Hairspray E-Book

Dana Heller

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 266

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

By reconsidering assumptions about mainstream popular culture and its revolutionary possibilities, author Dana Heller reveals that John Waters' popular 1988 film Hairspray is the director's most subversive movie.

• Represents the first scholarly work on any of film director John Waters' films
• Incorporates original interview material with the director
• Reveals meanings embedded in the film's narrative treatment of racial and sexual politics

Leseprobe

Contents

List of Figures

Acknowledgments

Introducing Hairspray

1 The Roots

2 Tangled Genres: The Teenpic Gets a Makeover

3 Hair with Body: Corpulence, Unruliness, and Cultural Subversion

4 Highlighting History: Hairspray’s Uses of Popular Memory

5 More Than 20 Years and Still Holding: The Many Lives of Hairspray

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Hairspray

Wiley-Blackwell Series in Film and Television

Series Editors: Diane Negra and Yvonne Tasker

Experienced media studies teachers know that real breakthroughs in the classroom are often triggered by texts that an austere notion of the canon would disqualify. Unlike other short book series, Wiley-Blackwell Studies in Film and Television works from a broad field of prospective film and television programs, selected less for their adherence to definitions of art than for their resonance with audiences.

From Top Hat to Hairspray, from early sitcoms to contemporary forensic dramas, the series encompasses a range of film and television material that reflects diverse genres, forms, styles, and periods. The texts explored here are known and recognized worldwide for their ability to generate discussion and debate about evolving media industries as well as, crucially, representations and conceptualizations of gender, class, citizenship, race, consumerism, and capitalism, and other facets of identity and experience. This series is designed to communicate these themes clearly and effectively to media studies students at all levels while also introducing groundbreaking scholarship of the very highest caliber. These are the films and shows we really want to watch, the new teachable canon of alternative classics that range from silent film to CSI.

This edition first published 2011© 2011 Dana Heller

Blackwell Publishing was acquired by John Wiley & Sons in February 2007. Blackwell’s publishing program has been merged with Wiley’s global Scientific, Technical, and Medical business to form Wiley-Blackwell.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Heller, Dana A. (Dana Alice), 1959–

Hairspray / Dana Heller.

p. cm. – (Wiley-Blackwell series in film and television)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4051-9162-3 (hardcover : alk. paper)–ISBN 978-1-4051-9198-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Hairspray (Motion picture : 1988) I. Title.

PN1997.H2583H45 2011

791.43´72–dc22

2010043501

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This book is published in the following electronic formats: ePDFs 9781444395617; Wiley Online Library 9781444395631; ePub 9781444395624

For the kids whose day is coming: Dasha, Galushka,Lindsay, Nastya, Ryan, and Samantha

List of Figures

Divine from Pink Flamingos (1972)

The Senator Theater. Photograph by Dana Heller

Divine from the trial scene in Female Trouble (1974)

Tracy Turnblad (Rikki Lake) and Penny Pingleton (Leslie Ann Powers) shake-a-tail-feather

Tracy’s Council interview: “Would you ever swim in an integrated swimming pool?” Asks I.Q. (Holter Graham)

Heteromorphic chic: Tracy’s roach-print gown (designed by Van Smith)

Divine as Edna Turnblad

Norman Rockwell, “The Problem We All Live With” (1964)

Lil’ Inez (Cyrkle Milbourne), denied entrance to Preteen day: “I have a dream”

Jazz legend Ruth Brown as Motormouth Maybelle

The real Buddy Deane, in a cameo role as a member of the press corps

Arvin Hodgepile (Divine) tries to block television cameras from filming the race riots at Tilted Acres

“Good Morning, Baltimore”: Tracy arrives at school atop a garbage truck in Adam Shankman’s cinematic adaptation of the Broadway musical

John Travolta as Edna Turnblad

Lil’ Inez captures the crown

Acknowledgments

I had more fun writing this book than I felt comfortable admitting while it was in progress. Now that its done, what the heck this was a blast. My hope is that the pleasure I experienced will convey to readers. If it does not, I will have only myself to blame. If it does, I will have my family to thank for providing me with the space and material support to revel in my quirky enthusiasms. Thanks to my partner, Galina Tsoy and our dog, Zoey, whom we adopted at the start of my sabbatical, and house-trained between writing sessions, and whose own growth soon outpaced the manuscripts. Thanks also to my parents, Dorothy and Edwin Heller, who have always been wonderfully supportive of my work, and whose lives continue to enrich mine in countless ways.

