loved the shock moments from these movies and people just screaming and freaking out and be like oh god. People would apparently get so scared at times they would puke during the showings. He said that he really really, from that point on, wanted nothing more than to shock people and scare people so much that they would get sick. And he said he kind of accomplished that coming up with Pink Flamingos We'll talk about that scene shortly. 

Nate
Host
20:36
Well, I mean, the thing is, I don't know, there's the people back then also had a lower tolerance. I believe that too. He's like, oh my god, that scared me to death. 

Shaun
Host
20:45
I'm like, yeah, yeah right, it's like eh, eh, yeah, and also it's probably a small percentage of people that got that freaked out. I'm sure there's plenty of people who are just like yeah. 

Nate
Host
20:56
Yeah, or the whole thing Like what was it? Oh, the spider from the Ewok movie. Oh my god, it's so realistic yeah it's terrifying. 

Shaun
Host
21:06
Actually, apparently in the original King Kong and during the test screenings there was a scene where they had people fall off like a rope bridge and down below there's a bunch of stop motion giant spiders that ate them, and I guess that scene was so horrifying that people only talked about that after the movie. So they actually had to cut it from King Kong because they realized there's overshadowing. The main character they yeah, I know I really want to see that scene. Who knows if it actually exists anymore. 

Nate
Host
21:31
Oh, I'm sure it's somewhere. I mean, you know what I say that, but from back in the day there's been so many fires. 

Shaun
Host
21:37
Also film. Back then was day two, yeah, so they reused film if they could at times. 

Nate
Host
21:41
Yeah, I mean that was either a fire or just a day, or just disintegrated from time, right, I mean, it's not exactly like they were preserving these things with the best quality stuff. 

Shaun
Host
21:54
So one of John's early formative things in his youth was when he was at Catholic school. The nuns pulled him aside and they knew he was into movies, and they told him that there was one movie he should never, ever even think about seeing, because if he saw it, it's a one-way trip to Hell, nate. It's like boom, you go in that theater, you're going to Hell, son Exodus. Nope, this is in the 50s, ok, yep. And so what happens? When you tell something like John Waters, you're going to Hell if you see this movie, of course he runs out to see this movie. 

22:24
This movie actually was in fact banned in many places and was very, very controversial, and the reason it's so controversial is because back then it was one of the only, if not maybe the only, movie touring around that you'd go see that actually had a full frontal nudity, which was a huge no-no back in the day. It had full shots of genitalia and everything. How'd they get around the standards of this time? They showed medical footage of live births and various STDs to get around the full frontal nudity thing, and thus they were educational films. 

Nate
Host
22:54
I think it was too. He starts off there like look at this, a baby of being born. Look at this good to have her now. Now we've got that out of the way. Sex. 

Shaun
Host
23:03
That's pretty much it. Actually, the sex was the birth. There wasn't any actual sex in it. I don't believe it was just like people would sit around in the theater just to watch the lady give birth, just so they could see a few of them. 

Nate
Host
23:12
Wow, yeah, and the thing was Poor star achievable. 

Shaun
Host
23:15
Yep. But the thing was this film was popular enough that it ran through the 40s and 50s and it made $40 million in back then money yeah, $40 million. And this was just kind of an underground thing. And Waters noticed when he went to see this that he thought the movie was kind of gross, naturally, because you know, it's like hey, here's a penis with chlamydia, kind of stuff. But John Waters looked around and he noticed it was all men and it was all men who kind of like zoned out, except for when the nudity scenes would show up and then they would just promptly get all horny and start beating off. And he's like, yes, dudes were sitting there watching a woman give birth, like in an educational film, and whacking it. 

23:53
Times were different back then. Yeah, serious, yeah, yeah. And this kind of influenced him on the fact that he was like hey, man, people will get excited and watch almost anything if it's like verbidden, you know. Yeah, if it's something that sensors don't want you to see, people go out of their way to go watch it. So that kind of influenced him. Then in his teenage years his grandma gave him an eight millimeter video camera and said hey, you like movies. Go nuts, kid, make yourself some movies, and he did so. He started making friends in high school and some high school adjacent friends, and they started making movies together. 

Nate
Host
24:26
The high school adjacent friends yeah. 

Shaun
Host
24:29
Well, he will forgive the first high school adjacent friend. The ones that buy them beer, I'm guessing is probably what this was or supplied them with weed. He actually what it was is he knew some people from high school and also there were some from like college film schools, that kind of like overlapped. So yeah. 

24:45
Yeah. So everybody was kind of around the right same age here, except for a few outliers. But this original cast and crew would go on to be known as the Dreamlanders after the name of their production company, dreamland Productions. Fun fact too everybody's going to call them Dreamlanders, john Warrows and crew. Everybody calls them Dreamlanders. They never called themselves that. That was something the press made up for them. Everybody thinks they call themselves Dreamlanders. Yeah, they're like. We never called ourselves Dreamlanders. The press made that up. We just called ourselves friends. But they were like, their impression was like they weren't that big on it, but they're like they could cause a lot worse things. So we'll just let that one stick. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean they weren't a fit about it, but everybody's like wow, you call yourself a dream. I was like no, but whatever. 

Nate
Host
25:29
Like OK. How about these derogatory terms? Ok, yeah. 

Shaun
Host
25:33
Exactly. There's a lot worse things. They could have called them back. Yeah, among these friends was Harris Glidden Milstead, who would be going to be known as a famous drag queen. Divine, who John John Waters famously calls the most beautiful woman in the world. Almost, john Waters also said about divine. Beauty is looks you can't forget, and that's divine. I've seen car accidents happen over divine's looks Of course, I'm about to be a full drag yeah. 

25:58
There's actually a scene of pink flamingos where they're like in a car, following her down the street, walking around a full drag with a camera, and bad people are just stopping and staring like what the hell is that? Because they're about to find. You know, divine looks like right, yes, ok, and Ursula was based off of divine, like it's basically a one for one. They look almost identical Basically. Divine was the very first drag queen that looked that way. 

26:20
Before that, all drag queens there was definitely drag queens around, but they wanted to look like their moms, all prim, proper housewives, nice perm hair, wearing pretty dresses and heels and you know to do, to do, to do, to do. Divine was just like screw that. I'm just going full over the top. I'm going to shave my head and put on a big old poofy wig and giant makeup and eyebrows and I just want to scare people. In fact, john Waters says that mostly the divine character was invented to scare hippies, because I guess hippies weren't as quite tolerant as you would think about drag queens back then. John Waters does not like hippies. He kind of talks down about them a lot, says they're too militant and kind of set in their ways. 

