John Waters Cont.

Timothy Wurtz, screenwriter of Perry Mason: The Case of the Sinister Spirit, pitcher of Home Alone 3: Lost in the Ghetto, and the Tow Truck Cycle, and former screenwriting teacher at Saddleback, supposedly once invited a friend of mine out to dinner. I was told told by this friend that over dinner Mr. Wurtz proposed a soft-core pornography project, to be based in Orange County, tentatively involving said friend. Something along the lines of: You're young and hot and some young hot fuck action would show a truer side of Orange County than that (at the time) popular OC television show.

I'm not sure if that actually took place. It doesn't matter. The point is this: much more interesting than a sleazy proposal from an overaged Hollywood outsider (a guy I genuinely looked up to in several ways by the way, it just happens several negative attributes emphasize the peculiarity of this particular situation) is the premise of a script about a character like this screenwriter attempting to organize and develop the exact same project.

And maybe a film about John Waters attempting to make A Dirty Shame would have been more interesting than A Dirty Shame. I don't know. I miss the presence of believable characters, that entrance into darker territory I spoke of when discussing Female Trouble. A Dirty Shame is Waters idealizing his own ethos, and executing them within the true gloss and sheen of 35mm - this is almost explicitly stated in the supplementary materials. Is real filmmaking supposed to involve this kind of distancing? What happens when actors take over roles established by seemingly more authentic symbols of a narrative's form of virtue? In Waters' early films the actors attempted to act based on an imagined vision of films - and their overacting added to the sense of a film being created. Their form of acting supported their presence as characters, and this was part of the fun. It's tough to watch A Dirty Shame because EVERYONE is in on the joke now. The whole thing is a joke.

And it's funny and I like it. But does it shoot from the heart? I would say not as much. I would say definitely not as much. So good or bad it doesn't even matter, because it's not the kind of soul-revealing cinema I truly love. I realize that's probably a statement of youth and inexperience. I'm okay with that. Waters once was too.