One day, a student happened to walk into my office and found me giggling at my computer screen, immersed in a DVD assemblage of John Waters childhood home movies and early interviews. You really get paid for this?! He asked.

I do. I am grateful to Old Dominion University for allowing me to get away with it for 20 years. I do not know exactly how it happened that I became the resident defender of all things considered in bad taste, but there are worse ways to make a living. Thanks to Kathy Pim, former Humanities Program Administrative Assistant. Thanks also to the students who contributed to this research: Dana Staves, Carnelia Gipson, Kate Skophammer, and Ana Timofte.

I am deeply grateful to Matthew Baskin, Margot Morse, Diane Negra, Yvonne Tasker, and all the folks at Wiley-Blackwell who helped produce the solid artifact the book itself.

Finally, I want to thank John Waters for his generosity in allowing me to interview him and spend a memorable afternoon in his Baltimore home. Thanks also to his assistant, Susan Allanbeck, for helping me arrange that meeting and locate that home on a map. Thanks to Atomic Books/Atomic Pop for making sure my letter reached Mr. Waters hands. Thanks also to Gayle, manager of the Senator Theater, for the Ju-Ju Beads and Peanut Chews. When you work in film studies, it is always helpful to know the person who holds the key to the candy counter.

Introducing Hairspray

Why a book on Hairspray, you ask? I’ll explain by way of an anecdote. I was visiting a small, liberal arts college in the Northeast, making polite conversation with a group of fellow professors who, like me, had been invited to examine students in the college’s undergraduate honors program. The season was Spring, the month was May, and the prospects of a long, enterprising summer ahead had us all in high spirits. Eventually our conversation turned, as it tends to do in academic circles, to what we were currently working on. By turn, each of us described his or her current project: a post-colonial analysis of the global coffee trade; an oral history of the Women’s Movement in twentieth century Italy. Then it came to me. “I’m writing a book on John Waters’ Hairspray,” I announced gleefully, having only the week before signed with a publisher. However, my announcement was met with awkward silence and raised eyebrows, which was finally interrupted by one particularly incredulous anthropologist who looked me square in the eye and asked, “And what of any importance might one say about that?”

Right there, right then, I knew I had the introduction to this book. It was not just that the incident annoyed me, which it did. It was not just that I found myself uncharacteristically caught off guard and unprepared to answer the question, which I was. It was just that word: Importance. Meaning, of course, scholarly importance. Who can argue with it?

Well, if nothing else, I would like to believe that 20 years of thinking, writing, and talking to others about the presumed highpoints and lowpoints of American cultural history has taught me to look most closely and carefully at the low, the seemingly inconsequential, the distasteful, the presumably frivolous or non-essential. Since when we look closely at the artifacts, events, ideas, and texts that tend to get relegated to the sidelines of scholarly importance we often – not always, mind you, but often – discover something uncomfortably true about the cultural legacy of the United States as it is and the cultural legacy of the United States as we would like to imagine it. These discoveries are perhaps least flattering to those who would aspire to arbitrate in the matter of what constitutes seriousness or good taste, particularly as such discoveries tend to be revealing of the ongoing suppression of unschooled, working class, non-White, queer, or otherwise marginalized sensibilities and perspectives. Moreover, these discoveries tend to champion our more unseemly desires and pleasures, along with the everyday aspiration to challenge the social and intellectual status quo that underwrites so much cultural production and reception in the United States. I need not rehearse yet again the well-known, oft-cited history of Mark Twain and his mercurial critical reception to make my point. After all, the basic plot of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn did not substantially change over time. However, our culture’s estimation of its importance most certainly did.1