Nate
Host
26:55
Yeah. 

Shaun
Host
26:55
I can see that, yeah, him and divine will actually live down the road from a hippie commune at one point and they were so militant anti meat eaters like I mean, go out of their way to make you miserable if they thought you ate meat that if they had extra money they would go to the meat market, buy a buttload of meat and just leave it on their doorstep just to piss them off, so they'd have to clean up and touch it. Yeah, he considered himself and his friends yippies, which is a term I never really heard before. But he calls it an anti hippie someone who uses snark and humor to change the system instead of loving music. I'd say snark and humor probably does work better than loving music. 

Nate
Host
27:27
Yeah, but let's be real, it's not love and music. If you're being that shitty to people, that's then. Love is just like love for your own kind, or? People who think like you Intolerance wrapped in a mask of love, right, I mean, that's the thing, like it's the intolerance part. That's the reason why I hate hippies. 

Shaun
Host
27:45
Yeah, exactly because there were a lot of hippies that were like hey, if you're not exactly like us in any way, you're a conformist man. 

Nate
Host
27:51
I mean, if you're against people like I don't know, like I don't get too political in here but if you're against people who support policies that end up with people dying or being miserable, then okay I, because I definitely have my biases towards certain people who believe certain things. But like, come on, man, if you're being a hippie, you're hating on people who are also like not part of the mainstream. 

28:13
You know, these people are. They're being you're being shitty, like you're being shat on by society, and there's another group that's also being shat on by society. 

Shaun
Host
28:25
Yeah, punch up, not across. 

Nate
Host
28:27
Yeah, thank you or down or whatever, just like you know that, that's the issue I have. 

Shaun
Host
28:33
Yeah, I'm with you on that. It's like, hey, you guys are all on the same side, maybe you should not fight each other and, uh, taste forward and find a common goal. Another fun story that also influenced John a lot in his movie making. He told a story about where him and Divine would skip school and head downtown to see one of the old, last old school burlesque vaudeville style shows you could see around Baltimore. You know one of those where they just had all sorts of stripping and higher wire acts and drinking and weird stuff, and apparently they it's. Since it was kind of a dying industry, they had no qualms about letting any ages, no matter what they're, just like oh, kid, you want to come in? Your money's good, fine, go sit down. 

29:10
He remembers one act that he said was one of the greatest acts he ever seen and he loved it. He was about a lady whose stage name was Zorro and he said she basically looked like Johnny Cash and she would come out on the stage just completely nude. No striptease, no, nothing. So you got a nude female Johnny Cash up there and her whole stick. She would just start pointing at dudes in the crowd and be like what are you looking at? What are you looking at? You like this. You want some of this. What are you looking at? That was her whole stick and people loved it. It's Danny. Ovations, people thrown money on the stage, people cheering yeah, sounds weird. 

Nate
Host
29:50
I mean there had to be more than that, has to be more than that, because that's that's so boring. 

Shaun
Host
29:55
This is well, it depends, because I mean, you got a picture not being very attractive to it, being all gruff and just like waving her tits angrily at people. I get a picture of being kind of amusing. Also, keep in mind, this is probably the same crew that was also just recently watching a VD film and jerking off. So I guess, yeah, these might not be the biggest standards of a quality type people. All right, we're gonna fast forward to 1964, when John Warris decides to finally make his first ever movie, which was a short film called Hag and a Black Leather Jacket. That's your title. Huh the plot A KKK member marries a black woman and a white woman atop the roof of his parents' house. 

30:33
That is John Waters' parents' house. Yeah, kkk member marrying an interracial couple, yay, yay. And he even managed to talk his mom and let them use her wedding dress for the video, and they shot it on top of his parents' house. The movie was made on a budget of $30 and they were only able to make it for that cheap because they literally just stole the film to make it and everything else was just invested in props and probably developing the film. Wait, after they got it made up, john managed to get it shown in a beatnik coffee house once and no one paid attention. Not one person even watched a video. It just like played on the wall and that was it. That's beautiful. 

31:03
Yeah, it kind of is. He also says, uh, with this movie too, he kind of wishes he realized that editing was a thing, because he was young enough at that time he just kind of assumed that whatever you shot is what you put on a movie. He said that whatever went on film just went straight on the screen. And he actually he said it was dogma, 1995, but ahead of its time in that regard. I'm sure what that means. It sounds like Kevin Smith reference. Oh, yeah, yeah, I mean that's about 95, not a lot of editing going on. 

Nate
Host
31:28
Oh. 

Shaun
Host
31:28
I mean, I thought so. 

Nate
Host
31:30
I mean, I don't get to listen. To listen to Kevin Smith, you know, recently, recently being, you know, last several years or decade or whatever. Now he's he loved, he calls himself an editor, he's like, he loves editing. So he, every time he talks about a movie, when he reviews something, he's like oh, I would have cut this, I would have cut that. 

Shaun
Host
31:45
So I mean so it sounds like he's overcompensating for not editing enough in his youth Gotcha. Maybe, maybe, I guess I don't know. So many people yelled at me for not editing my early movies, right. 

Nate
Host
31:55
I like. I like him Smith, but I'm not like, you know well versed? 

Shaun
Host
31:59
Yeah, I just ask you because I know you know more about Kevin Smith than me. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean I've seen dogma and Jane sound Bob strikes back and maybe like one other of his movies, I like him. It's just I don't know. I've just never gotten around to watching. 

Nate
Host
32:10
Yeah, I've seen a decent chunk of them. I think I didn't see like yoga hosers and I didn't see oh yeah, some more recent ones Like Tusk or some of them. 

32:17
Tusk. I mean, I've heard I don't know Like I was actually listening to. It's funny because I was listening to his podcast while he was making those and while he was releasing this I heard like kind of like the making of, if you will, while he was doing it, and I also even heard the original, because Tusk was based off of a conversation he had in a podcast with his friend Um, what's the space, that doesn't matter, um, and they were talking like they were like go just kind of riffing, like we do, and they went off on this whole tangent about like some guy who captured someone turns into a walrus. Yeah, it was all based on some news article they saw and that spun off into that movie and they, yeah, they made the whole movie based on, apparently at the end credits of Tusk. They play clips of that conversation that led to the movie, which you know it's all fine and Danny, but I've also heard the movie is terrible. 

