Waters advocates pushing standards

Acclaimed avant-garde filmmaker John Waters spoke in Levering Union Wednesday night, describing his long career in film, his life growing up in Baltimore and his lifelong desire to obliterate cultural standards of decency.

Presented as a part of The Diverse Sexuality and Gender Alliance's (DSAGA) Awareness Days, Waters gave some insight into the childhood hobbies that led to his obsession with the ironic and the outrageous behaviors of modern Americans. As a Baltimore native and a current resident of the Hampden neighborhood, Waters said he credits most of his inspiration to the city and its inhabitants.

"People don't realize that most of my movies are documentaries," Waters said after describing his current film project, A Dirty Shame. The movie, based on a block of west Baltimore Waters coined "the new Hampden," is based on a group of deranged sex addicts who try to take over the small neighborhood.

Some of his more famous-and tamer-films, including Pecker and Hairspray, have managed to break into the mainstream media. Hairspray has been made into a Broadway musical and has attracted big names in theater and music production. While Waters has only made two or three mainstream cinema films, his repertoire was built on a slew of shocking and perverse reels that have featured big names such as Ricki Lake, Johnny Depp and Kathleen Turner.

His earliest eight-millimeter movies featured a drag queen named Divine. Waters said of his initial film making, "We didn't know what we were doing. We would just drive around, find a scene and shoot it."

One of his first films, Eat Your Makeup, was about a deranged governess who captured supermodels and made them eat their makeup. The irony and madness of films like Makeup led people to question his sanity as well as his drug use but also developed a large fan base for his ultra-shocking films.

Responding to questions about his personal drug use, Waters said, "Yes, we were on drugs. I accidentally smoked crack last year, but I haven't smoked pot in 10 years." Waters did not condone modern drug use, saying, "You all have 'E.' Who wants to love everybody? That sounds like hell to me."

Throughout his life, Waters' obsession with crime and deviance led him into courtrooms and prisons, the most famous of which were the Manson and Watergate trials. Waters said his favorite film is Family Trouble, a movie based on a woman who wants to be famous and kills people in order to get sent to the electric chair. While dark and amusing at the same time, Waters conceded that Family Trouble was probably more realistic nowadays than it was at the time.

Waters said his first inspirations were Lady Zorro, a stripper at a local Baltimore Vaudeville club, and Crocker Babb, the maker of a documentary film called Mom and Dad. The film Mom and Dad featured the birth of a baby, and marked the first time frontal nudity was shown in theaters. Appropriately, Waters' legacy at Hopkins includes his arrest for "conspiring to commit indecent exposure" on the Homewood campus. Waters and his crew were trying to shoot The Nude Hitchhiker when the Baltimore police chased down Waters and his crew.

Associate Director of Film and Media Studies Linda Delibero said Waters was the "Pope of Trash" and "has consistently made mincemeat of community values of sex, family and gender."

In keeping with his persona, Waters gave numerous suggestions for how students as well as adults should treat gender, race and sexual orientation lines.

"Everyone has limits," he said, telling the audience to push community standards and disregard existing standards. Waters defined his own limit as adult infantilism, saying that even he, the "Sultan of Sleaze" could not handle pictures of adults in diapers.

Waters said he wants to switch from using his old, mechanical cameras to digital filmmaking.

"The next masterpiece of deviance is coming from the Internet and from digital film," he said.