John Waters was not of legal drinking age, which was 18 in Maryland, when he first ventured downtown to the now-legendary Martick’s Tyson Street Tavern. He was still in high school. “My mother would drive me from Lutherville to Martick’s and drop me off in the alley next door,” Waters says. “My mother was kind of amazing. She didn’t understand me, but she said, ‘Maybe you’ll meet people like you here.’ My parents were conservative, upper-middle class. How would she even know about a place like Martick’s?”

In mid-century Baltimore, a lunch-pail city no one yet described as quirky, charming, or artsy, Martick’s was one of few LGBTQ-friendly bars around. Although that term obviously wasn’t part of the vernacular of the early 1960s, when the crowd there included beatniks, cross-dressers, transgender individuals, and poets, artists, and musicians of all shapes and stripes.

His mother’s intuition proved spot on. Waters hung around outside and regulars snuck him drinks. When owner Morris Martick wasn’t around, they’d bring him inside. Waters not only met his tribe at Martick’s, but many of his future filmmaking co-conspirators. Among them: Emmy-winning casting director Pat Moran, who was then studying dance; actor, projectionist, and later Fells Point theater owner George Figgs; and bartender and model Maelcum Soul, who starred in two of Waters’ first films, Roman Candles and Eat Your Makeup and died at 27 of an overdose. “A true beatnik goddess,” says Waters, glancing at a framed photograph of Soul in his home office.

At the same time, Waters became friends with a heavyset, gay, neighborhood teenager named Harris Glenn Milstead, later famous as the 300-pound siren of Waters’ early films and by his stage name, Divine. As Waters’ circle grew, he was introduced to Van Smith and Vincent Peranio, who studied painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art and took up make-up artistry and set designing, respectively. He also met hairdresser-actor David Lochary, and actress Nancy Paine Stole, whom he nicknamed Mink. Childhood pal Mary Vivian Pearce was part of the crew and cast, too, all of whom shared an interest in art, film, and marijuana, and who Waters coined the Dreamlanders.

Notably, it was also at Martick’s where he met Harvey Alexander, who launched the Baltimore Film Festival in 1969. He showcased the fledging Waters’ short film The Diane Linkletter Story in 1970, and two years later, a certain outrageous, funny, sexual, gross, and occasionally banned movie named Pink Flamingos, officially released 50 years ago this month. (On St. Patrick’s Day, a nice coincidence for Waters and his subversive band, many of whom like him were rebelling against the heavy-handed Catholicism of their youth.)

Waters describes the film—made with $12,000 borrowed from his father—as “a terrorist act against the tyranny of good taste,” a pretty accurate tagline. The scandalous comedy was the first in Waters’ iconic trilogy, with Female Trouble (1974) and Desperate Living (1977), earning him the endearing moniker, The Pope of Trash. It was also an immediate underground hit in Baltimore, selling out nine shows over its first three days of screening.

“People who never came out of their closets came out [to see it],” Alexander told The Evening Sun, calling Pink Flamingos “the freak event of the year.”

For those who haven’t seen Pink Flamingos, a quick plot summary is in order. It may be disturbing, but it is not overly complicated. Divine plays an underground criminal femme fatale, who the tabloids have labeled “The Filthiest Person Alive.” Hiding out in a pink trailer on the outskirts of Baltimore County, with, yes, a pair of pink flamingos in the yard, she seeks anonymity (as if such a thing were possible) under the pseudonym “Babs Johnson.”

She lives with her mentally-ill mother, Edie (Edith Massey), wayward son, Crackers (Danny Mills), and companion, Cotton (Mary Vivian Pearce). Meanwhile, a pair of resentful rivals, the Marbles (David Lochary and Mink Stole), who deal heroin to inner-city children and kidnap and impregnate young hitchhikers—selling the offspring to lesbian couples—scheme to usurp Divine’s title. Voyeurism, vomiting, rape, castration, cannibalism, masturbation, murder, and more ensue.