Shaun
Host
33:03
Uh yeah, the best thing I've heard about that movie is it was interesting. I think it was the best comment I heard about it. 

Nate
Host
33:08
Yeah, I mean, and he got hell, he got Johnny Depp to do it and it appears to be really Johnny Depp's daughter and best friends with his daughter. So, yeah, yeah, they were like they were together. He just kind of said hey, I'm not, you know this is gross, and if you don't, you know this is making you uncomfortable, feel free to dislike, ignore me, but he's like I had this role and he gave him the script and, fairly, and Johnny Depp called them up. It was like, are you fucking serious? Are you really going to do this? Like, yeah, this is ridiculous. Are you really going to make this movie? 

Shaun
Host
33:32
He's like I'm in, I'm in, this definitely was like. That sounds like Johnny Depp. You know it was also a good friend of Johnny Depp, john Waters. Actually we're going to say in a few yeah, actually they got to, they became good friends during the shooting. Cry baby. 

Nate
Host
33:43
I mean that makes sense, because he was in cry baby and let's uh, johnny Depp's. 

Shaun
Host
33:46
I mean it's not, definitely not a one to one, but Johnny Depp is good buddies with Tim Burton, who's also yeah, and that's kind of that whole little weirdo crew kind of yeah, I mean weirdo in the most loving way possible, of course, totally so the uh six, uh, the lack of success of Haggin a black leather jacket did not dissuade John from making more short films. Next up was a movie Roman Candles. At that time everybody was looking up to Andy Warhol because he was the king of the underground movies at the time and he was making an experimental movie called Chelsea Girls. That involves showing two movie reels side by side to tell its story. Naturally, john Waters wanted to be a one upper and he said we're going to do that, but with three film reels. The film, more or less, was just a bunch of short, unrelated skits in movies, basically just him and his friends screwing around. Nothing too interesting. Something was actually footage of John and divine legit shoplifted views from a department store. 

34:31
Oh, wow, it turns out yeah, it turns out one way dreamlander support their movies was by shoplifting what they needed and uh selling uh what they stole or using the stolen stuff in the movies. And uh, much of the early John Waters movies had actual like real soundtracks with real produced music. Yeah, he didn't have the rights to those. It was all records he stole over the years. Am I to? 

Nate
Host
34:50
assume that, um like, like they didn't use that as evidence against him. Like, what proof do you have? We stole this. Well, let's see. 

Shaun
Host
34:57
Yeah, well, uh, as far as I know, outside of like a few art houses, that movie never really got shown. He'll show it at some of his film festivals, but yeah, it's, yeah, not many people actually really seen it. I don't believe. And uh, oh yeah. 

35:09
Also as far as getting a sound records and for the soundtracks, john Waters actually had a special record stealing code he would wear. It had pockets that are big enough to fit a whole LP inside of them. You just slide a whole record in there and he got really good at it. But there was this one time, as he was stealing a record, he noticed the security guard. She looked over and saw him sliding the record into his pocket and he like panicked and you know, second layer, put the record back. But she did not see him put the record back. 

35:33
So as he was leaving the department store he got tackled and arrested and they couldn't find a record on him. So he was like, hey, this is false imprisonment or false arrestment. And he got a $3,000 settlement out of this that he went on to use to make more movies with Nice. In fact, that year that he got busted he was a teenager and his parents were like well, john, it's the summer. Are you going to get a summer job so you have money to make your movies? He's like ha, I want a lawsuit. I got three grand, I don't need to do nothing. Parents not really impressed with that, but still supportive Right. 

36:02
All right boys go get a job this summer. Oh, he won a lawsuit. For what? 

Nate
Host
36:07
Something he was completely guilty of but realized he was getting caught. So he like well it's hard enough to get rid of the evidence. 

Shaun
Host
36:13
Yeah, exactly, that was good luck on his part. 

Nate
Host
36:18
You think later on in life, like when he starts telling the story that you know, eventually the security guard hears. It's like I fucking knew it. 

Shaun
Host
36:25
Yeah right, I knew that son of a bitch cost me my job. 

Nate
Host
36:30
You should probably think of me. If they have you sued and won, I get he. She didn't keep that job. Yeah, probably not. 

Shaun
Host
36:37
So all those records you stole, yeah, they started using them in all the early movies, it's even up through Pink Flamingos. They were using those stolen records and in case you're wondering how he got away without using those, with having the license for him, he really didn't. He did for a lot of years until the 90s when he started getting like more popular and all of a sudden the MP8 or the music industry was like hey, hey, hey, hey, we know you don't have licenses for a lot of these songs. It cost him somewhere between from what are you saying? 25 to 30 grand per song that he used in those movies. So it was expensive. 

Nate
Host
37:06
Yeah, I mean that's, that's the key words, like until you get noticed. 

Shaun
Host
37:10
Yeah, yeah, they will find you eventually. 

Nate
Host
37:12
Yeah, you do all this stuff to get noticed. Then finally you're noticed. That's when I was like wait a minute. 

Shaun
Host
37:16
This is also why one of his early movies, mondo Trash Show, will never get an official release, because he said it will cost him over a million dollars just to pay for all music licensing in it. Because essentially that movie is basically I believe it's just nonstop like a music track underneath with like some overdubbing. Yeah, because recording audio is kind of tricky. Back in the day At one point tried to make a movie I think it was called Dorothy Stoner of Kansas and they're trying to like film it while recording on like a little tape deck at the same time and sync it all up. That didn't work. They shot that movie for about a half hour and then gave up. 

Nate
Host
37:46
So that's literally half hour over the first. Where's the footage? They toss all the thing. 

Shaun
Host
37:49
Yeah, they're just like. Well, this syncing up isn't working. Let's forget this. John doesn't even really remember what the movie is about. Something about Dorothy probably being stoned. 

Nate
Host
37:57
Yeah, I mean, I hope so yeah, yeah, right, it's like. It was like. Oh yeah, it's called Dorothy is Stoner on me. Well, it was about, like you know, it was a remake of the original E-Cardaceous Philadelphia. 

Shaun
Host
38:13
Talking to the 10 man 10 minutes. I have AIDS Right Shoulda wrapped your funnel, better, baby. Next movie from John Waters good, we eat your makeup. It's gonna be his first film on 16 millimeter film. This is a story about a nanny who kidnaps young girls and forces them to model themselves in front of her boyfriend and his friends until they die. 

