Desperate Living

Well, my goodness, you have toured live shows all over the world.

You've been in TV shows like The Secret World of Alex Mack, Married with Children, Difficult People, and movies like But I'm a Cheerleader, the Eating Out series, and, of course, iconic roles in Pink Flamingo, Serial Mom, Desperate Living, and every other feature film John Waters has made.

That's true.

Thank you.

But I'll call it Triangle of Lust throughout this commentary, just to keep things nice and simple.

My name is David Flint, and I'm the editor of Desperate Living and the Overlooked Hotel, both of which you can find on YouTube if you look hard enough.

More pertinent to this film, I'm a connoisseur of and expert in cult cinema, and I have a particular interest in Euro exploitation in general, and Spanish destape era films in particular.

So you might well think that this movie is very much in my wheelhouse, and you'd be right.

That's some teenager shit.

That's some desperate living shit.

Let's just let the rat burn off.

Off the

burner.

Right? Oh, my God.

Desperate Living's the John Waters movie where they serve the rat, right? I think so.

Yeah,

You're listening to the Audio Diary from Tokyo, Japan, where each week we mine pop culture, literature, film, music, art, and ourselves in pursuit of a more beautiful and more popular life.

Last time on the show, we discussed the John Waters film Desperate Living, and this week we are continuing our exploration of late '70s malaise with a rousing conversation on Richard Linklater's Dazed and Confused from 1993, and the seminal album by Fleetwood Mac, Rumours, from 1977.

What's up, Maggie?

Hi.

And I love Richard Linklater so much.

He's one of my favorite living filmmakers, so Dazed and Confused is also very exciting for me.

Um, as I said, we're talking about kind of late '70s material here, and Rumours r- was released in the same year as Desperate Living, and Dazed and Confused is set in 1976, so that would've been when John Waters was making that movie and when Fleetwood Mac was recording Rumours.

So all of this kind of exists in, like, the same realm to me.

Yeah.

You had to ask for it because there was two other Divine Video movies, Desperate Living, which he wasn't in, but it was John Hortons and Female Trouble.

And Female

Trouble.

I think this film is a really useful knot at the end of a rope we've been kind of developing for the last few weeks.

We are talking about John Waters' 1977 Desperate Living.

What's up, Maggie?

Hi.

I've talked about, uh, this will be the fourth John Waters movie that I've discussed on the podcast.

The first time was Cecil B. Demented with Amy Terease, then I talked about Polyester with Paul Kupo.

We talked about A Dirty Shame last year, and tonight we're talking about, I think, what is maybe my number one favorite Waters film, Desperate Living.

It's either my first or tied for first.

Uh, Love Me or Leave Me.

These are all movies that were kind of blueprints for this kind of movie, which is ostensibly about- two musicians who meet one is a singer one is a um saxophone player and they're played by liza minnelli and robert de niro and their meet cute is anything but you know it's it's uh on i want to say vj day or something end of world war ii and it's this big gala at this dance hall and de niro is hitting relentlessly on liza minnelli and she just cannot get through to him like i'm not interested i'm not going to give you my phone number um i was just talking to a friend of mine about this i think this scene is amusing but it does go on for a really long time and maybe loses some of its amusement in that sense but the romance strangely continues from that point and uh you know it's it's it's not a happy movie ultimately it has some very funny moments inside the darkness um but it is about a dysfunctional relationship uh it features one of my favorite proposal scenes ever in a movie and i'll leave it to uh you to see it but um it it's it's really a remarkable movie and this uh this 4k looks great i think um and it includes speaking of marty commentaries it includes the old commentary that i guess was done for the dvd maybe years ago again they're porting over i mean if ain't broke don't fix it you know what i mean so like it's it's one of those that i remember liking i can't remember yeah i think it was from the laserdisc even maybe it goes that back that far um but it's it's really a great track because it's marty just talking for almost you know this movie is like i want to say like three hours long i forget the the total runtime of the film but uh it's nearly it's around there it's in that ballpark so you're basically listening to him talk about musicals and this movie in particular for that long and it's just heaven for me absolutely heaven um so uh the extensive bonus material includes an introduction by scorsese and a full-length commentary with critic he and critic carrie ricky and the blu-ray in disc offers the international version of the film with in-depth documentaries such as new york new york stories part one and two uh a featurette focusing on liza minnelli's performance alternate takes and deleted scenes cinematography focused commentary by laszlo kovacs additional materials uh as well so this is a 2025 4k scan and restoration 16-bit original camera negative scan of the expanded cut and it's 166 aspect ratio which scorsese does discuss the choice of going with that aspect ratio in the commentary but anyway it is uh a really i think a good movie and another one that's a little bit slept on inside of this filmography this wonderful filmography so i just wanted to mention it while i was talking about uh alice doesn't live here anymore we have 4ks of two of his better lesser talked about movies anyway also from criterion i got hud which is a paul newman movie directed by the great martin ritt about it's kind of a in conversation a little bit with something like the last picture show but precedes that film and is a little certainly not the same thing a family's downfall becomes a stark elegy for ideals of the american frontier in this quietly subversive reimagining of western myths in the fourth of his six collaborations with progressive director martin ritt paul newman created his darkest role yet as hud bannon a charismatic but ruthlessly unprincipled rancher hud's ambition to seize control of an ailing cattle business from his tradition-bound father melvin douglas thrives the family including his worshipful nephew brandon de wilde and worldly wise housekeeper patrician neil towards collapse um winner of academy awards for best actress for neil supporting actor douglas and cinematography courtesy of james wong how who's one of the greatest to ever do it and it looks fantastic um and so this 4k is very exciting um includes audio excerpts from the 1974 american film institute seminar with director martin ritt a new interview with actor sally field conducted by uh author isaac butler on ritt and hud new interview with cinematographer roger deakins roger deakins on director james wong director of photography james wong how so that's fascinating and an episode of inside the actor studio hosted by james lipton featuring paul newman uh plus an essay by film scholar gabriel miller and a 1963 american cinematographer interview with james wong how great stuff very excited to have that on 4k uh and then shifting gears a bit i also got desperate living which is john waters film from 1977 the same year as star wars uh john waters was doing his own world building with uh desperate living uh following the unrepentant outrageousness of pink flamingos and female trouble director john waters brought his notorious trash trilogy to a fittingly twisted close with this anti-fascist fairy tale after hysterical housewife peggy gravel mink stole murders her husband with the help of her fed up housekeeper jean hill the newfound sisters in crime escaped to the bizarro shantytown of mortville a depraved penal colony presided over by a despotic queen edith massey one of the great regulars of john waters's troop whose tyranny pushes her subjects to shocking revolt deviant cops death by dog food diy surgery waters unleashes all of this and more in And at once relentlessly warped an oddly moral vision of queer rebellion.

Yeah, so this is another one that had not had a Blu-ray release yet, and now we get a 4K and a Blu-ray.

Um, audio commentary by, uh, John Waters, and his are also some great commentary tracks, I have to admit.