Entertainment

Famed Filmmaker John Waters Brings His Christmas Cheer to Tucson

(Photo: John Waters, by Greg Gorman)

“Merry Christmas? How about an angry Christmas?” So says John Waters, filmmaker, raconteur, writer, traveler, and bibliophile, who’s on his way to Tucson to deliver what he describes as “70 minutes of me talking about politics, culture, and everything that has to do with Christmas. How do you go back home when it’s a civil war out there? Some families are very tense, knocking over the Christmas tree—just like what happened in Female Trouble, only about Trump and not cha-cha.”

Waters is no stranger to Tucson, though it’s been a few years since he was last here. He’ll be presenting his show A John Waters Christmas at the Rialto Theatre on December 9 at 8:00 pm, fast on the heels of his new book Mr. Know-It-All (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Always on the go, always in an airplane bound somewhere far away from his hometown of Baltimore, he writes there, “Sometimes I feel like a low-rent Oscar Wilde touring the coal-mining towns of America as he did in the 1880s.” One of those coal-mining towns is ours, just one of 16 to which Waters will bring his Christmas cheer over a period of three weeks. Tucson figures early in the tour because, Waters notes after years of hard experience on the road, you want to do your shows in cities where the weather is likely to be rotten last—and that means the final stop is Chicago. But, no matter how clement the weather here, Waters isn’t likely to notice. “I go from the airport to the hotel to the theater to the hotel to the airport,” he says. “I’m almost never found in real life.”

The book is vintage Waters, a blend of his hallmark sardonic humor with reflections on his work as a filmmaker and guerrilla fighter in the culture wars. On one page he’s taking on Pope Francis, writing that when he becomes the first man to get pregnant, then he’ll be worth listening to on what women should do with their bodies: “Not until he’s given birth to a female transgender Christ child of a different color will we indulge him with a little queer mercy of our own.” On another he’s dissing Madonna for stealing Blondie’s shtick, though not without good cause: Dare rest for a minute on your laurels in show biz, and someone will come along to make it theirs. And on the matter of religion, ever a Christmas-worthy topic, he throws his lot in with the nonbelievers, though in no organized way: Put them in a room, and atheists will drink too much, he says. “Plus atheists dress badly, too. It’s unfortunate, but they are a dreary lot.”

The best parts of the book are his recollections of making his films, of which he names the little-seen Cecil B. Demented as his favorite. “I guess all directors have a soft spot for one of their films that did the worst at the box office,” he notes. Even Serial Mom had its difficulties, he allows, while films like Cry-Baby and Hairspray have entered the mainstream, if improbably, while the films that earned him the sobriquet “The King of Puke” have been enshrined as cult classics, plate-licking, scratch-and-sniff horrors, and all. On the mainstream front, he’s even become a spokesperson for Nike, which, he says, is “ludicrous and ironic.”

But, notes Waters, there are only so many theaters out there and only so many bookings, so in order to keep an act alive, you have to keep putting out new material. “This is a whole new show,” he says, talking with Zócalo a few weeks before the curtain goes up. “I’ve written about three-quarters of it, and I haven’t learned a bit of it yet. But it’s all new stuff—I try not to put anything in the show from the book, since if you’ve bought the book you already know it. I try hard to give you your money’s worth.” Angry Christmas to all, and to all a good night!