So, what of any importance might one say about Hairspray? Well, to begin with, this book argues that Waters’ film is a uniquely American piece of comedic movie-making that successfully channels the aspirations of outsider praxis into the wholesome mainstream of popular culture and national myth, and in the process manages to pleasantly suspend the currents of mainstream cinema’s representational and signifying practices. When I interviewed Waters for this book, he admitted that of all his many films, including his early underground works such as the notorious Pink Flamingos (1972), Hairspray “is the most subversive film I ever made” (Pers. Com., 2009). While this may seem oddly counterintuitive to anyone familiar with Waters’ movies, the central aim of this book is to explore the meaning and legitimacy of his claim. Of course, such an exercise is not in itself sufficient to justify a monograph on any single film, so let me briefly outline, point by point (and in accordance with the structure of the discussion to follow) the importance of this unimportant film, the way I plan to argue for it, and the reasons for my conviction that this book – like it or not – had to be written:

1 Assuming that some readers may be unfamiliar with John Waters’ life, career, and the films he made before Hairspray, the book begins with what I consider to be essential background for understanding the social and biographical contexts, cultural influences and obsessions, and the artistic trajectory that combined to make Hairspray what it is: a marked point of significant aesthetic convergence in popular American movie-making. This convergence was perhaps best expressed in David Edelstein’s Rolling Stone review of the film. In describing the film as “A family movie both the Bradys and the Mansons could adore,” Edelstein underscores the fact that in Hairspray, the PG family movie meets the midnight cult film (1988, p. 47). At the very least, his description poses a challenge to anyone who would seek to locate Hairspray in relationship to received notions of cinematic genre.

2 The second chapter picks up this challenge, arguing that in this genial “teenpic”-styled comedy, 1960s nostalgia and a message of racial equality coexist harmoniously with the transgressive energies of the underground film circuit, the DIY ethos of the punk and independent film movements, and the deconstructive sensibilities of gay culture’s camp politics. The release of Hairspray announced officially the death of trash cinema as such, and the commercial appropriation by Hollywood of confrontational bad taste, which is now the life-blood of the industry’s annual slate of comedy and horror releases (such as the Deuce Bigalow and Saw franchises), not to mention the aesthetic template for what we have come to know as “reality television.” Realizing that underground movies had lost their ability to shock audiences and inspire new ways of seeing, Waters did the thing that seemed most radical: he made a PG-rated teenpic that encourages interracial dating and champions a family in which both parents are men.

3 Apropos of this, the third chapter goes on to consider Hairspray’s celebration of the revolting body, in both the visceral and political sense. Here, a diet-pill popping, working-class mother is played “straight” by a 300-pound drag queen. Her husband sells scatological novelties (e.g., fake doggie poop and whoopee cushions) for a living. Her daughter, a corpulent, libidinous teenager, is a television star and a soldier in the battle against racial segregation. Her best friend discovers romance and heavy petting with a smooth-strutting African-American teen, whose mother is a hefty Rhythm and Blues diva and inspirational leader in the integrationist cause. Hairspray is a meditation on the abject body as a gleefully productive site of cultural rebellion, pleasure, excess, and reform. However, there are larger (if you will) ramifications here: Hairspray is a Trojan horse of a movie that stealthily ushers into the American cultural mainstream all those messy, contradictory masses that refuse to conform to the tyranny of prejudicial attitudes and social limitations based on class, race, gender, body size, sex, and sexuality.

