Tom Waits lights up the screen. The minute the singer appears in a film, he brings with him a sort of atmospheric baggagewe may not know what character hes playing, but we know him. We know that no matter what the film is, Waits will lend his own distinct, off-kilter brand of weirdness to it. Waits has been playing characters all through his musical career, the boozy troubadours and raspy-voiced noir loners who populate his songs are all engaging Waits creations.
Using his distinct, gravel-caked voice, Tom Waits conjures up boozy ballads designed to be played low at 3 a.m. and melodies that might echo off the broken-down rides of an abandoned, haunted carnival. His is an eclectic style, combining blues, jazz, cabaret, Spooky Sounds of Halloween sound effects tapes, and more. This distinct, unmistakable style goes beyond Waits musical accomplishments, finding its way into his acting in the two dozen or so film appearances the singer has made.
Waits doesnt consider himself foremost an actor. I do some acting, Waits tells Pitchfork. And theres a difference between I do some acting and I’m an actor. People dont really trust people to do two things well. If theyre going to spend money, they want to get the guy whos the best at what he does. Otherwise, its like getting one of those business cards that says about eight things on it. I do aromatherapy, yard work, hauling, acupressure. With acting, I usually get people who want to put me in for a short time. Or they have a really odd part that only has two pages of dialogue, if that.
Waits first film appearance was in Sylvester Stallones 1978 directorial debut Paradise Alley. Its a small part, with Waits essentially playing a version of himself, or at least the self he presents in many of his songs. The character, Mumbles, shows up at a piano, twitching and crooning. When was the last time you was with a woman? Stallones character asks him. Probably before the depression, Mumbles says. What are you saving it for? Stallone shoots back in that garbled manner of speaking Stallone has perfected. I dunno, Waits replies. Probably a big finish.
In the grand scheme of things, this is a nothing part; it was intended to be a bigger role, but Stallone cut it down to little more than a cameo. Yet what made it to the screen is distinct because Waits makes it so. Stallone is very still in the scene, leaning on Waits piano like dead weight. Waits is a study in contrast, never sitting still, his eyes half open. It might even be considered too much acting. When asked if acting came naturally to him, Waits replied, Its a lot of work to try and be natural, like trying to catch a bullet in your teeth.
Tom Waits lights up the screen. The minute the singer appears in a film, he brings with him a sort of atmospheric baggage—we may not know what character he’s playing, but we know him. We know that no matter what the film is, Waits will lend his own distinct, off-kilter brand of weirdness to it. Waits has been playing characters all through his musical career, the boozy troubadours and raspy-voiced noir loners who populate his songs are all engaging Waits creations.
Using his distinct, gravel-caked voice, Tom Waits conjures up boozy ballads designed to be played low at 3 a.m. and melodies that might echo off the broken-down rides of an abandoned, haunted carnival. His is an eclectic style, combining blues, jazz, cabaret, Spooky Sounds of Halloween sound effects tapes, and more. This distinct, unmistakable style goes beyond Waits’ musical accomplishments, finding its way into his acting in the two dozen or so film appearances the singer has made.
Waits doesn’t consider himself foremost an actor. “I do some acting,” Waits tells Pitchfork. “And there’s a difference between ‘I do some acting’ and ‘I’m an actor.’ People don’t really trust people to do two things well. If they’re going to spend money, they want to get the guy who’s the best at what he does. Otherwise, it’s like getting one of those business cards that says about eight things on it. I do aromatherapy, yard work, hauling, acupressure. With acting, I usually get people who want to put me in for a short time. Or they have a really odd part that only has two pages of dialogue, if that.”
Waits’ first film appearance was in Sylvester Stallone’s 1978 directorial debut Paradise Alley. It’s a small part, with Waits essentially playing a version of himself, or at least the self he presents in many of his songs. The character, Mumbles, shows up at a piano, twitching and crooning. “When was the last time you was with a woman?” Stallone’s character asks him. “Probably before the depression,” Mumbles says. “What are you saving it for?” Stallone shoots back in that garbled manner of speaking Stallone has perfected. “I dunno,” Waits replies. “Probably a big finish.”
In the grand scheme of things, this is a nothing part; it was intended to be a bigger role, but Stallone cut it down to little more than a cameo. Yet what made it to the screen is distinct because Waits makes it so. Stallone is very still in the scene, leaning on Waits’ piano like dead weight. Waits is a study in contrast, never sitting still, his eyes half open. It might even be considered too much acting. When asked if acting came naturally to him, Waits replied, “It’s a lot of work to try and be natural, like trying to catch a bullet in your teeth.”
