In Person; John Waters; John Barth

Why. In person is brought to Marylanders through general support grants made possible by Waverley press incorporated that Williams and Wilkins company merit gasoline stations and the members of the Maryland Center for Public Broadcasting. I am regretting felt a British official a censor. Once said. We do not know how to deal with the subject of intentional bad taste. He was talking about one of the films produced by John Waters whose work has drawn international attention. No small amount of a claim. A

loyal worldwide following personal invitations to lecture at colleges and universities as well as the scorn and rejection of a good number of people in what might be called the establishment. And here's a famous and talented writer producer and director whose self proclaimed lifelong goal has been to make successful exploitation pictures for art theatres. Or put another way to make the trashiest motion pictures and film history. And how many of us can say that we have achieved our lifelong goals in person Marilyn moviemaker John Waters. John Waters was brought up in Baltimore in a normal traditional loving family his first film was made when he was 17 using the camera given to him by his grandmother. Since then

he's made eight others and they've been seeing enjoyed and vilified across the globe and translated into other languages. RH Gardener of the Sun papers has written personally the most charming and inoffensive of men. Water specializes in works of an unbelievably gross and offensive nature. John. I read that when you were a youngster you enjoyed the Wizard of Oz but you cheered for the witch to win a handy legend. Well no it's true I still love the words. I mean somebody sent me recently clips of a film of the wet yourself and I had a blown up from my kitchen I think that the witch melting is probably to me the most erotic thing that I've ever seen. But that was hardly the witch winning. Yeah. But the which I always rooted for the villains villains are always the best parts of movies plays TV shows I think if you're an actor you should always try to get the part of the villain because it's what people remember. And the villain you can have more fun with it. I mean I'm interested in in evil

characters everywhere I mean in real life in movies I think that the banality of evil is interesting and evil exaggerated as a style was interesting. You've made that into your films where you know some of the people say well you pick on women in your film all the people in my films are pretty terrible I don't pick on one particular group I think I'm pretty unfairly opportunity offended. You used to like automobile crashes is young still I don't like to be in them. I like to K and destruction so I used to go. Watch go to junkyards get my mother to take me to junkyards and I was just fantasy. There's been a hideous accident here but that was just how I played as a kid I didn't like dodgeball much or any of that stuff but so I would go the junk yard so I feel like I was if I was alone I had a million friends because I had a little millions of fantasies I was always obsessed. And my films are if you feel that you are an outsider yet it didn't bother me I was glad of that. I mean I was never I didn't have a rough time in school I don't feel like I was hassled or anything like that people just sort of left me alone because it made me

feel fine I really just wasn't interested in what they were interested in. What kind of puppetry did you do for younger children. Well it started out pretty normally I gave Cinderella a Punch and Judy but then I saw these movies by William Castle always had gimmicks like buzzers point off under your seat or skeletons coming out into the theater. So I tried to put them in my puppet shows and the parents are getting all nervous when they saw fake blood that's when I made a movie that it was time to move on. You had fake blood with one side I remember the horrified parents you know the kids loved it. It would have been a party of yeah it was the hats and everything I still have birthday parties for kids a lot you know and show like crazy movies and the kids like my movies you can't shock a kid. You can only shock adults because the kids haven't been taught all the things they're supposed to be offended by or be nervous about they haven't they haven't grown into those fears yet. Your humor is based on that nervousness. I'm trying to get you to laugh at things that you're a little nervous about which I think is healthy. For laughing in general. Tell me about that first movie The 17 year old kid gets a camera

from his from his grandmother. Did she know you really wanted a camera to make me think she was worried about you thought I might end up in jail so she better give me time or maybe that would I would she have that worry. Well because I used to get allowed to go to driving every night and then I got arrested once in the drive in for underage drinking I think the movie was robbed in the seven hoods with Frank Sinatra. I used to go the drive in every night. And watch the meatball sandwich commercial that really aesthetically influenced me I thought that was the most common eat out of media but the concession stand and I always respected the people that sat on benches where you can go the drive in without a car. And they have this little area for really weird people that walk into the door. I sense that there was a lot of theater. Yeah yeah. So the first movie was called bag in a black leather jackets really terrible in my closet where it will stay forever. Eight Millimeter black and white you can't I don't think you can even buy millimeter black you did film you did include what was later to become vintage waters you know Luda did. It was influenced by a very 60s kind of theater of the absurd happenings that common

