I've been arrested several times. I've been known to dress in ludicrous fashions. I've also built a career out of negative reviews.
People looked at my early pictures and called them the most disgusting things ever, and now 'Hairspray' is being done at every school in Britain and America.
Who have I been starstruck by in real life? One of the weirdest ones was, when we were making 'Cry-Baby,' David Nelson from 'The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet.' I couldn't believe he was sitting in my living room. Certainly Patricia Hearst. Tab Hunter. A lot of the stars I've worked with, when I first got them.
I like film books at the bottom of the barrel and art books at the top. 'The Ghastly One,' by Jimmy McDonough, is a hilarious biography of one of the most hideous directors who ever picked up a movie camera - Andy Milligan.
I remember when I first went to the Baltimore Museum of Art and I bought this little Moreau print in the gift shop. I took it home, and I was, like, 12 years old or something.
I always was a weird child. My mother told me the story that, in kindergarten, I would come home and tell her about this weird kid in my class who drew only with black crayons and didn't speak to other kids. I talked about it so much that my mother brought it up with the teacher, who said, 'What? That's your son.'
I used to run away to New York from Baltimore all the time. I would get on the Greyhound bus and tell my parents I was going to some sorority weekend... I'd even make up fake permission slips, come to New York, and just ask people on the street if I could stay with them and go see midnight movies.
In sixth grade, I went to a very good private school, and I did learn there. I learned how to read and write. If I had quit school in sixth grade, I would know as much as I know today and would have made one more movie. By the time I got to college, I was so bored and angry.
'Hairspray' maybe did change people's minds, and that's how you get your political enemies to change their minds - by making them laugh and making them look at something in a way they haven't seen it. Not by preaching and cutting them off and being a separatist.
The nightlife in Baltimore is very mixed. Any gay people I know go to the hipster bars; they don't go to the gay bars. Start your night at the Club Charles, and then you can meet people to go other places. The Charles has been Baltimore's favourite cool hipster bar forever.
I'm sick of '60s nostalgia. I've been to clubs in New York where it's just like the Fillmore East. And I thought I hated that then.
My mother was Catholic, my father not. I went to Catholic high school. Every form of education failed me. I was trouble.
New York was scarier than Baltimore ever was. It was terrible in the '70s. I'm glad they cleaned it up. I got mugged; I had to go to the hospital. Every time you went out, you got robbed. It was horrible. You can't imagine.
I'd love to sell out completely. It's just that nobody has been willing to buy.
My main residence is Baltimore. I have an apartment in New York, one in San Francisco, and I live in a rental in Provincetown in the summer.
I've been an art collector since the Sixties, and I kept it very separate from my showbusiness career. I've had art shows since the early Nineties, a museum show that travelled to four countries. I've had three or four art books; it's just another way I have to tell stories.
The few movies I can even think of that I watch over and over would be the Elizabeth Taylor/Richard Burton movie 'Boom!', 'Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!', and 'Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.' I wouldn't call any of them mainstream.
'Serial Mom' tested really well when we finally got with the right audience. But they would go to some shopping mall in a deep, deep suburban L.A. neighborhood where they knew people would hate, and they just wanted to spend money to prove that people wouldn't like it. The movie was not a success when it came out.
I don't like rules of any kind. And I seek people who break rules with happiness - and not bringing pain to themselves.
I have so many other things going on that if 'A Dirty Shame' is my last movie, that's OK.