Notoriously, Divine consumes dog feces in the closing scene. One of her birthday party celebrants, played by David Gluck, who remained anonymous until he passed away in June 2020, lip-syncs, if that’s the right term, The Trashman’s hit “Surfin’ Bird” with his anus for a full minute. It was the only movie appearance by Gluck, who became a Social Security computer analyst.

“When we had the 25th anniversary and Pink Flamingos was shown in regular theaters,” Waters told The Baltimore Sun, “he’d go to the movies and when his scene came on he’d tap the per- son on the shoulder in front of him and say, ‘That’s me.’” It is an anecdote as good as any that illustrates the weird but good-hearted humor beneath all of Waters’ films.

If you’re not a Baby Boomer, or Baby Boomer adjacent, you wouldn’t remember the rise of the cult classic and midnight movies, or that Pink Flamingos played a starring role in the 1970s phenomenon, predating The Rocky Horror Picture Show and David Lynch’s Eraserhead by several years. In fact, Pink Flamingos was the second original midnight film ever screened, after Alejandro Jodorowsky’s acid western El Topo, at New York’s innovative Elgin Theater, where the madness got started, and the first to receive national exposure.

Even if that were Pink Flamingos’ only cinematic contribution, it would have been remarkable. Banned in several cities, and several countries, the movie left an indelible mark on the cultural landscape that reverberates to this day. With its DIY ethos, retro, thrift shop wardrobes, neon-haired villains—try finding film characters before Raymond and Connie Marbles with similarly wild dye jobs—it was at once a precursor to the ’70s punk movement and a seminal example of independent filmmaking.

The sets were inexpensive. The furniture was what became known as midcentury modern. The whole thing has an anarchic Technicolor feel. Even the soundtrack blended genres, juxtaposing rockabilly, surf music, and the ’50s doo-wop of Waters’ youth. And with her bawdy, larger-than-life, and at times menacing presence—coupled with a touching vulnerability—Divine altered the course of drag and beyond, inspiring not just current smash hit RuPaul’s Drag Race but Ursula the Witch in The Little Mermaid, a Disney film of all things.

By 1971, a time of great cultural upheaval, there seemingly wasn’t much left to knock down regarding social mores and traditional “values,” one of Waters’ lifelong artistic themes. Whatever mores were left standing in 1971, he took a chainsaw to with Pink Flamingos, brandishing his own personal, peculiar, subversive sense of humor. If “flower power” hadn’t fully shaken suburban America from its slumber and stereotypes, perhaps raw shock would. In Waters’ films, the outcasts—the obese, homosexual, and neurotic—were depicted as family-oriented protagonists worth rooting for long before gay marriage, transgender rights, and body-positive campaigns were on anyone’s radar. Self-righteousness, jealousy, intolerance, cruelty, and pretentiousness were the enemy.

The irony is that several months ago, a half-century after it was derided by so many—in 1974, Variety called it “one of the most vile, stupid, and repulsive films ever made”—Pink Flamingos was named to the prestigious National Film Registry. The Criterion Collection also plans to restore the film and re-release it as part of their acclaimed trove.

“I wish I was from Baltimore,” says Susan Arosteguy of the Criterion Collection, by way of expressing her appreciation for Waters’ films. “It was a time and place that couldn’t happen again.”

“Pink Flamingos was a reaction to everything happening in the fall of 1971 when we made it,” says Waters, who was 25 when he wrote, directed, and produced the film. “Horror and exploitation movies were in theaters. Not just European art-house nudity, but pornography, too. Nothing was illegal. Nothing was against the law. That was the challenge.”

