Dreamlander George Figgs, Who Played Jesus in John Waters’ First Talking Feature, Still Loves Movies

“When John asked me to play Jesus, I was taking so much acid at the time, I thought I was Jesus,” George Figgs, with a mischievous grin, tells the audience after a recent Maryland Film Festival showing of Multiple Maniacs, John Waters’ first talking feature.

Screened in its original 16mm format, the 1970 black comedy holds up surprisingly well. An irreverent, profane commentary on the hippies vs. straights battles of its day—think Woke Left vs. MAGA—the guerrilla film satirizes middlebrow suburbia, sanctimonious politics, and, especially, the sexual mores of the Catholic Church. (“I thank God I was raised Catholic,” Waters once said, “so sex will always be dirty.”)

Figgs, now 78 and pictured above at Beyond Video, actually attended seminary for a year before finding his calling as a Waters’ ensemble Dreamlander.

“Multiple Maniacs is my favorite of John’s films and not because I’m Jesus,” continues Figgs, who acted in 10 of Waters’ movies. “It’s because I participated [while dying on the cross] in one of high-water marks of blasphemy in cinema history.” For those who have not had the pleasure, that “high-water mark” would be Mink Stole’s notorious “rosary job” on Divine in a church pew.

Figgs first met Waters and the other future Dreamlanders, including Susan Lowe and Mary Vivian Pierce—also on hand after the Maniacs screening—at Martick’s restaurant and downtown art-house theaters. They soon shifted to Pete’s Bar in Fells Point, described as “a wino bar” by Waters, with several Dreamlanders moving into a co-op known as the Hollywood Bakery next door.

For his part, Figgs maintained a 20-year, psychedelic folk career amid his Dreamlander roles, cutting a record and touring with T-Bone Walker. He performed at venues like Greenwich Village’s Cafe Wha? while residing at the artist-haven Hotel Albert—where The Mamas & the Papas penned “California Dreamin’.” In fact, we have Figgs to thank for singing and playing “The Streets of Baltimore”—possibly the best song ever about the city—to Gram Parsons, who helped make it famous.

Movies, however, remained Figgs’ first love, if not as an actor, as a curator. In the 1980s, he became a projectionist, handling the rushes for several Hollywood films shot here (see our January cover story, on newsstands now). In 1991, he returned to Fells Point and opened the beloved Orpheum Cinema on the second floor of a converted stable, screening an eclectic mix of noir, B-films, and foreign, cult, and underground classics. For a period, he drove a cab to support the theater, a 10-year mission he calls “the best thing I did in my life.”

To this day, he still helps curate a film series at Motor House. La Strada, All About Eve, On the Waterfront, El Topo, The King of Marvin Gardens, Nostalgia, and The Wizard of Oz, which he first saw in its Technicolor re-release as a kid in Hampden, are on his all-time personal best list.

“My backstory is my mother had a nervous breakdown, and the babysitter next door took me to the movies and left me there,” explains Figgs of his lifelong obsession with film.

“I was in the movies daily at the tender age of 6. It was ‘Lorenzian imprinting,’” he says, referencing scientist Konrad Lorenz’s discovery that geese would bond with and follow the first thing they saw after hatching, often him. “It became my mother. At The Hampden and The Ideal in the ’50s, I saw all the westerns, all the gangster pictures, all the film noirs. It was the regular fare for neighborhood theaters then.

“For that feeling of being enveloped, that transcendent experience, you have to be in a theater,” Figgs says. “It has to be bigger than you, and you have to share that experience with other people.”