barristers say but that was all in it. What your parents think and so well they let us film it on the roof of their house which was about a woman a white woman marrying a black man in the Ku Klux Klan preacher married them together and they let me film on the roof of their house so they didn't quite get it but they figured. But I want to do it so they encourage me always to make the films even though they were horrified by the subject matter a lot of the time. Your father helped pay for some of the loans you money to to make some of these to me. Yeah earlier films he lent me the budget and then I paid him back. Out of the profits of that. Well so as we went along every time I'd show it and get money I'd give it to him. But here's a here's a gentleman undoubtedly of what could be called the establishment. So his son talented though he may be is he's taking pictures of some pretty vivid and startling shocking offensive scenes and he's supporting it. What did you have a conflict.

Yeah I think it was nervous and you know I don't tell my son you know you gotta lie about it. I paid him back in and you know I didn't go to college I very briefly got kicked out of college school just wasn't for me. I mean I think schools are great for some people and some people a total waste of time. What schools did you get kicked out. New York University. But they invited me back and I gave lectures or so I got some part of my tuition money back incentive years later yeah. But. I think that he just figured that it was. I didn't go to college so the last film with pink flamingoes he said you don't have to pay me back but Bahjat never asked me again. You know I mean so that was fair I mean he had got me going in the business and then I used all that money to make Female Trouble on the money and the money I made from Pink Flamingoes. So it was sort of my college education. Pink Flamingoes was the first of the you know Waters filmography that. Attain some national working rubble and he did that.

Where do people play these films you don't play and you know now Pink Flamingoes players all over the world in regular theaters all the time it started out as a midnight movie. What does that mean well it means a movie it only plays it minutes when the audience comes they know that they're going to see something not like the normal movie. We build it as an exercise in poor taste which was really an understatement. I think. It opened at the Elgin Theater in New York which had made the film Alto poem in that success. And actually the world premiere was in Baltimore the University of Baltimore. And from the reaction I got from that I knew that we that it would work. I felt it was a large one and well people either really hate it or really loved it but it was sold out and people came back and saw it over and over and over which is what a cult film is people to come back and see the film over and over and over. And it's been playing in one theater in Los Angeles for nine years straight and still there is a set of personality characteristics among those that really love your stuff. Brain damage. No I think it appeals to all to pop to all ages really. It's a certain sense of humor and it's a sense of humor about

laughing at everything that's terrible in the world. And the easiest people to offend are liberals not conservatives because liberals. Give lip service to everything's OK until it's in their life. Oh my. A year a year after pink flamingoes opened variety brand I love the way they talk and variety of course. They said dregs of human progress draws a weirdo element monstrous. Oh yeah like on the last line the last lines brother said beyond a doubt the most disgusting film capper in film history lesson rather of the lifelong goal. But my work isn't understood or misunderstood. That was a fair review it was a funny reveal. They didn't get the humor of it I don't think the people were coming not just because it was shocking but to be able to laugh at the same time. This reviewer obviously didn't think it was funny but some of those kind of reviews helped my career in the old days they were they wouldn't right now but they did like the Detroit Free Press like a septic tank explosion must be

seen to be believed. Well we put that ad right in the quote right in the ads. What what kind of review would help your career now. What kind of reviews we got for polyester which were mainstream like Newsweek Time the New York Times that liked the film and said it was very funny. But I don't want to try and go to stray because it won't work. So you started out with. With films that. Went beyond X X ratings not because of sex though no. Nobody wants to see my character's great mood straight shoot. Straight to shocks. Now with polyester you came to an ordinary R rating. Yeah but you know you know we know we're mellowing know as a filmmaker I was trying to spread my disease further and if you only have it at midnight you're not going to get a lot of people will not go to the movies at midnight no matter what it is. It's hard enough to get people at a movie theater for any reason today. Some people saw polyester morbid appalled at the play. It

depends on your threshold. Paul Willis Valerie's about how you live in America but nowadays I think the humorous completely changed I think in the 10 years since I've started. You can see stuff that usually might be offensive in my films that is on television. Just because the morning laughing at them at themself now which I think is healthier. There are other people who specialize in this kind of film I can't quite get the adjective I want rest my air. Well his films are different than mine he is the king of like softcore pornography. But he is. Similar to mine. Is that like he is his films I hope I don't live like my films he does and he's really obsessed by women with that are. Almost freaks of nature because of their bust size. But he has a very good sense of humor about it I think I mean he makes movies with titles like Mudhoney and beneath the valley of the ultra Vixens. His new one is going to be called the breast of Rosmer. Did you. You went out to meet him didn't you.

