Behind the scenes of ‘Cry-Baby’ with John Waters, Johnny Depp, Iggy Pop and Traci Lords
The fulcrum of John Waters’ career is Hairspray, the PG-rated 1988 crossover hit that made it possible to discuss his movies in, erm, “polite society”. Before Hairspray, he was a scourge; after it, he became America’s favourite dirty uncle.
This news report of the filming of Cry-Baby, Waters’ 1990 follow-up to Hairspray, is unimaginable without the success of its predecessor. Shooting for Cry-Baby took place in the spring and summer of 1989 in and around (where else?) Baltimore. The photo above was likely taken during the shoot, as Johnny Depp turned 26 in June of 1989.
The voiceover blandly calls Waters “a poor man’s Barry Levinson gone berserk”, which seems highly questionable to me. Aside from their hometowns, Levinson and Waters have little in common.
The segment features a couple of great quotes from Waters:
“It’s the same kind of movie. It’s a John Waters film. There’s puke in it, you’ll be happy to know.”
“Some older woman came up to me in the supermarket and said, ‘I love all your films!’ I said, ‘You do not!’”
Priceless stuff.
Cry-Baby was the only movie of Waters’ career that went through a bidding war, based on the success of Hairspray. But then Cry-Baby didn’t make its $12 million budget back, and that was the end of the bidding wars for John Waters.
Of course, Cry-Baby isn’t just a musical; it’s a glorious grease-slicked middle finger to square America, filtered through the candy-colored lens of 1950s teenage delinquent kitsch. Released in 1990, it was Waters’ slickest production to date, arriving hot on the patent leather heels of Hairspray, but it never strays too far from his beautifully perverse roots.
With its ducktail hairdos, switchblades, juvenile hall melodrama, and subversive love story between a good-girl “square” and a tear-dropping greaser named Wade ‘Cry-Baby’ Walker (played by a pre-superstardom Johnny Depp), this film is basically Rebel Without a Cause on poppers, laced with punk spit and a sock hop death drive.
Waters populates Cry-Baby with the kind of casting only he could dream up: Iggy Pop as a shirtless hillbilly patriarch, Traci Lords as a sex-bomb delinquent with the best cat-eye makeup in Baltimore, and Patty Hearst as—what else?—a society matron with a taste for bad boys. There’s a camp holiness to it all, like the entire movie is performed in air quotes, but with so much love it practically levitates.
Beneath the pompadours and pastel prisons, Cry-Baby is Waters’ twisted hymn to the outcasts who are too weird to live and too fabulous to die. It might’ve looked like a nostalgic romp, but make no mistake: this is John Waters burning the American Dream at both ends—and making it look divine.
I’d bet anything that the Cry-Baby set was a fun place to hang around. You had Waters and Depp, of course, but also Ricki Lake, Iggy Pop, Traci Lords, Patricia Hearst, Susan Tyrrell, and Willem Dafoe, and that’s not even getting into Waters’ usual supporting players. There’s a video below, and we’ve supplied some groovy pics taken while the shooting of the movie was in progress.
