At age 73, John Waters isn't planning on going anywhere, but he does know what he wants his obituary to say.
"It should say that I made trash one bit more respectable," said Waters. "That's what I was put here on earth to do."
In a wide-ranging talk at the First Parish Unitarian/Universalist in Cambridge, acclaimed cult filmmaker and LGBT icon Waters talked about his new book, Mr. Know-It-All, told stories about his filmmaking career, and dished out life advice. Waters told the crowd of 300 that although he doesn't know how or when he'll go, he said he does know where he wants to go when the time comes. After a negative experience with a high-pressure salesperson at the cemetery where his parents were buried, he decided to be buried near collaborator and drag performer Divine, who was in many of Waters’ early films. "I went back to where Divine was buried. In fact, all my friends have bought plots there...we call it Disgraceland."
After showing him this chart, he pointed to the word 'Genius,' and said, "I'd never say that about myself." But Waters, who has been honored at film festivals around the world and nominated for a Grammy, doesn't need to say it for himself. He's got plenty of other people to say it for him. Early films of his, like Polyester, that were banned by censors and panned by critics, are now being reissued by the Criterion Collection, which preserves and distributes classic films.
Waters' career was not a tale of instant success, and certainly not instant acclaim. His early films made so little money that sites that track box office revenue have no records of them. Critics panned his work. Waters aimed to shock them, and his aim was pretty good.
One notable review of Waters' “Female Trouble” by film critic Rex Reed asked, “Where do these people come from? Where do they go when the sun goes down? Isn’t there a law or something?” Waters used outraged reviews like these as publicity: He put quotes from Reed's review on movie posters.
Source: Box Office Mojo, IMDB
Waters wasn't deterred by small budgets or harsh critics. He persisted, finding a cult audience who loved his work. After the release of “Polyester,” Waters caught Hollywood's interest, and in 1988, he released “Hairspray,” which catapulted Waters from cult film director to mainstream fame.
Waters has worked as a director, actor, producer, writer, and author, but the great role of Waters' life has been playing himself, which he has done 189 times.
The crowd at First Parish asked Waters for all different kinds of advice.
He urged parents to respect their kids as they are and told kids to forgive their parents: "You can't order up your kids, and you can't order up your parents,” he said. “But after the age of thirty or so, you have to let it go. Stop whining about it."
For young writers, he emphasized plenty of reading and plenty of commitment: "Read, read, read everything you can possibly read, and write every day. I write every day from 8 to 11:30,” said Waters. “The hardest thing is to get a first draft. You read it and think, 'Who wrote this thing?!' My advice is, just start. Every day at 7:59 I don't want to do it. Every day at 8:01, I'm doing it."
In Waters’ most recent book, “Mr. Know It All,” he related his experience taking LSD at age 70. Speaking about it on Monday, he said: "I did it fifty years ago, but I did it again at 70. A really strong dose, too. … I was hallucinating for 12 hours,” said Waters. “My mother used to say 'Don't tell young people to take drugs.' I'm not telling young people to take drugs. I'm telling old people to take drugs.”
For a man who frequently plays himself, Waters is surprisingly low profile when it comes to social media. So low profile that he doesn't have any social media accounts. While filmmaker Jordan Peele has millions of followers on Instagram and Twitter, apart from public appearances like the one he made in Cambridge on Monday, Waters takes missives from fans in only one way: They can write to him care of Baltimore's Atomic Books. In fact, the cover of “Mr. Know-It-All” is by an artist he came to know because she sent him a package with a portrait of the singer Johnny Mathis.
As the evening wrapped up, Waters left the audience with one piece of advice on love. "If you're going to say it, just whisper it to them while they're asleep. And not at any other time."
