Ready for Return of ‘Flamingos’?

Hollywood likes to bathe in the glow of its glorious past--and make some money while it is at it. So, over the past few months, such films as the “Star Wars” trilogy and “The Godfather” have been re-released. Now comes another classic from the past: “Pink Flamingos.”

Yes, the movie that Variety called “one of the most vile, stupid and repulsive films ever made” has been cleaned up, in a matter of speaking, to celebrate Friday’s 25th anniversary of its original release. And in keeping with the grand traditions of reissues, fans will get to view never-before-seen footage complete with director John Waters’ commentary.

The irony of this does not escape Waters. In fact, he’s made a career out of flying in the face of the good and the great.

“I thought, ‘Well, how about the crazy people?’ ” Waters says. “They have to have something that they remember fondly too, something that was their own thing 25 years ago. And at the same time it’s making fun of this whole re-release thing, which has such pomp and so little humor, as if they’re the cure for cancer.”

Waters, who will be 51 this month, is seated in his clubby, book-lined home here reminiscing about a movie that one newspaper compared to a septic tank explosion. He’s wearing black pants and jacket, a striped sweater, his trademark eyeliner-width mustache and an impish expression. He apologizes in advance for being a little slack-jawed, as he’s just been to the dentist. It was not an unpleasant experience, he says, because the dentist gave him laughing gas and let him listen to rap music while the drilling was going on.

Obviously a lot has changed in the 25 years since “Pink Flamingos” was made. Waters is now a “Hollywood” director in the sense that he gets financing from the studios instead of benefactors, and he uses real stars--Johnny Depp in “Crybaby” (1990), Kathleen Turner in “Serial Mom” (1994)--instead of his friends. Some of those friends are dead, notably Edith Massey, David Lochary, Cookie Mueller, and, of course, Divine (Harris Glenn Milstead), the 300-pound drag queen who was his muse. Talk to Waters about “Pink Flamingos” or any of his early movies and you have to talk about Divine.

The world that produced “Pink Flamingos” is gone now too. While cinephiles argue that the early 1970s was the last golden age of Hollywood, Waters remembers it differently. He and his friends were engaged in what he calls a cultural war. His targets were not only “straight” society but also the counterculture, the hippies, who were his primary audience.

“They were hippies ready to turn into something else,” he says. ‘They were angry hippies. They were hippies who were closet punks. I’ve seen footage of audiences then. Believe me, this was no love generation that made ‘Pink Flamingos’ a hit in the beginning.”

“Pink Flamingos” was a kind of nuclear weapon in this war, but Waters preceded and followed it with a series of movies that were aimed at the same constituency and had the same transgressive sensibility: “Mondo Trasho” (1969), “Multiple Maniacs” (1970), “Female Trouble” (1974), “Desperate Living” (1977). (He later went after a more mainstream audience in 1981’s “Polyester” and 1987’s “Hairspray.”)

These movies were all shot in Baltimore, and they all featured his repertory players who, as he describes them, were such an undifferentiated mix of suburban kids and the downtown Baltimore gay scene that they had everybody confused. But Divine somehow transcended this confusion.

“All people who were angry liked Divine,” Waters says. “Even the straightest. He keeps saying, ‘Filth is my politics, filth is my life.’ Well, that’s the message of that movie. And by ‘filth’ I didn’t mean sexually or dirty. It was terrorism in a way that no one was hurt except their perception of how they were supposed to live. It was making fun of political correctness, only there wasn’t that word then.”

In the film, Connie and Raymond Marble (Mink Stole and Lochary) vie with Divine for the title of the filthiest person alive, and the plot is essentially their escalating efforts to outdo each other. The Marbles kidnap hippie girls, impregnate them, sell their babies to lesbian couples, and use the proceeds to finance heroin dealers at elementary schools. Divine lives in a trailer with her demented mother (Massey), a Jean Harlowish traveling companion (Mary Vivian Pearce) and her hillbilly son (Danny Mills). Her claim to the title is more dependent on attitude and style than on bad behavior, although she is capable of that too. When she triumphs over the Marbles she seals her victory with one of the most repulsive acts ever captured on film.

One of the ironies about the re-release of “Pink Flamingos” is that it may be more shocking now than it was then. As Waters points out, contemporary audiences won’t remember--or weren’t old enough at the time to know--what was politically correct in the ‘70s. When Divine engages in sex with her son or the Marbles play with each other’s toes, people may not be aware that he’s satirizing porno chic. And while the movie is steeped in “pot humor”--Waters says he wrote it loaded, though he directed it straight--he says the difference now is that kids take drugs to not think whereas his generation took them as an act of rebellion.

“I was surprised when I saw the film again,” says New Line’s Bob Shaye, who released it originally and is re-releasing it now. “There were a couple of things that shocked the hell out of me even though I was familiar with the movie. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but they can shut it off. Some people may call it naive or gross, but I think there’s an enduring charm about the film that allows us to get a healthy laugh about ourselves.”

“Actually, I think it’s a joyous and loving movie,” Waters says. “Divine’s side is moral and the other side is bitter. It’s the same way I judge my friends today. I don’t like people who are unhappy at other people’s success. And the Marbles were. They were jealous of publicity, which was then a joke. Now I’m sure there are people who are jealous of publicity. In Hollywood, I know they are. They’re furious when they see a bigger article about somebody, which I find so delightful and funny.”

The making of the movie was not so delightful and funny. It was shot in the dead of winter for $12,000. Waters had one crew member and a mile-long extension cord. The camera would freeze. Footage would sometimes come back black, necessitating reshoots. The performers were society’s outcasts for the duration of the shoot, which lasted four months because they worked only a few days a week. Waters doesn’t remember why they shot it so sporadically.

