It’s a chilly January afternoon and John Waters is on the phone talking about his new one-man show, “Going to Extremes.”
Waters, whose subversive indie films inspired William S. Burroughs to dub him “The Pope of Trash,” is calling from San Francisco, where he has an apartment. He has another one in New York and a place in Provincetown, Mass.
But Waters’ heart — and his home — is in Baltimore.
“That’s where my house is, that’s where my office is, that’s where my studio is,” Waters said. “Baltimore is always where I lived. I never for a moment thought of leaving there.”
Waters’ 1970s queer cult classics like Multiple Maniacs and Pink Flamingos starring iconic drag queen Divine were all made in Baltimore, as were mainstream breakthroughs like Hairspray (1988) and Cry-Baby (1990).
Charm City has always been essential to Waters’ work because, “I knew it well, and I praised a city that, in that time, had an inferiority complex.”
Thanks to his movies and other works, like Barry Levinson’s Diner and David Simon’s The Wire, “Baltimore does not have an inferiority complex anymore because we praised all the things that people used against it.”
“I think Philadelphia has the same issue sometimes, too. And we even have the same accent, though ours is a little weirder.”
That “no one likes us, we don’t care” attitude has always made Waters a natural fit with his Philly fans, many of whom will be in attendance when he comes to the Colonial Theatre in Phoenixville on Saturday.
“Philadelphia was always a good market for me,” he said. “Elizabeth Coffey was from there, a great, great actress who’s in a lot of my films, the first [transperson] I ever worked with… And the TLA cinema was one of the first theaters that made Pink Flamingos famous. It played there forever.”
Waters and Divine made several trips up I-95 for appearances at TLA midnight movie screenings, one of which, from 1974, is immortalized on YouTube.
It shows a lank-haired Waters in trademark shades and a Little Richard-inspired pencil mustache sitting beneath a Citizen Kane poster, and Divine popping out of a cake.
Waters’ early movies can still shock. Watching Divine’s character Babs Johnson eat poo in Pink Flamingos never goes down easy. But over time, Waters has been lauded as a transgressive pioneer of undeniable importance.
Or, as he puts it: “I’m so respectable I could puke!”
In 2023, his oeuvre was celebrated in a retrospective show at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles.
Pink Flamingos was added to the National Film Registry in 2021 and judged to be the 31st best comedy of all time last year by Variety. The publication called it “the cinematic birth of punk.” In the 91st spot on the same list is Waters’ Hairspray, the musical starring Ricki Lake (and Divine as her mother) about an American Bandstand-like 1960s Baltimore TV show’s struggles to integrate its dancers.
“C’mon, the 100 best comedies in the history of film, and two of them are mine? We’re talking the Marx Brothers, Charlie Chaplin, everything. When I see that for movies that are probably even more offensive today than they would have been then because of all the things that you wouldn’t have been allowed to do — it’s astounding to me.
“I’m proud,” he said. “I’m amazed by it. I think it’s wonderful. Debbie Harry, who’s a friend” — and hilarious as a scheming stage mom in Hairspray — “and I have talked about that. Aren’t we glad we’re alive to see this? Because many are not.”
For all of his respectability, however, Waters, 79, still finds it hard to get films financed and made.
“The last two movies I was supposed to make never happened. Aubrey Plaza was going to star, and we had a big company buy the rights to my novel Liarmouth. And it fell through.”
Still, Waters says, “I’m busier now than I’ve ever been.”
He’s a host for hire at events like the Mosswood Meltdown, the Oakland punk rock festival with a terrific lineup, where he’ll be serving as emcee for the 12th consecutive year in July.
“I love the punks,” he said. “They’re the only minority who want to be hated.”
He also gathers his flock every September for a long weekend in Connecticut at Camp John Waters, where “people come and live as my characters for four days. We call it Jonestown with a happy ending.”
Every year, he also writes a brand new show and takes it on the road, sometimes with a Christmas theme in holiday season. “Going to Extremes” is billed as “crackpot comedy.”
But don’t call it stand-up, or performance art.
“It’s a sermon,” he said. “It’s a religious gathering.”
And it aims to speak to America’s deep divisions with a tool he finds sorely lacking in the body politic: humor.
“When I was young, the radical left had a sense of humor, with the Yippies and Abbie Hoffman. Today, they have more rules than my parents had.”
Waters is worried about the times, especially about the persecution of trans people in the second Trump administration.
“Of course, I’m worried about all of it, because you can’t embarrass him,” he said about the president. “He’s like the punks — he loves to be hated, too. When I saw him around in the ‘70s, he was a liberal. He was in Studio 54. He hung around with Hillary!”
One of the highlights of “Going to Extremes,” he promised, will be revealing “the only funny thing [Trump] has ever said.”
What is it? “You have to come to the show to hear it.”
Waters is excited to return to the Colonial, where he performed in 2022. “The Blob was filmed there! And I, of course, love The Blob.”
Water doesn’t love everything about barnstorming the country, though.
“I don’t like it when the plane is late,” he quipped. “But I do enjoy it. I do 50 shows a year, so I’m always in motion. I’m a carny. It’s what I do. And I’m in touch with my audience.
“Elton John once said to me, the day you stop touring, it’s over. And that’s true. You have to keep doing it. Somebody’s waiting to take your place the minute you blink.”
“John Waters: Going to Extremes,” Feb. 7, 8 p.m., the Colonial Theatre, 227 Bridge St., Phoenixville. ColonialTheatre.com.
