Divine drag queen oscars11/11/2023 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.ĭo 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. Once in a while, yes, but just one second of a movie-one second that proves no movies are bad. So you’re using images from your movies as well other filmmakers’. Like my commercially shot movies don’t work in the art world when I use them for imagery. 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. And I’ve experienced a lot that went right, too. Well and you’ve lived it-you’ve probably experienced firsthand pretty much everything that could go wrong on set. 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. I show things that go wrong like hair that gets stuck in the gate and ruins a scene. I show the tape marks that the actors have to hit to stay in focus-but I don’t show the actors or costumes. 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. This is just telling a story in a different way-in the art world rather than in a movie or onstage when I speak. So it’s about writing and editing.Īll your career has been about that, right? Yeah, you know, I write all my movies, I write all my books. 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 getting back to your exhibit-I understand that you take photos of TV screens and rearrange them to create a new narrative. You might have to have people outside of Baltimore like, but you don’t have to leave. You don’t have to leave Baltimore anymore to have success. 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. You see that happening with the younger generations of artists? Yes, I do. I think that’s very, very important, to stay in Baltimore. 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. It’s gotten more expensive, but it’s still cheaper than anywhere else. I like living there now more than I ever did because it’s the only place left that has a bohemia. 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. What is it about Baltimore that’s kept you here? Everything-the sense of humor and the extreme style. 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. It’s the only thing I do that has very little to do with Baltimore. It’s not obvious to a viewer whether it’s prominent in your visual art as well. It’s where I got my first taste for the love of how art can infuriate people.īaltimore is so prominent in all your films. Now that I’ve done that, I think Baltimore is the perfect homecoming. 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. 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. You’ve lived in Baltimore all your life, you’ve been exhibiting in the U.S. We asked him to reflect on some of his favorites from the upcoming salon-style exhibit. 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). 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. No one better represents Baltimore’s fringe arts scene than living icon John Waters.
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