After any viewing of Errol Flynns The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), one is tempted to say, They dont make em like that anymore. From the perfection of its casting, with Flynn, Olivia de Havilland, Basil Rathbone, Claude Rains, Eugene Pallette, Alan Hale, and Melville Cooper, to its lush score by Erich Wolfgang Korngold, to its unity of tone (despite a midcourse change of directors), to what historian David Thomson called its stained-glass Technicolor, it represents the apotheosis of a genre as well as an exemplar of what the old factory-style studios could deliver when the personnel on staff and the story they were telling found a near-perfect alchemy. However, Robin Hood had only dim antecedents and no successors, so to say, They dont make em like that anymore, isnt quite accurate. But for this one picture, They never made em is closer to the mark.
The swashbuckler genre, that of swords flashing in times ranging from the Dark Ages to the 18th century Caribbean to which Flynns greatest film belongs, began in 1920 when Douglas Fairbanks switched from comedies to action films with The Mark of Zorro. Right in that first picture, Fairbanks and director Fred Niblo established conventions that were repeated in film after film and still recur in cinematic cousins such as the Star Wars movies. The hero is, in the words of Robin Hood co-writer Norman Reilly Raine, a swashbuckling, reckless, rakehell type of character, who is in rebellion against corrupt government authority, but never government authority in generalthe swashbuckling hero is not an anarchist or terrorist, but in many senses a conservative who wants to see power exercised responsibly or by the right people. The hero is an expert with the sword and other weapons, but is also an acrobat, capable of amazing stunts such as riding down a mainsail on the point of a dagger (Fairbanks in his 1926 The Black Pirate). He wins his cause in one on one combat with the villain, usually in a long duel, after which he is often revealed to be a disguised noble, or at the very least forgiven for his trespasses against a government that had lost its way.
Zorro came out of pulp fiction by way of Baroness Orczys Scarlett Pimpernel, but as Fairbanks and others went on to capitalize on the films success, they found additional sources in the novels of Alexandre Dumas (The Three Musketeers, The Man in the Iron Mask, The Corsican Brothers, The Count of Monte Cristo), Rafael Sabatini (Captain Blood, The Black Swan, Scaramouche), Walter Scott (Ivanhoe, Rob Roy), and the pirate and Robin Hood tales of Howard Pyle. Despite the deep well of material to adapt, the run of swashbucklers largely halted with the simultaneous decline of Fairbankshe was 46 in 1929, the year of The Iron Mask, his last genre film and the first in which, as if to underscore the passage of time, he diedand the arrival of sound.
It wasnt just that Fairbanks was now a bit old and somewhat paunchy for an action hero. Other actors might have picked up cloak and rapier, but nascent sound technology made it impractical for a hero to bounce all over the screen while delivering dialogue. As hilariously and accurately recalled in Singin in the Rain (1952), movies were almost back to the fixed camera and proscenium arch style of the early days, when filmmakers couldnt do much more than film plays as staged. Sound rapidly evolved to allow for more dynamic productions. In the meantime, Hollywood reveled in films set in contemporary times that explored sex, crime, and even the odd glimpse of nudityprominent swords gave way to prominent nipples.
Alas, the new candor only lasted so long due to the strict enforcement of the Production Code that began in 1934. Now the studios had to offer clean thrills, which is to say pure romance without innuendo and visceralbut not prurientexcitement. A small handful of successful 1934 filmsMGMs Treasure Island with Wallace Beery as Long John Silver and a too-young Jackie Cooper as Jim Hawkins, independent producer Edward Smalls The Count of Monte Cristo with Robert Donat as the revenge-minded Edmond Dantes, and the Britain-originating The Scarlet Pimpernel with Leslie Howard as the title charactersuggested that public taste would welcome romantic adventure in place of earthier forms of romance.
Warner Brothers entry was Captain Blood. Donat initially committed to taking the title role of an Irish doctor who inadvertently finds himself on the wrong side of an attempt to overthrow King James II and is condemned to serve as a slave in the Jamaica colony, but he withdrew at the last minute for reasons that are still unclear but may have been as simple as a health issue and as complicated as his mistress refusing to spend several months in California. The films producers fantasized about Howard, Fredric March, Clark Gable, and Ronald Colman (the last of whom would later excel in the 1937 swashbuckler The Prisoner of Zenda for David Selznick), and tested Brian Aherne and designated Bette Davis costar George Brent before studio head Jack Warner suggested they try Flynn. The 26-year-old Tasmanian was on the payroll, after all; might as well use him.
In retrospect, its amazing how all the elements of a successful Flynn swashbuckler came together at once, but again, for all the negatives inherent in the studio system, one plus was that it functioned as a huge sorting bin for talent that could be deployed as needed. Flynn and the director Michael Curtiz would be together for years. De Havilland, going on 20, was a film neophyte the studio was trying to establish. She and Flynn would eventually make another seven films together (eight if you count the review film Thank Your Lucky Stars) and tantalize the public with one of the screens great unconsummated but nevertheless real romances. Rathbone is on hand as an antagonist with a deadly sword (something he didnt have to fake), a role he would reprise not just in Robin Hood but in pictures as diverse as The Mark of Zorro (1940) opposite Tyrone Power and The Court Jester (1955) in tongue-twisting battle against Danny Kaye.
