Confessions of a ‘Filth Elder’ and Ali MacGraw’s Fabulous Tush

John Waters' "Mr. Know-It-All: The Tarnished Wisdom of a Filth Elder" (Photo courtesy Amazon)

Somewhere in the great beyond, where no curse is everuttered nor bloomer ever dropped and, if anybody’s having sexual relations, it’sgotta be hetero, Mary Avara must be killing herself. John Waters is at itagain. Mary could have stopped that boy long ago, and now look what he’s goneand done.

He’s written another book. First, it was just those awfulmovies – the ones where the titles alone drove Mary crazy, like “Eat YourMakeup” and “Mondo Trasho” and “Multiple Maniacs.”

Later, it was the Broadway theater, where Waters turned theignominy of racial separation on the old Buddy Deane Show into the dancing andsinging hilarity of “Hairspray.”

And now this – another book by Waters, this time chroniclinghis career, including all the goofball days in Baltimore when he and Avara weresnarling at each other over every scrap of film Mary tried to razor-cut.

It was Avara who headed the old Maryland Censor Board. Backin the ‘60s, when the rest of the country was unbuttoning its long-repressedlibido and watching it mirrored on movie screens, the censor board was snipping“the good stuff” out of films before they ever reached local theaters.

They didn’t understand Waters and his outlaw brand of humorat all. And so Mary went to war with John. And instead of him fading intoobscurity as just another low-budget kid scrounging to break into the moviebusiness, their high-profile battles titillated the whole country and helped turnWaters into a national icon.

His new book is called “Mr. Know-It-All: The Tarnished Wisdomof a Filth Elder.” Don’t be misled, the title’s just a spoof on Water’s bad-boyimage. The book’s delightful. It’s funny and it’s show-biz gossipy, and it’shonest even when Waters isn’t the hero of the story. What’s more, to use a wordJohn would hate, it’s heartwarming, too.

Because behind the most bizarre instincts of even theearliest and most grotesque early Waters movies, there was the misunderstoodmisfit sensibility of a man who was championing life’s underdogs.

That’s always been the underlying theme of Waters’ works.The outsiders in American culture – the odd ones, the homely ones, the misfits,the left-out and the lonely — became, in Waters’ telling, the heroes of thepiece.

He’s been teaching us to whistle past the graveyards of our anxietiesand our Puritan inhibitions. If we laughed hard enough, we wouldn’t have tofeel haunted.

That’s what the Maryland Censor Board never understood.They’d sit there in their darkened little viewing room, erasing all the “goodstuff” from every movie that hit Baltimore.

And then Mary Avara would come charging out of the room,declaring, “They’re doing things on that screen that I wouldn’t do in mybedroom.”

“Like what?” she was asked one day.

“Like that filth,” she replied, emerging from a showing of “Goodbye, Columbus,” where she had just snipped all frames that showed Ali MacGraw’s tush.

Now that was an artistic tragedy. It took several decades before that movie showed up on late-night cable and we got to see what real art looks like.  

A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books. His most recent, “Front Stoops in the Fifties: Baltimore Legends Come of Age,” was reissued in paperback by the Johns Hopkins University Press.

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