Thelma Adams: Novelist, Critic, Oscar Expert

Thelma Adams, Oscars, Playdate, Marie Claire, Movie Reviews, Interviews, New Releases, New York Film Critics, Celebrities, Personal Essays, Parenting, Commentary, Women, Women\'s Issues, Motherhood

Waters, Dr. John Waters

By Leave a Comment

Waters doctored up at RISD

Waters doctored up at RISD

“I didn’t change; society did,” John Waters told the graduating class of the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) yesterday at the Rhode Island Convention Center. John aka The People’s Pervert aka The Prince of Puke got an honorary doctorate — but not tenure — as he told the 667 graduates assembled and their families the secrets to his success and exhorted the students to ” “Remember, you must participate in the creative world you want to become part of…. Keep up with what’s causing chaos in your own field…. Read, read, read. Spy, be nosy, eavesdrop!”

Here’s a portion of his speech:

In a recently published interview I conducted for Columbia: A Journal of Art and Literature, Waters discussed how the culture has changed since he made Pink Flamingos:

“That’s the whole point of my films: what parent would be liberal enough to be thrilled for her son in drag eating dog shit [like Divine did]? That was the whole reason Pink Flamingos was successful. Can you imagine if my parents saw this?….Now people bring their children to see Pink Flamingos. It’s amazing how things have changed even though I haven’t, really. My last film got an NC 17 rating. I try to keep up with the times. Carsick and Role Models were both on the New York Times bestseller list. I could have gone to jail for those books in the ’50s. Lenny Bruce went to jail for saying “fuck.” “Howl” was a huge case. It’s amazing what is on cable TV now that makes [Bruce and Allen Ginsberg] look pale.”

 

 

The Manson Family, Mommy Porn and Love Maps: Still Waters Runs Deep

By 4 Comments

John Waters

John Waters

(This interview first appeared in Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art.)

The holy grail of the interviewer is ferreting out the nugget, the defining truth, the revelation that we have, like big game hunters, captured our prey (on paper or video). For me, the best interviews are nosy and messy and reveal a curiosity about the human condition and a generosity of spirit. These qualities define artist John Waters’ work as a filmmaker, author, television personality, raconteur – and interviewer.

On stage last June at Waters’ annual “Filmmaker on the Edge” interview at the Provincetown International Film Festival, the 68-year-old Baltimore native asked Naked Lunch Director David Cronenberg if he’d done drugs with the source material’s author, William Burroughs. “No,” the Oscar-nominated Canadian replied, “I think at that time, he was just doing methadone.” Waters confessed, “I smoked pot with him.” Whereupon Cronenberg genially one-upped his interrogator, saying he’d accompanied Burroughs to Tangier, Morocco and witnessed the beat writer’s reunion with writer/composer/subject Paul Bowles after 17 years apart. Talk about a collision of hipster culture: That was an interview!

What is most impressive about Waters, besides the fact that he could charm a crack stash from a Baltimore junkie straight out of The Wire, is how he seamlessly mixes high and low culture, from tea-bagging to the mainstream, popular singer Johnny Mathis. And, for those who just know him as the director of outsider art Pink Flamingos and mainstreamed Hairspray, the hyper-organized multi-hyphenate is a voracious reader, his annual top ten films list appears in highbrow Artforum and his last two books, Carsick and Role Models, were New York Times Bestsellers.

Every winter Waters takes his pencil mustache and trademark Comme Des Garcon jackets on the road with “A John Waters Christmas,” an outrageous holiday stand-up act. It even played in Poughkeepsie, where I had the out-of-body experience of being at the absolute epicenter of cool in that upstate town. After the show, I went backstage to congratulate Waters in the claustrophobic institutional green room and encountered Rachel Weisz and Daniel Craig, who had come backstage to praise Waters’ show – and share Baltimore stories. James Bond and “The Pope of Trash,” together in 144 square feet of space . . . . You don’t need hallucinogens to find the life circling John psychedelic, a mix of high and low, old world courtesy and trash talk and bold-faced names.

When Waters picks up the phone, having apologized for being fifteen minutes late, he says: “I’m having a bad day but I won’t take it out on you.”

Columbia Journal: Anything big?

John Waters: Nothing I will remember in a week.

Recently I was discussing Birdman with Alejandro G. Inarritu and the Oscar-winning writer-director said, “The definition of intelligence is the capacity to have two completely opposite ideas living at the same time and at the same time to be capable of functioning, the battle with a double nature.” Could you describe yourself in those terms?

