Director: Steve Yeagar

Of all cinema’s most shocking scenes, from the razored eyeballs of ‘Un Chien Andalou’ to the ear removal of ‘Reservoir Dogs’, there is one moment that stands above them all, and one that will never be topped. Towards the end of John Waters’ 1972 cult classic ‘Pink Flamingos’, his drag queen star Divine, with eye makeup so outrageous that his hair had to be shaved to accommodate it, spies a poodle depositing its business on the street. In a single shot, he kneels down, collects this delectable treat from the ground, and eats it up like peanut butter. These kind of scenes, you just don’t forget.

‘Divine Trash’, a production for the Independent Film Channel, is neither a documentary about Waters’ career nor about Divine — it is about their lives up to the point where Divine and his shit-stained teeth stared gleefully into the camera, and cinema was changed forever. Through interviews with absolutely everybody involved with Waters’ early career, from make-up artists to film censors and parents who have never watched his films, as well as those who have followed and worshipped him, a story is pieced together about the life of a real underground film movement, and two men who would never be happy unless they were shocking everybody else.

Waters, growing up on trashy horror films, dropped out of film school and developed his love for film through worship of Kenneth Anger and Andy Warhol. Drawing inspiration from such seminal underground classics as ‘Sins of the Fleshapoids’, he began to shoot his own guerrilla 8mm masterworks, rounding up Baltimore’s fabulous freaks to take the leading roles. Chief amongst these was the 300-pound drag queen Divine, known to his mum as Glenn Milstead, destined to become the greatest and most controversial queen ever to hit the silver screen. Divine was to feature in all of Waters’ films until the late eighties, when he died of a sleep apnea one week after the opening of ‘Hairspray’.

As Waters’ earlier films, such as ‘Multiple Maniacs’, developed his reputation as a daringly different leader of the underground, he with the pencil-thin moustache precariously balanced on the top of his lip became a darling of the Maryland it-crowd. Learning all of his technical skills from the person who processed his film stock, Waters borrowed a large sum of money from his father to make ‘Pink Flamingos’, a story of a competition to win the crown of efilthiest person alive’. After filling his previous films with lobster-rapes and porno crucifixions, it only made sense that his feature debut would forever alter the limits of truly independent cinema.

Yeagar, keen to get the full story of these early years, has tracked down anybody with something even slightly interesting to say, and included far more than he needed to of any of them. Centred around interviews with Waters in 1972 and the present day, the film has a tendency to become an endless procession of talking heads saying exactly the same thing. It is interesting to hear Jim Jarmusch (eGhost Dog’, ‘Mystery Train’) talk about Waters’ influence on the underground, but then David O. Russell (eSpanking the Monkey’, ‘Three Kings’) shows up to say exactly the same thing. It is clear that everybody involved either loves or hates Waters to bits, but a few less interviews and a little more depth would have greatly improved the documentary.

After skirting through Waters’ life and covering ‘Pink Flamingos’ in extensive detail, interviewing even the set decorators, ‘Divine Trash’ goes no farther. It vaguely mentions Divine’s death, but no details, and makes no reference to any of Waters’ films after ‘Pink Flamingos’ save for a brief mention of 1998’s ‘Pecker’.

This poorly constructed, by-the-book documentary tells a fascinating story, but one that could have been so much more. Post-‘Flamingos’, Waters has gone on to become the ultimate Hollywood outsider, churning out gleefully subversive tributes to a world that never existed except in his head, where midgets and transvestites can live happily with two point four children, and freaks are society’s heroes. There is no doubt that Yeagar is a devoted fan of his early work, and for anybody else that is (and that should be everybody), this is well worth checking out, if only to learn just how they got the poodle to perform on demand.