“I don’t think anyone had a real job,” he says. “How could they, looking like that? Divine couldn’t go out with his head died yellow with food coloring. Mink’s hair was Magic Marker. David’s was peacock blue ink. They didn’t have hair dyes like that then. So they couldn’t go out of the house. David, truck drivers would try to kill him.”

Waters had promoted and distributed his previous films himself in churches and at underground venues, but after the premiere of “Pink Flamingos” at the University of Baltimore, he was convinced that it had enough potential to attract a real distributor. He sent it to Shaye, who picked it up, although at first he had trouble figuring out what to do with it. Eventually it was booked at a midnight show at the Elgin Theater in Manhattan. From there it developed word of mouth, and the underground press got on board. It ran for 50 weeks at the Elgin, 45 weeks at the now-defunct New Yorker, and 10 years at the Nuart Theater in Los Angeles.

“He’s like the Arnold Schwarzenegger of surrealist cinema,” says Shaye of Waters’ tireless promotional efforts. “He will go to any video store and shake hands with the customers. He’s great that way.”

Interestingly, the film fared best with white audiences, the more affluent the better. As if to illustrate this point, Waters says he showed it to felons while he was teaching in a prison, and the blacks in the audience fled the class while the whites stayed behind and laughed.

“I used that movie as a good lesson to tell them, ‘Look, I want to do antisocial things too, but thank God I have an outlet,’ ” he says. “I told the prisoners, ‘Next time, write a poem or a short story about murdering someone. Just don’t do it.’ ”

Though the movie was included in the Museum of Modern Art’s Bicentennial Salute to American Film Comedy in 1976, many video stores still won’t carry it. You won’t find it in many video guides either. The movie still runs afoul of local courts in the United States. It’s still illegal in Switzerland. One of the many ironies of the re-release is that New Line is overseen by Ted Turner, who had very public qualms about distributing David Cronenberg’s “Crash.” Has he seen “Pink Flamingos”? Shaye says it wasn’t an issue.

As the Variety review suggests, critics, if they reviewed the movie at all, didn’t get it. Smartly, Waters embraced these negative reviews as proof that the movie worked and used them as part of the marketing strategy. They’re even using these reviews to promote the re-release.

“ ‘Fine Line Features recycles its trash,’ ” Waters says. “It’s all in the right kind of spirit.”

Waters first pitched the idea of reissuing the movie to Shaye at Cannes two years ago. Apparently it took Shaye a while to warm up to the idea. Certainly he was well within his rights to hesitate because, as Waters puts it, “it cost a lot. I’m going to leave blank how much, but believe me you’d be surprised.”

“The only convincing was the economic benefits of the way John wanted it to be done,” Shaye says. “We’ve all grown up a little bit. The aesthetic standards are one thing. The technical standards are the another. After reflecting on our 25-year relationship, I decided to go ahead with it.”

Because the film was shot in 16mm, it had to be rescanned so it could be shown in 35mm. Originally it was blown up without scanning and heads were cut off. The sound was cleaned up and digitalized. Music rights were secured, a ticklish process when you consider the sorts of scenes the songs accompanied. They also had it rated NC-17, because when it went out unrated it would sometimes mistakenly get slotted in the comedy sections of the video stores that would carry it, which made for some irate parents.

As for the new footage, Waters decided to append a few scenes to the end of the movie along with his commentary. They’re brief, because they ran too long at the time, and they run too long now.

“It’s three big subplots basically,” Waters says. “You can see why they were cut. But I think now it’s different. If you know the movie and you like the movie, it’s shocking to see Edie or Divine doing another scene.”

Waters wears the legacy of “Pink Flamingos” lightly. He gleefully admits it’s appalling. Wisely, he never tried to top it. At the Sundance Film Festival this year, which he attended to promote the re-release, he says the younger filmmakers “treated me with such respect it was mortifying. I felt like Uncle Remus.” While he approves of the indie scene, he says its success has made it harder for him to make movies.

“Now some of them want me to make movies that cost what an 18-year-old’s first movie costs,” he says.

Waters has had trouble getting a project off the ground since his last film, “Serial Mom.” Some say that reality has outstripped his invention, although he insists there’s still plenty to laugh at. He wrote a script called “Cecil B. Demented,” but he couldn’t get it made, in part because at $19 million it cost too much. He’s now waiting to see whether his current project, which is being developed at Fine Line, will get a green light. It will cost much less, about $7 million.

“It’s about a kid who picked at his food as a child,” he says. “He works in a blue-collar sandwich shop in Baltimore and takes pictures of his family on the side and accidentally gets discovered by a New York art dealer and turned into an art star, a teenage Weegee whose paintbrush is a broken-down camera.”

Between projects, Waters performs at colleges and comedy clubs for a whole new generation of fans. He’s also developed a second career as a photographer, taking pictures off a TV screen of other people’s movies and redirecting them “the way I think they should be in storyboards.” He is not sure what the re-release of “Pink Flamingos” will do for his filmmaking prospects.

“John has cosmopolitanized himself over the years,” Shaye says. “His views have become a little more mainstream. Hollywood may be amused to see where he was 25 years ago and where he is now. I think an artist is entitled to mature, if I may put it that way. I’ve seen other artists start out trying to make a splash.”

And as “Pink Flamingos” demonstrates, sometimes the splash is what people remember.

“I’m very proud of something that my friends and I did when we were young,” Waters says without irony. “If I drop dead tonight, I know it’ll be in the first paragraph of my obituary no matter what I do for the rest of my life, and I’m proud of that.”