Pink Flamingos is such a part of the film canon, it’s almost impossible to remember how terrified “the squares” were by it. One person never amused by Waters’ films was Mary Avara, the ultra-conservative head of the Maryland State Board of Censors. During her tenure, from 1960 until the board’s demise in 1981, she became a celebrity in her own right for making things miserable for Waters. Once called “America’s Mother Superior of Censors,” she appeared on network TV defending her cultural gatekeeping to Dick Cavett and Johnny Carson, among others. “Waters!” she told one interviewer. “I don’t even want to discuss him. Makes my mouth feel dirty.”

“We really all did love film,” says Pat Moran, an original Dreamlander, who went on to win Emmys for casting on Homicide: Life on the Streets, HBO’s VEEP, and HBO’s Game Change. “We took it seriously. Although I’m not sure why,” she adds with a laugh. “We knew enough to show up on time and know your lines. We didn’t know what a gaffer was or any of the positions. It wasn’t happening in a vacuum, however,” Moran adds.

“We knew Andy Warhol, Jonas Mekas, and Jack Smith and the films they were making in New York.”

Waters, as most of his fans probably know by now, got kicked out of New York University’s film school for smoking pot. In expelling Waters, the university informed Mr. and Mrs. Waters that their son needed psychiatric counseling. Ambitious, smart, gay, artistic, and compulsively well-read, he found that his outrageous films were all the expression and therapy he required. As many Waters admirers also likely know, he was a puppeteer before he was a filmmaker, which he notes is rather common among directors. He served as the primary camera operator on all his films before Polyester in 1981 and refers to his earliest works as “my film school.”

 

“MY FAVORITE CHARACTERS ARE PEOPLE WHO THINK THEY’RE NORMAL BUT THEY’RE NOT. I LIVE IN BALTIMORE, AND IT’S FULL OF PEOPLE LIKE THAT.” —JOHN WATERS

 

Less common were his eclectic influences. He took equal pleasure and influence from high-brow, art house films—going to Ingmar Bergman films at Goucher College as a teenager—as well as sleazy exploitation films in downtown Baltimore theaters. “I was attracted to any type of extreme,” he says.

The 50th anniversary of Pink Flamingos has provided Waters the occasion to reflect on its making, which was a grind at times. The kind only possible when you’re young, he says. The outdoor scenes were shot during winter, often on weekends at Divine’s friend Bob Adams’ local farm—and 12-to-15-hour days was the norm. Divine and Van Smith would awaken before dawn to apply Divine’s makeup. At least with Pink Flamingos, no one was arrested during the shooting, as had been case during the making of Mondo Trasho.

“Pink Flamingos is an assault on the senses, but it’s not just an assault on the senses,” says Mink Stole, who would appear in nearly every Waters film over the course of a wide-ranging career. “The set designs, the juxtapositions, the color compositions of everything, the wardrobe—it was also a feast for the senses. I do also find it astounding, and I’m grateful, that 50 years later it is still out there and considered outrageous, and people give a whatever about what we did so long ago.”

Marketing and getting the film screened was another kind of creative process, and also a complete guerrilla operation. Not all filmmakers possess both skill sets, but Waters always has. Initially, that meant screenings in church basements, on college campuses, at art galleries, and tiny independent theaters. The goal in those days was simply making enough money to keep making films.

“With Pink Flamingos, I got the University of Baltimore to rent me directly the whole auditorium, and we had the premiere there,” Waters recalls. “There were posters and everything. It was Friday, Saturday, and Sunday shows at eight, 10, and midnight. And all three were filled out every night, and I could tell from the reaction that it worked. But then it took me years really to find the real distributor to put it out.”

The official trailer for the film eventually put out by then-new New Line Cinema remains a treasure. There’s not a single clip of the actual film, just reaction interviews on afterward with people leaving the theater in various states of shock, disgust, and delight.

Meanwhile, the censorship battles along the way were in real courtrooms with real judges and juries. As late as 1990, an Orange County, Florida, grand jury indicted a local video store for renting it to a 14-year-old. Inevitably, those episodes tickled Waters, well, pink.

