As he turns 79 today, writer, filmmaker and raconteur John Waters can look back on a year in which he performed in dozens of cities and racked up thousands of frequent flier miles – not unusual for a self-described “carny.”
But Waters also did something within the past year that he had never done before: He spent a night in jail. It happened while he was in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where he spends his summers. Though he’d been arrested and taken to jail before, this was the first time he was in jail for an entire night.
But Waters didn’t break the law. He had himself detained. And it was for a good cause.
Waters spent the night in jail to raise money for the Provincetown Film Society, an organization he strongly supports. The non-profit holds an auction every year to raise funds for its programs, and Waters always donates a one-of-a-kind item that can be put up for bidding.
For the 2024 auction, Waters pledged to spend a night in jail with the four people who bid the most for his item, with all proceeds going to the film society. The location was the old Provincetown police station and jail at 26 Shank Painter Road, and the overnight stay included a catered, three-course dinner. Waters promised to stay the whole night and endure whatever the others endured, eat what they ate, and sleep under the same conditions they slept.
The downside was that the “inmates” would be exposed to the sights and sounds and smells of a musty, decades-old jail. The upside was that they’d be able to do it alongside the legendary filmmaker, and get to see him in a way few others ever will.
As with many of the ideas and events Waters dreams up, this one turned out to be a memorable experience for his fellow prisoners and himself. What follows is an account of that night: Eleven hours in jail with John Waters.
One-of-a-kind experiences
Waters is well known for making 16 films, including “Pink Flamingos” and “Hairspray,” and writing 10 books, including “Shock Value” and “Role Models.” He has three softcover books coming out next month – new versions of the screenplays he wrote for “Pink Flamingos,” “Desperate Living” and “Flamingos Forever,” a never-filmed sequel to “Pink Flamingos.” Though he maintains permanent residences in Baltimore, New York and San Francisco, he has spent every summer since 1964 in Provincetown, the beach town at the tip of Cape Cod. This summer will be his 62nd season there.
For the past four years, Waters has organized one-of-a-kind experiences to help raise money for the film society, one of his favorite causes. These experiences have all involved some variation of a date, which the filmmaker contributes as an item for the non-profit’s winter auction. He led a tour of local sex haunts in 2021, cooked up a “Dinner at the Dump” in 2022 and hosted a “Soiree at the Sewer” in 2023. Each contribution was a marquee event for the auction and raised upwards of $15,000 for the organization.
After events at the municipal junkyard and the town’s water treatment plant, spending a night in the local jail seemed like a logical next step, Waters explained when the 2024 auction lineup was announced that January. “I try to come up with something that will be startling” and different from any other auction item, he said. “I’ve taught in prison. I’ve written about prison. It’s hardly a surprise that I would do it.”
The online auction took place in January 2024, and the event was set to take place when Waters was in town the following summer. The auction listing was titled “Spend the Night in Jail with John Waters,” and it promised a “once-in-a-sentence experience” for the successful bidders: “Four lucky inmates will get the chance to go behind bars to dine and spend the night in Provincetown Jail with John Waters,” it teased. “After a private meal served by Chef Jacob Hetnarski, inmates can return to their cells for the night or prowl the corridors in hopes of making friends – just be up in time for a 6 a.m. parole!”
But how could Waters and the film society pull off an event inside a jail? What about the real inmates? Would the winning bidders have to share the night with actual prisoners? Would the prisoners get to have dinner with Waters too?
That’s what made Waters’ vision both clever and difficult to pull off. As it turned out, Provincetown was building a new police station that was scheduled to open by spring of 2024, to replace the Shank Painter Road police station that contained the old lockup. Waters’ plan called for the dinner and sleepover to be held at the old jail in July, months after the new one had opened, giving ample time for prisoners to be transferred.
Is there much need for a jail in a beach town such as Provincetown? According to local residents, people who are arrested for serious crimes (and they do occur, if one believes the 10th season of Ryan Murphy’s “American Horror Story”), typically are detained at a high-security facility in Barnstable, elsewhere on the Cape. But Provincetown police officers make arrests for a wide range of offenses, including public drunkenness or other infractions associated with the town’s nightlife, and rowdy vacationers or locals may find themselves taken to Provincetown’s jail, sometimes to “sleep it off” overnight.