4 Next, I contend that one of the primary ways Hairspray assimilates the abject body into a cogent Civil Rights narrative is by turning American history on its head. In the process, the film teaches us something about the uses of the past in popular movie-making. More complicated than it appears on the surface, Hairspray mobilizes popular memory and cultural history in ironic ways to critique the conservatism of the Reagan-Bush years and to communicate a sweet message of progressive promise that at the same time dryly satirizes the naïve optimism of “message movies.” However, Waters, it seems, cannot resist championing optimism, perhaps even despite himself. This becomes evident in the selective ways that he revises the historical record in order to enunciate a mythology of national progress and hope, one that could be taken right out of President Barack Obama’s campaign playbook of “change we can believe in.” Baltimore’s own local history as a national flashpoint of Civil Rights upheaval is mythologized not only through its cinematic reimagining, but through the film’s pervasive emphasis on television as a technological arbiter of memory and shaper of knowledge and subjectivity.

5 While it is important to understand Hairspray’s relationship to the past, in the fifth chapter I make the case for considering the film’s futures, especially given its resilience and enduring popularity in more recent adaptations to the stage and screen. These days, Waters’ original Hairspray is often discussed as a “cult film,” which productively highlights questions of fandom, spectatorship, and consumer agency within mainstream cinema production. Of course, nobody intentionally sets out to make a cult film.2 Rather films acquire cult status over time through local grassroots networks, online communities, and old fashioned word-of-mouth. Like most cult films, Hairspray is more widely known and appreciated today than it was during its initial theatrical run in 1988. Like a good wine, it has mellowed and increased in value. Like a cheese, it has ripened and changed color. However, unlike most cult films, Hairspray has demonstrated amazing longevity and resonance around the world through new technological formats and cultural forms, from its original theatrical release, to VHS format, to DVD format, to a blockbuster Broadway musical, to Adam Shankman’s Hollywood film adaptation of the musical, to CD (and digital) audio soundtrack, to a British television reality series about the casting of a high school production of the musical. Without question, Hairspray is important to our comprehension of global media, cultural franchising, and processes of textual adaptation.

6 And finally, I argue that Hairspray changed the world.

No, just kidding on that final point. In fact, I would have to agree with Waters, who, when asked in a 1987 television interview whether his films were intended to be taken seriously or not, admitted that while he was very serious about making movies, he was, after all, making comedies – comedies that certainly do “wink” at the audience. He remained focused on this question of seriousness, as he explained: “I never want to take myself so seriously that I would say […] I’m gonna change your life with this movie. I don’t think movies change anybody’s lives. I think it’s a pleasant way to spend two hours” (Waters, 1987). This should not, however, be taken to mean that our entertainments are regressive, meaningless, or unimportant. To dismiss Hairspray as Waters’ tamest film because of its veneer of innocence and its mainstream acceptance is to fail to understand the revolutionary potential of commercial pop culture products. In fact, Hairspray is a valuable indictment of the false dichotomy between commercial and revolutionary movie making, since it exposes the blind spots of an inherited aesthetic hierarchy that skeptically denies the unanimity of popular culture and artistry.

Such blind spots are certainly evident within the discourse of academic film studies. As Richard Dyer famously argued, film scholars have long tended toward a methodological approach that emphasizes the important things movies do in addition to entertaining us, as if the two were not implicitly linked, or as if entertainment were merely the “sugar” on the “pill” of ideology (1992, p. 1). However, this method denies the value of understanding radical pleasures, or of conceptualizing an alternative methodology that might embrace the importance of unruly delights, the gratification of movies that behave badly. This book begins, then, with the assertion that studying and teaching John Waters’ films requires a hermeneutic of debauchery. For the purposes of this study, let us not neglect the importance of cinema that snickers at the pretensions of cinematic seriousness, or revels in the transformative possibilities of enjoyment. Indeed, of all the things that Hairspray has given audiences over the years, the most important is a rollicking good time.