“We never ever won a case, even though the Museum of Modern Art bought a print right in the beginning, which was pretty amazing,” Waters says. “I thought when they bought it for the permanent collection it would get us off with every jury.

“[Juries] weren’t impressed, because as I’ve said forever, but it’s really true: At midnight, with a group of people, Pink Flamingos is joyous. At 8 a.m., when you are being sworn in with strangers for jury duty, it is most definitely obscene.”

No one better represents Baltimore’s fringe arts scene than living icon John Waters. From putting his hometown and its off-beat characters on the big screen in Hairspray to sparking the city’s affection for kitschy plastic flamingos and drag queen Divine in Pink Flamingos, his five-decade arts career continues to this day—and his eccentricity does, too.

On October 7, the Baltimore Museum of Art will unveil John Waters: Indecent Exposure, a retrospective of his work dating back to the 1990s, featuring more than 160 photos, video clips, early films, photocopied drawings, sculptures, and assorted ephemera (like archival photos of John with Andy Warhol and the framed Joan Miró reproduction he bought at the BMA Shop when he was a child). We asked him to reflect on some of his favorites from the upcoming salon-style exhibit.

You’ve lived in Baltimore all your life, you’ve been exhibiting in the U.S. and abroad for some 20 years—why are you just now doing this massive exhibit in your hometown?
I think it’s the right time for me to come home and have a show at the Baltimore Museum [of Art]. I couldn’t have the first one there because people would’ve just said, “Oh, that’s just because he lives in Baltimore.” I had to go out in the rest of the world and build 20 years of exhibitions and museum shows and books. Now that I’ve done that, I think Baltimore is the perfect homecoming. It’s where I got my first taste for the love of how art can infuriate people.

Baltimore is so prominent in all your films. It’s not obvious to a viewer whether it’s prominent in your visual art as well. Is it?
No. It’s the only thing I do that has very little to do with Baltimore. Not completely. My studio is there. My art assistants are there. I have a piece about Mr. Ray, who was one of the most notorious hairdo lunatics on the radio in Baltimore for decades, that I idolized—and he was horrified that I liked him [laughs].

What is it about Baltimore that’s kept you here?
Everything—the sense of humor and the extreme style. Everything I wrote about, everything that informed me was always about taking what some people think is a negative thing and exaggerating it, turning it into a style, and having a sense of humor about it. Baltimoreans have always done that. I like living there now more than I ever did because it’s the only place left that has a bohemia. It’s gotten more expensive, but it’s still cheaper than anywhere else. And kids can still live there and start, you know, bohemia! And the music scene there, the people who have had national success—they stayed. They bought houses. I think that’s very, very important, to stay in Baltimore.

You see that happening with the younger generations of artists?
Yes, I do. I see musicians and artists that grew up in Baltimore didn’t leave when they got success, and students that came here decided to stay. That’s all kind of new and good. You don’t have to leave Baltimore anymore to have success. You might have to have people outside of Baltimore like [your work], but you don’t have to leave.

So getting back to your exhibit—I understand that you take photos of TV screens and rearrange them to create a new narrative.
Yes, most of the work is like that. This show is really about editing. I take images from other people’s movies and put them in a completely different context, often with other movies and scenes, and tell a story that you read from left to write. So it’s about writing and editing.

All your career has been about that, right?
Yeah, you know, I write all my movies, I write all my books. I’ve never made a movie I didn’t write. This is just telling a story in a different way—in the art world rather than in a movie or onstage when I speak. It’s about telling a story and celebrating the failure of show business that really all the movie stills would be rejected from real publicity campaigns. They show what you can’t show.

I show the tape marks that the actors have to hit to stay in focus—but I don’t show the actors or costumes. I show things that go wrong like hair that gets stuck in the gate and ruins a scene. I just show everything that could go wrong and celebrate the failure of show business and the art world, hopefully in a humorous way, because I love everything I make fun.