I met I met him a couple times. What is he like. He's very very funny he's like a typical Hollywood movie director. You know we went out with Kit Lim Kit was his girlfriend who is I mean unbelievable looking Plus she hands out nude photos of herself to the waiters when you walk in restaurants you get a great table. Does not sound as if he takes himself NO NO NO NO NO NO. But he's a great technician his films are almost like industrials only instead of being about a product they're about bras. What about this guy Gordon Lewis. He's an expert well he was the first he's the granddaddy of Ghawar he was the very first person that did Gore films and he wanted to go even lower than sex films so I thought what else is there so he appealed to the lowest common denominator millions which is blood lust and did it and outrageously and did it ridiculously. But. Today there's millions of those still. What's he like I mean most society may not like it but without her for Gordon Lewis we wouldn't have a maniac or a Friday the 13th Part 82. You know he's a very nicely teaches college now and Florida has an advertising agency. Herschel was

like totally. So it was like selling shoes and it was like a product to him he scorns filmmaking in a way. He says things like that they would say well we'd like to get this show it's all who cares about the shot just get the glory. But he's quite honest about it. He's the only director I've ever heard that said to me there's really no reason to show most of my films today. I've never heard a director. Why are these people you in these two making these movies for the money for the fun. Well we're trying to make a living and certainly. We're making it for the fun for and to get our sense of humor across to other people and I feel I'm lucky enough that there are people around the world that share my sense of humor enabled me to make a living doing this. Tell me about the dream Landers. Well mostly we were well they've grown I mean it was it was mostly a group kids that we hung around together and a lot of us lived in Lutherville Maryland that's where and we were sort of. Outcast from the normal sorority fraternity high school life because we just weren't interested in that and immediately went to downtown Baltimore and used to hang out a place called Marduk which

was a bar. Now it's a French restaurant but it used to become like a beatnik bar. At the time we all thought we were beatniks. We wore sandals that laced up and divine lived up the street from my parents. Mary Vivian Pierce I know since I was one year old her parents and my parents were good friends. So we just sort of got together and started making these movies that started out almost like home movies. This is mid to 60s. Yeah 64 65. And you grew age then during a period in which our country had it. Oh I am I was called the generation gap and all sorts of things where young people were in a state of. That's different from the state in which they now are and were rebelling when it was much more fun to rebel. And that's why I'm glad I'm 15 now because there's no way left to rebel when you had long hair and took drugs and all that the 60s that caused outrage and now you can have a safety pins you know people go. It doesn't cause that same kind of anger and reaction. So I think it's much harder to be a rebel these days than it.

In person is brought the Marylanders regrets by Waverley press incorporated the Williams and Wilkins company and the members of the mountain setter for Public Broadcasting.

Brighton Maryland has been home for an interesting array of American writers. Francis Scott Key Nash HL Mencken even F. Scott Fitzgerald who was named after Mr Key spent a few of his drinking years here and now James Michener. I'm about to talk with a native Maryland writer a novelist and a professor about whom New York Times critic has said he's the best writer of fiction we have in America at the present. And one of the best we have ever had in the face of that remarkable praise imagine the courage he has just to sit down in front of a typewriter in person. John Barth. John Bryant is the grandson of a German immigrant stonecutter family is from the Eastern

Shore where point runs into the Chesapeake Bay and Maryland's history runs through most of Mr. Botts work. He was graduated from the Johns Hopkins University from which he also earned a master's degree. He taught at Penn State until 1965 when he accepted an appointment at the State University of New York. And a few years later returned to Maryland to become alumni Centennial professor of English and creative writing at Hopkins. All this while he was churning out four novels the floating opera the end of the road the weed factor and Giles Goat Boy Plus a collection of short fictions called Lost in the funhouse and a volume of novellas called which won the one thousand seventy three National Book Award. His latest novel is letters published just recently. Jack. You've said that novel writing is a kind of disciplined drudgery. Which is which and how much a discipline and a passionate drudgery. The novel was invented by the middle class for the middle class. And most novelists that I

know myself included are really very middle class people who are working habits are middle class also disciplined in the sense that unlike many poets whom I know novelists have to put in a sustained budget of time we sort of speak go to the office in the morning we even if the office is just up stairs in the study though I've done some novelists and known of some novelists who are who are night people and know he means and who wrote on you know off the wall hours. Most writers I know and certainly this one will go to work after breakfast and work uninterrupted lay until let's say mid afternoon or early afternoon at what must be the most solitary occupation in the world. And then knock it off. Almost every writer I talk to speaks of that in the same spirit that one speaks of going to the office there is not a romantic offer occupation by any means but discipline because. The first requirement for writing especially for writing novels is enough motor control to keep your hand going from left to right left to right page after page year after year and sometimes decade after decade.