And then there was Flynn himself, vaulted instantly to stardom by the picture. The son of a marine biologist and a distant mother he came to despise, Flynn never completed his formal education due to the peripatetic existence required by his fathers career and his own propensity for getting expelled from whatever school his parents placed him in. By the time he was 18, he had worked as a mail clerk and a stevedore, and he competed as an amateur boxer before leaving Australia for New Guinea to prospect for gold. In addition to his efforts to get rich quick, he worked a series of jobs with the islands various tobacco and copra plantations, got into a series of scrapes he would spend the rest of his life embellishing, and somehow, in 1933, ended up playing Fletcher Christian in an Australian film, In the Wake of the Bounty. This seems to have put the idea of becoming an actor in his mind, and that year he went to Great Britain and got work in a repertory theater company. The next year he was the lead in the film Murder at Monte Carlo, a film financed by Warner Bros. to honor British laws requiring a certain percentage of films exhibited in the country must have originated there. Flynns work was promising enough to intrigue the studio (completing a kind of circle, he was recommended by an acquaintance, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.) and they brought him to Hollywood.
Critics have long considered Flynn a poor actor. If true, this would certainly be unsurprising given his journey from New Guinea knockabout to leading man took a little over a year, with training that consisted almost entirely of the 22 plays in which he performed for the Northampton Repertory Players in England. It was certainly true at times in Captain Blood. Flynn was nervous and his readings were often stiff. As he became more comfortable, Curtiz was ordered to reshoot certain scenes so that Flynn could give a better performance. Yet even in the finished film there are many lines that die in his mouth. He never was good at limning deeper emotions. Hes far more polished in his second film, The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936, Curtiz), and yet when hes asked to react to a brutal massacre of soldiers and civilians by tribesmen on the Indian frontier, he tosses off the line, Those poor little kids horrible, with all the anguish of a man ordering a ham sandwich. Its something hes saying, not feeling.
And yet, he was also able to convey a brio that few other actors, then or now, could equal. It is often remarked that Flynn could carry off a period costume in a way that contemporaries such as Clark Gable and Cary Grant could not. (Each had a famous flop in this regard, the former with Parnell, 1937, directed by John M. Stahl, and the latter with The Howards of Virginia, 1940, Frank Lloyd). Midway through Captain Blood, Peter Blood leads his fellow slaves to escape, capture a ship, and embark on a career of piracy with himself as captain. As they ready the ship to depart Jamaica, Flynn shouts, Up that rigging, you monkeys! Aloft! Theres no chains to hold you now! Break out those sails and watch them fill with the wind thats carrying us all to freedom!
Its a ridiculous speechno one really talks like that, least of all in 17th century Jamaica. Yet, while Flynn couldnt mourn murdered children on screen with any real passion, he could make lines like that believable. It doesnt hurt that he was beautiful. A joyous Flynn was simply radiant, his elation in liberation contagious. At the other end of the emotional spectrum, he could also bring a convincingly grim intensity to a duel to the death, which he animated not via the complexity of the swordplay (as a swordsman, Flynn was able to fake an excellence that far exceeded his technical ability) but through personality and character. Compare his climatic duel with Rathbone in Robin Hood to the endless and mostly mute balletics of Ewan McGregor and Hayden Christensen that close Star Wars: Episode III Revenge of the Sith (2005, George Lucas, God help us). There is an exchange between Flynns Robin Hood and Rathbones Guy at the outset of what will clearly be a long and fatal fight:
Robin (smiling): Did I upset your plans? Sir Guy: Youve come to Nottingham once too often! Robin: When this is over, my friend, therell be no need for me to come again!
Or moments later, when Robin is down and Guy has the advantage:
Sir Guy: You know any prayers, my friend? Robin: Ill say one for you!
And with that, he escapes once more. It would be a pleasure to report that Warner Bros. recognized the alchemy they created and made a dozen more films in this vein, but it didnt happen that way. Some of that was due to the studios grind-em-out ethos, a great deal to Flynn himself, and some to the way World War II disrupted lives in ways both monumental and trivial. Peak Flynn was short-lived, and during that time he made only one more pure swashbuckler, The Sea Hawk in 1940 (Curtiz), with an honorable mention to 1937s The Prince and the Pauper, in which he acts in support of (and steals the picture from) the juvenile twins Billy and Bobby Mauch. It would be eight years before The Sea Hawk received a follow-up, The Adventures of Don Juan, a very different kind of swashbuckler with a very different Flynn, and also his last of inarguable merit.
