For anyone wondering where filmmaker John Waters shot all of his movies, a visit to the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles provides more than a hint.
In the first gallery of the museum’s blockbuster exhibit, “John Waters: Pope of Trash,” visitors are treated to a movie montage in which characters say the name of the city where each film was shot:
“God, I love Baltimore. It’s a real city of diversity.” (“A Dirty Shame”).
“Come on down to Baltimore, the trade capital of the world.” (“Pecker”).
“You’ve made me the happiest juvenile delinquent in Baltimore.”(“Cry-Baby”).
“I love you, Baltimore!” (“Hairspray”).
The exhibit will end this weekend after a nearly 11-month run, with “Hairspray” star Ricki Lake appearing in conversation with curators Jenny He and Dara Jaffe for an Aug. 3 event entitled “Let’s Talk with Ricki Lake” to help close out the show. Museum members will get exclusive last looks during Member Appreciation Day, Aug. 4, from 5:30 p.m. to 8 p.m.
When it opened last Sept. 17, the show was billed as “the first comprehensive exhibit dedicated to John Waters’ moviemaking, exploring his process, themes and unmatched style.” Works on view include costumes, props, handwritten scripts, posters, correspondence, scrapbooks, photographs and film clips, culled from dozens of sources. A diverse group of Waters’ fans, colleagues and “Dreamlanders” have come to see it, many of them more than once. Its opening party was a confluence of guests from the worlds of cinema, music, fine art and fashion, supplemented by some of RuPaul’s fiercest drag queens.
“The Academy wanted to be more diverse,” Waters, 78, quipped during a sold-out screening of “Serial Mom” on the opening weekend. “Well…I guess this is the way to do it!”
Now that the show is nearly over, “I am eternally grateful to the Museum’s curators and entire staff for such an honor,” he said in an email message this week. “It doesn’t get much better than this! Only good thing about the show’s closing? I get my electric chair back to put in the front hall of my house where it belongs.”
Since last September, “we’ve had the unique opportunity to share the extraordinary details of John’s career — from his early experimental work all the way to his studio films — to the delight of superfans and the trash-curious alike,” said Amy Homma, Director and President of the Academy Museum, in a statement. “It has been an honor to share his transgressive work with new audiences, hopefully inspiring new generations of artists to express and rebel.”
The ultimate Dreamland reunion’
Four years in the making, spread over a dozen galleries, “Pope of Trash” pays tribute to a singular filmmaker and the work he’s created over six decades as a writer, director and producer. Waters called it “the trashcan of my memories” and said the opening week of parties and tributes was “the ultimate Dreamland reunion.”
The exhibit also honors memorable cast members that Waters discovered and employed on a recurring basis, from Edith Massey and Mink Stole to David Lochary and Divine, as well as established stars he brought in, including Kathleen Turner, Melanie Griffith and Johnny Depp. And it acknowledges others critical to creating the look and feel of Waters’ movies, including casting director Pat Moran, production designer Vincent Peranio and costume designer Van Smith.
But there’s one other star in the “Pope of Trash” exhibit: Waters’ hometown of Baltimore, Maryland, the city where he filmed all 16 of his movies and made them integral parts of his stories.
If visitors learn anything from the exhibit, it is that Baltimore is not only the setting for his movies, it is a character in them. And as much as the exhibit pays homage to Waters, it’s also a love letter to the place he calls home.
‘A major character’
To be sure, Waters isn’t the only writer or director to mine Baltimore for material.
Baltimore native Barry Levinson filmed three movies in his hometown — “Diner,” “And Justice for All “and “Liberty Heights.” David Simon set “Homicide: Life on the Street” and “The Wire” in Baltimore. Matthew Porterfield has filmed four movies in the region. Anne Tyler’s “The Accidental Tourist” was filmed in Baltimore and so was Laura Lippman’s “Lady in the Lake,” currently showing on Apple TV+.
But rarely has a writer-director been as closely associated with one city as Waters has been with Baltimore. The city is as much of a muse for him, in its own way, as his high school friend and featured actor, Divine.