Nate
Host
38:37
Wait, I'm assuming there's other violence than just this stuff just on the modeling, like I can't get off the catwalk. 

Shaun
Host
38:44
I think it's just they go until they're exhausted. They also forced them to eat makeup. I wasn't able to find a copy of this movie to watch that would do it. But yeah, the description was basically just forces them to model until they die. I'm assuming pass out from exhaustion, I guess. 

Nate
Host
38:58
Well, I mean, if they're captured and the only thing they have to eat is makeup, then yeah, eventually, you know, yeah, they would die, I guess. 

Shaun
Host
39:06
This scene actually got a little bit of press, because there's a scene where Divine plays Jackie O and recreates the Kennedy assassination while in full drag. Yeah, some people found this a little tasteless because the actual assassination only happened a few years prior. 

Nate
Host
39:19
Yeah, there was only a couple years after. 

Shaun
Host
39:22
Yeah, people, like fun side story from this movie, the dress that Divine was wearing the Jackie O dress was like completely covered in fake blood and he stuffed it into his parents' trunk of their car and one day the pair he kind of forgot about and his mom opened up the trunk and was like what's this bloody dress in the back of the car? And Divine got really frightened and was all stoned and was like I'm Jackie Kennedy mom and then just ran off. The parents are like, huh, all right then, and they just dropped it after that. They did know at this point that Divine was into drag. Oh, that's funny. 

Nate
Host
39:59
Well, he would be divine if that wasn't. I mean, I don't know what Divine's real name is, Glenn. 

Shaun
Host
40:04
Harris Milstead. I was actually trying to say Glenn a minute ago, but I could not think of the name. 

Nate
Host
40:10
Is. Was he an assassin? Because there's three words, three names. Oh yeah, serial killer. Good question. 

Shaun
Host
40:16
Yeah, I don't know why I put down third middle name. Oh, do you know why they do that? The middle name for serial killers To make a stand out, kind of it makes it harder to confuse it with people who have the normal name, because I mean, there's probably like 5,000 Ted Bundy's out there, but you know yeah fair. 

40:30
Yeah Well, john Wayne Gacy actually I just said that and I'm like wait, man, there's no middle name for Ted Bundy. Like wait, john Wayne Gacy would be a much better example of this. Fairly, there's not that many Ted Bundy's out there. 

Nate
Host
40:45
Well, not anymore If you're. If you're your last name's Bundy, like the last of you would name your kid is Ted. Like I'm taking the name back like now. 

Shaun
Host
40:53
We got. Oh man, we all got two things that we can name our kid Ted or Al. Hmm, right, the slip of coin. Yeah, it also got a pop to my head watching some of this early foot of John Waters and kind of his looks and the way he be in his attitude. It kind of gives me off a Joan and Vasquez vibe. You know that, too cool for school, I'm an outside hipster kind of thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you kind of get that. Yeah, if you actually look in the chat, I should pop the picture of Mrs Young under the general thing, I think, because yeah, I'm not saying I met John, uh, john Vasquez a lot, but I met twice at the convention and yeah, you kind of get the same vibe off the two. I guess you should say John Vasquez has a John Waters vibe, since one is very much older than the other. 

Nate
Host
41:32
Is it the black or white one? 

Shaun
Host
41:33
Yeah. 

Nate
Host
41:34
Yeah, okay, I see it, yep. Yeah, we'll get into what the other two pictures are in a moment. Well, let's say what the other features. 

Shaun
Host
41:42
We will get to that just a moment. Okay, and after this uh uh movie came John Waters first full length film, mondo Trash Show the one we were just talking about, with too much music in it for them to ever release it. Uh, this plot is basically a lady known as bombshell rides around with uh divine and Baltimore and experiences weird stuff like push foot fetishes and the mother Mary blessing people. And again, this doesn't have a lot of dialogue, it's mainly just music cues and like overcut dialogue on top of it. You know if it's not not good from what I saw, there's only a few clips out there. I saw the one where uh divine's praying to the mother Mary. It's basically a scene of divine like rolling around on the floor playing to praying to somebody dressed as mother Mary saying oh God, oh God, oh God, oh God, oh God, mother Mary, oh God, oh God, save me, save me, oh God, oh God. 

Nate
Host
42:32
That goes on for like three or four minutes and say batch of things like mother Mary blessing people, what? No yeah. 

Shaun
Host
42:39
But if you actually see the scene it's kind of weird. 

Nate
Host
42:43
Oh, I mean, your description of it sounds weird. 

Shaun
Host
42:45
Yeah, it's kind of one of those things too. I'm guessing if you went to Catholic school at the time, you probably would find it even more funny, because there's some kind of out there Catholics at times who go a little overboard with their worship of Mary. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, okay, you know exactly what I'm talking about. That's kind of what that was about with the race Catholic. 

Nate
Host
43:02
You know I, I, you know, did the whole art. You know, conversion thing, the catholics. So like I saw that, I mean I saw playing that when I was Baptist, now that I'm atheist, it's like it's all ridiculous this movie was also. 

Shaun
Host
43:14
Mondo Trasho, that is John Waters is not a huge fan of it. He wishes he made into a short film instead of full length one, so there's way too much filler. But this movie was also notable of it got most of the crew arrested, including John Waters, for conspiracy to commit indecent exposure. What? Yeah, there's one scene where divine is driving around in like a 65 convertible Cadillac and she pulls over, picks up a nude hitchhiker and was there setting up for that scene. Neighbors saw that and called the police, thinking it was going to be like a prostitution thing was going on outside of their house. So as they're starting to shoot the scene, divine pulls up to go pick up the nude hitchhiker. The cops come whipping in, hop out of the car to start yelling at everybody. Everybody got arrested except for divine, who saw everything happen in the rearview mirror and just Florida and just got the hell out of town. 

Nate
Host
44:01
Yeah, that was correct. 

Shaun
Host
44:03
That was correct too. And John Waters was like I'm surprised they didn't catch her, because it's a drag queen that looks like divine driving a convertible Cadillac. It seems like that wouldn't have been hard to find, yeah. 

44:14
Yeah, this was also the movie where the Dreamlanders dubbed divine the hog princess because there's one scene that I guess. 

