The Diane Linkletter Story

John Waters – 1969 – USA

Made in between John Waters’ first two features – the silent Mondo Trasho (1969) and the talkie Multiple Maniacs (1970) – this short film was done off the cuff just one day after TV personality Art Linkletter’s daughter’s much-publicized suicide, which may or may not have happened while under the influence of LSD.  It was also made to test the sound-sync camera that Waters intended to use on Multiple Maniacs.  It was filmed in a single set – a house eerily similar to ones seen in other Waters films of the early 70s – and much of it in a single shot as well.  David Lochary and Mary Vivian Pearce play Mr. and Mrs. Linkletter sitting in their living room and fretting over what’s become of their daughter since getting mixed up with a new crowd and drugs.  Diane (played by Divine) eventually appears in hippie garb and mumbling multiple times, “I’m doin’ my own thing, in my own time.”  Portions of the notoriously mawkish record that Art Linkletter put out a few weeks later is heard on the soundtrack; used ironically by Waters to accentuate the surreal absurdity of the tabloid story that transformed a private tragedy into an inane PSA about drug abuse.  It may seem insubstantial, but the film actually gets right to the heart of much of Waters’ aesthetic; anti-establishment politics, contempt for the nuclear family and the suburbs, and all-out culture war.