Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, April 27, 1994 TAG: 9404260086
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By MIKE MAYO CORRESPONDENT
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
The creator of the notorious cult hits "Pink Flamingos," "Female Trouble" and others has a mainstream hit on his hands with "Serial Mom," a dark comedy starring Kathleen Turner as a suburban housewife gone bad and Ricki Lake as her daughter.
Two weeks ago the film opened to favorable reviews and a $2 million box office. Yes, the man whose name was once synonymous with bad taste is now lionized on the pages of Premiere magazine. Even the irreverent Movieline has run a completely favorable piece on him. That's not hard to understand: Even though he's part of the Hollywood establishment, Waters refuses to take himself or his work too seriously.
Last week, in the middle of a day filled with interviews, he learned that Savoy Studio had decided to screen "Serial Mom" at the Cannes Film Festival, adding another stop to his publicity tour. The significance of that hadn't quite sunk in when we spoke on the telephone.
Though he was born and raised in Baltimore, where he still lives and where "Serial Mom" was filmed, there's not a trace of that city's distinctive accent in his voice.
Waters says that the first inspiration for "Serial Mom" came from a painting. "There's a bookstore in Los Angeles called Amuck Books. It specializes in truly berserk books - Nazis, true crime, anything extreme. On the cover of their catalog was an amateur painting that somebody found in a thrift shop of a housewife looking fairly berserk. I already knew that I wanted to do a true crime parody when I saw this painting.
"Then I used it as a visual aid to sell [the story] to the studio. It's about a loveable housewife but something's the matter with her. I'd give them the whole rap and show this image, even though it was a found object. It was on my bulletin board as I was writing the script."
Though the script went through several rewrites, as all scripts do, Waters' central idea didn't change. He wanted "to make a movie where you rooted for the serial killer, not against her. It was the opposite of the Hays Office where evil had to be punished. I wanted to make a movie where you actually liked her because that would be more politically confusing today.
"People generally hate serial killers, but they love to read about them, so they don't really hate them. They are more glamorous than movie stars. I'm not saying that's right. I am saying that I criticize myself a little for being like that, too. I get bored with movie stars."
In the film, "We come to her side finally because she's famous. That's what I'm saying: Fame wipes away all your sins in America."
Waters also brings some personal experience to the story. He spent some time teaching inmates in the Maryland prison system. He understands that the public perception of criminals as inhuman monsters is flawed. "The worst killers were so normal," he said, "They could have been anybody. They didn't look like monsters. They looked like a normal class at a community college. That was much scarier to me than a killer from central casting."
But Hollywood executives are a notoriously timid breed. A comedy about a sympathetic murderer ought to be just the thing to stampede them in the other direction. That wasn't the case.
Columbia Pictures accepted the project, and then it was taken on by Savoy when Columbia's production schedule became overcrowded. Waters found no resistance at either studio. "No one ever told me I had to lighten the movie. During the testing process it's always weird because whenever you've got a film with any extremes, the marketing people get nervous. Hardly is it a movie where anyone's going to say, `Boy, the studio made him put that liver scene in there.' The extremes are certainly still in it."
Waters doesn't try to hide the fact that he means for his films to challenge one end of the political spectrum - his own. "I've always made movies about the limits of liberals' tastes. There was a small section who could laugh at the really extreme parts of `Pink Flamingos' and now there's a much larger population that still laughs at things that are pretty extreme.
"They're not as extreme as the end of `Pink Flamingos,' but I certainly made my point then. I didn't have to do that over and over and over. It would be fake to do it over. I'm trying to make it more sublime - the hideousness of my movies."
He also admits that the lines between fact and fiction have become so blurred that it's hard to shock people these days. "We did `Serial Mom' Day on the Ricki Lake Show, which was very strange. We had an ad on the TV movie about the Menendez brothers the other night."
Is that perhaps going too far? No, he says, "That's good; that's what the movie's about. Parody today and the horrors of the news are almost the same."
It's hard to argue with that.
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