44:27
They were driving around and they noticed a farmhouse off to the side of the road, and next to this farmhouse was a pigpen, a big muddy shit filled pigpen. And they decided, hey, wouldn't be fun to have divine crawl around in a big pile of pig shit for one of our scenes. So they decided to do that, and they pulled over. No, get the pulled over pulled out of cameras. And divine getting that mud start rolling around. And as divine was rolling around in the mud having a good old time, all of a sudden two of the pigs in the pin just started just going at it with each other, just humping madly, and all of a sudden everybody looked at this side and said, hmm, divine must make pigs horny. Therefore she can be called the hog princess. Nickname really didn't stick past that scene, but you know they thought that was funny. Even better, though, was the fact that John Waters was discussing the fact that he wonders what the family inside that house was thinking watching that go on, because he said there was cars there, there was lights on, and the house was probably like 30 feet away, and there's no way they didn't see a bunch of hippies in a drag queen playing around in their pig pin. I get these. They're just like no Martha, just let them bond themselves out there with hippies that way. Just let them do that thing. The hippies are back. Yeah, he's very glad they didn't call the cops too. Maybe they're into that kind of stuff, who knows, but that was something they did a lot in their movies. They never asked for permission. They're like, hey, we're just gonna show up, trespass, do our thing and hope we get out before the cops show up. 

45:47
Also, weird random side fact about John I learned that he talks about a lot His favorite drug Poppers. You know, those little inhalants that you can get. Those are his favorite things. He likes to do them on roller coasters and while doing stuff like grocery shopping. Poppers, yeah, poppers, they're a Vasco dilator, apparently. You take a big old inhale and they give you a huge head rush. Oh, yeah, yeah, you can buy them in like sex shops and online, which interesting. Also, he likes weed and LSD, but poppers, he says that's his go-to drug, even though he hasn't done them since like the 80s. 

46:19
Also, as far as John Rar's substances, his only regret in life Smoking. He says at one point in life he was smoking up to four packs a day and the thing that actually got him to quit is kind of a weird story. He was after a movie premiere and he ran out of cigarettes and he was Jones and real bad for smoke like no other. So he went up to a homeless person and asked him if he could have a drag off their cigarette. And the homeless person as they had his cigarette, gave him a big old wing and was like yo wanna sip off my soda to their sweetheart. He said he felt so awkward and so low at the moment asking him to take a drag off a homeless person's cigarette. 

46:52
He decided to quit at that point and now he actually every day. He wrote down on a little card how many days he's been quit and carries that around in his pocket. If he could also send one note back to his young self, it would be don't smoke, but do everything else the same. Ha, yep, yeah, four packs a day, that's a lot. And I actually saw an interview where he's showing off his apartment and yeah, like every time you walk by an ashtray, he'd immediately reach home and grab out a cigarette and just start just taking big old drags off it. That dude was a smoker. Yeah, sounds like. 

Nate
Host
47:23
Yeah, I mean I know I still go for a little bit and then I don't know I'd buy to start rejecting it. 

Shaun
Host
47:29
So yeah, and he got out when you're still young and good. Yep, 1970 brought us a couple of movies of his. First, the Diane Linkletter story, based off of the suicide of Art Linkletter's daughter. The morning papers basically had a story about Diane Linkletter's suicide and John and the crew had some new camera equipment to test out and they're like, hey, let's see if we can make a little skit about this. So they went out and improv and rift for a little bit and didn't really come up with a movie, but just kind of a dumb little short film testing out their new equipment called. And then the second movie, multiple maniacs, was a his quote unquote first full length talky film meaning actual real dialogue instead of layered over as in. It's actually them talking on screen, not just you know, yeah. 

Nate
Host
48:17
So was it. There's no talking as prior films. 

Shaun
Host
48:20
There was talking, but it wasn't the actual actors talking on screen and then being recorded. It was them like pantomiming and doing like you know, basically miming, all the stuff. Well, you could tell it's very obvious something they recorded days after the fact being piped in. 

Nate
Host
48:32
I got you. I got you. I know what you mean. I've seen Mr Sausage's. Doesn't that mean? 

Shaun
Host
48:37
Yeah, yeah, I mean they were talking in the films, but it wasn't actually them talking to memorizing lines and recording it like the Divine Mother Mary thing. It's basically just her being like, oh, making like kind of a face as well. The dialogue is going on, if that makes more sense, or maybe I just confused you even more. No, I got it Okay. Multiple Maniacs is about a freak show that's run by Divine. It's free to attend, but at the end she robs you. Then Divine gets bored with this concept and moves on to killing people at the end of the freak show and that's kind of just it. So you just accelerate from robbing people to killing people. This movie also does have some weird stuff, including the some anal rosary action and some cannibalization. The infant of Prague shows up for some reason too, and also one scene where I can probably only use this term legitimately once in my life. It features rape lobster. Yep, there's a scene where a surprisingly well made for its budget lobster has its way with Divine. 

49:40
Yes, how many are you gonna do? Yeah, there you go. It should be noted John came up with this idea. Well, on LSD he was hanging out at the beach and over near him was a billboard and it was one of those billboards is like visit Baltimore, and it had like a big cartoon lobster on there like having a cookout or something. And as he was high on ass he saw that was like huh, lobster rape. I should put that in a movie. Yeah, lsd. 

Nate
Host
50:04
And so it was done. 

Shaun
Host
50:06
And so it was done. Yeah, it's interesting. Everything about these movies is interesting. That movie actually ends with Divine trying to kill everyone in Baltimore before being gunned down by the National Guard, to the tune of America, the beautiful, so Divine in the lobster no, not the lobster, the lobster had its way with the divine and then, after that divine trip, went around trying to kill everybody in Baltimore, probably post lobster trauma, yeah that lobster really did number. 

50:36
Yeah, it really did. And while they're making this movie, mondo Trasho was actually making his round and getting a lot and a lot more popular the movie we were just talking about, with all the stolen film tracks and not that much actual talking in it. But and eventually this movie made its way into the hands of a dude named Bob Shay, and Bob Shay was starting up a new company that you might know called New Line Cinema. You know that name. Never heard of it. New Line Cinema and Bob Shay made such movies as the Lord of the Rings movies and a million others. I know you're lying to me. 

Nate
Host
51:09
I am, I do. 