Well and you’ve lived it—you’ve probably experienced firsthand pretty much everything that could go wrong on set.
Yes, I have, probably [laughs]. And I’ve experienced a lot that went right, too. And sometimes when something goes wrong, it is right in the arts world once it is isolated and put in a different completely showcase what is wrong is right. Like my commercially shot movies don’t work in the art world when I use them for imagery. The worst shot ones work the best.

So you’re using images from your movies as well other filmmakers’.
Once in a while, yes, but just one second of a movie—one second that proves no movies are bad. Because there’s 24 frames a second, and somehow you can find one frame out of 24 in a 90-minute movie that’s good.

Do you truly believe that no movie is bad?
I’m saying if you have access to every frame in a movie, no movie is all bad. You can find one great frame and celebrate it—out of context, stolen, isolated, hidden, put in the wrong projector, the wrong theater, the wrong book for the wrong audience, then it’s good.

I wanted to talk about this photograph called “Divine in Ecstasy.” What were you thinking when you captured that?
I was looking for a still that I didn’t have. I wanted that still. It’s the most ludicrous part of the film [Multiple Maniacs], where Divine is attacked and raped by a transgender man and an insane woman. It’s probably is the most sacrilegious scene to ever be filmed. I never had a still because we were always worried the police were gonna come and get us. We’d been arrested for making a movie before that, Mondo Trasho, so we’d jump out, do a scene, and run! So I just put an old VHS on the TV, and I just kept shooting like a crazed fan in the dark. And then I saw it and thought, oh God—this looks even artier than I could ever imagine. So that’s how I started doing this. Stills are what everyone remember from movies. I always knew how important they were. Even when I had no budget, I had stills.

Why is this photo considered your first official visual art piece?
I never say the word “art.” When people say to me, “I’m an artist,” I secretly think, “I’ll be the judge of that.” Someone else can call me an artist; I’m not calling myself an artist. I think that is up to others and history to call you an artist. But it was my first photograph that was ever shown in an art gallery.

Well, assuming what you’re exhibiting is art, do you see your work as pop art or conceptual art or what would you classify it as?
I think it is conceptual, if I had to name it. I think it all up before I do it. and then I have to go find the images to write with, to edit with, to make that concept come through. The whole idea behind the show is, can art be funny? It’s always been witty, but can it be funny? To me, it can be. But we’ll see.

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John Picks His Favorites

Beverly Hills John. 2012. Rubell Family Collection, Miami. © John Waters, Courtesy Marianne Boesky Gallery

“I always say L.A. is just one big York Road. To me, eventually everyone is gonna look the same in L.A. There’s only so many kinds of faces you can get.”

Congratulations. 2014. Collection of Brenda Richardson. © John Waters, Courtesy Marianne Boesky Gallery
“Congratulations is code. When your gallery calls you and says, ‘congratulations,’ you know that you sold something. When you’re a collector and you say, ‘I want it,’ the art dealer will say, ‘congratulations’—which to me is so ludicrous. Many galleries leave the price list out with red dots on [the pieces] when they’re sold. I told the story of the worst thing that can happen in the medium that is the best thing that can happen.”

Divine in Ecstasy. 1992. Collection of Amy and Zachary Lehman. © John Waters, Courtesy Marianne Boesky Gallery
“I wanted that still. It’s the most ludicrous part of the film [Multiple Maniacs], where Divine is attacked and raped by a transgender man and an insane woman. So I just put an old VHS on the TV, and I just kept shooting like a crazed fan in the dark. And then I saw it and thought, oh God——this looks even artier than I could ever imagine. So that’s how I started doing this. It was my first photograph that was ever shown in an art gallery.”

Loser Gift Basket. 2006. Courtesy of the Artist and Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York. © John Waters
“I’m trying to imagine and celebrate everything that can go wrong in show business. Everybody used to give away gift baskets. If you went to the Oscars as a presenter, you’d get cars and stuff. You’d get amazing stuff. But then they started taxing you. It ruined—overnight—the gift bag business. This was my idea of what could be the worst gift basket if you lost the Oscars.”

