Next month the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles will open “John Waters: Pope of Trash,” the first comprehensive exhibition about the artist’s contributions to cinema.
The retrospective explores Waters’ process, themes and moviemaking style, and his impact over more than five decades as a writer, director and producer of films such as “Pink Flamingos,” “Hairspray,” and “Serial Mom.”
But there’s one film that won’t be part of the exhibit or the book that accompanies it.
“Reckless Eyeballs” is the title of a short film that Waters made in 1985 with inmates at the Patuxent Institution in Maryland, a correctional facility where he was teaching.
The black-and-white film has never been shown outside the prison and never will be, according to the ground rules set by the institution. It’s not considered part of Waters’ official filmography. It’s been seen by fewer people than earlier Waters short films such as “Eat Your Makeup,” which will be shown as part of the “Pope of Trash” exhibit. His fans have likely heard more about “Dorothy the Kansas City Pot Head,” a 1968 project that was never finished. It’s part of what Vulture.com calls his “alternate universe filmography.”
“We said that it would never leave the prison, that it couldn’t go out because they didn’t want people to see it …It was the deal I made,” Waters said of “Reckless Eyeballs.” “The educator that did hire me to do it did send me a copy once and I think it may be in my film archive at Wesleyan University, but it was never to be shown or anything…They didn’t want the other prisoners to know what they were doing, either.”
Waters discusses the little-known film on a podcast that was made available this month by City Arts & Lectures (www.cityarts.net), a San Francisco-based non-profit that produces talks, concerts and other performances by leading figures in the arts.
The podcast is an edited recording of an hour-long conversation that Waters had last May with actress and interviewer Aubrey Plaza before a large audience at the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco. The event was broadcast this summer on KQED-FM, co-producer of the program, and other public radio stations. Waters, 77, appeared while on a book tour marking the release of the paperback edition of his first novel, “Liarmouth: A Feel-Bad Romance.”
As part of a wide-ranging discussion, Plaza observed that going to jail or prison is a theme in many of Waters’ movies. Being in jail, or threatened with going to jail, are plot points in “Female Trouble,” “Hairspray,” “Cry-Baby,” “Serial Mom,” and “Cecil B. Demented,” among others. Waters’ novel “Liarmouth” follows Marsha Sprinkle, a woman who steals luggage at the airport, and her efforts to stay ahead of the law.
“What is your thing about prison?” Plaza asked Waters. “Have you ever been in prison?”
Her question prompted Waters to open up about his experience teaching inmates at Patuxent and the film they made there. Located halfway between Baltimore and Washington, D. C., in Jessup, Maryland, Patuxent is a treatment-oriented, maximum-security correctional facility for sentenced criminals in Maryland. It opened in 1955 with the mission of ensuring public safety through the psychotherapeutic treatment of individuals who have demonstrated persistent antisocial and criminal behavior.
Housing more than 1,000 inmates, Patuxent is staffed by psychiatrists, social workers, psychologists and other civilian employees experienced in delivering “evidence-based, therapeutic services” to men and women who are incarcerated.
According to the state of Maryland, treatment primarily occurs in the context of therapy groups that are “cognitive-behavioral” in orientation. Groups address issues such as “criminogenic thinking and behavior; emotional regulation; mindfulness; interpersonal effectiveness; distress tolerance; victim awareness; traumatic experiences and addiction,” but participants don’t all follow the same curriculum. Each inmate receives an individualized treatment plan based on a formal assessment of their history, risk level and needs.
In the 1970s, before Waters taught there, Patuxent had the reputation of being a “Clockwork Orange” prison because some inmates were allegedly shocked and brainwashed as part of their psychiatric treatment. Its mission and procedures have changed somewhat over the years, but it has continued to engage psychiatrists, psychologists and educators to work with inmates, with the goal of rehabilitation. Its unique program and willingness to try new approaches is what enabled administrators — Warden Norma Gluckstern at the time — to take a chance on unconventional lecturers such as Waters.
Waters wrote about his years teaching at Patuxent in the “Going to Jail” chapter of his 1987 book of essays, “Crackpot: The Obsessions of John Waters.” He explained that he was hired to teach college-level English, and that as part of his class he showed and discussed movies, including some of his own. He called it “my first real job” and said he enjoyed it. “I can’t help it,” his chapter begins. “I enjoy the company of murderers, rapists and child molesters.”
In his book, Waters discussed the unusual nature of Patuxent and his “experimental” course. He said approximately half the inmates at Patuxent were murderers and 40 percent were sex offenders; the inmates’ average age was 24 and the average sentence was 30 years. He noted that the inmates’ violent crimes were sometimes their first offense.