Fortunately for the film society, the new building opened and began taking in prisoners as planned. That freed up the old jail for Waters’ event. The facility has five cells, which is what limited the number of “inmates” in the auction – the four winning bidders plus Waters. It also explains why the ‘night in jail’ event couldn’t have taken place before: 2024 was the first year there was an opportunity to use the old jail, an unquestionably authentic setting. That’s how Waters and the auction winners came to be outside the former police station last July 13, waiting to check in for the night.
Another show business veteran
Waters’ 2022 “Dinner at the Dump” was attended by journalist Emily Kirkpatrick, who wrote about its “Dancing Bulldozers and Noxious Gazpacho” for Vanity Fair magazine. No members of the press covered the jail event from start to finish. One of the bidders, Daniel “Danny” Nero, posted about his stay on social media and agreed to talk about the night after it was over. Waters also agreed to talk about his experience but declined to get into specifics about anyone else.
Like Waters, Nero has a show business background. He’s a veteran actor who lives in southern California and took a week off to fly east specifically to spend a night in jail with Waters.
Nero has read all of Waters’ books and seen all of his movies, many of them more than once. He’s attended Waters’ spoken-word shows and gone to his book signings. A member of the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles, he visited its “John Waters: Pope of Trash” exhibition several times when it was on view in 2023 and 2024. This was the first time he had bid on one of Waters’ auction items.
For more than 15 years, Nero has worked on “Grey’s Anatomy,” the ABC hospital drama that was just renewed for a 22nd season. At 6 foot 2 inches, he was a stand-in for cast member Eric Dane until Dane’s character got killed off in the show. He’s also appeared on the show playing an anesthesiologist and other parts.
Nero, 72, has had many other roles in a career that goes back to 1972. He was a Vulcan guard in “Star Trek 3: The Search for Spock;” a radioman in “Top Gun;” a precision driver in “Lethal Weapon;” a waiter in “The Accidental Tourist,” and a reporter in the original “Ghostbusters.” In other TV shows, he’s been a dancer, a shopper, a café patron, a jail guard, a convention attendee and, in numerous appearances, either a hotel guest, party guest or wedding guest. Born in Los Angeles, he’s from a show business family; his mother was “the bun lady” at the purser’s table in “The Poseidon Adventure.” He’s sad that he’s never been in a John Waters movie – largely, he suggests, because they’ve all been filmed in Baltimore and he’s based on the West Coast.
Nero is creative outside his television and movie roles as well, and he has an off-kilter sense of humor. When Waters received his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2023, Nero stood in the crowd outside the Larry Edmunds bookstore waving a placard he made: It contained an image of the famous HOLLYWOOD sign, altered for Waters’ big day to say FILTHYWOOD – a nod to the filmmaker’s reputation as the Pope of Trash.
“There is an app where you can change the HOLLYWOOD sign to say wherever you want, so it occurred to me: FILTHYWOOD,” Nero said. “I did it on my phone and then I went to a FedEx-Kinko’s and they printed it, and then I went off to Hollywood Boulevard” to wave it at Waters’ Walk of Fame event.
Checking in
The night officially started at 7 p.m., when all the inmates, including Waters, were due to arrive. The schedule provided time for them to meet, get settled in their cells, and have dinner.
Unlike a real jail situation, there were no strip downs or cavity searches. Everyone was allowed to bring pillows, sheets, a change of clothes and other personal items that wouldn’t normally be permitted. The bidders could also bring their cell phones and use them to take photos and keep track of the time – another departure from standard procedure.
The auction winners group consisted of two men and two women. Besides Nero, from Sherman Oaks, California, they came from Winchester, Massachusetts; Charlotte, North Carolina; and Brooklyn, New York. All were big John Waters fans, but they hadn’t met before. Nero said he thought of organizing a Zoom meeting with them before they got to town, just to get acquainted ahead of time, but it didn’t work out.
A police officer was stationed at the jail to let them in. Two representatives from the film society, executive director Anne Hubbell and board president Gabrielle “Gabby” Hanna, were present at least part of the time. Chef Hetnarski was there to prepare and serve dinner, but other than that, they had the jail to themselves.
