It looks like John Waters has a new muse. In an interview with Pop Candy’s Whitney Matheson, the filmmaker discusses his upcoming Christmas movie Fruitcake––“imagine The Little Rascals if John Waters had directed it”––and has nothing but effusive praise for the film’s star, Johnny Knoxville:
Yeah, I love Johnny. He really personifies every male character that’s a good guy that I could write that would live in Baltimore. I think Jackass is very much in the spirit of what my early films were. He’s an anarchist, and I’m always happy to hang around anarchists. He’s a cultural anarchist.
Knoxville, of course, starred in Waters’ most recent feature, A Dirty Shame. And Waters has been vocal about his admiration of the prank punk turned actor before; he memorably stuck Jackass Number 2 in the (wait for it) number 2 slot of his Top Ten Films of 2006 list for Artforum, declaring it a triumph that Knoxville and his boys had the “number-one-grossing movie in America on its opening weekend—and the male stars eat shit and drink horse semen for real. They’re nude a lot, too. If this isn’t cultural terrorism, I don’t know what is.”
By now, we’re used to Waters cheerfully celebrating mainstream culture for co-opting his once-shocking provocations. I’ve never been entirely sure how I feel about it––complimenting a product of a Viacom subsidiary as an act of “cultural terrorism” is a little much, don’t you think?––but I don’t know…there’s something vaguely interesting about the idea of him taking this superfamous guy who he’s convinced is an “anarchist”, and putting him in a children’s film. Maybe Waters is finally co-opting his aesthetic back.
The latest incarnation of Hairspray had its New York premiere last night, and it was an apparently uneventful evening– pity the poor celebblogs, who have nothing to pump other than the “Katie Holmes Left The House, Possibly Pregnant” vein. But back in 1988, the premiere of the first Hairspray took Baltimore by storm. This amazing clip (from Jonathan Ross‘ late-80 cult film documentary series The Incredibly Strange Film Show) features interviews with John Waters and a tuxedo-wearing Divine, as well as a brief history of Waters’ pre-Hairspray output.
Towards the end, Ross, interviewing Waters weeks after Divine’s death, asks the filmmaker to define his late muse’s appeal. Waters sighs and answers, “He represented to any kind of rebel somebody that could win.” THAT’s what’s missing from this new version of Hairspray–it’s an incredible crowd pleaser, but it’s got nothing on the original film’s spirit of insurrection.
It looks like John Waters has a new muse. In an interview with Pop Candy’s 