Shaun
Host
51:11
Yeah, and back then, however, their main income was just distributing copies of reefer madness to college campuses that was basically all they did and maybe put out the occasional tiny little film. That didn't do anything. Well, he got a. Bob Shay got a copy of Mondo Trasho and he was like hey, I kind of like to cut your jib, john. You go out and you make something that's a more higher budget, with more money and a little bit better, and I'll actually distribute it for you. We can get something going together. So John went to his parents and said hey, I need $12,000 to make one of the most perverse movies you will ever see. And they said, okay, $12,000. 

51:46
Thus, 1972's Pink Flamingos, probably John Warr's most memorable film, possibly one of the most memorable films of all time too. Never seen it. If I watched it, this is one of those things. If I saw it when I was really young, I probably would have been disgusted by it, but, seeing as an adult, I was infallibly amused by how weird and just out there deviant it was. This is the movie we're divine. 

52:11
Oh, this is the movie we're divine is the filthiest person in the world, a title which she earned just by being herself and apparently in this form of the world, john Warr is just spinning. The filthiest person in the world is an actual title that you can win and it's something that shows up on magazines of like deviant monthly and this and stuff. She does this stuff by living her life and doing things. Like to start it out, there's a scene where she goes into a meat mart, she buys a steak and to take the steak home, she literally just like takes and just jams it up her dress and holds it between your legs to take it home and feed it to her family. Yeah, she does a lot of stealing and making fun of people and shooting people and just a lot of weird deviant things, and including one thing at the end that gets really odd. We'll talk about it. 

52:50
Is there a plot? Yeah, actually she's got the title of the most filthy person in the world. However, her title is soon challenged by a degenerate couple who want to become the nastiest filthiest people in the world and take over her role. But they do it by their base. She does it. The moral of the story is basically defined, does it by natural ways, by being herself, whereas the quote unquote bad guys who are trying to steal the title do it by, you know, being tryhards who aren't really that nasty, they just want to pretend to be. However, the degenerate couple do do things like kidnap women and have them impregnated by their man servant, and then they sell the babies to lesbian couples for money. Then they use those profits from that to finance heroin dealers in elementary schools. In fact, you get this. 

Nate
Host
53:33
I think it's overly complicated. 

Shaun
Host
53:34
It kind of does yeah, yeah, it seems like you cut out one of those things. 

Nate
Host
53:40
Yeah, I mean, that's also not really really nasty as being like a shitty person. Yeah. 

Shaun
Host
53:47
They even show the part where they kidnap women and throw them into a pit with their man servant, and the way he impregnates them is he actually jacks off into his hand and then takes a syringe and fills that up with the common and just jams that like cool injector into the women. They basically just have this pit of women that they keep knocking up and stealing their babies and selling them. Fun, yeah, yeah, and this is stuff that they actually do show. There's another scene, too, where Okay, so the degenerate couple they hire some chick to go investigate divine's family and try to get dirt on her, like we want you to go date her son and find out everything you can from her son. And she's like well, you're going to have to pay me good money because their son has some very, very endeavoured sexual things that I'm going to have to take a part in. You're like all right, here's your money. Go do what you got to do. 

54:33
Very next scene she's with her son, her divine son, and they're having sex, full naked sex, with one alive chicken and a dead chicken in between them. Basically, they went out and they got a dead chicken for them to have sex with. It's like it's actual head is cut off. You can see this one chicken in between, with his head missing, and then to the side of them, like the dude's, holding onto a live chicken who looks very confused with what's going on. Eventually that poor chicken looks at the camera, being like record scratch. You'll never guess how I got here. 

55:05
Literally they are having a sex scene with a dead chicken in between them and like holding an actual chicken. She's like oh, yes, yes, do me, do me. She's like I love chickens and eggs. I love chickens and eggs. There's kind of an egg theme with that family too, because I kind of like this one seed, because it brings up some other fun stories involved in John Waters' day to day activities. Divine's mom is played by this dreamlander named Edith Massey. If you look back at those pictures I showed you, you see the old lady in the crib, or older lady in the crib. Yes, that is Edith Massey. First of all, she basically plays this role where she's basically a giant woman, baby, and she just hangs out in the crib yelling at Divine, divine, where's the egg man? I want my eggs. 

Nate
Host
55:47
I need my eggs. 

Shaun
Host
55:48
Because there's this traveling egg salesman who comes by, who sells all grades and all types of eggs, and he's romancing this big elderly baby lady. Spoiler alert eventually they do get married at the end. It's kind of sweet, but uh, I object. 

Nate
Host
56:03
It was not sweet as far as this movie goes. 

Shaun
Host
56:07
It was sweet, trust me. But because she plays this role of kind of like a simpleton, there's some rumors early on of her being mentally disabled and the crew taking advantage of her Because they're like, oh, obviously they have to keep her in a pen to keep her from escaping kind of stuff. That kind of dumb thing. Yeah, john Rogers responded. He's like, do you think she could have remembered her lines if she was that disabled? Oh yeah, one thing about this movie too is there are some like decently long lines of dialogue for people to remember. In this, I mean, we're talking like several minutes of back and forth dialogue. Apparently, too, john Rogers is kind of an asterisk recording this, so like if they even float up a syllable, he would like get all pissed off and start screaming and make them redo everything. Yeah, that's it. Yeah, kind of shitty. 

56:50
But also Ian Massey another story. She was actually because of her looks and the roles she played, she was one of the favorites of all the fans. What fun story John Waters like to tell about her is. 

57:01
She ran a thrift store in Baltimore and it was a thrift store that went solely on donations and during the summer months not a lot of people would be donating, giving her stuff, so she wouldn't have a whole lot of things to sell. So in her clever way she would start pulling stuff out of the trash, like bottle caps and paper clips that were bent up and other various things that she was just throwing away. She would gift wrap each of these things and put them in a big bin and just be like mystery surprise pack 25 cents, and all the neighborhood kids would be like, ooh, what's that? You might get a prize, kids. And the kids would just open them up and it would always be garbage every time. And when they would be confused or mad she would just look at them and be like, oh, sweetheart, you can't be lucky every time. 

57:40
So that's how she yeah right, Every one of them was junk, though. 

Nate
Host
57:49
Yeah, it was like indoor flea bar, like at Pele's Mall, like here in town, and they have this room. You go in there, everyone has to think there is this room full of boxes, like random boxes all taped up, and they're like, okay, you was it like $25 or $50 for a box, but you don't know what's in there. 

