Movie legend tells all about his SF apartment, taking LSD and people-watching |
When John Waters started making movies in the suburbs of Maryland in the late 1960s, the Summer of Love was happening all the way across the country in San Francisco — and it sounded pretty horrible to him. “I was a yippie, not a hippie,” he once said in a 2002 interview.
Yet the city has had an undeniable impact on his career as a director, writer and all-around cult icon. Its midnight movie crowds were the first on the West Coast to embrace his off-the-wall vision, which glorified filth and violence at a time when everyone else was preaching peace and understanding. Once waging wars with film censors over deliberately disgusting classics like “Pink Flamingos” and “Multiple Maniacs,” Waters’ subversive work is now part of the National Film Registry, shown in art galleries and taught in college classrooms across the country. His filmography was the subject of an entire exhibit at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles in 2023, the same year he finally earned his rightful star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
While he stays loyal to his Baltimore roots, these days, the filmmaker has an apartment in San Francisco, returns to Oakland every year to host Mosswood Meltdown and is about to celebrate his 80th birthday with a West Coast tour that kicks off in Berkeley on Saturday.
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Baltimore’s finest multitalented artist John Waters hosts Mosswood Meltdown in Oakland on Saturday, July 20, 2025.
This interview, conducted with the Pope of Trash on April 6, has been edited for clarity and length.
SFGATE: Can I get your consent to record this for my personal use?
Don't let Google decide who you trust.
John Waters: Yeah, this is so Watergate.
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SFGATE: So how did you spend this holy Easter Sunday?
Waters: I had Easter dinner with my very good friend, film critic Dennis Dermody, in New York around the corner last night. It was nice.
You know, I always hated Easter. I hated the Easter Bunny. I thought it tortured children by making them look through the bushes and find a rotten Easter egg. The one good memory I have that I talked to my sisters about, and it’s hard to imagine because my parents were very straight — I’m using that in the old-fashioned Berkeley way. That doesn't mean gay; it means, you know, they weren’t hip.
But they used to leave me an Easter basket with a carton of Kools surrounded by black jelly beans. It would be a great Diane Arbus photo actually today, but it wasn’t even thought of as a weird thing to do. We were allowed to smoke in Catholic school in ninth grade. There was a smoking area. So that kind of thing is so weird when you look back on it.
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FILE: John Waters attends “John Waters: Pope of Trash” at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures on Sept. 14, 2023, in Los Angeles.
SFGATE: Tell me about your 80th birthday tour. How did that come to be? What can people expect when they go?
Waters: Well, I do about 59 shows a year on the road. I’m a carny. I’m a vaudevillian. But my birthday show this year is especially exploitive because I’m doing it in eight cities. You know, in the Bay Area, I always do my Christmas show in San Francisco. I’ve had art shows there. I host Mosswood Meltdown in Oakland, so I’m wildly covered, but I never played Berkeley.
So I’m really looking forward to it. I haven’t played Berkeley for so long, and so I’m really excited to come back. I have special Berkeley jokes. Let’s see if everybody still has humor there. They always did. Sometimes they were a little more humor impaired about politics, but I think we’re going to have a great time.
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And Berkeley was such a great place for my films. I remember always going to the movies there, to Moe’s Books, and all the places I used to go there. The only gay bar that was over there, I remember. I have great memories of Berkeley, but I just haven’t played there in really a long time.
SFGATE: I want to go back to your very first shows in San Francisco. Can you share your memories of going to the Palace Theater and seeing the Cockettes perform?
Waters: Well, I drove across the country. I lived in San Francisco, right? I lived in my car at one point and everything, but still, I did go to the Palace Theater that had the Cockettes. I met Sebastian, and I showed him my films, and then we showed, I think, “Multiple Maniacs” or “Mondo Trasho” first, but not with the Cockettes. It was a separate night. My films, I don’t believe were ever shown actually with the Cockettes, but definitely part of that scene.
And then Sebastian, who ran not only the Palace midnight show, he also had a place called the Secret Cinema that was this great kind of illegal cinema in a loft that showed really crazy movies. And so he booked my stuff a lot, and then he got paid for Divine to come out in drag........