So, let’s begin where it all began …

Chapter 1The Roots

Baltimore. The story of Hairspray begins here, as does the story of its director. John Samuel Waters, Jr was born in Maryland’s largest municipality on April 22, 1946. He was raised in suburban Lutherville, in an upper-middle-class Catholic home. His parents, Patricia Ann Whitaker and John Samuel Waters, a successful manufacturer of fire-protection equipment, provided him with a happy and conventional childhood despite recognizing early on that their eldest child was “an odd duck” (Waters, 2004b).1 For example, he was obsessed with catastrophic automobile wrecks, fires (an interest he shared with his father), hurricanes, and disasters in general, all of which fed the grisly fantasies of his precocious imagination. He was drawn to stagecraft, costuming, and showmanship, always with an entrepreneurial edge. Neighborhood children paid a nickel for admission to his family’s garage, which Waters transformed into a “horror house.” He staged puppet shows for local birthday parties at US$20 a pop, presenting hyper-violent versions of Cinderella and Punch and Judy. He developed a particular fascination with the stage actor, Cyril Ritchard’s portrayal of Captain Hook, so much that the young Waters attempted to imitate him by scotch-taping his fathers’ neckties to his head to create the appearance of long, pirate locks.

Growing up, Waters loved the movies. He especially enjoyed horror films, films with evil villains, or anything involving a gimmick. In the late 1950s, he became a fan of the director William Castle, the “King of the gimmicks,” who aggressively promoted his low-budget horror films with sensational stunts such as “Emergo” (glow-in-the-dark skeletons attached to wire were floated over the audience during House on Haunted Hill (1959)), “Percepto” (joy-buzzers attached underneath movie-goers’ seats were activated synchronously with the attack of the creature, The Tingler (1958)), and “Illusion-O” (audiences were given cellophane “ghost-viewer” lenses to look through during climactic moments of 13 Ghosts (1960), which enabled them to see spirits or, if they became too frightened, make them disappear). In 1960, Mike Todd, Jr. introduced the short-lived gimmick, “Smell-O-Vision” with the release of the film Scent of Mystery (1960). This technique made it possible for movie audiences to smell what characters in the film smelled by releasing odors through theater seats in sync with the film’s projection. For good or ill, technical and aesthetic limitations plagued “Smell-O-Vision” from its inception, and it met with an abrupt end. However, Waters’ 1981 film, Polyester (starring Divine and Tab Hunter), a satirical homage to the women’s melodramas of Douglas Sirk, paid tribute to the great film gimmicks of the director’s youth through the introduction of “Odorama.” Viewers were provided with numbered scratch-’n’-sniff cards that were used with corresponding numbers on the screen to enliven the olfactory dimensions of the plot.

An aspiring beatnik, Waters rebelled against the rigid moral and aesthetic principles of the post-World War II era. In addition to the popular horror and novelty films of the day, he was irresistibly drawn to forbidden movies that were labeled “dirty” or sinful by the nuns at his Catholic Sunday school. He was fascinated by cultural objects and behaviors that were considered “criminal,” “filthy,” or offensive to middle-class taste. In Junior High School, he became fascinated by the tough girls who were regarded as “skags” or cheap. He studied their risqué manner of dress – their hair, make-up, and cha-cha heels – and marveled at their catfights and brazen disregard for authority. When he entered Catholic High School, Waters was unable to find many kindred spirits so he befriended kids from his own neighborhood who were similarly inclined to challenge social decorum, polite manners, and the law. With buddies such as Mary Vivian Pearce (who would eventually become a “Dreamlander,” one of his regular cast of actors), Waters discovered the delights of shoplifting and alcohol. Drugs – mainly marijuana, LSD, and speed – would come later. He quickly learned that art films, foreign films, and above all Swedish films were simply synonyms for “dirty” films. “I was interested in how the taboos would fall,” he explains, recalling the thrill of discovering the hidden world of cinematic garbage (Waters, 2004b). Waters began reading Variety in his early teens, clipping out the ads for movies that sounded particularly lurid, sneaking outside with a pair of binoculars to watch from a nearby hill the distant drive-in showings of sensational “adult-only” exploitation features. At school, and among his friends’ parents, he established a reputation as a troublemaker. Waters eventually lost interest in academics, preferring instead a program of self-education that included the writings of the Marquis de Sade, William Burroughs, Jean Genet, Theater of the Absurd, and Sigmund Freud’s case studies of abnormal psychology. He began cutting classes in order to attend sleazy downtown movie theaters that showed B films. Later, he would cut entire days of school to hitchhike with friends to New York City’s Greenwich Village, where Waters discovered the burgeoning underground film scene and the iconic directors whose work would eventually inspire his own, directors such as Kenneth Anger, Jack Smith, Andy Warhol, and the Kuchar Brothers. Meanwhile, back home in Baltimore, Waters’ grandmother gave him an 8mm Brownie movie camera for his seventeenth birthday. By then he already knew what he wanted to do with his life: his goal was to create “the trashiest motion pictures in cinema history” (1981, p. 34).

