Although it was far from a hit when it landed in theaters, auteur John Waters has nothing but love for his 1990 movie Cry-Baby.
The musical romantic-comedy, which featured Johnny Depp in the titular lead role, is getting a 4K UHD and Blu-ray release that includes both the remastered theatrical and Director's Cut courtesy of Kino Lorber Studio Classics. The writer-director was very hands-on with the process.
"I was very involved, and my DP, Dave Insley, also looked at the new cuts and stuff. It took a really long time," Waters said. "I thought it had been canned or something because Heather, one of the main producers, started doing all the interviews years ago. They found everybody who was in it. The only person who wasn't interviewed was Johnny Depp because he was in the middle of his trial, which made it pretty impossible. Two of the actors, one of them being Darren E. Burrows, I haven't even seen them since we made the movie, so it was pretty great to see everybody again."
"The extras on this release are pretty amazing because there are different cuts, all the new conversations, my new commentary, and even interviews we did when it premiered. It's really the whole history of the movie and perhaps even more than you'd ever want to know about Cry-Baby, and I say that with great respect."
Now considered a cult classic, Cry-Baby sees Depp playing a bad boy with a heart of gold who wins the heart of a good girl despite the protestations of her family and boyfriend. However, one thing Waters, who wrote and directed the film, didn't want the restoration to do was remove any of the film's visual character and look too clean.
"I know all that because of working with Criterion. They took Multiple Maniacs, a movie that cost $5,000 and looked pretty terrible, kept some of the 'good' terrible, and made it look like a bad John Cassavetes movie, so I was thrilled with that. I don't want them to make it look like what it didn't look like but I want it to be the best version I could do today and keep the original flavor," the filmmaker mused. "Good restorers know that. Criterion has a guy named Lee who is a master at that, and Kino Lorber did it here, too. Cry-Baby was the only movie I ever made that finally did look like a Hollywood movie.
MORE FROMFORBES ADVISOR
We wanted it to look and feel like an Elvis movie, and I think my cinematographer, Dave Insley, did that. There wasn't so much to change in Cry-Baby as there has been in Pink Flamingos or Multiple Maniacs."
Waters considers the 4K UHD and Blu-ray release to be the most definitive release of the movie yet, giving audiences more of the experience of making Cry-Baby.
"There were so many different versions, including one for TV," he recalled. "What happened was that we tested the movie the first time at Universal, and every girl in the audience screamed like an Elvis movie, but then they never did it again. Then we had test screenings, and Cry-Baby tested badly, and they freaked out. We did a reshoot that cost $1 million, and the movie tested the same. It did make the movie a little better. It gave some points of the movie a little more clarity and made it a little shorter, which is always good with a comedy, but then they cut out a great musical number. You can see it both ways."
"The shorter version is probably better in the long run and more simple. It just goes to show that test screenings can help you with little things, but if someone doesn't like the movie and you try to take all the extremes out, the people who like it won't like it anymore. Universal was respectful of that. Brian Grazer and Ron Howard at Imagine, whom I worked with through all this, were respectful too. They hated the scene where Amy Locane's character, Allison, saves her tears in a jar, but I think audiences today would love that. That's one of my favorite shots in the whole movie. They realized that that was an extreme thing my fans would like, so they didn't try to get me to cut signature scenes like that. Brian once told me that after he okay'd Cry-Baby, his wife looked me up and said, 'You gave this man money?' It makes me laugh because she was right."
The remastering process also involved Waters recording a new audio commentary. He loved doing it but couldn't tell you what he said.
"I've never listened to my audio commentaries ever in my life. I'm not that much of an egomaniac. I did an event recently in Canada that was a live commentary for Cry-Baby, and I have no idea if I said any of the same stuff because I never remember what I said, and I never listened to it," he laughed. "I just tell the backstories, and as time goes by, there are a lot of new backstories. Some of the people aren't with us anymore; things have happened to Johnny and Amy, and things have happened to me. My movies never go away; even if they're big flops when they come out, you can get them. They aren't forgotten. If you look back, when Cry-Baby came out, it was not a success at the box office at all, but some of the biggest movies from that time, people don't remember what they were. They aren't remembered 20 years later. Studio executives don't care about that because they don't care if it's a hit 20 years later; they get fired if it's not a hit when it comes out."
As great as the movie is, there's no denying Cry-Baby was a flop. Made for $8 million, it took just $8.3 million at the domestic box office and has yet to turn a profit.
