I interviewed John Waters at the Pyramid Club in New York’s East Village on December 4, ca. 1983. He was there to support a gay men’s magazine called Straight to Hell, published by Boyd McDonald, and agreed to talk to me because I knew Ann Craig, one of the club’s co-founders. Waters and I sat at a small table in the semi-finished basement while his short film The Diane Linkletter Story played in the main space upstairs.
Waters, who was born in 1946, received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on September 18, 2023. This interview originally appeared in Terminal! magazine.
Thaddeus Rutkowski: How did you decide to appear here for the Straight to Hell benefit?
John Waters: Well, I’ve been a fan of the magazine for a long time. I first saw it about six years ago. It has a great sense of humor, and it’s really good pornography. It’s so good and dirty; that’s the point. And it’s all true stuff that people write in. I can just imagine some people coming home after having this real hot sex and writing, “Dear Straight to Hell, Tonight you wouldn’t believe . . .”
TR: You’re showing a film here, The Diane Linkletter Story. In it, Divine plays Diane, Art Linkletter’s daughter. She’s high on LSD, and she jumps out a window after having an argument with her parents.
JW: That’s a film I made fifteen years ago. It’s ten minutes long, and it was never supposed to be a movie. It was a joke. We were testing a camera, and we needed something to film. I read in the papers that Diane Linkletter had jumped that morning, so we just ad-libbed it. I never ever expected to release it. I hardly thought I would be showing it fifteen years later.
TR: How often has it been shown?
JW: Oh, it plays all the time. Not a lot, but it still plays around. The movie cost a hundred dollars to make. It’s probably one of the technically worst-done movies ever, because I was zooming in and out just to test the camera. It was never supposed to be shown.
TR: And all the dialogue in it was improvised?
JW: Yeah, but I told them what to talk about. Now, I never make movies that are improvised. I hate improvised movies. But The Diane Linkletter Story was just a test to see if the sound worked, because we had never worked with a sound camera before.
TR: Was the film Divine’s first appearance?
JW: No, I made about four movies with Divine before that. The first one we made with Divine was in ’66, which was called Eat Your Makeup. We had the whole Kennedy assassination in it, with Divine playing Jackie.
TR: When did you start filmmaking?
JW: In ’64, with kids I went to high school with.
TR: You once said, “I wish I had quit high school when I was sixteen. I would have made more movies.”
JW: Yeah, I would have. I didn’t learn anything there. I learned in grade school, because I went to a really good grade school. But I went to a terrible Catholic high school, where they didn’t encourage anything I was interested in. They would let me pass if I would just shut up and sit there and read. So I read William Burroughs and Jean Genet. The teachers didn’t know who they were. So that’s how I got my education.
TR: Were you a member of the counterculture?
JW: Oh, I always hated hippies, you know. No, I was one generation too early for that. I had long hair and stuff, but I wasn’t a love child.
TR: How did you discover Divine?
JW: Well, Divine lived up the street from my parents. My father would take me to school every morning, and I would see this person standing on the corner. Every day he had a different color hair, and my father used to just shudder. I’d say to myself, “Aha, there’s somebody who can make my father shudder by just waiting for the bus.”
Divine and I used to go shoplifting together. We were a really good team. I actually saw Divine walk out of a store once with a TV in one arm and a chainsaw in the other. This was when we were about twenty. Divine got caught for stealing a steak, which he did steal in the movie. And it swore him off stealing forever, because the police chained him to all these big black drag queens. He had to walk down the corridor, and everybody in the jail was yelling, “Fat mama!” which made him nervous.
TR: Divine is making records now. How is he doing?
JW: He’s doing really well in Europe; he has the Number 6 record in London right now. He has a gold record in Europe. He’s a rock star, which amazes all of us.
TR: Chris Stein of Blondie did the soundtrack for Polyester. That was a departure from what he usually does.
JW: Yes, I think it was. I think Chris wants to do movie soundtracks, and he knew that we were doing this movie. He liked my movie and wanted to do some sort of thing. I think he did a very good job. I liked what he did.
TR: On the Mondo Trasho soundtrack you have a really eclectic collection of oldies.
JW: Those were just my old records. It was just the music I liked. That was the music I played and grew up with.
TR: And yet you managed to synchronize the music really well with the movie.
JW: It was like The Flying Saucer (1950). You remember that? It was made by telling the story with snatches of music.
TR: Who is your favorite director?
JW: Douglas Sirk (1897-1987), I think.
TR: What current films do you admire?
JW: I really like The Moon in the Gutter (1983). It was the best bad art movie I ever saw in my life. It was the Beyond the Valley of the Valley of the Dolls of art movies. It was so excessive.
I like this new rat movie very much, Of Unknown Origin (1983). It’s really good. It’s about this rat that jumps out of the cake at kids’ birthday parties. There are some good creepy scenes in it.
TR: Why do you make films?
JW: To keep out of prison. I don’t really know how to do anything else, except maybe I could be a warden, if I worked at my new career in corrections (teaching inmates for the state of Maryland). I make films to make people laugh. That’s it. I don’t want to give any messages. Movies that keep giving messages are going to have all the appeal of being forced to go to school.
TR: What do you think of the scene here at the Pyramid?
JW: Well, what I like best about it is that it’s total sexual confusion. Nobody knows who or what anybody is (from background: “I’ll drink to that!”). It think that’s what sex should be—confused.
TR: Confused?
JW: Uh huh. To me, the best kind of atmosphere is when it’s straight and gay and people are not sure if they’re either one. And nobody knows who’s what, so it makes it so complicated to ask somebody for a date. I enjoy that confusion.
Thaddeus Rutkowski is the author of Tricks of Light (great weather for MEDIA, 2020)