Waters’ 2nd film ‘even more hideous’
There aren’t many films that cost $5,000 to make that undergo a 4K restoration, but John Waters’ “Multiple Maniacs” is no ordinary shoestring indie.
And Waters is thrilled it will be playing at the Castro Theatre, just around the corner from his former San Francisco apartment near 18th and Church streets.
“It’s the biggest screen it’s ever been projected on — ever,” Waters said in a recent phone interview. “So it will look even
more hideous than ever! It’s been restored, so basically it looks amazing. There’s stuff in it I never noticed before.”
“Multiple Maniacs” plays for one night only, at 7 and 11 p.m. Friday, Sept. 16. The 1970 blackand-white slice of mass depravity, starring Waters regulars Divine, Mink Stole, David Lochary, Mary Vivian Pearce, Edith Massey and Cookie Mueller, is key to Waters’ early filmography. His second film, after “Mondo Trasho,” it paved the way for his rise to cult stardom in the 1970s, leading to his Trash Trilogy: “Pink Flamingos,” “Female Trouble” and “Desperate Living.”
In “Maniacs,” Divine heads a traveling show, the Cavalcade of Perversion (a well-earned title), that is actually a front for robbery and murder. There are over-the-top shockers (Jesus’ crucifixion is juxtaposed with a depraved sex act in a church; Divine is raped by a lobster), and subtle (and not so subtle) commentary on the times. One of the characters is implicated in actress Sharon Tate’s death, which would make him a Manson cult member apparently on the lam.
“It was filmed in 1969,” said Waters, who resides mainly in his native Baltimore but keeps an apartment in San Francisco. “It was kind of when the entire world seemed to explode, so it was a made as a movie to offend hippies, in the greatest way, and especially the first place it got popular was San Francisco, which was the hippiest town.
“But the hippies wanted to be offended. And the hippies turned into punks, and bikers came. It certainly caught on at the Palace Theatre (in North Beach) with the Cockettes and later at the Secret Cinema, which was a wonderful place that a promoter named Sebastian ran.”
With “Multiple Maniacs,” Waters progressed not only as a filmmaker, but also as a businessman.
“No one would distribute it, so I went around the country with it in my car. I would sometimes rent theaters — although I didn’t in San Francisco; I found booking for it,” he said. “But in other cities I’d go to whatever the weirdest art theater was, and say ‘Can I rent your theater?’ and I’d four-wall it. They’d rent it to me for a midnight show. If nobody came, I lost money, and if people came, I made money.
“My dad was very, very conservative and never saw the movie. But he lent me the money to make it, and I paid him back.” All 5,000 bucks. “That was a lot for us at the time, because the first one, ‘Mondo Trasho,’ cost $2,500,” Waters said, laughing. “So basically it was a big-budget film for us. If you look at it today, it’s about the same as kids making their first film on a cell phone, only mine was a big, cumbersome, film-heavy, single-system sound camera that was used to film the news then.”
Since Waters, now 70, helped supervise the restoration process (which certainly cost many times the original budget), he naturally spent a lot of time with the film. He was asked how, looking back from nearly a half century later, he thinks of the film today.
“It gets a 100 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, which staggers me because its reputation was built on two negative reviews — the only people who paid any attention to it at the time. So it’s a little bit exciting to get it back, rehabilitated. I feel like a proud new father whose juvenile delinquent son is still a juvenile delinquent, but even got worse and found success,” he said, with a chuckle.
“How did I ever get this movie made? We didn’t smoke pot or take drugs when we were making the movie, but certainly I smoked pot and took LSD when I was thinking it up. But believe me, the audiences in San Francisco were on pot and acid. I am really happy it’s going to play there. The vibes are going to be good.”
Best of the rest: Another movie maniac’s early independent film screens when David Lynch’s “Eraserhead” (1977) plays at the New Parkway Theater at 9:30 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 15 (474 24th St., Oakland. (510) 658-7900. www.thenewparkway.com).
Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove” plays at theaters across the country, including several in the Bay Area on Sunday, Sept. 18, and Wednesday, Sept. 21, in a Turner Classic Movies/ Fathom Events collaboration (go to www.fathomevents.com for theaters and showtimes); Also, Kubrick’s “Barry Lyndon” plays at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 15, at the Balboa Theatre (3630 Balboa Ave., S.F. (415) 221-8184. www.cinemasf.com/balboa).
“They Live,” John Carpenter’s fabulously entertaining vision of illegal aliens — the from-outer-space kind — is the midnight movie on Friday, Sept. 16, and Saturday, Sept. 17, at the Clay Theatre (2261 Fillmore St., S.F. (415) 561-9921. www.landmarktheatre.com).