PROVINCETOWN — John Waters is marveling at the fact that Janus Films, venerable distributor of classics by European auteurs like Bergman, Truffaut, and Antonioni, is re-releasing a restored version of his 1970 proto-trash film “Multiple Maniacs” this month on DVD and Blu-ray, goosed by a theatrical run in select cities. The film, which features the outrageous drag performer Divine getting ravished by a rosary in a church pew and later being violated by a giant lobster, opens at the Coolidge Corner Theatre on Friday.
“When I was in high school, the first art movies I ever saw were always Janus. They had a huge influence on my life,” says Waters, during an interview in June at the Provincetown International Film Festival. “So the fact that Janus Films is distributing one of my most hideous movies is very pleasing to me. It’s the biggest irony of all.”
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Still, in some ways, Waters says, it makes perfect sense.
“I’ve always said I made exploitation films for art theaters. I always did the best in the richest neighborhoods. They never worked in real grind-houses. Because my films were making fun of [grind house cinema] and the audience somehow knew. They didn’t think Russ Meyer movies were funny. ... They didn’t think [1964 American splatter film] ‘Two Thousand Maniacs’ was funny. They were screaming.”
“I think irony is so overused now,” he says, with a laugh. “But I’m still an irony dealer.”
Shot in black-and-white 16mm film, “Multiple Maniacs” begins with “Lady Divine’s Cavalcade of Perversion,” a tent-pole freak show luring shocked middle-class couples to gawk at the sick-and- twisted depravity on display. The real aim of this cockamamie theatrical troupe, though, is to hold its patrons at gunpoint and rob them blind.
From there, the film becomes a demented story of violent revenge after Divine discovers that her lover Mr. David (David Lochary) is having an affair with a doe-eyed blonde (Mary Vivian Pearce) and plans to skip town. Divine smashes the windows of a car and winds up in a raunchy afternoon-delight encounter inside a church with a coquettish Mink Stole, before her feverish transformation into a horrifying, fur-coat-clad monster running rabid through the streets of the city.
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A Baltimore judge deemed the film “horrendous, sickening, and revolting.” Waters calls it a transgressive test run for his later trash-film classics “Pink Flamingos” (1972), “Female Trouble” (1974), and “Polyester” (1981). “In ‘Multiple Maniacs,” Divine does eat a disgusting cow heart, raw from the butcher. You can see him gag,” Waters said. “I guess that was training wheels for the dog turd in ‘Pink Flamingos.’”
Dressed in all white and still rocking his famous pencil-thin mustache, Waters peers out from behind dark-rimmed sunglasses on the porch of a hilltop inn overlooking the harbor. He marvels at the fact that this is his 52nd summer in Provincetown, where he can be seen regularly riding his bike up and down Commercial Street.
Waters, now 70, first came to the tip of the Cape when he hitchhiked from his native Baltimore in the summer of 1964. For years, he worked in the local bookshops (“that was my college education”), and Provincetown, he says, was the first place to show “Multiple Maniacs” outside of his hometown.
“I had to rent the theater from the owner and pay him his cut of every seat. So if nobody came, I would have owed him really a lot of money,” he recalls. “But we sold out every showing. That’s how I started to pay it back.” (He borrowed $5,000 from his father to make the film.)
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For years, the original print of “Multiple Maniacs” was stored in a closet, then in an attic. At first, the Criterion Collection film restorers asked him if he wanted to keep all the scratches and splice marks. “I said, ‘No! I never wanted it to look like that!’ It was just the best I could do at the time. Now it looks like a bad John Cassavetes movie. So I’m happy about that.”
Because of the improvements, he saw details and heard dialogue that he had never encountered before while watching it. “They did such an amazing job of cleaning it up — not content-wise, of course. I kept saying, ‘I still own that ash tray!’ I still have the [silver] Warhol Jackie that’s on the wall [in Divine’s apartment]. That’s a real one!”
Despite the technical challenges for a novice filmmaker using sub-par equipment, Waters says he learned on the fly — making movies was his film school. “I look back on it and think, How did we ever even do that? But the pitifulness of it was part of its appeal. It’s just like any kid making a film today on their cellphone camera.”
Waters hasn’t made a new film since “A Dirty Shame” in 2004. A children’s Christmas adventure, “Fruitcake,” never came to fruition, and a sequel to “Hairspray” for HBO also stalled. “My last movie was not a success, but my last two books [“Role Models” and “Carsick: John Waters Hitchhikes Across America”] were both best-sellers.” He’s now got two new ones in the works — “Mr. Know-It-All,” a non-fiction guide to “how to avoid respectability at 70,” and a novel called “Liar Mouth,” centering on a woman who steals suitcases at airports.
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So don’t expect a “gone fishing” sign hung up at Waters’s house, or the kind of late-night acid-tripping he was known for in his youth. “I’m here all summer, but I’m not on vacation,” he says. “I’m up working every morning.”
Christopher Wallenberg can be reached at chriswallenberg@gmail.com.