“Patuxent is the only institution of its kind in the country, and I think it works,” he said. “The inmates have not been found legally insane, but they might have if they had been able to hire better counsel. All inmates are under full psychiatric treatment and must be accepted into the institution. If the Board of Review feels they are not responding, they are dumped back into the regular prison system…Patuxent even has its own parole board outside the state jurisdiction, and its recidivism rate is much lower than that of other institutions.”
According to the website IMDb, the classes were meant as rehabilitation therapy for convicted killers, in which they learn to write about their violent fantasies rather than act them out. Waters taught there in the mid-1980s – after he completed Polyester (1981) and before Hairspray (1988). He began in 1983 by guest-lecturing in the class of another instructor, Harvey Alexander, and later was hired as a teacher.
Waters wrote in “Crackpot” that he learned the warden, knowing he was a filmmaker, had feared he might want to make a documentary about Patuxent, the way Frederick Wiseman exposed conditions at the Massachusetts Correctional Institution Bridgewater, a state hospital for the criminally insane, in his 1967 film, “Titicut Follies.” He assured her that was not the case because he thoughtPatuxent was doing “a great job,” and that helped assuage her concerns.
In his chapter about teaching at Patuxent, Waters wrote about exploring the possibility of making a movie with the inmates, maybe “a prison comedy, one that would concentrate on the ridiculousness of their situation rather than on the horror.” He said the students proposed ideas for a screenplay and taped some improvisations with acting partners, and that one student suggested the title “Reckless Eyeballs,” but he didn’t go into detail about any specific film project. His conversation with Plaza, and his answers to an audience member’s questions, shed more light on what he did.
“We made a movie in jail with them,” he told Plaza. “This is when they allowed it. You had to sign up for my class and the first day, two-thirds quit. But the ones that stayed were great.”
The prison didn’t separate him from the inmates or provide any extra security for him, he said.
“I was just in the room with them with no guards or anything, and most of them were murderers,” he said. “But I was scared of the guards.”
The inmates took on various roles in the film, based on their own traits.
“I made them play the opposite of themselves,” Waters said. “So the bikers were the girls. The child molesters were the tough guys. The Blacks were rich. The whites were the…servants, and everybody played the opposite of themselves.”
Waters had told Plaza earlier in their conversation that he thinks he would have been a good psychiatrist if he hadn’t become a writer and filmmaker. He called himself a “closet psychiatrist.”
In making the film with inmates, “it was a psychiatric thing to say: What is the opposite of yourself? What would you say is the opposite of yourself?” he explained. “I guess I’d be a hetero sports fan that likes Yanni.”
There was no script for the film. Waters said it was shot on video, in the prison classroom during class time, with a radio playing in the background.
“We’d wait for a song to come on the radio,” he said. “There was no editing. We shot it in order with each take. Close up. Wide shot. There was no editing because we just had one video camera.”
“Reckless eyeballing” is a term that refers to the act of looking around instead of keeping one’s eyes on the ground. In the Jim Crow era, it was used to describe Black people making eye contact with white people. ‘Reckless Eyeballing’ is the title of a 1986 novel by Ishmael Reed and a 2005 underground film by Christopher Harris. Reckless Eyeballs is the title of a print that Waters made in 2006 and a solo art exhibit that Waters had at Rena Bransten Gallery in San Francisco in 2007.
The phrase had a particular meaning at Patuxent, Waters said: “That’s a charge you can get in prison for giving a dirty look to a guard: Reckless eyeballs. That’s a good title, isn’t it?”
At the end of the class, he gave each of his students a present, of sorts.
“The last day we had the premiere, and I gave everybody a ‘Get Out of Jail Free’ card, from Monopoly.”
Waters is a proponent of two ideas related to crime and incarceration: that most people aren’t inherently evil and that no one is past rehabilitation. He believes in the opposite of original sin, that no one is born guilty. He believes that people can change.
That comes out in his movies, his writing, and in the talks and interviews he gives. “I think all of my work is about how nobody (well mostly nobody!) is born evil,” he said in a 2022 interview with The Chicago Review of Books. “I don’t think anybody was born bad,” he told The New York Times. “They can get better,” he told The Frederick News-Post.