The Nicest Kids in Town

Not all of Waters’ youthful fixations were so scandalous. In fact, among the many obsessions, squalid or otherwise, that would ultimately work their way into his films, perhaps the most innocent was The Buddy Deane Show, the televised dance party that was Baltimore’s own local answer to the nationally-syndicated, American Bandstand, and the principal plot backdrop of Hairspray. The Buddy Deane Show (which Waters renames The Corny Collins Show) began airing in 1957 on WJZ-TV. The show was hosted by Winston “Buddy” Deane, who first established his reputation as a radio disc jockey and dedicated rock-and-roll enthusiast. Deane’s televised dance party also featured local teenagers known as “the committee” (Waters renames them “the counsel”). Billed as “the nicest kids in town,” the young people who were selected to appear as regular “Deaners” were catapulted to instant celebrity as a result of their dancing ability, fashion sense, rumored on/off screen romances, and – above all – their unrelenting penetration into Baltimore’s living rooms. The Buddy Deane Show aired for two and a half hours a day, six days a week (on Saturdays it would run even longer). Indeed, the show became a fixture of Baltimore’s youth culture, and for a brief time, it was the most popular local television show in the nation.

Waters was a self-confessed “groupie” of the show. Passionately, he followed the gossip, studied the dance moves that were introduced every week, and lusted after the clothing and hairstyles, although much to his disappointment his parents forbid him to have a “drape,” or greaser haircut. He also entertained himself by constructing wicked fantasies about the television teens whose names became household words as a result of their celebrity status. Waters playfully imagined them “committing crimes; robberies, burning down schools” (O’Donnell, 1988, p. 12). Above all, he loved the rhythm and blues music that was so frequently featured on the program. This was the music that was considered indecent and corrupting “race music” by White defenders of youth morality (typically code for pro-segregation and anti-miscegenation views), and which was “whitened” by chart-topping teen idols such as Elvis Presley. Baltimore’s African-American community was home to many great R&B musical performers, and the city could boast of some of the best R&B music stations in the country. The music was inseparable from the life of Baltimore itself, and Waters recalls hearing from his bedroom on still summer nights the lilting a cappella voices of Black men walking home alone in the neighborhoods that bordered on his.2 However, Baltimore was a racially turbulent city, and tensions ran very high in the years before and during the Civil Rights Movement. “It burned,” Waters recalls, in describing the late-1950s racial atmosphere and Baltimore’s centrality to Hairspray’s story of integration. “It’s the South here” (2001, 2007).

The Buddy Deane Show featured musical acts that were both Black and White. However, unlike American Bandstand, which allowed Black teenagers to appear on the program so long as they only danced with one another, The Buddy Deane Show prohibited White and Black teens from appearing together on the floor. Instead, the last Thursday afternoon of every month was set aside as “Black Only” day, where Black teens were permitted to dance without the participation of any Whites. The core committee members remained all White, and WJZ fiercely resisted growing pressures to integrate the show. In fact, the station refused to broadcast American Bandstand, substituting Deane’s show instead, precisely because of Bandstand’s policy of allowing Black teens to mix with Whites on the floor. Such staunch opposition to changing times and attitudes would eventually be the show’s downfall. In 1964, WJZ decided to cancel the show rather than yield to mounting calls for integration. In this sense, as we shall discuss subsequently at length, Hairspray revises the past and imagines a just ending to the Buddy Deane saga where actually there was none.