Period pictures took time to put together, something antithetical to the way Warner Bros. viewed actors and films. This was the studio of gangster pictures and backstage musicals, both of which could be knocked out quickly. The careers of James Cagney and Joan Blondell, who appeared in both kinds of films and had arrived at Warners together ahead of Flynn, are instructive. They began in 1930 with Sinners Holiday and rapidly ascended to stardom. By the time Flynn arrived five years later, Cagney had appeared in 23 films and Blondell in 36. These actors were shuttling from soundstage to soundstage, sometimes starting their next picture before their current one had quite been finished. Similarly, Bette Davis came to Warners with The Man Who Played God in 1932. Though she fought relentlessly against being tossed into the studios meat-grinder (For the first time in my life I dont care whether I ever make another picture or not, she wrote to Jack Warner in 1939, I am that overworked), she nevertheless made another 34 pictures by the end of the decade. Jack Warner was heard to say, I dont want it good, I want it Tuesday, and the studio did its best to work on that pace.
After any viewing of Errol Flynn’s The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), one is tempted to say, “They don’t make ‘em like that anymore.” From the perfection of its casting, with Flynn, Olivia de Havilland, Basil Rathbone, Claude Rains, Eugene Pallette, Alan Hale, and Melville Cooper, to its lush score by Erich Wolfgang Korngold, to its unity of tone (despite a midcourse change of directors), to what historian David Thomson called it’s stained-glass Technicolor, it represents the apotheosis of a genre as well as an exemplar of what the old factory-style studios could deliver when the personnel on staff and the story they were telling found a near-perfect alchemy. However, Robin Hood had only dim antecedents and no successors, so to say, “They don’t make ‘em like that anymore,” isn’t quite accurate. But for this one picture, “They never made ‘em” is closer to the mark.
The swashbuckler genre, that of swords flashing in times ranging from the Dark Ages to the 18th century Caribbean to which Flynn’s greatest film belongs, began in 1920 when Douglas Fairbanks switched from comedies to action films with The Mark of Zorro. Right in that first picture, Fairbanks and director Fred Niblo established conventions that were repeated in film after film and still recur in cinematic cousins such as the Star Wars movies. The hero is, in the words of Robin Hood co-writer Norman Reilly Raine, a “swashbuckling, reckless, rakehell type of character,” who is in rebellion against corrupt government authority, but never government authority in general—the swashbuckling hero is not an anarchist or terrorist, but in many senses a conservative who wants to see power exercised responsibly or by the right people. The hero is an expert with the sword and other weapons, but is also an acrobat, capable of amazing stunts such as riding down a mainsail on the point of a dagger (Fairbanks in his 1926 The Black Pirate). He wins his cause in one on one combat with the villain, usually in a long duel, after which he is often revealed to be a disguised noble, or at the very least forgiven for his trespasses against a government that had lost its way.
Zorro came out of pulp fiction by way of Baroness Orczy’s Scarlett Pimpernel, but as Fairbanks and others went on to capitalize on the film’s success, they found additional sources in the novels of Alexandre Dumas (The Three Musketeers, The Man in the Iron Mask, The Corsican Brothers, The Count of Monte Cristo), Rafael Sabatini (Captain Blood, The Black Swan, Scaramouche), Walter Scott (Ivanhoe, Rob Roy), and the pirate and Robin Hood tales of Howard Pyle. Despite the deep well of material to adapt, the run of swashbucklers largely halted with the simultaneous decline of Fairbanks—he was 46 in 1929, the year of The Iron Mask, his last genre film and the first in which, as if to underscore the passage of time, he died—and the arrival of sound.
It wasn’t just that Fairbanks was now a bit old and somewhat paunchy for an action hero. Other actors might have picked up cloak and rapier, but nascent sound technology made it impractical for a hero to bounce all over the screen while delivering dialogue. As hilariously and accurately recalled in Singin’ in the Rain (1952), movies were almost back to the fixed camera and proscenium arch style of the early days, when filmmakers couldn’t do much more than film plays as staged. Sound rapidly evolved to allow for more dynamic productions. In the meantime, Hollywood reveled in films set in contemporary times that explored sex, crime, and even the odd glimpse of nudity—prominent swords gave way to prominent nipples.
Alas, the new candor only lasted so long due to the strict enforcement of the Production Code that began in 1934. Now the studios had to offer clean thrills, which is to say pure romance without innuendo and visceral—but not prurient—excitement. A small handful of successful 1934 films—MGM’s Treasure Island with Wallace Beery as Long John Silver and a too-young Jackie Cooper as Jim Hawkins, independent producer Edward Small’s The Count of Monte Cristo with Robert Donat as the revenge-minded Edmond Dantes, and the Britain-originating The Scarlet Pimpernel with Leslie Howard as the title character—suggested that public taste would welcome romantic adventure in place of earthier forms of romance.
