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bainbridgezu wrote:

ianungstad wrote:I assume Mondo Trasho would be part of a Waters box? Hopefully Multiple Maniacs turns up there too. Would love to toss my bootleg in the bin.

Unfortunately, Waters stated at a recent retrospective that neither Multiple Maniacs nor any of his shorts would ever be released commercially.

We can hope Criterion at least gets around to revisiting Pink Flamingos and Polyester, though I wouldn't mind if they picked up Female Trouble and Desperate Living as well. The former would be especially nice as New Line's DVD was heavily cropped without Water's involvement, often to the exclusion of Divine's various hairstyles.

bainbridgezu wrote:Looking back, it appears that Multiple Maniacs is indeed the Waters film which was recently restored in preparation for re-release.

kidc85 wrote:

bainbridgezu wrote:Looking back, it appears that Multiple Maniacs is indeed the Waters film which was recently restored in preparation for re-release.

I'd love for you to be right about this, what are you basing this on?

kwippleton wrote:Saw John Waters do his Christmas show tonight and during the Q&A portion he mentioned that a re-release of Multiple Maniacs was in the works and will look great. He didn't specifically mention Criterion, but given that he was just there a few weeks ago...

ianungstad wrote:That clip Criterion showed is certainly from John Water's Multiple Maniacs. Fantastic news.

albucat wrote:Janus just announced theatrical screenings of Multiple Maniacs following a restoration. Waters will be doing some interviews to promote the film, too, which implies that they likely have more than just this in the pipeline.

Also notable, to me at least, is that the press screening is actually at Criterion. I haven't paid attention to these for a while (I write fewer film reviews than I used to), but that might be a first.

Raymond Marble wrote:I wonder if the eventual physical media release of Multiple Maniacs will include as special features Waters' 60s-era shorts ("Hag in a Black Leather Jacket," "Eat Your Makeup," "Roman Candles"), which have never been released on any home video format before, and are virtually impossible to have seen. He used to keep a tight grip on them, but at least twice in the past fifteen years he's allowed them to be screened in New York, which is an improvement on not screening them anywhere for decades, at least.

swo17 wrote:Coming in March

You also asked about films that were banned or cut in the past and the answer to that question really is that we will look at films again when they are submitted for classification, so we don't go through our archive and say "Well, we classified this film in 1980, shouldn't we take another look at it?". We respond to film distributors sending in content and we will judge those films according to our classification guidelines as they stand now, and as UK law stands now.

So there's an example actually that we have been dealing with this week, which is an old John Waters film called Multiple Maniacs, which is getting a release in Northern Ireland in 2016. When this film came into us in 1990 we cut it. There is a sequence which we, at the time, considered to be blasphemous and at the time there was a statute that made blasphemy illegal. Since 1990 when we classified the film that statute is no longer on the statute book and it is no longer an offence in England and Wales to make comment about the established church in the way that it was back in 1990. So we are now able to pass that film uncut in England in Wales and there has not been a prosecution for blasphemy in Scotland or Northern Ireland for many, many, many years, so we considered that issue and that it would be safe to classify the film at 18 without any cuts.

So that is an example of where the law may have changed so a film that we were not able to pass legally uncut in the past, we are now able to classify.

colinr0380 wrote:Here's something interesting that just turned up in one of the latest BBFC podcasts "Ask The Chief Executive" from 8th December, in which David Austin answered some Twitter questions. Here's his response to a question about revisiting classification decisions, which after the general response mentions Multiple Maniacs:

You also asked about films that were banned or cut in the past and the answer to that question really is that we will look at films again when they are submitted for classification, so we don't go through our archive and say "Well, we classified this film in 1980, shouldn't we take another look at it?". We respond to film distributors sending in content and we will judge those films according to our classification guidelines as they stand now, and as UK law stands now.

So there's an example actually that we have been dealing with this week, which is an old John Waters film called Multiple Maniacs, which is getting a release in Northern Ireland in 2016. When this film came into us in 1990 we cut it. There is a sequence which we, at the time, considered to be blasphemous and at the time there was a statute that made blasphemy illegal. Since 1990 when we classified the film that statute is no longer on the statute book and it is no longer an offence in England and Wales to make comment about the established church in the way that it was back in 1990. So we are now able to pass that film uncut in England in Wales and there has not been a prosecution for blasphemy in Scotland or Northern Ireland for many, many, many years, so we considered that issue and that it would be safe to classify the film at 18 without any cuts.

So that is an example of where the law may have changed so a film that we were not able to pass legally uncut in the past, we are now able to classify.