Waters arrived in faux prison attire — a black and white striped shirt, white jeans and sneakers. He brought two pillows, a blanket and a bottle of Evian water. Before going in, he posed for photos with the police officer. The other inmates wore jail-themed clothes as well.
“I got into it,” Waters said. “I wore a striped shirt that looked like The Beagle Boys. That was my fashion. Many people forget them. They were the burglars that robbed Scrooge McDuck in the Donald Duck comics…One of the women wore stripes too, so we had the same idea.”
The 1970s-era building that housed the old jail had been a funeral home, which the police department took over in the mid-1980s and subsequently outgrew. Each inmate was assigned to a separate cell – a small cubicle with a combined metal toilet-and-sink unit, a metal bench for sleeping, and harsh fluorescent lighting. Walls were bare. Instead of metal bars, the doors were made of thick glass, and they were kept unlocked for the duration of the stay.
The five cells were all near each other. Waters’ cell was around the corner from three of them, and slightly larger than the others. The floor was wet in spots, and Waters said he detected a lingering odor.
“It was moldy in there,” he said. “That jail’s been closed for a while. There was water on the floor. It was pretty hideous.” He also said he found his cell with glass to be “more claustrophobic than if it had bars.”
Breaking news
When the inmates were arriving, one of the first topics of discussion had nothing to do with the auction. Less than an hour before check-in time, at approximately 6:12 p.m. East Coast time, former president and 2024 presidential candidate Donald Trump was shot in the ear during an assassination attempt while making a campaign speech in Butler, Pennsylvania. Waters broke the news to anyone who hadn’t heard. The conversation eventually shifted to subjects more closely related to the reason they were there, but the breaking news made for an unusual start to the night.
“It was just minutes after it happened,” Nero said. Waters “said something about the shooting. I said, ‘Shooting?” He said, ‘You didn’t hear?’ That was the first topic of conversation, with everyone looking at their phones.”
Although the inmates each had a separate cell, Nero said, they stayed together in the common area for much of the time. The cells didn’t have anywhere to sit except the toilet and the metal “bed.” Nero said they talked about a wide range of subjects – where they’re from, what they do for a living, their favorite movies. He said everyone got to talk to Waters, both one-on-one and as a group, and all agreed “Serial Mom” is Waters’ best movie.
“We all had conversations with him before, during and after dinner,” he wrote on social media. “He’s so nice and funny and smart and all you’d hope he’d be…Of course he had good stories to tell.”
Waters said they talked about “everything.” If a certain subject was off limits, he said so, but that didn’t stop the conversation. “We talked the whole time,” he said. “We talked all evening.”
Nero brought several outfit changes, including an orange prison jumpsuit and a suit for dinner. He also brought numerous Dreamland-themed items to decorate his cell and show the others. He said he’s a three-time veteran of Camp John Waters – the adult playground for superfans in Kent, Connecticut, where guests dress up like characters from John Waters movies and bring personal items to make their cabins feel like home — and he wanted to personalize his jail cell too.
“I was the only one who really did any decorating,” he said. “I would have done more, but it was time-consuming and I didn’t want to miss what was going on out at the dinner and cocktail table.”
Roasted piglet for dinner
Once the bidders were settled in, dinner was served. Hetnarski is a former chef of Prune, a restaurant in New York City that’s no longer open. He later launched the Sweet Somethings Supper Club, “a roving restaurant throughout New England,” and takes on “unique and challenging culinary endeavors.”
Hetnarski was the chef for Waters’ previous dinners for the film society. He served chicken feet, skate fish, simulated broken glass and two cubes of cheese on a sprung mouse trap as part of his five-course “dumpster dive” meal at the town dump, and “Log-Jam Appetizers, “Elimination Entrees” and “Mudslide Desserts” at the sewer soiree.
What does one serve for a catered dinner in jail? A roast piglet, of course!
For the inmates’ banquet, Hetnarski went all out on his Law & Order/Prison Break theme, with a pair of handcuffs, spent bullet shells and squirt guns on the dinner table and the chalk outline of a human body on the floor. The menu was written on yellow legal pads. The meal was served on trays that had TV dinner-style compartments for different menu items, with plastic utensils and red Solo cups for drinks.