Warner Brothers’ entry was Captain Blood. Donat initially committed to taking the title role of an Irish doctor who inadvertently finds himself on the wrong side of an attempt to overthrow King James II and is condemned to serve as a slave in the Jamaica colony, but he withdrew at the last minute for reasons that are still unclear but may have been as simple as a health issue and as complicated as his mistress refusing to spend several months in California. The film’s producers fantasized about Howard, Fredric March, Clark Gable, and Ronald Colman (the last of whom would later excel in the 1937 swashbuckler The Prisoner of Zenda for David Selznick), and tested Brian Aherne and designated Bette Davis costar George Brent before studio head Jack Warner suggested they try Flynn. The 26-year-old Tasmanian was on the payroll, after all; might as well use him.
In retrospect, it’s amazing how all the elements of a successful Flynn swashbuckler came together at once, but again, for all the negatives inherent in the studio system, one plus was that it functioned as a huge sorting bin for talent that could be deployed as needed. Flynn and the director Michael Curtiz would be together for years. De Havilland, going on 20, was a film neophyte the studio was trying to establish. She and Flynn would eventually make another seven films together (eight if you count the review film Thank Your Lucky Stars) and tantalize the public with one of the screen’s great unconsummated but nevertheless real romances. Rathbone is on hand as an antagonist with a deadly sword (something he didn’t have to fake), a role he would reprise not just in Robin Hood but in pictures as diverse as The Mark of Zorro (1940) opposite Tyrone Power and The Court Jester (1955) in tongue-twisting battle against Danny Kaye.
And then there was Flynn himself, vaulted instantly to stardom by the picture. The son of a marine biologist and a distant mother he came to despise, Flynn never completed his formal education due to the peripatetic existence required by his father’s career and his own propensity for getting expelled from whatever school his parents placed him in. By the time he was 18, he had worked as a mail clerk and a stevedore, and he competed as an amateur boxer before leaving Australia for New Guinea to prospect for gold. In addition to his efforts to get rich quick, he worked a series of jobs with the island’s various tobacco and copra plantations, got into a series of scrapes he would spend the rest of his life embellishing, and somehow, in 1933, ended up playing Fletcher Christian in an Australian film, In the Wake of the Bounty. This seems to have put the idea of becoming an actor in his mind, and that year he went to Great Britain and got work in a repertory theater company. The next year he was the lead in the film Murder at Monte Carlo, a film financed by Warner Bros. to honor British laws requiring a certain percentage of films exhibited in the country must have originated there. Flynn’s work was promising enough to intrigue the studio (completing a kind of circle, he was recommended by an acquaintance, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.) and they brought him to Hollywood.
Critics have long considered Flynn a poor actor. If true, this would certainly be unsurprising given his journey from New Guinea knockabout to leading man took a little over a year, with training that consisted almost entirely of the 22 plays in which he performed for the Northampton Repertory Players in England. It was certainly true at times in Captain Blood. Flynn was nervous and his readings were often stiff. As he became more comfortable, Curtiz was ordered to reshoot certain scenes so that Flynn could give a better performance. Yet even in the finished film there are many lines that die in his mouth. He never was good at limning deeper emotions. He’s far more polished in his second film, The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936, Curtiz), and yet when he’s asked to react to a brutal massacre of soldiers and civilians by tribesmen on the Indian frontier, he tosses off the line, “Those poor little kids… horrible,” with all the anguish of a man ordering a ham sandwich. It’s something he’s saying, not feeling.
And yet, he was also able to convey a brio that few other actors, then or now, could equal. It is often remarked that Flynn could carry off a period costume in a way that contemporaries such as Clark Gable and Cary Grant could not. (Each had a famous flop in this regard, the former with Parnell, 1937, directed by John M. Stahl, and the latter with The Howards of Virginia, 1940, Frank Lloyd). Midway through Captain Blood, Peter Blood leads his fellow slaves to escape, capture a ship, and embark on a career of piracy with himself as captain. As they ready the ship to depart Jamaica, Flynn shouts, “Up that rigging, you monkeys! Aloft! There’s no chains to hold you now! Break out those sails and watch them fill with the wind that’s carrying us all to freedom!”
It’s a ridiculous speech—no one really talks like that, least of all in 17th century Jamaica. Yet, while Flynn couldn’t mourn murdered children on screen with any real passion, he could make lines like that believable. It doesn’t hurt that he was beautiful. A joyous Flynn was simply radiant, his elation in liberation contagious. At the other end of the emotional spectrum, he could also bring a convincingly grim intensity to a duel to the death, which he animated not via the complexity of the swordplay (as a swordsman, Flynn was able to fake an excellence that far exceeded his technical ability) but through personality and character. Compare his climatic duel with Rathbone in Robin Hood to the endless and mostly mute balletics of Ewan McGregor and Hayden Christensen that close Star Wars: Episode III Revenge of the Sith (2005, George Lucas, God help us). There is an exchange between Flynn’s Robin Hood and Rathbone’s Guy at the outset of what will clearly be a long and fatal fight:
Robin (smiling): Did I upset your plans? Sir Guy: You’ve come to Nottingham once too often! Robin: When this is over, my friend, there’ll be no need for me to come again!