Having two completely different ideas is the only thing that ever interests me. Everything I ever write about I don’t understand. To me I wrote about things that I can never fully understand. Even [Manson “Family” member] Leslie Van Houten: It’s a different thing to make a movie about murdering than doing the deed. It’s difficult to have the huge success Johnny Mathis did without racism and never going off deep end. I’m always interested in people that have more extreme lives than I have, good or bad, and things that are not easy, or why they acted the way they did. That’s the human condition. [Read more…]

John Waters on Why He Pays to See David Cronenberg Movies

By Leave a Comment

John Waters, raconteur, filmmaker, writer and voracious cultural consumer

John Waters, raconteur, filmmaker, writer and voracious cultural consumer

I’m with John. He pays to see Cronenberg movies for the same reason I buy my friends’ books when they come out. Because that’s how you show your support. Waters says go see the movie Friday night and pay. While I was in Provincetown, I bought a copy of Waters’ Carsick and am happy to report that not only did I support the local bookstore (which, OK, smelled heavily of cat pee), but I used my credit card to help put that book on the NYT bestseller list in my small way. And, then, when I opened the book and read his fantasy of getting picked up by a manly dude and invited to ride shotgun at a demolition derby, I was truly amazed that John had done it again: taken me to a place I’d never been before with a guide I trusted to both make me laugh and gross me out.

Here’s his introduction of David Cronenberg at the Provincetown Film Festival:

“David Cronenberg has been honored in this country, in Canada, and all over the world, yet Martin Scorsese commented that he was scared to actually meet him. I was drunk the first time I met him. It was at William Burroughs 70th birthday at The Limelight about 30 years ago. And God knows I have been his fan forever, and I have paid, even, to see every one of his movies. I go see them on the first Friday night when it counts….

“Some say he’s created his own genre, and the word Cronenberg-esque needs no explanation. I think he argues that, and truthfully, because some of his films are so different from the others, so maybe Cronenberg-esque just means great, which I think it does….”

John Waters and David Cronenberg Get Naked – ‘Naked Lunch’ – in Gay Mecca Provincetown

By Leave a Comment

Cronenberg, Winger, Waters at the Provincetown Film Festival (via capecodonline)

Cronenberg, Winger, Waters at the Provincetown Film Festival (via capecodonline)

Directors David Cronenberg and John Waters incite in me the excitement often reserved for teenage girls at the premiere of The Fault in Our Stars. The pair are the definition of sophisticated no bullshit, two men very much in touch with their obsessions and capable of drawing an audience along. Over the course of their wide-ranging discussion on the Provincetown Town Hall stage, their dialog trended toward Cronenberg’s adaptation of William S. Burroughs novel Naked Lunch.

When I’m asked about successful literary adaptations, Cronenberg’s 1991 hallucinogenic fantasy starring Peter Weller and Judy Davis is high on the list. Here’s a bit of the conversation between icons Cronenberg and Waters:

JOHN WATERS: Remember when we got to say, how did they ever make a movie out of Lolita? Well, I think with Naked Lunch you did a wonderful job, so how was Burroughs with you?

DAVID CRONENBERG:Burroughs was great. His public persona was very intimidating, and he was very sort of plastic and cynical, and kind of mean. But on personal time, he was really quite sweet, and very generous. He loved the concept. He loved the script that I had written. I did submit it to him but said, really, I don’t think I can make this movie just from your book. I don’t know if you’ve read the Naked Lunch, but it’s a difficult one to think of as a movie.

I said, I feel I need to incorporate a lot of stuff from your actual life…I understand if you don’t want me to, and in particular, I was talking to the fact that he shot his wife, which was a crucial moment, of course, in his life, but also as a writer. He said, I don’t separate my life and my art, and you can just go ahead….

JW: Did you do drugs with him?

DC: No. Actually, at that time I think he was just doing methadone.

JW: Oh, methadone. Got it. I smoked pot with him. Did you go to the bunker, or –

JC:: I didn’t, but I did go to Tangier with him.

JW:: Oh, wow.

DC: And met Paul Bowles, whom he hadn’t seen for seventeen years. I sat right down with the two of them, the authors of Naked Lunch and The Sheltering Sky, so there is a connection. [He looks out into the audience and sees Debra Winger, who starred in Bernardo Bertolucci’s film adaptation of Bowles’ classic novel set in North Africa.] Bizarre, but it is there.

Video: John Waters Makes us ‘Carsick’ on ‘The Colbert Report’

By Leave a Comment

I saw John Waters perform his hilarious and filthy Christmas spectacular at Poughkeepsie’s Bardavon Theater a year ago. Afterwards, my husband and I went backstage and bumped into Daniel Craig and Rachel Weisz in the greenroom. Not quite Divine returned from the grave, but still.

Never underestimate how far and wide Waters’ appeal stretches. What I love about John is how funny and connected he is in the moment, and how widely read and culturally savvy. He now has a new book, a combination of fiction and travelogue about hitchhiking from Baltimore to San Francisco called Carsick: John Waters Hitchhikes Across America. Here he is with Stephen Colbert doing the dog-and-pony show and nailing it:

I’m betting the highlight of my summer culture calendar will occur when Waters interviews “Filmmaker on the Edge” David Cronenberg at the Provincetown Film Festival. I think Waters is a great interview but what I discovered at Provincetown on Cape Cod is that he was also a terrific interviewer.