For years, Waters was an advocate for the release from prison of Leslie Van Houten, a former member of the Manson family who was convicted of two counts of first-degree murder and one count of conspiracy to commit murder in 1971 for her involvement in the 1969 LaBianca murders in Los Angeles. On July 11, after 53 years in prison, Van Houten was released after California Gov. Gavin Newsom said he wouldn’t fight a state appeals court’s ruling that she should be granted parole. She had been denied parole more than 20 times before and now lives in a transitional facility.
Waters has also spoken and written about his own brushes with the law, including his obscenity battles with the Maryland State Board of Censors and its longtime head, Mary Avara. In the late 1960s, he and his friends were arrested and charged with “conspiracy to commit indecent exposure” while filming his movie “Mondo Trasho” on the Johns Hopkins University campus without permission. He was taken to the old Northern District police station on Keswick Road in Baltimore’s Hampden neighborhood, and his arrest made the cover of Variety magazine.
The scene in question featured the 300-pound drag actor Divine driving a bright red Cadillac convertible, about to pick up a naked hitchhiker. They filmed it on a Sunday morning, hoping no one else would be around. As Waters tells it, a campus security guard called the police and he and his film crew were arrested, but Divine and the naked hitchhiker got away.
That didn’t make the local police look good, Waters said in a 2014 interview with the Johns Hopkins “Hub”: “He was in a red 1959 Cadillac Eldorado convertible with the top down and a gold lame toreador outfit with a nude man in the car – in November. And they couldn’t catch him,” he said.
On a more serious note, Waters was involved in a car accident that resulted in a man’s death, but it wasn’t his fault. He wrote about the incident in his 2010 book, “Role Models.”
“In 1970, Mink Stole and I were driving up Broadway, a Baltimore thoroughfare that is divided by a safety island,” he wrote. “It was Sunday early afternoon, we were not on drugs or liquor, and an elderly man, without looking, stepped off the curb right in front of my car. His body flipped up and landed on the hood with his face pressed towards mine through the driver side’s windshield.”
The man turned out to be the peanut vendor at Broadway Market. A crowd gathered around the car. “Luckily,” Waters wrote, ”a cop approached and said, ‘I saw it all happen and it wasn’t your fault.’ “
The officer later testified in court that he saw the man “just walk into oncoming traffic, without looking,” Waters wrote. Because of his testimony, the court hearing ended quickly and Waters wasn’t convicted of any wrongdoing. Even though the incident wasn’t his fault, Waters wrote, “I certainly felt horrified…This awful experience will never leave me.”
In his conversation with Plaza, Waters said teaching in prison “changed me a lot…I got a lot less flippant about it and I understand about victims’ rights, too. And I still visit people in prison.”
One reason he has empathy for inmates, he suggested, is that he believes he might have wound up in prison himself, under different circumstances.
“I could have ended up there, maybe, if I didn’t have the parents I had, and I didn’t have the outlet of my movies to let me commit every violent, crazy [act],” he said. “I’m not a violent person. I’ve never hit anybody in my life. But I had an outlet for my criminal activities.”
His comment was a throwback to advice he gave the inmates at Patuxent, as he recalled in a 1991 British documentary, “John Waters — The Incredibly Strange Film Show”: “I told them, look, the next time you want to murder somebody, don’t do it,” he said. “Write a movie about it. Paint it. Write a poem about it. Because these films are my crimes, only I get paid for them” instead of doing time.
He expressed a similar thought in “Crackpot,” saying that a psychiatrist “once suggested that if I didn’t have the outlet for rage that my films provide, I might be in prison myself.”
In addition to advocating for Van Houten, “I did help one person get out,” Waters said in San Francisco. “That was a double murderer and he’s doing great…He served 27 years and he was 16 [when he went to prison]. I understand why the victims don’t think he should get out, but I’m arguing it from a society viewpoint.“
The City Arts & Lectures podcast bleeped out curse words from the Goldstein Theater conversation. It also cut one of the more memorable exchanges, which started with Plaza’s opening question to Waters: “If your penis could talk, what would it say?”
“Things are looking up!” he responded.
Plaza, 39, has her own connection with crime stories. She co-produced and starred in the 2022 thriller, “Emily the Criminal,” which Waters praised. Known for her TV roles in “Parks and Recreation” and the second season of “The White Lotus,” for which she received an Emmy nomination, Plaza has been mentioned as a possible candidate to be in Waters’ next movie, an adaptation of “Liarmouth,” but no casting announcements have been made.
“John Waters: Pope of Trash” opens to the public on Sept. 17 at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, 6067 Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles, and runs through Aug. 4, 2024. The day after the museum exhibit opens, Waters will receive a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