Or moments later, when Robin is down and Guy has the advantage:
Sir Guy: You know any prayers, my friend? Robin: I’ll say one for you!
And with that, he escapes once more. It would be a pleasure to report that Warner Bros. recognized the alchemy they created and made a dozen more films in this vein, but it didn’t happen that way. Some of that was due to the studio’s grind-‘em-out ethos, a great deal to Flynn himself, and some to the way World War II disrupted lives in ways both monumental and trivial. “Peak Flynn” was short-lived, and during that time he made only one more pure swashbuckler, The Sea Hawk in 1940 (Curtiz), with an honorable mention to 1937’s The Prince and the Pauper, in which he acts in support of (and steals the picture from) the juvenile twins Billy and Bobby Mauch. It would be eight years before The Sea Hawk received a follow-up, The Adventures of Don Juan, a very different kind of swashbuckler with a very different Flynn, and also his last of inarguable merit.
Period pictures took time to put together, something antithetical to the way Warner Bros. viewed actors and films. This was the studio of gangster pictures and backstage musicals, both of which could be knocked out quickly. The careers of James Cagney and Joan Blondell, who appeared in both kinds of films and had arrived at Warners together ahead of Flynn, are instructive. They began in 1930 with Sinner’s Holiday and rapidly ascended to stardom. By the time Flynn arrived five years later, Cagney had appeared in 23 films and Blondell in 36. These actors were shuttling from soundstage to soundstage, sometimes starting their next picture before their current one had quite been finished. Similarly, Bette Davis came to Warners with The Man Who Played God in 1932. Though she fought relentlessly against being tossed into the studio’s meat-grinder (“For the first time in my life I don’t care whether I ever make another picture or not,” she wrote to Jack Warner in 1939, “I am that overworked”), she nevertheless made another 34 pictures by the end of the decade. Jack Warner was heard to say, “I don’t want it good, I want it Tuesday,” and the studio did its best to work on that pace.
In his seminal tell-all Hollywood Babylon, Kenneth Anger claimed to reveal the festering truth beneath the dream factory of the American film industry. His was a bemused but cynical perspective on the business of show, reveling in the sordid juiciness of early Tinseltown controversies that usually concluded with tragedy, if not death. Representatives of the film idols referred to in the book lined...
In his seminal tell-all Hollywood Babylon, Kenneth Anger claimed to reveal the festering truth beneath the dream factory of the American film industry. His was a bemused but cynical perspective on the business of show, reveling in the sordid juiciness of early Tinseltown controversies that usually concluded with tragedy, if not death. Representatives of the film idols referred to in the book lined...
John Waters, the subversive auteur behind the cult films Pink Flamingos and Pecker, watched Ryan Murphys recent anthology TV series Feud every week. The show chronicles the rivalry between screen legends Bette Davis and Joan Crawford during the making of their 1962 film What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? Waters appeared in the shows first season as William Castle, the director of Crawfords B-grade horror movie Strait-Jacket. Decades before Murphy was championing women over 40 in his TV shows, Waters was doing the same for one of the biggest stars of the 1980s. His 1994 suburban-set black comedy Serial Mom cast former blockbuster darling Kathleen Turner in the role of a loving mother who maims and murders anyone who crosses her family. Serial Mom merges Waters trash film roots with Hollywood, poking fun at the middle-class, and the American obsession with true crimewell before the days of popular podcast Serial. Shout Factory recently released a special Blu-ray edition of the film.
Waters fans have been clamoring for a new film since the directors last major feature, 2004s A Dirty Shame. He spends a lot of time writing and reading (Ariel Levys book The Rules Do Not Apply, about her sad miscarriage and breakup of her marriage to a woman and The Son, currently), and hell be hosting an adult summer camp in September. Im writing two books, Im writing a Christmas show, Im promoting my new book, Make Trouble Ive got so many projects I can barely breathe, he told Musings by phone recently. And he doesnt discount the possibility of directing again. I have four development deals… . None of them happened, but who knows? Next time they say yes, Ill do one. Musings revisits Waters serial killer comedy and the Pope of Trashs career for a chat about sex, screenwriting, and suburban malaise.
Musings: Apart from being a great true-crime satire, Serial Mom is an interesting snapshot of the 90s. You reference things like Pee-Wee Hermanthis was during his adult movie theater arrest scandal. Serial Mom was released two months before the O. J. Simpson white Bronco chase. And then Matthew Lillard would star in Scream, the biggest horror movie of the decade, just two years later. This was also when reality TV, talk shows, and court TV were really starting to become popular.
John Waters: I was ahead of my time! I was The Amazing Kreskin!
