![]() In the course of working together, did you feel like he was getting those elbows in? His great strengths have been taking truly unattractive people and making you care about them, and I just think that’s admirable. Yeah, he’ll dig an elbow into you when he sees a weak spot or a sore point, but if he sees that he’s actually hurt you, he’ll back off and apologize. I liked John, and what I came to learn about John is he’s honest to God one of the kindest people I have ever met. Oh, I don’t remember specifically anymore. Is it true that Michael Douglas cautioned you against it as well? What was I, some kind of institution that had to be put in a glass case? The crap with that shit. That attracted you to it more, because people were cautioning you against it? It’ll ruin your career.” Which of course set my back up. He’s a B-movie director, and you don’t do B-movies. My agents and all the other people around were like, “No, you can’t do that. I said, “All right, I’m going to do this with you.” Well, that’s when the screaming started. I liked that sense of celebrity-excuses-all crap. I thought, Okay, this is kind of what I was hoping for. He had storyboards and explained to me exactly how he would shoot it. Yeah, he just jumped on the train and came to my house in New York. Are you going to be home this afternoon?” I gave him my address, and four hours later John was ringing my doorbell. I don’t do that.” And he said, “No, no, no. I need to know exactly how you would shoot this because if it’s going to be a gore-fest, that’s not for me. So I called John and said, “Here’s the deal. I finished it, and I thought, Okay, this will either be the height of absurdity and humor, or it can be a gore-fest. It was the only thing I didn’t like when we got to doing it.Īnyway, I threw it down again, and again I went back. I started reading on, and it was fine until the lit hairspray with the kid. I got to the point where she sticks the poker in and pulls out the guy’s liver, and I went, No! Gross! I threw the script down in my office and puttered around, and then I went back to it. So when he sent me the script, I thought, Well, of course I’m going to read it. Honestly, if you’d said to me, “You’re going to do this John Waters film,” I’d have said, “You’ve got to be kidding me.” I had seen Cry-Baby with Johnny Depp - I liked that, but all the Divine stuff I didn’t have much of a handle on. Oh God, the first thing I think is how we laughed. When you think of Serial Mom and that era of your career, what first comes to mind? There’s never a wrong time to revisit Serial Mom, so Turner rang up Vulture to reminisce about working with Waters, and why her agents told her not to take the part - which only made her want it more. But the role was always meant to go to Turner, who was riding a career high that started with 1981’s Über-sensual Body Heat and continued with Romancing the Stone, Peggy Sue Got Married, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, The Accidental Tourist, and The War of the Roses. Along the way, Glenn Close, Meryl Streep, and Roseanne Barr were among the actresses considered for Beverly. Serial Mom was initially developed at Columbia before landing at Savoy Pictures, a short-lived distributor co-founded by two former Columbia executives who didn’t seem to grasp the humor of the movie they’d acquired. When Beverly snaps, a mischievous glint fills Turner’s eyes, as if a demon has possessed Beverly’s body - not that she minds. Beverly is content to keep her home tidy and her family fed as long as no one insults her children, steals her parking spot, interrupts her bird-watching plans, or violates the insipid fashion codes of the upper middle class. John Waters’s 1994 satire underperformed at the box office, but today it’s considered one of the sharpest parodies of suburban life. Turner’s Beverly Sutphin is the perfect housewife, aside from, you know, all the carnage and whatnot. Serial Mom runs a jaunty 95 minutes, just enough time for Kathleen Turner to make vulgar prank calls to her scandalized neighbor (“Is this the Cocksucker residence?”), extract a teenage boy’s liver with a fire poker, bash a woman singing Annie over the head with a leg of lamb, clobber Patty Hearst with a pay phone for wearing white after Labor Day, and have acrobatic sex with Sam Waterston because murder makes her horny. Photo: Mary Evans/Polar/Everett Collection On defying her agents, hitting Patty Hearst with a pay phone, hating Barry Manilow, and watching Shirley MacLaine eat a staggering number of crabs.
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