The town had issued a temporary liquor license for the event, and a bar was set up on one corner. There was wine and champagne. The signature drink of the night was called Suicide, made with orange juice, rum, Grand Marnier and other ingredients. The swizzle sticks for the drinks were actually toothbrushes sharpened to make shivs.
The first course was Ricotta Caramelle with Favas and Basil. The main course was Suckling Pig with pickled tomatoes, artichokes and salmoriglio, rice pilaf and castelfranco dressed in shallot vinaigrette. Dessert options included “Timothy McVeigh’s ice cream,” “John Wayne Gacy’s strawberries” and upside down cake. Before it was carved, the roasted piglet wore a policeman’s cap and had a powdered sugar donut in its snout.
In preparation for dinner, Nero said, he went to the nearby Stop & Shop grocery store, where he had hoped to buy a sheet cake. He said he bought a file on Amazon and planned to hide it in the cake and then use it to file his way out of jail, like prisoners do in the movies. Unfortunately, he said, the store didn’t have any sheet cakes and his file went unused.
Little sleep
Dinner was followed by more conversation and storytelling. Waters said he went to sleep at around 11:30 p.m. or midnight while others stayed up to play cards and have cocktails in the “booking” area. At one point, he said, “I had to go out and say, can we bring it down a little?”
Nero said he got about two hours of sleep, in part because his steel bench was so uncomfortable. When he got up to get ready to be released at 6 a.m., he said, he learned that one of the women had left at around 4 a.m. to meet friends who were picking her up.
Nero said he was particularly impressed that Waters stayed the whole night.
“He easily could have slipped out to the comfort of his own Ptown place, but he wanted to see us all out at 6 a.m. and thank us when we got paroled,” Nero wrote on social media. “The perfect host.”
Recurring subjects
Jails and prisons have been recurring subjects in Waters’ work, and many of his movies include jail scenes or threats of going to jail. Ricki Lake’s Tracy Turnblad went to jail in “Hairspray.” Kathleen Turner’s Beverly Sutphin got arrested and was tried for murder in “Serial Mom.” Divine’s Dawn Davenport died in the electric chair in “Female Trouble,” which Saturday Night Live star Bowen Yang wants to remake. Johnny Depp’s Wade Walker went to reform school in “Cry-Baby.”
Waters has spoken and written about other times when he’s been arrested, including an instance on a Sunday morning in 1968 when he was filming “Mondo Trasho” on the Johns Hopkins University campus. The scene called for Divine to be wearing a gold lame toreador outfit and driving a bright red 1959 Cadillac Eldorado convertible with the top down, with a naked man in the back seat, in November.
A campus security guard caught them filming and called the city police. The city officer arrested Waters and three others (David Lochary, Vivian Pearce and Nancy Stoll, aka Mink Stole) and they were charged with “conspiracy to commit indecent exposure.” But Divine and the naked man sped away and were never caught.
Waters was taken to the old Northern District police station on Keswick Road in Baltimore but called the American Civil Liberties Union and got released before he had to stay overnight. He said he has been in jail perhaps “four or five” times in his life, but the auction event marked the first time he stayed in jail all night.
“Yes, we did really spend the whole night in jail,” he confirmed. “That’s what the whole point of it was.”
Jail break
Waters said he was prepared to lead the prisoners in an escape attempt if the conditions in Provincetown weren’t satisfactory, but that never became necessary. Still, he said, he didn’t drink from any faucets while in custody, and “I did not eliminate in prison either.”
At any point in the night, he said, he was prepared to bolt.
“I always figured that if it was really intolerable — if during the night, it was really horrible, which it wasn’t — I would have been able to lead a jail break and get out,” he said. “I could have pulled that off…Just get to all the others and we’d run out. But I didn’t have to do that.”
He said he only found out afterwards that one of the women inmates “escaped” in the middle of the night. “I wouldn’t have allowed it if I had been awake,” he said. “I would have busted the woman that left early. She could have waited two more hours.”
John Waters Slept Here
Hubbell, who had tended bar earlier, made coffee for the prisoners around 5:30 a.m., and then it was time for their “parole.”
