THE CINESKINNY THE
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THESKINNY.CO.UK / CINESKINNY
N0 1 | 15 – 17 FEB
Thu 16 Feb, GFT, 9.00pm
An Audience with the Pope (of Trash) John Waters’ little-seen sophomore feature Multiple Maniacs is getting a revival. Despite its new polish, it’s as outrageously grotesque as ever. The filmmaker takes us back to its making at the tail end of the 60s
J
ohn Waters has been transgressing ever since he was in short trousers. His original sin, appropriately enough, happened in a house of God. “My mother told me the first thing she remembers me rebelling against is that I refused to take the Legion of Decency pledge in church,” the 70-year-old filmmaker tells us proudly down the phone from San Francisco. The
pledge was an initiative of the Catholic Church to identify and combat objectionable content in motion pictures. The young John Waters’ beef was that these were exactly the films he loved. “I wanted to see condemned movies! It inspired me to see condemned movies! And I wanted to make them!” The pint-sized revolutionary wouldn’t know it at the time, but two decades later he would make a movie so outrageously filthy that it would be described by those same Bible-thumpers as “the most disgusting film ever.” While there’s nothing explicit in the Good Book about transvestites eating dog poop, Pink Flamingos – Waters’ riotous third feature – went straight to the top of the Legion of Decency’s shit list.
Interview: Jamie Dunn
We can only presume they hadn’t seen Waters’ sophomore effort, Multiple Maniacs, for it contains a sex scene so uproariously blasphemous that it makes the antics in Pink Flamingo look rather quaint. “Even I look at that now and think what my father used to always say to me, ‘What were you thinking about?’” admits Waters. Picture the scene. Lady Divine (played by drag queen Divine, Waters’ larger-than-life muse), a fierce freak show impresario who makes a living by robbing her patrons at gunpoint, has just been raped by a man in drag and has stumbled into a church for sanctuary. Inside, she’s hit-on by Mink (played by Mink Stole, another Waters regular), a prostitute wearing a nun’s continues…