Shaun
Host
58:06
And I'm like no no right, yeah, they're like it's worth at least $50 and you get like $5, $5 t-shirts. They're like well, those are worth like 20 bucks each. 

58:16
Yeah yeah, yeah, I stay away from those kind of things. There's a story out here that had like returned Amazon boxes that were randomly packaged up or something like that. It was like random Amazon boxes, $25. Who knows what you'll get. I do nothing. Yeah, yeah, pretty much, oh, yeah. 

58:32
Also another thing about Ian the Massey, two other facts John Waters brought up. Apparently she was one of the sweetest people in the world, other than when she drank. She only drank a couple of times, but apparently I mean drunk. And also when you drove around with her she had this thing that drove John Waters crazy, where she would literally just list off everything she saw. She'd be like dog, car, tree house, car, tree, fire, hydrant, sidewalk. You said that woman had like no internalization. I want to kill you over and over. Yeah, for Pink Flamingos. 

59:03
Actually, john Waters hired Teamsters. It was like one of the first movies that they actually hired some of the crew for In order to save money. They would actually bribe these Teamsters that on their way from the studio they would actually quote unquote borrow equipment temporarily and loan it to John Waters so that they could have some nicer equipment than what they had. I mean they would give it back and everything. But yeah, they weren't really supposed to be renting it out like that. Oh, of course, yeah, yeah, and one of the Teamsters too. They were kind of all the Teamsters were sort of weirded out by what was going on. But you know they're Teamsters, whatever union they'll deal with it. But when the Teamsters, john said, brought out his wife to the shooting one day, the wife walked up into the set and saw Edith Massie in the corner and the little address to her underwear and the crib and it was like hi, nice lady. 

59:43
And the wife turned around and looked at her husband like we're not staying here, we're leaving. And she forced him to leave and they never saw them again. Yeah, but something's wrong here. They have an adult woman, a baby playpin over there. I mean, it's funny, but also a little bitch. Yeah, yeah, all right, could have hung around and talked to them and, yeah, associated with them a little bit and see what was up. The end of this movie involves one of the most shocking scenes ever and this is the scene that John Waters said got him as close as he ever went to those old horror movies where people were freaking out. This is the infamous dog do eating scene where divine follows around a dog for a while and eats dog poo diligently. Actually I got that written down better. Where divine devours dog do diligently. Ooh, alliteration, Good for me. 

Nate
Host
01:00:24
Like for real or like chocolate 100% for real. 

Shaun
Host
01:00:29
Like fresh, fresh warm out of the dog. I just get it. 

Nate
Host
01:00:31
Look at picture number three. That's actually I saw. 

Shaun
Host
01:00:35
I was hoping that was chocolate, but it is 100% poo. Here's the thing, yeah. 

Nate
Host
01:00:40
I, that's my, that's my button. Yeah, I watched your footage. 

Shaun
Host
01:00:43
Trust me, divine did not enjoy eating that either. 

Nate
Host
01:00:46
Not all of it made it in the mouse. 

Shaun
Host
01:00:48
Like probably Okay. I don't know what the why like what? 

01:00:52
I will tell you about that One. Well, john's not a monster. First of all, he asked divine if that was okay. He's like divine, do you mind doing this? Divine's answer was basically a starch. If it's in the script, I'll do it, because that's how movies are made. John was like well, that's dedication, right there. The reason John wanted to do it. Well, there's actually two reasons on this. One, he wanted, like he wanted a shocking scene. Some of the people would talk about something to get people like you got, to see this in movie. You got it's at the end, but you got way through all of them. You have to see this is something you've never seen before, which is true. The other reason was and this is actually a slightly more interesting reason because they're part of the underground film movement. 

01:01:29
One thing in the underground film movement was big on at the time was to push the envelope as far as they could while still staying legal. Hence that movie we talked about earlier, where we would show like STD things and you know birth to get away with showing full vag on screen. Yeah, you know, because it was educational. That way it was legal. Well, going through the legal books, john realized there is no law against eating poo on camera. So he said, hey, we can push the envelope and see what, how the people react to the legal act of eating feces on the screen. So in that went, because that was their contribution to underground movie making. This is what we found. It was legal, we can do on TV and we're going to put it in or on the movie set. 

01:02:08
And apparently this accomplished everything John Waters wanted, and maybe a little bit more. So people got them talking about the movie and also got a law made about eating poo on TV on a movie. Good. But here's the thing, though. Here's the thing John talks about, and this might have to do with the fact it was a drag queen doing it. You can't allow to. You're not allowed to eat poo in a movie in a sexual way. You can still eat it like a humorous or a educational way I guess Educational this time. Shit, yeah, I guess so. But yeah, apparently the actual law, the way it was written up, or at least was back then it was like in a sexual way you can't eat, and I'm guessing this has to do with the fact people were weird out by the fact it was a drag queen eating it and it was one of those. Well, obviously it's a sex thing if a drag queen's doing it. 

Nate
Host
01:02:52
Which is a part of that's a problem. I mean like it's just it doesn't matter who's eating it in what way. It's like it's someone eating poop, yeah it is. 

Shaun
Host
01:03:02
It's gross. I watched the scene. It's not fun to watch, yeah, no. 

Nate
Host
01:03:05
I don't ever watch it. I see the pictures. Enough for me. My imagination is done enough. 

Shaun
Host
01:03:10
Yeah. The next day, devine did have some worries so he called the hospital claiming his son ate dog poop and what they should do. The hospital was like well, you know, rinse out some peroxide or whatnot. Keep an eye on the kid. How old did you say your son was? Devine panicked. It was like 24, which was his age. The hospital was like yeah, keep an eye on your 24 year old poo eating son. Get back to us 24. 

Nate
Host
01:03:35
Yeah, or is it something like you could have said? Any age. 

Shaun
Host
01:03:39
Yeah right, same thing as panicking me like I'm Jackie Kennedy, even though this was not sexual in any way for Devine or John Waters. Sometimes after this movie came out, they would get people coming up and being like dude. That is the hottest thing I've ever seen in my life. You have no idea how turned on I was by that. 

Nate
Host
01:03:58
See, that's the test. Someone comes up and says that you're like and you failed. 

Shaun
Host
01:04:02
Yeah, john and Vine naturally were always nice people, like, oh well, we're glad we could excite you in that way, and they were like I don't want to be around this person anymore. 

