The film’s reputation is so intertwined with the content, but Divine gives a legitimately great performance in it. His comedic timing is flawless.
He gives an incredible performance, and I think that’s why he was weary of talking about eating shit. But he also liked the movie and was very proud of it, as am I. I still wanna make people laugh and surprise them in filthy ways, but I never felt the need to try and top Pink Flamingos because I felt I’d made my point.
One other thing I meant to ask about were some of the film’s one-scene roles, like the “singing asshole” man or the woman in the park who flashes her penis. How did you cast them?
That woman’s name is Elizabeth Coffey. She’s a great comedian who used to be a hippy chick in Baltimore and became one of the first trans women to get gender confirmation surgery under Dr. John Money, who was a famous doctor that got discredited by Oprah. David [Lochary] plays a flasher, so in the scene she’s supposed to flash her breasts, he flashes his dick, and then she flashes her dick. Elizabeth is a great friend and said, “I wanna own that joke!” She had her operation three days after we shot that scene and then came back to show her vagina in [1974’s] Female Trouble—just a hint to let audiences know what she’d been up to.
Do you still keep in touch?
I’m still friends with all of the people from Pink Flamingos who are living. When I gave my entire art collection to the Baltimore Museum of Art, they said they wanted to name a rotunda after me, but I said, “No, I want the bathrooms named after me!” They thought I was kidding, but I kept insisting that I wasn’t, and the museum named its first gender-neutral bathroom after me. Elizabeth came down to cut the ribbon and took the first piss to christen it!
Could you have imagined you and your Dreamland crew would be attending ribbon-cutting ceremonies and booking Calvin Klein campaigns 50 years after Pink Flamingos?
I didn’t think it was impossible. I was never some kind of idiot savant, but I am ambitious. I read Variety when I was 14! When I watch Pink Flamingos now, I just think, How did we do that? But when you’re young and dumb you just kinda go for it.
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