During a panel discussion about the exhibit last year, Waters talked about striving to get shots that are “so Baltimore.” One benefit of filming multiple movies in the same city, he said, is that he was able to work with some of the same crew members on more than one film. “We even had crazy Teamsters that liked us, in Baltimore, that just did my movies,” he recalled.
“In John’s movies, Baltimore is always one of the major characters, the city of Baltimore,” said Scott Huffines, the former owner of Atomic Books in Hampden and a longtime friend of the filmmaker. “It always plays a big role in his movies.”
Viewing Waters’ films is like watching “a Baltimore travelogue,” Huffines said. “If you were on a John Waters pilgrimage, all you’d need to do is watch the movies and you could pick all the locations you’d want to go visit.”
“There are a handful of directors who are intrinsically linked to a city or town, but no other director is a loyalist the way Waters is,” He, now the museum’s Senior Exhibitions Curator, wrote in the catalog that accompanies the exhibit.
“With the exception of a few scenes, all his films were shot in Baltimore and take place in and around the city,” she continued. “Fells Point, a waterfront neighborhood in southeastern Baltimore and the site of many of his creative endeavors, is where ‘Lobstora’ went back into the sea, ceremoniously thrown into Chesapeake Bay by Waters and its creator, Vincent Peranio, after the production of ‘Multiple Maniacs’ (1970). For the setting of 1998’s ‘Pecker,’ Waters selected Hampden, historically a seedy, grungy working-class neighborhood filled with Formstone-covered row houses and uplifted by the character and charm of real life.”
But Waters uses Baltimore as much more than a filming backdrop. In “Pecker,” for example, he uses various locations in Hampden to advance the story he wants to tell, the curator notes.
“Touched by gentrification in the 1990s, the filming location doubles as an allegory for the dichotomy at the heart of “Pecker”: the sincerity of art-naïve real-folk Baltimoreans versus the pretentious elitism of denizens of the New York art scene,” she wrote in the catalog. “The film parodies the two groups equally, and Waters holds affection for both sides of the divide.”
Dialogue and artifacts
The connection between writer and place is made clear in a number of ways. Throughout the exhibit, He and associate curator Jaffe made a point of showing how Waters chose various Baltimore settings, both indoors and outdoors, to help tell his stories, set a tone and give his films a distinct, often quirky, sense of place.
The first mention of Baltimore comes in the exhibit’s initial gallery, a darkened space that was designed to evoke the churches where a young John Waters showed his early films such as “Roman Candles,” “Eat Your Makeup” and “Mondo Trasho.” The church motif also reinforces the “Pope” theme, with faux stained glass windows depicting characters from Waters’ movies and a serene portrait of a seemingly-beatified Waters, looking as if he’s peering down from Heaven.
Instead of an altar in the center of the space, there’s a movie screen. That’s where the movie montage plays on a loop, hinting at what visitors will see in the rest of the galleries. And part of the montage is a rapid-fire segment that shows the many times that characters in Waters’ movies mention Baltimore.
But dialogue is just one of the ways the curators underscored the strong connection between Waters and Baltimore. From the mock church setting, visitors move into a gallery that features a timeline tracing the filmmaker’s career, from his years growing up in Lutherville to the opening of the exhibit they’re standing in, with artifacts that represent milestones along the way.
‘Come to Baltimore and Be Shocked!’
Again, Baltimore figures prominently in what’s on view. There’s a governor’s proclamation from 1988, declaring February 14 to 20 to be “John Waters Week” in Maryland to coincide with the release of “Hairspray.” There’s a photo of the Senator Theatre, where many of Waters’ films had world premieres. A calendar from when Waters and Massey were named two of Baltimore’s “sexiest celebrities.” A bumper sticker he dreamed up to promote his hometown: “Come to Baltimore and Be Shocked!”