01:04:11
Yeah, they want to turn around and walk away. But you know they were kind of like, well, we'll humor them, oh yeah. So I know someone has optioned Pink Flamingos as an opera, but it never went anywhere. Good, imagine singing an operatic about eating dog poop or inseminating women with an injector Nothing but Pink Flamingo. It got a 25th anniversary edition and when it was released in theaters it was the number two movie that year, behind Jerry McGuire and the head of the rock. That's actually pretty impressive. Head of the rock, yeah, the movie, the rock. Oh, you said not the actor, the rock. 

Nate
Host
01:04:46
No, I'm sorry, I heard the movie title was head of the rock. 

Shaun
Host
01:04:49
Oh, no, sorry. Yeah, head of the rock, it's a movie about Mount Rushmore. 

Nate
Host
01:04:54
Right, that was. That's a little confused. We were like head of the rock. What movie is that? 

Shaun
Host
01:04:58
Yeah, like I've never heard of that movie. There's the rock the movie and the rock the actor. Oh, another fun thing about this movie John Waters talked about he went to see this in Japan once. In Japan, you know their weird censorship thing Whether their censorship is no pubic hair on screen, none whatsoever. So what he has watched you that? John said that whenever there's pubic hair on screen, apparently this little like censorship ball like floats from the offscreen, shoots right down to cover up any pubic hair. And he said that this actually makes movies feel way more perverse, because this little ball literally drags your eyes straight to where the worst part is of the scene. Yeah, it's like, honestly, I wouldn't even notice some of this stuff, except this giant floating censorship ball goes right to somebody's crotch and like, oh yeah, I can kind of see that. Or it's like, what's that ball doing? Oh Lord, yeah, their censorship is so weird. 

Nate
Host
01:05:49
Yeah. 

Shaun
Host
01:05:50
Yeah, he was literally like you can show us snuff film over there as long as there's no pubic hair in it. 

Nate
Host
01:05:54
Yeah, like even their cartoon stuff is like okay. So let's make sure we cover up her bits, I think, while she's being raped by a nine dog. Yeah, yeah, john says they have the weirdest censorship over there and he absolutely loves it because it's so nonsensical and weird it makes no sense. 

Shaun
Host
01:06:14
Yep, okay. One last thing about Pink Flamingos, real quick. A copy of this movie is actually in the Museum Modern Art and it is also part of the Library of Congress's National Film Registry in a list of movies deemed culturally or aesthetically important to American culture. It made the list in 2021 and John was quite surprised about this. I mean, don't they try to save most stuff? There's actually only like 300 movies, I think, in the Library of Congress. Huh, yeah, actually, I thought the National Film Registry was like all movies, but hold on. 

Nate
Host
01:06:44
Well, I mean, it still makes sense. Like, as weird as it is, it's still, like you know, a movie of note, you know it's. 

Shaun
Host
01:06:51
Yep, it changed. It actually did change a lot of things. Oh, 850 films are what's in the film registry. 

Nate
Host
01:06:58
Cool, I mean that's way more than like you're like 10. Yeah, 10 movies in there. What other movies are you? 

Shaun
Host
01:07:03
I mean 850. That's probably almost every movie ever made. 

Nate
Host
01:07:07
I would guess no, god, no, no, oh sorry. We're supposed to be like he's being serious and it took me a second Like oh no, no, the 800 total. 

Shaun
Host
01:07:15
I heard that Tony of Roses like what you idiot? There's probably 850 movies released in the last, like three years of worldwide Go all stippy, it wasn't red, whatever Idiot Idiot. 

Nate
Host
01:07:27
Oh wait a minute. He's being facetious, Whoops. 

Shaun
Host
01:07:32
Another random John Waters story that actually just heard this morning watching an interview 1975, there's a movie called Snuff that came out, which was one of those fake Snuff movies and the tagline was shot in South America, where human life means nothing Kind of problematic subtitle nowadays, I guess. But right after that movie came out, john Waters was at home and all of a sudden he got a call from Roger Ebert. Roger Ebert was like John, I need you to get me into one of these Snuff films so I can see how it's made. And John was like I don't think those things actually exist, roger. He's like yes, yes, they do, I know they exist and you have your my ticket to go see one. And John was just like no. So yeah, kind of a random thing right there. 

Nate
Host
01:08:14
That's right, that's a random thing, Like, for some reason. That's actually kind of funny. Roger Ebert came up with a conversation yesterday my father-in-law's birthday party and I looked him up I had forgotten he had jaws removed. He looks so weird he does. I mean I get it Like so was jaws removed, Of course it looked weird, no shit. 

Shaun
Host
01:08:33
Yeah, most people have a whole jaw. 

Nate
Host
01:08:35
He looked like he was just perma-smiling. It was just unsettling. 

Shaun
Host
01:08:42
I feel bad for the guy he kind of looked like a Cinnabide or something like that after all the surgeries you see him in the shadowed corner. 

Nate
Host
01:08:50
I mean he did piss me off the whole, like video games art thing type thing, but it's like yo. But I mean that's his. He's expressing his personal opinion, fine. 

Shaun
Host
01:08:58
But you can express your opinion even if it's wrong, like that one. 

Nate
Host
01:09:01
Yeah, I mean it's, it's whatever, but yeah, it's still irritated me. 

Shaun
Host
01:09:05
Yeah. Yeah, I was irritated by him saying that too, but that's just him being old, he's probably all bitter because he never got to see a snuff film. 

Nate
Host
01:09:11
Yeah, I mean really a snuff film. That's, that's your. That's your thing. Like I need, I must watch someone die. 

Shaun
Host
01:09:17
Yeah, yeah, I mean, maybe he was just really high that day or something. He was like I know, I'll just call it John Waters. 

Nate
Host
01:09:23
Yeah. 

Shaun
Host
01:09:24
Maybe the part of the conversation we didn't hear is after John Waters said no, roger, he was like so what you wearing? And that's going to be it for our first episode on John Waters. We made Nate gag this episode. That was fun. Tune in next week when we discuss if John Waters is a necrophile dwarf on golf, who John Waters planned on kidnapping, what's in the Pulp Fiction suitcase and, finally, what sex act John Waters invented. Come on back next week for that and more with part two of our John Waters episode. This is where the ending jingle goes. This is where the ending jingle goes. I don't know if we need one. I don't know if we'll get one, but if we do, then here is where it goes. 

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