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Divine Trash

By Diane Krieger

Photographs by Matthew Wunderlich

USC's James Egan compiles the first collection of John Waters interviews.

JAMES EGAN AND JOHN WATERS go way back. The USC faculty member vividly recalls that Christmas party at the legendary filmmaker’s Baltimore apartment, circa 1975. Instead of decorating a tree, Waters had hung Christmas lights from the electric chair he’d used as a prop in Female Trouble. Egan also remembers when Waters first dreamed up “Odorama,” his idea for introducing the smell of pizza, glue, feces and sweaty sneakers into the 1981 comedy Polyester. Theatres would distribute scratch-and-sniff cards embedded with these odors, Waters had excitedly revealed, having first sworn his friend to secrecy.

“I have seen John from a very personal perspective that very few people have access to,” says Egan, who teaches screenwriting at the USC School of Cinematic Arts. “He allowed me to see scripts, to be on the set. I became friends with many of his actors, and still am today. It was a privilege for me to be there at John’s most formative stages in filmmaking.”

Who better, then, to compile the official Waters interview book for the prestigious Conversations with Filmmakers Series published by the University Press of Mississippi?

John Waters: Interviews is the first collection of Waters Q&As to appear in print, and an important scholarly contribution to the understanding of this pioneer in shock comedy, horror and reality TV. “He has redefined cinema,” Egan asserts. “Wes Anderson, Jonathan Demme, Todd Solondz – these are directors who look to John as an inspiration to their work.”

Released Oct. 14, the book had its official launch party at a sold-out Visions and Voices event at USC’s Eileen Norris Theatre. Waters was on hand for a special screening of Pink Flamingos, followed by a conversation with Egan and a book signing. The book’s East Coast launch came Nov. 17 at a similar event held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Waters reminisced and took questions from the USC audience. He explained the 1972 film’s enigmatic name, which refers to the ubiquitous lawn ornaments – to him a symbol of perfect honesty about having bad taste – of his native Baltimore. Setting the film in context, Waters noted that it was made around the time Deep Throat was pushing the boundaries of what’s vulgar. Pink Flamingos was Waters’ attempt to push them even farther. “The film was political action against the tyranny of good taste,” he said at the screening.

EGAN FIRST MET the “Pope of Trash” in 1974, when a roommate dragged him to a birthday party for the cross-dressing starlet Divine. A self-described “uptight preppie” recently graduated from Amherst College and working in the family insurance business, Egan was totally unprepared for the Dreamlanders, Waters’ bizarre troupe of actors. There in the grungy Fells Point waterfront bar, he beheld the Egg Man from Pink Flamingos, completely naked and playing pool. Nearby, a slender dark-haired beauty caught Egan’s eye, only to turn around and reveal herself to be a wizened old man. “I have to say, I got sick,” Egan recalls with a chuckle. “It was a pretty crazy scene.”

But he stuck around long enough to get introduced to Waters and to ask actress Mary Vivian Pearce out on a date. (Egan ended up taking the blonde bombshell to his parents’ box at the Preakness, Baltimore’s version of the Kentucky Derby. “She wore a see-through dress,” Egan says. “Needless to say, it was quite the shockeroo of the clubhouse.”)

Soon after, Waters called about production insurance for his next project. Egan obliged, successfully writing a policy through Lloyd’s of London, having misrepresented the raunchy Female Trouble as a children’s fantasy. When Egan’s father found out, he insisted his son be on the set every day “to keep an eye on our exposure,” Egan recalls. “And that’s how I fell in love with the film business.”

Egan provided insurance for Waters’ next film, Desperate Living, and spent many hours on the set. In the evenings, they would go to see horror flicks at Baltimore’s run-down old Hippodrome Theatre. Waters asked Egan to read the script for Polyester.

By then, Egan had decided he wanted to be a filmmaker, too. When he applied to UCLA’s MFA program, Waters wrote a letter of recommendation. He even promoted Egan’s student films. “John brought Paul Morrissey and all these amazing filmmakers to my first screening,” Egan says.

The two have stayed tight over the years, even though Egan’s cinematic path couldn’t have been farther from the extremes of vulgarity that Waters was exploring.

Right out of graduate school, Egan went to work in the documentary department at BBC, writing screenplays about literary lions, such as Aldous Huxley and D. H. Lawrence. In recent years, through his production company Wild At Heart Films, Egan has concentrated on documentaries and feature films about everyday heroes. His producing credits include Kimjongilia, about the struggles of a North Korean refugee born in a concentration camp; Angels in the Dust, about a woman who started an orphanage for South African children infected with HIV; and The Defector, about the high-ranking Soviet official who, at the cost of his own life, first exposed Stalin’s crimes. Through his involvement with the Wounded Marine Careers Foundation, Egan also trains returning veterans at Camp Pendleton and Twentynine Palms for careers in the film industry. His next book project, a history of the treatment of returning American veterans, dovetails with this work.

The contrast between the two men isn’t as stark as it would seem. Appearances notwithstanding, Waters turns out to be a profoundly serious person. “He reads voraciously, reads every magazine and several newspapers a day. His house is literally a library,” Egan says. “He could be a professor of American culture: He knows more about the arts, music, literature than anyone I have ever met.”

All of which makes Egan’s collection of interviews that much more interesting. The volume, described as “meticulously curated” by LA Weekly, is organized chronologically, one interview per film. From the article in the May 1973 issue of Andy Warhol’s influential Interview magazine to the 2007 article in PopMatters.com, the book presents Waters, across the decades, in his own words. It concludes with an expansive new interview by Egan, titled “Where Will John Waters Be Buried?” (The answer, by the way, is in Baltimore, next to Divine.)

Putting it together wasn’t easy. Waters’ archives at Wesleyan University have yet to be annotated and organized. Thanks to a grant through the USC Advancing Scholarship in the Humanities and Social Sciences initiative, Egan traveled to Connecticut with an archivist in tow. After combing the Wesleyan archive, he proceeded to New York, Baltimore and Provincetown, Mass., – Waters’ perennial summer retreat – in search of every interview ever given by the filmmaker. Among Egan’s rare finds was a 1965 interview from a gossip column in the Baltimore Evening Sun. The newspaper clipping was literally stapled to a card in the antique library catalogue of Baltimore’s venerable Enoch Pratt Library. It was Waters’ first-ever interview. Repositories such as the Juilliard School’s library and the Museum of Modern Art also proved helpful, as did USC’s own Doheny Memorial Library and the USC-based ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives.

Having unearthed each and every interview, Egan’s next challenge was whittling them down to the two dozen most important ones. “My editors were very generous. Mine is one of the longer books in the Conversations with Filmmakers Series. Still, there’s a page count limit,” Egan sighs.

Fortunately, his exhaustive search is captured and preserved in the bibliography at the end of the book. Egan also presented a complete set of the interview clippings to Doheny Library’s film school archive as a resource for future Waters scholars.

Of course, the job isn’t really done. At age 65, Waters probably has many more interviews ahead of him. For the past decade, he has been making headlines as an artist. A retrospective of his work – mostly photographic assemblage – was organized in 2004 by the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, and he continues to show in museums and galleries around the world.

As a filmmaker, Waters continues to shock, or at least to try. His latest screenplay, Fruitcake, currently is in search of funding. “The world of independent financing is very, very challenging, and even an icon like John Waters faces difficulties in getting his film made,” Egan says. When and if Fruitcake is produced, Waters may well achieve new heights of bad taste. “It’s his Christmas movie,” Egan explains, “and I would love to see John Waters make a Christmas movie.”

Expect something ho-ho-horrible.