Baltimore is a city of iconic symbols. We have Poe and Boh. We have the Orioles. We have Formstone and painted screens. And, of course, we have the pink flamingo. Over the years, the mid-century lawn ornament has cemented itself in our city’s narrative, largely thanks to our own auteur John Waters and his 1972 film Pink Flamingos.

“When I grew up, I think my mother, who was great at the tyranny of good taste, mentioned her disdain for lawn ornaments, especially pink flamingos,” Waters says. “That may have been the beginning of my obsession with them, because whatever I was told I wasn’t supposed to like, I always did.”

On Monday, the plastic bird’s inventor, Don Featherstone, passed away at the age of 79, nearly 60 years after his famed flamingo first came off the assembly line. Fittingly surnamed, Featherstone was not a Baltimore native but rather from Massachusetts. He attended art school there, honing his craft as a sculptor, before ultimately landing a job at a large manufacturer of lawn and garden decorations. One of his first assignments was to create the neon, umbrella-shaped bird, which debuted in 1957, and was soon immortalized in American culture.

At the time, post-World War II America was in a state of suburban sprawl, with baby-boom desire driving development of nuclear dream homes. All across the country, houses looked the same, but front lawns were a way to keep up with the Joneses and also stand apart. With a burgeoning consumer society came the embrace of plastic and mass production, and hence, Featherstone’s tour de force. From California to Charm City, families welcomed the bright, beloved bird into their yards.

By the 1960s and ’70s, however, the flamingo’s mainstream popularity waned. Hippies opposed the use of plastic, and what had once been a symbol of taste quickly devolved into a tchotchke of tackiness. Just as Waters’ film was banned in theaters, some neighborhood associations started to ban the eyesores in their communities.

“I liked [pink flamingos] because the ’50s had not been revived yet,” says Waters. “When we made Pink Flamingos in the fall of ’71, nobody collected ’50s stuff—it was before ‘modern-antiques’ was even a term—and thrift shops were filled with it.

Everybody was collecting ’30s and ’40s stuff—even hippies dressed like they were the gold diggers of ’33—but nobody wanted to look like the ’50s. Later, [pink flamingos] became like the hula-hoop, they became a huge fad, but they’ve gone through many, many changes over the years.”

Through bouts of popularity all across the country, the pink flamingo has remained bound to our city, at one point or another designating Hampden as its unofficial urban district, which proudly wears the honor. (As does Madison, Wisconsin, whose council named the plastic pink flamingo their official city bird.)

Waters notes that Pink Flamingos production designer Vincent Peranio, who went on to do Homicide, Cecil B. Demented, and The Wire, found them for the film, along with other set pieces like a plate that read “God Bless Our Mobile Home.”

“But it was always going to be called Pink Flamingos because it was a very calm title for a movie that was the opposite,” he says. “And at the time, pink flamingos subtly questioned taste. But then it went on to become: yuppies have it on their lawn! That’s when I gave all mine away . . . I think when it was innocent, it was much more touching and influential.”

Up near The Avenue, pink flamingo populations are still alive and well. There are flamingos tucked into every corner of the neighborhood’s annual HonFest, on the treetops of 34th Street during the holidays, and, of course, in Cafe Hon, first opened in 1992, with its flamingo chandeliers, cocktails, and prodigious façade (which caused the Flamingogate of 2009).

“I would’ve loved to have had my picture taken with him under our big pink flamingo,” Café Hon owner Denise Whiting says of Featherstone.

But best of all, even as the country mourns the loss of the inventor (on Wednesday, Featherstone graced the cover of The New York Times), his creative legacy lives on—those plastic feathered friends forever emblazoned in American memory as a symbol of novelty, and still stuck, neck arched and one-legged, into the Baltimore grass.