When John Waters was “livid” with Debbie Harry for getting Bill Murray to sing on the ‘Polyester’ soundtrack
John Waters is the kind of guy who seems like he can get on with anyone if they are interesting enough.
In fact, he has a history of befriending criminals and hanging out in the kinds of bars most people wouldn’t go in unless they were forced at gunpoint. Waters would probably leap into a grotty bar full of knife-wielding freaks with a grin on his face, even if there was a gun pressed to his temple.
The filmmaker, who has always enjoyed shocking people with his exercises in bad taste – from the filth-ridden world of Babs Johnson in Pink Flamingos to the depraved sexual terrain of A Dirty Shame – counts Manson Family members and bank robbers as friends. Seriously, he even dedicated Female Trouble to Charles ‘Tex’ Watson. But he once drew the line at Bill Murray.
Back in the 1980s, Waters befriended Debbie Harry of Blondie fame, most famously casting her as Velma in Hairspray. But before that, he’d hired her to create some music for his 1981 film Polyester. Working alongside Chris Stein, she came up with a few tracks for the movie, and one of them would feature comedic star Murray from Saturday Night Live. Waters was not impressed.
As it turned out, Waters hated what Murray represented, and he didn’t want him anywhere near his subversive film, which was released with an accompanying scratch-and-sniff card that boasted Smell-O-Vision and featured the overweight drag queen Divine as a crazy housewife. This wasn’t anything like Caddyshack.
According to Waters’ collaborator Robert Maier, the filmmaker was “livid” that Harry had roped Murray into the film. Writing in Low Budget Hell: Making Underground Movies With John Waters, Maier explained, “John’s humour was not doofusy like Bill Murray’s. John was angry, gay, and shocking, and he didn’t want it diluted.”
Apparently, Waters found Murray too “mass-audience,” believing him to be far removed from the “underground and dangerous” elements of his own filmmaking.
Chris Stein recalled the recording in a Facebook post in 2020, writing, “John was wary of using Bill at first, I remember him saying, ‘I’m going to be known for having the guy from Saturday Night Live in my movie,’ but I’d seen Bill do his lounge singer act and was pretty sure it’d fit in well… John came around.”
It seems like Waters inevitably embraced this contrast between himself and the mainstream appeal of Murray, just like how he’d cast Hollywood heartthrob Tab Hunter as Divine’s love interest. Sure, it wasn’t the same, but Waters had to have some faith in Harry’s ideas, and soon he realised that having Murray on the soundtrack wasn’t such a bad thing after all.
He’d never even met Murray, so he decided to put his prejudices aside and see what Harry had been working on. The result was ‘The Best Thing’, which she composed with Michael Kamen, while Murray dramatically performed lines like “our love became infinity, our timeless fantasy.” Waters was proven wrong – it worked.
Reflecting on the song in an interview with W Magazine, he said, “He does it seriously, like a bad Douglas Sirk film track, which is why it’s funny.”
