John Waters Was ‘Shocked’ When “Hairspray” Landed a PG Rating, But Says He’s Glad It ‘Snuck In’

The original 1988 movie inspired the Broadway musical, plus the film based on that musical

NEED TO KNOW

• John Waters said he was ‘shocked’ when he learned 1988’s Hairspray would be rated PG
• Waters ultimately decided that seeing PG attached to a movie made by him and his collaborator Divine was the bigger shock
• Waters reflected on how the PG rating helped Hairspray “sneak” into different places where it otherwise wouldn’t be accepted

Often, directors are surprised when their movies get higher ratings from the Motion Picture Association, but John Waters was shocked when Hairspray came in with a PG rating.

Waters, 80, opened up about his career on the May 13 episode of Las Culturistas, hosted by Bowen Yang and Matt Rogers. 

During their convo, Waters reflected on some of the bad reviews he'd gotten throughout his career and how he doesn't think reviews matter quite as much now. “They don't have the power they used to,” he said. “It used to, if you were an art film, you got a rave review in The New York Times, it was a hit. If it's the bad one, it's still a bomb.”

Yang and Rogers shared that their friends Josh Sharpe and Aaron Jackson made the 2023 movie Dicks: The Musical, which they think will be a “future cult classic,” but Waters said, “A cult classic is the worst thing you can say when you're trying to get financing. That means five smart people liked it and it lost money.” He remembered that his 1994 film, Serial Mom, led to an executive getting “fired” because it didn't make money. 

“My movies are weird,” Waters said. He never understood why they took his films to mid-America to test them. “That's not where they're gonna play the best,” he said, before adding that it's “a different world” now and the audiences in “Iowa” aren't that different from the ones in “New York.”

Waters became known in the 1970s because of his transgressive films, many of them starring Divine, a drag queen. Many of their films together were rated NC-17 or X by the MPA (if they were rated at all). 

But then came Waters' 1988 movie Hairspray. Yang, 35, called the movie the “punkiest thing” he did because he swerved in the other direction with it. 

“It's the most devious because it snuck in,” Waters said. “It plays in Florida in grade schools and nobody b—-es. Two men singing a love song, encouraging interracial dating. Racists even like it. They're so stupid,” he said. In the movie, which stars Ricki Lake as Tracy Turnblad, Divine plays Edna Turnblad, whose husband is Wilbur, played by Jerry Stiller.

Rogers, 36, asked, “Were you shocked by the PG rating?”

“I was shocked by it just because it was Divine and I,” Waters said. The distributor, New Line Cinemas, was shocked too. “They wanted me to put the word s— in so we'd get a PG-13 at least. I said, ‘No, let's keep it. That's the shock, that it is PG.' ”

Yang said he watched it for the first time in seventh grade. Waters said he thinks the movie is fine at “any age,” adding, “I think it would get a G today.”

Waters remembered one thing they cut out of the movie that probably helped with the ratings: scenes where “Tracy's mean.” He remembered they originally filmed scenes where she's mean to the kids at the drug store, where she jokes about getting a hickey making out in a car, and where she breaks into the house of Amber Von Tussle (Colleen Fitzpatrick) and reads her diary. He said those scenes were “wisely” cut “because it goes so far away from the nice girl that Tracy was.”

Hairspray was nominated for six Independent Spirit Awards and won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival. A modest box office success, it attracted a larger audience thanks to its home video release in the 1990s. The film was then adapted into the 2002 Broadway musical of the same name. That musical version was then adapted into another film, 2007's Hairspray, starring Nikki Blonsky as Tracy and John Travolta as Edna. 

Waters continues to work as a director and an actor, but he said on Las Culturistas, “I built a career on bad reviews. Now, when I get good ones, I'm shocked. I take them with no irony.” When the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures did an exhibit on him, he thought, “How would that ever be possible?”

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