The most outrageous ‘Pink Flamingos’ demands: “Few are as brave as actors who work with John Waters”
John Waters began making movies simply because he could, not necessarily because he should. He quickly discovered that the camera could become a weapon and thus he caused cinematic destruction – his extremely low budget movies both scaring and mesmerising viewers. With his long hair and pencilled-on mustache, Waters gathered friends to create movies designed to freak out hippies, and under the influence of a lot of marijuana or acid, he did just that.
With movies like Multiple Maniacs, Pink Flamingos, and Female Trouble, Waters centred his drag queen muse Divine and his cast of Dreamlanders, including Mink Stole and Cookie Mueller, as tales of grotesque behaviour, criminality, and perversion played out on grainy handheld cameras. It’s Pink Flamingos that remains Waters’ most controversial movie, however, most notorious for the scene in which Divine eats shit freshly laid by a dog on the pavement.
It’s a stomach-turning scene, but one that helped to give the film its notoriety, and alongside other revolting scenes, Pink Flamingos was soon banned in various parts of the world. It’s trashy, it’s camp, and it’s lots of fun, but to make such an iconic piece of filth, Waters had to hope that his actors would be down to do these shocking acts for real. In Mueller’s book Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black, she recalls preparing for some of the most intense moments in the movie, including Divine gearing up to eat the faeces.
“There was no question that Divine would eat the dogshit. He was a professional. It was in his script, so he was going to do it,” Mueller recalled. Waters wanted to keep the sequence a secret, as Mueller writes, “Maybe he was afraid some other filmmaker might beat him to it, steal the shit-pioneer award.” Despite the craziness of Waters and his friends, who seemed to have no regard for safety whatsoever, when it came to eating a turd, the actors wanted to ensure that Divine wouldn’t get ill from the stunt.
So, Waters got the dog assessed by a vet while Divine rang a paediatrician and asked what to do because his imaginary son had just eaten some dog faeces. “He said all I have to be careful about is the white worm,” Divine told his friends, and the rest was history. He didn’t swallow the poo, but he put the freshly delivered waste in his mouth at the end of the film, because, as Mink says, “Audiences want the truth.”
Mueller had a pretty intense scene to shoot herself that isn’t talked about half as much as the dog shit scene, but it’s arguably much more traumatic. “‘In the script it says Crackers cuts off the head of a chicken and he fucks me with the stump,’ I said. ‘Oh that sounds easy,’ Divine said.” I guess that’s what becomes normal when you’re one of Waters’ closest collaborators.
To shoot the scene, Danny Mills, who played Crackers, sliced the heads off of “eight or nine” chickens because multiple takes had to be shot. “Even without heads, they were a lively, nasty bunch of fowl, flopping and kicking with all their might. I got completely scratched up by their sharp claws. I was getting hurt for real,” Mueller wrote. The scene is one of the most horrific in the movie, although it provided the cast and crew with a huge banquet at the end of it.
Working with Waters evidently pushed actors to their limits, but to work with the filmmaker seemed like a joy that kept his Dreamlanders coming back for more. “We didn’t think he was asking too much. We didn’t think he was crazy, just obsessed,” Mueller wrote. He’s one of the most iconic and notorious filmmakers for a reason – he pushed boundaries like no one had before, and he tried anything, no matter how dangerous, in the name of art. “Few are as brave as actors who work with John Waters.”