What about when you sit there and it's nine thirty. And there's nothing there. One has to learn to be patient or else as you mentioned Baltimore writers a moment ago and as you know one can drink oneself to death or or commit literal or metaphorical suicide if you don't learn to have what most veterans of the medium acquire. Most survivors in the media require a kind of patience with yourself. Hemingway I'm told used to count his days word out put every morning when he was on the toilet I believe that man must have been constipated all his life. I think most novice learn to measure by the month and by the year and that's one way to stay calm so that if the muse isn't talking to you this morning you read your student's manuscript so he reads or you read a book by somebody else and be patient and patient wasn't it. I'm not sure that was Hemingway who left his work at the end of the day on an up. So that's a little less and less. There are many tricks as having a way of

self so that when you're mad at you for his you answer it. That's right. You wrote in a recent book that. We writers you said talk ineluctably and there forever to ourselves. I said a moment ago it's a lonely occupation when I worked in Buffalo at the State University of New York. I commuted for a while down a New York State Thruway and I used to envy the the ticket takers in the toll booths because at least Well that must be the second loneliest job in the world. At least there is that moment when their fingers on one end of the ticket and your fingers on the other end of the ticket and there's that little imitation of human communication there just for the moment but a novelist much more than a poet because of the hours involved. The novel sits by himself in the room for hours and hours and hours. Television People office workers all teachers all have other people going things going on around them that may not be communication but it's company at least. But it's no wonder that many of us who after spending those hours and hours all by ourselves in that really quite intense concentration.

When we get out you can't shut us up or or we may want to do something very physical like don't try to write or how to really do this rather than yourself. Talking to us rather than yourself when you're talking to three things or four you're talking to yourself. Surely all all written language finally is speaking to the writer who writes it. It also speaks to the reader of course readers are important. A written object that isn't read is a very strange object indeed it's like a tree falling in a forest and it's a very strange philosophical position. At the same time you're writing you're writing to the language and you're writing to the generations of the dead in your culture who've used that language and made language the language shapes you you know that you have a tiny part in shaping the language. There's a kind of dialogue in other words in addition to a writer's dialogue with him or herself with his or her readers. There's a dialogue with the language is that it's a two way thing as all dialogue.

Do you care. Ah how the reader reacts to what you've written. When you say you the reader if you're talking about you write without I would care very much. But of course you don't. There's no use caring about all readers you can't I mean you drive yourself crazy trying to reach all readers. The novel begins as a popular form of literature and I take that origin very as the first pop John of written literature. I take that very seriously. A writer who it's only been a 19th century into the 20th that we get this rather unfortunate but perfectly understandable division between popular literature and art literature. The phenomenon we call modernism is the sort of aggravated form of that in it's a 20th century phenomenon and the 19th first half of the 20th and I think one of the things we can see as we come towards the close of this century is an effort on the part of a great many serious writers to the feeder so as to close the gap a little bit. Now you can't have it both ways but your sister your twin sister said.

His stuff didn't sell in the early years and it didn't seem to bother him. Now he did not bother you because you're terribly modest person and or were you just writing for yourself. It didn't bother me that's true but I think and and my sister Jo was quite right she was reporting the news accurately when she said that. But I think it didn't bother me because of none of the. Not because of any of the considerations we've just been talking about but because when you're very young and very ambitious and new to the medium you're so busy getting it all said that in a sense you haven't got time to worry about whether advice as you get older and wiser and slower and more careful you may begin to realize as I have since I've been 30 or 35 or so. Let the moment go that you don't want to write a kind of fiction that only professional readers can understand that only devotees of high art can understand. There's a place for that kind of fiction I cut my teeth on that kind of fiction the fiction of James Joyce of Kafka the smog and so forth. But man himself in 1933 was already

smiling at what he called the early Christians those few people who will read anything no matter how difficult and the more difficult the better. Most of us are passed let me read to you from some reviews of your latest talk about talk about the dialogue between a writer and audience Newsweek magazine. Letters the name of your latest novel. Obviously letters is a brilliant witty at times area diet and damn near unreadable as well. New York Times New York Times as I'm sure that I don't fully understand this corky wasteful fascinating thing Barth has done I suspect that it may not be understandable in the ordinary sense. Does that kind of thing by the way it disappoints me a little bit I'm disappointed in both Peter Prescott and Thomas Edwards I think it was though for those they paid some compliments and I would always disappoints me when they when they do not feel neglected. That whatever its complexity is whatever its difficulties Its also funny or meant to be. Its also a story and I hope a very good one and I believe a very good one. My feeling about it.