How much of the movie was informed by that vibe? You dont strike me as a TV junkie.
I never watched any of that. I still dont. A reality show asks you to put people down and feel superior. I dont think Ive done that in any of my movies. I ask you to love my characters, even though others wouldnt.
Whats happened now is that every cable channel seems to be milking the true crime genre to the point that theres nothing new. These documentaries are not documentaries. Theyre just cut and paste jobs of the same thing over and over. They ruined the genre. Truman Capote started it with In Cold Blood, but now there arent many good hardback true crime books to come out that are well written. There are a lot of cheap paperbacks. The shows on TV are pretty bad, too. It seems like every cable station does another miniseries. The older ones were brilliantbut as we all know, whenever anything good happens, they do fifty bad imitations.
I didnt see the new Casey Anthony. I think the Enquirer was a producer. I wrote something once about why I loved the National Enquirer. Well, I hate it nowbecause its just Trump every week. I cant believe anyone is buying the National Enquirer anymore. The headlines arent funny or exciting. Even Trump supporters I cant imagine they would buy it.
Youve said many times that whenever you make a movie about one of your obsessions, like true crime, that its over for you. How do you engage in your obsessions?
Obsessed just means interest to me. I keep reading about it. I keep files about it. Generally, I write about it now. I do a spoken word show all year called This Filthy World. I have a Christmas show that I do in 18 cities in 20 days. I write books all the time. Everything Im interested in, I end up reading it and telling my own stories with it, using it for information in my own work. To me, the newspapers are my soap operas. I look at them every day. Theyre my stories.
I went to so many trials when I was young. I went to Patty Hearst. I went to [Charles] Manson. I went to Hillside Strangler. All those trials kinda showed up in [Serial Mom]. In Pink Flamingoes and Female Trouble theres a trial. Theres a mock trial in Desperate Living. I had those scenes in all my movies. I still think that a really good trial is theater.
Serial Mom and the true crime craze also make me think of how the Satanic Panic spread during the 1980s, and people became obsessed with the gory details of these made-up satanic rituals and abuses in the suburbs.
Oh, so many innocent people some innocent people are still in jail! The Satanic Temple, who I am a supporter ofthough Im certainly not a Satanist they go around the country crashing these conventions of doctors that believe in that stuff and exposing them. It all started with the McMartin case. I went to that trial a lot. They were innocent! Their entire lives were ruined, because of that panic. Im not saying there were never any child molesters in daycare centers, but there were many, many, many who were not.
What was the atmosphere of the McMartin preschool trial?
I went a lot. I had lunch. I sat with the McMartins at the table. I said, Why arent you so angry? They said, Because the lawyer wont let us! They were all found not guilty. The trial lasted forever. People burned down their school. When they sued, I think they only got a dollar once it was over. That poor old lady, Mrs. McMartin they had pictures of her in leather S&M outfits in her wheelchair. They said children were taken away on airplanes. It was all bullshit! The children nicknamed the one accused man Ray Ray [Raymond Buckey, the grandson of school founder Virginia McMartin and son of administrator Peggy McMartin]. That was Johnny Knoxvilles name in A Dirty Shame.
Polyester and Hairspray were made during that time and poke fun at suburban life and the idealism of the 1960s. Does the theres something rotten in the suburbs theme still excite your imagination?
I always make fun of suburbia. Suburbans are always the villains in my movies. I grew up in suburbiaand it was the first thing I tried to escape, so I could go downtown and be a beatnik.
When I hitchhiked across the country, the people picking me up in Mid-America were lovely and great. I dont think its so cut and dry anymore. You can live in suburbia, you can live in the city. Everywhere is cooland there are assholes everywhere, too! You have to weave your way through society no matter where you live and pick and choose carefully.
John Waters, the subversive auteur behind the cult films Pink Flamingos and Pecker, watched Ryan Murphy’s recent anthology TV series Feud every week. The show chronicles the rivalry between screen legends Bette Davis and Joan Crawford during the making of their 1962 film What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? Waters appeared in the show’s first season as William Castle, the director of Crawford’s B-grade horror movie Strait-Jacket. Decades before Murphy was championing women over 40 in his TV shows, Waters was doing the same for one of the biggest stars of the 1980s. His 1994 suburban-set black comedy Serial Mom cast former blockbuster darling Kathleen Turner in the role of a loving mother who maims and murders anyone who crosses her family. Serial Mom merges Waters’ trash film roots with Hollywood, poking fun at the middle-class, and the American obsession with true crime—well before the days of popular podcast Serial. Shout Factory recently released a special Blu-ray edition of the film.