Nero brought a gift for Waters – a replica of the Rhoda Penmark Pensmanship medal that figured prominently in the plot of “The Bad Seed,” a 1956 Mervyn LeRoy movie about an eight-year-old school girl who murders a classmate who gets a prize for good handwriting that she thought she deserved to win. Nero said he found a company that makes medals like the one in “The Bad Seed” and had one engraved with the fictional institution’s name, Fern School, because he knew Waters likes the movie.
Waters said he was touched by the gesture. He said he met Patty McCormack, the actress who played Rhoda Penmark, the title character in “The Bad Seed,” and saw her not long ago.
“It was amazing,” he said of the medal. “I had to call my friend Dennis Dermody and ask, What school did she go to? Was it the Fern School? He said, Yes it was. I met Patty McCormack. I interviewed her for ‘Role Models’ and then she came to the Academy [museum opening of his show.] We’re friends. ‘The Bad Seed’ was a huge influence on me as a child. I used to pretend I was the gardener: ‘Give me those shoes.’ Leroy Jessup. The one she sets on fire.”
Having gone to Catholic school around the same time that the movie was filmed, Waters said, he understands the importance of good penmanship. He said his own handwriting has gotten less legible over the years and more like that of Cy Twombly, an artist known for his wobbly writing.
“It used to be all right,” Waters said of his handwriting. “I went to Calvert School. They taught it well. But now it looks like Cy Twombly as I’ve gotten older.”
Waters gave each inmate a gift as well – a signed copy of Hetnarski’s dinner menu. “They paid a lot of money,” he said. “That was the least I could do.”
The bidders took selfies with their host and each other. Earlier, Nero had taken a photo of Waters’ cell with a sign he made for the occasion:
John Waters
Slept Here
13 July 2024
Waters marveled at Nero’s ingenuity.
“I don’t know what the police did with that” sign, he said, “but that was beyond the call of duty.”
End of the line
Started in 1999, the Provincetown Film Society is dedicated to showing new achievements in independent film and honoring the work of emerging as well as acclaimed directors, producers and actors. Known for its support of LGBTQ filmmakers and their work, it has three primary activities: producing the annual Provincetown International Film Festival; running a year-round theater, the Water’s Edge Cinema, and overseeing the Gabrielle A. Hanna Provincetown Film Institute for film and and media artist residencies and conferences.
Waters warned after the event that the night in jail may be the last of his elaborate and strong-scented auction donations. For one thing, it was unclear whether the deactivated jail would be available for any more overnight stays, since the town plans to tear the building down. For another, he doesn’t like to repeat himself. But most of all, he said, he’s not sure how he could top this one.
“I think it probably is the end,” Waters said after the jail night. “I told Gabby I may be retiring from the ‘fume’ auction experience. I always joke you can have sex with me at 80, but I think I’ll pass on that. I would probably get no bidders. And if I did, that would be really scary…This might have been it.”
That proved to be the case this year at least. For the 2025 auction, Waters offered another one-of-a-kind donation, but it wasn’t a date with multiple bidders and strong odors. It was a collection of rare memorabilia from his personal collection, signed for the winning bidder.
‘Worth every penny’
According to the film society, Waters’ night-in-jail donation raised just under $12,000. All told, Waters’ last four years of events have raised more than $55,000.
Nero said the experience was “a dream come true. It was all I could hope for and more.”
With each auction bidder donating between $2,500 and $2,700 for their night with John Waters, the old jail’s spartan accommodations “cost more than any other place in town” that night, he noted on social media, but the experience was “worth every penny…How lucky can an obsessed John Waters fan get?”
The night was oddly educational in what it revealed about jail conditions, he added.
“Along with the fun,” he said, it “was a good lesson on why being incarcerated isn’t much fun.”
Waters said he “got a good story out of it — yet another amazing thing that fans have done. It always astounds me the things that happen.”
He admitted he was glad to get released — “When I got out in the morning, I definitely came home and took a long nap.”
But he said he always has a good time at the fundraising events he’s done in Provincetown, and the night in jail was no exception.
“I stayed all night, and it was fun,” he said. “We had a good time. I liked all the people. They were wonderful. They entered it with the complete, correct spirit and excitement about it, and it was for a great cause, the film festival…It was a good night.”
Ed really captured the event and more so that even someone sadly unfamiliar with John Waters would appreciate it. Hopefully it’s my only jail experience but now that protests are something I participate in, who knows?