Part of the timeline’s significance is that it shows how much support Waters received for his filmmaking from elected officials such as the late William Donald Schaefer. Schaefer served as Mayor of Baltimore from 1971 to 1987 and Governor of Maryland from 1987 to 1995 – years when Waters was active as a filmmaker. Schaefer was also the ultimate Baltimore booster — a backer of anything that might bring attention to the city, even notoriety.
Schaefer passed away in 2011. But as long as he was in office, Waters said last year, Schaefer encouraged him to keep making films in and about Baltimore, even though he didn’t necessarily understand them or know exactly what they were about. Schaefer surely had a sense that Waters’ movies could be controversial, if only from news articles that appeared whenever one of them ran afoul of the local censor board. But that didn’t diminish his support.
“I don’t know what you do here but just keeping doing it. I don’t care what they are,” Waters said, imitating Schaefer talking about his movies. “And this was before I made “Hairspray” or anything. He just knew them from being banned and the censor board and all that. “I don’t care. Just keep doing it. Who cares?”
Another gallery wall contains hand-lettered posters that Waters put up to direct movie-goers to some of the places where he showed his early films, including Emmanuel Episcopal Church at Cathedral and “Reed” streets (a misspelling of Read Street.) Churches and educational institutions were good places to show films, he said, because censors couldn’t stop those places from showing his movies the way they could ban them from commercial movie theaters.
Displayed along a third wall are Baltimore-centric objects associated with Waters characters and colleagues: the birth certificate for Harris Glenn Milstead, AKA Divine, which Waters bought on eBay; the restored cat-eye glasses that Mink Stole sported as Connie Marble in “Pink Flamingos”; early sketches that Peranio made of the Lobstora costume he and his brother Ed wore in “Multiple Maniacs.” Artifacts such as those show that Waters’ films are Made in Baltimore productions, from the actors to the props to the sets and costumes.
Baltimore references
The galleries that follow are devoted to the movies themselves, shown in the order they were released. The Baltimore references continue from gallery to gallery, movie to movie, even as the tone of Waters’ movies changes from “celluloid atrocities” to more mainstream movies set in suburbia. In all of the galleries, there are more artifacts saved from the film locations. They’re often supplemented by set recreations that evoke the original setting.
The gallery devoted to Waters’ trash trilogy – “Pink Flamingos,” “Female Trouble” and “Desperate Living,” dubbed “Trash Trinity” by the curators — contains a nearly full-scale replica of the actual house trailer that went up in flames at the end of “Pink Flamingos.” For the exhibit, it’s used as a mini-theater to show a movie trailer that promoted the film — a trailer within a trailer.
One wall of that gallery is covered with a sepia-tone image of 3900 Greenmount Avenue, the house where Waters and Mink Stole lived when he was filming “Pink Flamingos” and which doubled as the home of Raymond and Connie Marble, who competed with Divine to be the “filthiest people alive” in the film. On display is a yard sign bearing the street number, 3900, which Mink Stole swiped and gave to Waters as a gift. Film clips on another wall show views of vintage Baltimore, including Divine walking around Fells Point and Federal Hill.
In the “Polyester” gallery, there’s a large map showing the main filming location near Severna Park and a copy of a letter that locations manager Stephen Walker wrote to community residents, apologizing for the “inconvenience and extreme annoyance” of a noisy helicopter that flew overhead during filming one day.
For the “Hairspray” gallery, the curators recreated the dance studio from “The Corny Collins Show” in the movie, modeled after “The Buddy Deane Show” that aired in Baltimore. The “Cry-Baby” gallery contains a sign from the 50s-era “Maryland Training School for Boys” and an image of Johnny Depp on the 1955 Harley Davidson Model K motorcycle he rode in the film.
The “Pecker” gallery contains fake covers of several Baltimore publications, including Baltimore Magazine, Citypaper, The East Baltimore Guide and the old Sunday Sun arts section, that were used in the movie. The “Serial Mom” gallery features a clip of the Baltimore County courthouse where Kathleen Turner’s character, Beverly Sutphin, has her murder trial. One of the film’s sight gags is the framed portrait of disgraced former Baltimore County Executive (and former U. S. Vice President) Spiro T. Agnew, hanging on a wall next to the ladies’ room. It’s the sort of only-possible-in-Baltimore reference that reinforces Waters’ ties to his hometown.