"There was a bidding war to make it, for the development deal, where I went in and pitched the idea for me to write the movie and then make it," Waters recalled. "That was because Hairspray had just been out and the only time ever that I had what was considered a box office hit in Hollywood with good reviews."
Cry-Baby saw the filmmaker reunite with Hairspray's breakout star, Ricki Lake, who took on the role of Pepper Walker. As well as sharing the actress, both films had another commonality.
"I don't think I knew that I was going to make Cry-Baby next so I don’t know if we discussed it. Hairspray was basically what happened when I was a teenager, and Cry-Baby was the only other thing I remembered from my musical past. It was a different time, a silent place before the tornado of rock'n'roll started, so those were the two things I remembered from my youth," Waters explained. "That's what I knew the best, and I could use as a background to tell a story that is really the same story I've told him every movie I've ever made, which is basically saying, 'Mind your own business.' If you get hassled by other people in high school, you'll be a success. Embrace what they say about you that is negative, turn it into a style, and be proud. You'll win. I still say that."
Depp was a big deal for Waters, who was a fan of the actor. It turned out that the actor was also a fan of the director.
"He was from the rockabilly world, and he also had a sense of humor. Johnny also hated being a teen idol, which I never understood, and he was ready to go along with us because he knew it was rebelling against that. He was at 21 Jump Street, and that show was huge. Johnny even put me on it," he said. "At the same time, I got him the biggest paycheck he had ever had, and Johnny got the movie financed. That was because of him. He was involved right from the very beginning. I collected every teen magazine with him on the cover and knew Johnny was right for it. He had seen my past movies, wasn't afraid of them, and was actually thrilled by them. Casting Johnny was a no-brainer for me, but we didn't know he was going say yes, although he did, right away, and then the steamroller happened."
Cry-Baby also features a cameo from four-time Oscar-nominated actor Willem Dafoe as Hateful Guard in one of the prison scenes. His casting was a coup after his career-making performances in Platoon, The Last Temptation of Christ, Mississippi Burning, and Born on the Fourth of July.
"I knew Willem through Denis Dermody, who was the nanny for Willem's son. He went on to be a critic and still writes today for a great website called Original Cinemaniac. He's a great horror film writer and a good writer, period," Waters enthused. "I also knew Willem from The Wooster Group, a company of artists based in New York City that Willem was involved with. Willem knew Dennis' friends and was always involved in the underground scene in New York way before he became a big movie star so I had a past with Willem. He knew me way before that happened."
There is little about Cry-Baby that Waters doesn't remember with anything other than fondness and a sense of gratitude. Something he has particular affection for is, as with so many other of his films, the quotes that fans latch onto and immortalize.
"There are tiny ones from Cry-Baby that people say that make me laugh. I have realized that the more obscure it is, the funnier it is to me," he laughed. "They have tattoos of things like, 'Beat it, creep,' which Traci Lords says in the movie. My favorite is when Johnny says with a straight face, 'Electricity killed my parents,' and he opens his shirt to show the electric chair and then says his father was the Alphabet Bomber who bombed in alphabetical order. That scene still makes me laugh, but there really was an Alphabet Bomber."
"Something else I love got cut from the original movie, and I can't remember if it's any of these cuts. It's a scene where somebody runs out of the orphanage, and flying over them is Hatchet-Face escaping the prison in the helicopter. She throws up, and it lands on them. It was a giant thing of puke. The orphanage still makes me laugh. It's so politically incorrect, I guess, but it's pretty funny that you'd have an orphanage where you went and looked at children in little display windows. It's like going to the dog pound."
Of all Waters' films, Cry-Baby deserves a continued narrative or a sequel, whether as a movie, series or perhaps even a graphic novel. The writer-director, who is reportedly still trying to secure funding for his Liarmouth movie, doesn't think we should hold out collective breaths.
"A sequel to Cry-Baby? Let me think," he mused. It had a happy ending, so I don't know. I had the sequel for Pink Flamingos. I wrote the whole thing, but it never came out. I wrote many sequels to Hairspray that never got made, but I never really did consider one for Cry-Baby because when it finally came out, it was not a success at the box office at all, so there's no point in pitching a sequel to a movie that didn't do well."
"Even I am that much of a realist in Hollywood," he concluded with his biggest laugh of the conversation.
