John Waters: Ironic John

"Do you see movies in a theater or wait for them to come to you on video?" I ask. Almost everyone I know waits for the video.

"Oh, I go see them in the theater, or I don't see them. I never watch videos, except at the end of the year when they send out the Oscar videos, and then my house is like Blockbuster for my friends. I like all kinds of movies, except romantic comedies. I really should walk out on them, but when a film is so terrible that I want to walk out, I just stay and make snide comments that drive people up the wall because they're so engrossed with the movie. I hate romantic comedies because I hate manipulative, feel-good movies. And really, when was romance ever a comedy? And I won't name the films I'm talking about, either. Although I thought Titanic was fine. I saw it the day it opened, before I heard any of the hype. I liked The Poseidon Adventure too, though. I liked Das Boot. I guess I like tragedies on boats."

"Do you vote every year for the Academy Awards?"

"Oh yes, religiously. I love voting."

"Do the movies you vote for usually win?" I ask this because Waters seems so outside the Academy it's hard to imagine that he's even close.

"You're not supposed to tell," he says in all seriousness. "That's the rule in the Academy, and I'm a rabid Academy member."

When we stop at a light and a tawdry hooker walks by, we sit in stone silence until she gets to the other side of the street. "I heard you were once a judge for the Porno Oscars [Adult Video News Awards]."

Waters smiles. "Yes, that was fun, let me tell you. They sent me so many tapes. I think there's only one real male porno star, and that's Jeff Stryker. I've met him a couple of times. He's so great, and here's why--everybody is always trying to get out of porno and into 'legitimate' movies, whatever the hell that means. But he's the opposite. He doesn't want to be in regular movies, and when I met with him, he tried to convince me to make a porno movie."

"Do you think porno has gotten better or worse now that everyone has their own video camera?"

"Better in a lot of ways, because some of these people are very creative. It's very curious to see the politics of sperm in movies today. In straight movies they don't use rubbers and they fuck up the ass, which to me is like watching a snuff movie. In gay movies they always use rubbers. Am I allowed to talk about this stuff?"

"Oh, absolutely," I assure him.

"In gay movies they use rubbers 100 percent of the time. The, um, uh I'm trying to figure out how to say this properly."

"I doubt there's a way to say it properly."

"Basically, the gay pornography industry is much more sexually correct, I guess you would say. The reason I'm really interested is it's the only real outlaw cinema left. But no, I won't ever make a porno film."

"There are people who think you already have," I say.

Waters gets hysterical. "True, true," he admits. "But that's because they're uptight Catholics. You know how it is."

"Not really," I tell him. "I'm Jewish."

"Oh, you don't have Catholic guilt, you have Jewish shame. That's the difference."

"It's a big difference, because if you're Catholic, they tell you you're bad from the beginning. If you're a Jew, your mother tells you that you're the best thing in the world. And then you can never live up to it."

"That's a good way to put it," says Waters, who was raised Catholic. "I think Jews are probably healthier. Catholics have better sex, though, because it's dirtier."

"Is that why there's a whole part of Pecker that's about pubic hair?"

"Have you ever been to Japan?" asks Waters. "Because when you get there they confiscate your magazines and cut out all the pictures of pubic hair. So you get the magazines back and they're ripped to shreds."

I'm trying to figure out what this has to do with Pecker, but I don't want to interrupt Waters. He's on a roll.

"In Maryland, you can't serve liquor where you show pubic hair," Waters continues. "So you either have to be sober in a strip club, which, believe me, not too many people want to do. Or you can serve booze and keep the pubic hair covered up. To me, that's the most bizarre rule. So I just played it up in the film."

"Do you have a boyfriend now?" I inquire.

"No, do you know anyone great for me? But he'd have to have his own house. I can't imagine why people want to live in the same house as the person they love. I have never understood that. I think they should come by, have dinner, have a great evening and go home so I can do what I want."

I don't have a snappy comeback to that, so I ask, "Do you own a home in Los Angeles?"

"Oh God no. I'm not in L.A. a lot. When I go, I live in the Chateau Marmont, where I've stayed for the past 25 years. I have great friends in L.A., but unfortunately, when I'm there, it's really important and all business, because either I'm gonna live for the next three years because a movie's going to be made, or I'm doing testing-- whatever it is, it's all high anxiety. So I try to get in and out as quickly as I can. My motto is, if they say 'yes' to you in Hollywood, run for your life before they change their mind. Don't hang around and let them see you at a party Friday night. Get out before their wives can say, 'Honey, what the hell were you thinking?'"

Waters points out other landmarks in Pecker's life, and some in his own. We drive around like that for about an hour more, looking at Laundromats and delis, used clothing stores and flea markets. "Wave," he says, suddenly, and I realize that we've been circling the same couple of blocks for some time now and that people on the street are waving at us. We both wave back. Now I am sufficiently dazzled.

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Martha Frankel interviewed Julia Louis-Dreyfus for the September '98 issue of Movieline.

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