Scavenger hunt
Amassing all this material wasn’t easy, and the curators went to great lengths to find just the right props and artifacts for each gallery.
Waters opened up his homes in Baltimore, New York and San Francisco, and they yielded finds such as the leg of lamb that Serial Mom used to bludgeon one “Annie”-loving victim and the electric chair used to fry Divine’s Dawn Davenport character at the end of “Female Trouble.”
The John Waters Archive at Wesleyan University loaned the exploding beehive wig that Debbie Harry’s Velma Von Tussle character wore in “Hairspray.” The Divine Museum in Burbank also made valuable contributions, including the Princess phone used in the prank phone call scene from “Serial Mom,” an item that Divine Official Enterprises CEO Noah Brodie acquired from Peranio.
Beyond that, the curators went on something of a scavenger hunt in search of more items for the exhibit. He and Jaffe tell of one successful scouting trip when they literally knocked on doors in the Chartwell neighborhood where key scenes of “Polyester” were filmed and Waters’ crew had held a yard sale after filming ended. Residents of one family that bought some of the items answered the door when they knocked, and their well-preserved liquor cart from the film became a centerpiece artifact in the “Polyester” gallery.
Accentuating differences
The curators’ resourcefulness and tenacity greatly helped the museum mount an exhibit that provides a comprehensive picture of the real-life settings that Waters sought to capture on film. Their work also helps address one aspect of Waters’ filmmaking that some may find contradictory.
Waters is an artist who says he doesn’t like to repeat himself, whether it’s telling a joke or creating visual art or exploring a movie genre. Observers may think at first that Waters has broken his own rule by filming all of his movies in essentially the same metropolitan area, as opposed to other directors who intentionally go from place to place.
But what the exhibit shows with its attention to detail is that Waters gets around his self-imposed rule by choosing distinctly different neighborhoods within one geographic region, and accentuating the characteristics that make them different from each other in the stories he tells.
The Hampden of “Pecker” and the East Baltimore rowhouses of “Hairspray” are very different from the leafy suburbs of “Serial Mom” or “Polyester,” and the ’50s vibe of “Cry-Baby” is a far cry from the more contemporary urban setting of “Cecil B. Demented.”
In the end, viewers get a sense that Waters didn’t repeat himself; he challenged himself to explore what makes neighborhoods different from one another, and to celebrate those differences, even when the neighborhoods are relatively close together.
‘Pecker’ in Peoria?
Could Waters have made his movies in different cities? “Pink Flamingos” in Phoenix? “Hairspray” in Harrisburg? “Pecker” in Peoria? He certainly was capable of filming in other cities. The result might be just as entertaining. He can find quirks and foibles anywhere. But if Waters had gone from city to city to make his films, it wouldn’t have been the same. Something would be lost in the telling.
What the “Pope of Trash” exhibit shows, as much as anything, is what a feat it has been for one filmmaker to do what Waters has done, to spend so many years and so much energy making movies about one part of the country the way Waters has.
He could have gone elsewhere to make films, but he didn’t. What hits home after walking through the different galleries is that there aren’t many cities that have been the subject of one filmmaker’s attention, or “loyalty” as He puts it, the way Baltimore has been for Waters. Not many cities have had a filmmaker hold a lens up to it the way Waters has held a lens up to Baltimore, or for as long as Waters has, or with the painstaking devotion that Waters has shown to his hometown.
The result of Waters’ approach is a textured, multi-layered, cohesive body of work that provides a rare, nuanced picture of one city and region, created by one filmmaker over a six-decade span of time. It’s not always flattering, and it’s not complete by any means, but Baltimore is arguably richer for having been the focus of his attention. And that, as the exhibit makes abundantly clear, has been Waters’ gift to Baltimore all along.