Midnight Madness

By 1964, however, Waters was preparing to leave his teenage years and his hometown behind. Despite his spotty academic record, he was accepted into New York University to study film-making after earning good grades for one year at the University of Baltimore. His NYU experience did not last very long, however, as once again Waters found himself far less interested in the highly formalistic, academic study of film – the endless viewings of the Odessa Steps sequence from Eisenstein’s The Battleship Potemkin – than in the grittier cinematic attractions of the city. He discovered the underground and exploitation theaters, which he bought admission into by stealing textbooks from the college bookstore and then selling them back as used. After three months, he was expelled after complaints that he and others were smoking marijuana in their dormitory.

Returning to Baltimore, Waters reconnected with the core group of friends that would constitute, for most of his career, his cast and crew. This group would come to be known as “The Dreamlanders” after his production company, Dreamland Studios. Over time the group came to include, but was not limited to, David Lochary, Edith Massey, Harris Glenn Milstead (aka Divine), Pat Moran (his casting director), Mary Vivian Pearce, Vincent Peranio (his production designer), Van Smith (his costumer and hairdresser), Maelcum Soul, and Mink Stole. During the ensuing years, Waters moved frequently around the United States, finding temporary work and living arrangements in Baltimore, New York City, Provincetown, New Orleans, and San Francisco. He also began making movies in earnest, a process he had earlier initiated with his first project, Hag in a Black Leather Jacket (1964), a 15-minute film shot with his grandmother’s 8mm camera. In 1966, he followed up with Roman Candles, a 40-minute film inspired by Andy Warhol’s Chelsea Girls. A moving-picture triptych, Roman Candles was composed of three synchronized movies projected by three adjacent 8mm projectors. Billed as a “trash epic,” the film was never commercially released, and is perhaps most memorable for Maelcum Soul’s strung-out performance as a lascivious nun (Waters, 1981, p. 50).

Waters next complete project was Eat Your Makeup (1968), a 16mm film that also starred Maelcum Soul as a maniacal governess who kidnaps fashion models and tortures them by forcing them to model in front of a crazed audience until they drop dead from exhaustion. Not long after the film’s opening Soul died of a drug-overdose at the age of 28, thus opening the way for Waters’ friend and future muse, Divine, to take center stage in the next Dreamland project. That project was Mondo Trasho (1969), Waters’ first feature-length film.3 It was financed by Waters’ father, who loaned his son US$2000 to make it. It starred Divine as a trashy blond-bombshell, a gum-chewing Jayne Mansfield look-alike. Filmed without dialogue or discernible plot, but only a musical soundtrack comprised of unlicensed original tracks, Mondo Trasho was notable for a brief outdoor nude scene that got Waters, along with several of his cast and production crew, arrested for “indecent exposure” and “conspiracy” to commit indecent exposure. The charges were eventually dropped, but the coverage of the scandal in the press turned out to be great publicity for the film, which sold out for its gala world premiere at Emmanuel Church in Baltimore. When it was screened in Los Angeles, Variety’s A.D. Murphy assessed it as: “A very amusing satire on films that exploit sex, violence, and seaminess. Should give pause to some established film makers who think they have their fingers on the pulse of the film-going public” (quoted in Waters, 1981, p. 61). Waters’ reputation was beginning to take shape.

Next was Multiple Maniacs (1970), a work Waters refers to as his “celluloid atrocity” (1981, p. 62). It was his first “talkie,” shot on a budget of US$5000, with another loan from his father. Like many of Waters’ early films, the plot of Multiple Maniacs