Audience members burst into applause during the opening credits for director/writer Waters and the since-deceased transvestite performer, Divine, who played the film’s repugnant but loveable lead, Dawn Davenport, a disaffected high school student who turns career criminal after her suburban parents neglect to give her cha-cha heels at Christmas.
Throughout the film, Divine and the other actors shouted their lines of dialogue with such Herculean force that it even took Waters by surprise. “All that screaming. I hadn’t seen that film in a while,” he chuckled afterwards as he climbed the stage in a striped suit, accented by his trademark pencil-thin moustache, to participate in a Q&A moderated by film director, Mary Harron, who also co-chairs the DGA’s Independent Directors Committee East.
Harron started the discussion off by declaring Waters’ transgressive comedy to be “as fresh as the day it was made.” To which Waters playfully responded, “I was a sadist,” launching into a description of the sleeting, wintry day when he directed Divine to swim across a Maryland river wearing only a sleeveless cocktail dress and a towering Mohawk-style wig. However, he added, “The wig didn’t come off and we were able to do it in one take.”
Asked to talk about his early influences, the maverick filmmaker replied that he faithfully attended the Charles Manson murder trial. “That was an obvious influence in Female Trouble,” he said. He also admired the underground filmmakers, the Kuchar brothers, and loved to watch ludicrous and trashy art house cinema such as Russ Meyer’s Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! He added, “I used to need to take acid to go see [Ingmar] Bergman films,” cracking up the audience.
The necessity to produce on the cheap also forced his creative hand. To stay within Female Trouble’s $25,000 budget, he called upon his local network of friends – “Baltimore delinquents,” he called them – to play his cast of social misfits, rehearsing them for a month in his apartment and at a local garbage dump. “The sanitation workers were stupefied,” he said, recalling that he never applied for permits, yet a local warden permitted him to film Divine’s electrocution scene inside the prison. “When we brought the electric chair through the gate,” said Waters, “the inmates were screaming.”
He thinks the whole movie was probably shot in 12 days. Scripts were handwritten and mimeographed. One friend styled everyone’s beehives while doubling as a butch prison guard. The novice who played Divine’s scabrous husband was talked into participating the day before shooting commenced. “We didn’t know him. He was walking down the street and ended up in this movie.”
Another friend went far beyond the call of duty when she handed her day-old-son over to Waters for the scene in which Divine gives birth, the tiny infant appearing to emerge from Divine’s fat loins coated in fake blood. “He’s now thirty-three and he’s fine,” Waters replied to the audience’s groans.
Waters prefers Female Trouble to his earlier film, Pink Flamingos, which put him on the map. “It was the ultimate Divine vehicle. I wrote it for her,” he said, referring to his early muse and high school friend, Harris Glen Milstead, who created the iconic drag queen persona and got beat up a lot as a kid. “He had a rage,” said Waters. “I used Divine’s rage.”
