John Money, who was a famous doctor that got discredited by Oprah. She’s a great comedian who used to be a hippy chick in Baltimore and became one of the first trans women to get gender confirmation surgery under Dr. One other thing I meant to ask about were some of the film’s one-scene roles, like the “singing asshole” man or the woman in the park who flashes her penis. I still wanna make people laugh and surprise them in filthy ways, but I never felt the need to try and top Pink Flamingos because I felt I’d made my point. But he also liked the movie and was very proud of it, as am I. He gives an incredible performance, and I think that’s why he was weary of talking about eating shit. I think it worked beyond anything he could have imagined. He did it because it was in the script and when you make your first movies, you really go out on a limb to get noticed. That scene is just him being a great stunt performer. I think he got sick of talking about eating dog shit. He’s really good in the movie, but nobody ever wanted to talk to him about acting. I always said that Divine could never live Pink Flamingos down and I could never live up to it. Was there ever a time when you resented the film’s success? Or, at least, the expectations it placed on you to out-filth yourself? I think it happened because someone made the case that we ate the chicken afterwards. The chicken scene was the last of five cuts that got approved so that Pink Flamingos could finally be screened in the U.K. A scene would usually get put back in based on the argument that it’s a gross-out comedy. Pink Flamingos was banned in the United Kingdom for a while, and every few years it would get resubmitted to their ratings board. It was more shocking to him than anything else. I watched the film with a vegetarian friend at the IFC screening, and he almost had to leave the room during that scene. Instead, it got to have simulated sex in a movie and become famous! You could honestly argue that we made that chicken’s life better. We bought it at a market that advertised “freshly killed chickens,” so they were about to cut its neck and hand it over to us. I don’t wanna give anything away, but just know that I continue Divine’s curse. There’s also a documentary where we go back to the places we filmed in and tell the people who live there now about the atrocities that occurred in their homes. But we include some of them in this Criterion release for people to finally see. There were also a lot of scenes where characters talked for 10 minutes that just felt unnecessary. We filmed a subplot where Cookie gets murdered that was too violent and not very funny. What do you remember of the scenes that got cut? I read that your original cut of the film ran for two and a half hours. That’s why we shot the trailer stuff in the middle of nowhere up at my friend Bob Adam’s farm. It was a nationwide news story, and the American Civil Liberties Union ended up handling our case. I filmed a nude hitchhiker scene for Mondo Trasho and got some of us arrested for conspiracy to commit indecent exposure. Were there many instances like that, where the real world bled into filming? We were all influenced by radical politics and rioting, so we were driven, but we were also looking for trouble. But I wouldn’t call us a happy-go-lucky bunch. Danny Mills and Mary Vivian Pierce were freshly in love at the time, so those are the memories that flood back to me when I watch it. I certainly wrote Pink Flamingos under the influence of marijuana, but nobody was on drugs when we made the movie. Divine was an incredibly shy guy who just liked to smoke pot all day. I’m sure it helped that you and most of the cast had already made movies together and had a sense of camaraderie.Īnd we only got closer. It was also freezing because we shot in the middle of winter, so you can see everyone’s breath in a lot of shots. We’d all be in prison if we were like that! We’d work 20 hours straight, and some days the film wouldn’t develop so we’d have to reshoot everything the next day. Everybody always thought we were like those people, when in fact nobody was. What do you remember most about the experience? Some of the Pink Flamingos stories in your book Shock Value are just as shocking as the movie.
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