In Hot Waters With 'Female Trouble'

By Stephen M. Silverman

10/18/2001 at 02:44 PM EDT

Tinkerbell has touched "Female Trouble." The 1974 tasteless comedy, by cult director John Waters, has surfaced on DVD for the first time ever this month, double-billed with an earlier Waters work, the truly disgusting (and the filmmaker considers that a compliment) "Pink Flamingos." "It's like having a magic wand," the Baltimore-based Waters, 55, told PEOPLE.com about the DVD technology. "Suddenly it's like $100,000 has been added to the production budget. You can hear and see things in the movie that I didn't even know were there." Waters's favorite film, "Female Trouble" tells the story of Dan Davenport (played the late drag queen Divine), who becomes a mass murderer because her parents don't give her the cha-cha heels she wanted for Christmas. "There were six different versions out on video, all slashed to 92 minutes," said Waters, who's grateful that New Line Home Entertainment has restored the definitive director's 96-minute cut of his masterpiece. Where was the missing footage, which includes a scene of Divine swimming across a river? "In my attic," said Waters, "not in some temperature-controlled film vault. And Baltimore in summer can be as humid as Vietnam." Other double-DVD sets in the Waters collection: "Polyester," "Desperate Living," "Pecker" and "Hairspray," the movie that introduced the world to Ricki Lake.