Complexity is this Rick I think you can I think though it's my feeling about complexity is very simple about complexity is that as with good jazz or good classical music or what have you a great man or good good sports for example a new Orioles game or a corps well played Colts game there's an enormous amount of complexity going on among the players there so much so that as the poet Randall Gerald who was a great fan of professional football pointed out out of 70000 fans maybe only a handful in the stands really understand every detail of what's going on on the field at any given moment. But the game should be exciting anyway. With classical music good classical music and a great deal of jazz there's an enormous amount that you don't hear the first time through. But it's my conviction that the first time through ought to be so ravishing or entertaining in some way that you know OK later you go out you play the disc a few more times or you check the score let's say. I don't like in itself I don't like the kind of art that brandishes its complexity like a

shield or a gargoyle to scare off why do the critics like your art is that because someone is guilty of that you know you can. One has one's aspirations and then one does what one does. You can't in other words it's my idols after all in the novel are not so much James Joyce as though I admire him enormously. As people like Charles Dickens and Mark Twain and and of course servant. But you can't go from we don't live in the 19th century much less the 17th century complexity a complication a kind of sophistication comes into the novel in the twentieth century that I think would be a mistake to turn one's back on one's got to learn how to wear the complexity up one's sleeve was OK up the sleeve. One critic said he's winking coyly at us from every page now and again I get the feeling that you're. You're kidding around with this that you're toying with the readers that you're toying with us you know kind of way we're going to remember the most writers are readers too when I'm a reader I hate like hell to

be toyed with and I suppose that you and for that matter. Cajoled entertained puzzled fascinated in through it as a reader I can put up with all those 30 perhaps. But a distinction should be made I think between toying with the reader which is a rather contemptible thing to do and they won't make may make the reader want to throw the book across the room and enjoying a kind of sport with the medium that is to take a playful attitude a kind of high spirited playful attitude toward the language and toward the form is one thing good musicians do. Of course they're not toying with the listener in any unpleasant sense of the word but they can certainly surprise while at the same time and this is an important ingredient doing under all the trickery let's say under all the legerdemain getting some very heavy perhaps or passionate things said. Otherwise it's just trickery. And why are these cryptograms in your latest book. Part of the sport

part of the sport. I don't like a kind of novel which takes us a crossword puzzle attitude toward reality toward life toward the passions of the human breast at the same time. It would be foolish to deny that life for example has its puzzling aspects that we ourselves have are puzzling aspects we puzzle over each other we puzzle over the meaning of our experience. One way to reflect that if it could be done with good humor and energy and without irritating intelligent readers is to capitalize on. The puzzle aspect that a great many things in language after all children are learning the language of love puzzles word play riddles and so forth sporting with the language is one of the most natural things we do when we're using the language we hear it all the time. Street language any kind of slurring any kind of our God is full of wordplay squit puns and it changes rapidly. This is a family as human an impulse as we have to play with the language. That's what you're doing in for sure.

If. You know to discover in your in your latest in your latest book that if if you arranged the first letters of each. Chapter or letter. The thing reads an old timey Pista Larry novel by seven fictitious girls and dreamers each of which imagines himself actually I'm sure this is tiresome to you at this point I went and looked up epistolary. And I and I really was confused why an author should say you know I'm going to play with the language here and I wonder who'll find it did you suspect that it would be lost. No that one is worn on the sleeve. And it and let me say is the least important thing about the novel that kind of word game is fun to do while you're doing something else that's a kind of left handed thing that you do while you're playing the real melody line lets off the key off the chord somewhere with your right hand so you noodle over this epistolary novel the novel in the form of letters is the oldest form novel we have it is a novel that pretends to be some kind of documents is where the novel began.

My only ambition as you may know was to be a musician and specifically neither a composer nor a performer but what in the.