Waters’ fans have been clamoring for a new film since the director’s last major feature, 2004’s A Dirty Shame. He spends a lot of time writing and reading (“Ariel Levy’s book The Rules Do Not Apply, about her sad miscarriage and breakup of her marriage to a woman” and The Son, currently), and he’ll be hosting an adult summer camp in September. “I’m writing two books, I’m writing a Christmas show, I’m promoting my new book, Make Trouble… I’ve got so many projects I can barely breathe,” he told Musings by phone recently. And he doesn’t discount the possibility of directing again. “I have four development deals… . None of them happened, but who knows? Next time they say yes, I’ll do one.” Musings revisits Waters’ serial killer comedy and the Pope of Trash’s career for a chat about sex, screenwriting, and suburban malaise.
Musings: Apart from being a great true-crime satire, Serial Mom is an interesting snapshot of the ‘90s. You reference things like Pee-Wee Herman—this was during his adult movie theater arrest scandal. Serial Mom was released two months before the O. J. Simpson white Bronco chase. And then Matthew Lillard would star in Scream, the biggest horror movie of the decade, just two years later. This was also when reality TV, talk shows, and court TV were really starting to become popular.
John Waters: I was ahead of my time! I was The Amazing Kreskin!
How much of the movie was informed by that vibe? You don’t strike me as a TV junkie.
I never watched any of that. I still don’t. A reality show asks you to put people down and feel superior. I don’t think I’ve done that in any of my movies. I ask you to love my characters, even though others wouldn’t.
What’s happened now is that every cable channel seems to be milking the true crime genre to the point that there’s nothing new. These documentaries are not documentaries. They’re just cut and paste jobs of the same thing over and over. They ruined the genre. Truman Capote started it with In Cold Blood, but now there aren’t many good hardback true crime books to come out that are well written. There are a lot of cheap paperbacks. The shows on TV are pretty bad, too. It seems like every cable station does another miniseries. The older ones were brilliant—but as we all know, whenever anything good happens, they do fifty bad imitations.
I didn’t see the new Casey Anthony. I think the Enquirer was a producer. I wrote something once about why I loved the National Enquirer. Well, I hate it now—because it’s just Trump every week. I can’t believe anyone is buying the National Enquirer anymore. The headlines aren’t funny or exciting. Even Trump supporters… I can’t imagine they would buy it.
You’ve said many times that whenever you make a movie about one of your obsessions, like true crime, that it’s over for you. How do you engage in your obsessions?
Obsessed just means interest to me. I keep reading about it. I keep files about it. Generally, I write about it now. I do a spoken word show all year called This Filthy World. I have a Christmas show that I do in 18 cities in 20 days. I write books all the time. Everything I’m interested in, I end up reading it and telling my own stories with it, using it for information in my own work. To me, the newspapers are my soap operas. I look at them every day. They’re my stories.
I went to so many trials when I was young. I went to Patty Hearst. I went to [Charles] Manson. I went to Hillside Strangler. All those trials kinda showed up in [Serial Mom]. In Pink Flamingoes and Female Trouble there’s a trial. There’s a mock trial in Desperate Living. I had those scenes in all my movies. I still think that a really good trial is theater.
Serial Mom and the true crime craze also make me think of how the Satanic Panic spread during the 1980s, and people became obsessed with the gory details of these made-up satanic rituals and abuses in the suburbs.
Oh, so many innocent people… some innocent people are still in jail! The Satanic Temple, who I am a supporter of—though I’m certainly not a Satanist— they go around the country crashing these conventions of doctors that believe in that stuff and exposing them. It all started with the McMartin case. I went to that trial a lot. They were innocent! Their entire lives were ruined, because of that panic. I’m not saying there were never any child molesters in daycare centers, but there were many, many, many who were not.
What was the atmosphere of the McMartin preschool trial?
I went a lot. I had lunch. I sat with the McMartins at the table. I said, “Why aren’t you so angry?” They said, “Because the lawyer won’t let us!” They were all found not guilty. The trial lasted forever. People burned down their school. When they sued, I think they only got a dollar once it was over. That poor old lady, Mrs. McMartin… they had pictures of her in leather S&M outfits in her wheelchair. They said children were taken away on airplanes. It was all bullshit! The children nicknamed the one accused man Ray Ray [Raymond Buckey, the grandson of school founder Virginia McMartin and son of administrator Peggy McMartin]. That was Johnny Knoxville’s name in A Dirty Shame.
Polyester and Hairspray were made during that time and poke fun at suburban life and the idealism of the 1960s. Does the “there’s something rotten in the suburbs” theme still excite your imagination?
I always make fun of suburbia. Suburbans are always the villains in my movies. I grew up in suburbia—and it was the first thing I tried to escape, so I could go downtown and be a beatnik.
When I hitchhiked across the country, the people picking me up in Mid-America were lovely and great. I don’t think it’s so cut and dry anymore. You can live in suburbia, you can live in the city. Everywhere is cool—and there are assholes everywhere, too! You have to weave your way through society no matter where you live and pick and choose carefully.
