‘Cry-Baby’ Turns 30! Here Are 5 Things You Didn’t Know About the Classic John Waters Musical
Cry-Baby, John Waters‘s 1950s-set musical comedy about the forbidden, Romeo-and-Juliet-style love between a greaser (Johnny Depp) and a good girl (Amy Locane), shook, rattled and rolled into theaters 30 years ago today, on April 6, 1990. The follow-up to Waters’ mainstream breakthrough, Hairspray, Cry-Baby wasn’t quite as much of a hit — in fact, despite having a red-hot star in Depp (who was then freshly off 21 Jump Street), the film barely broke even on its $8 million budget. But in the decades since, it has become a cult classic and a lasting style influence, especially on rockabilly culture — surely more than a few viewers have gone on to buy black leather jackets, convinced that they might look as good as Depp’s Wade “Cry-Baby” Walker.
Read on for five Cry-Baby facts so fun, they’ll make you shed a single, perfect tear.
1John Waters stopped Johnny Depp & Winona Ryder from getting married on set
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Depp was, at the time of filming, in a highly publicized relationship with actress Winona Ryder (inspiration behind his famous “Winona Forever” tattoo — later updated to read “Wino Forever”). Depp, 27 at the time, and Ryder, then 19, were sure their love was made for the ages, and wanted to get married during filming.
Waters went so far as to get ordained by the Universal Life Church to perform the wedding, he told the New Yorker in 2007: “I think Winona and Johnny wanted to add a twist to it. I met her parents. I met his parents.” However, in his 2019 memoir, Mr. Know It All, he revealed that “I gently talked them out of it because Winona was so young. Her parents thanked me.”
2They took a pass on Brad Pitt
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Pitt had his career breakthrough in 1991, when he starred in Johnny Suede and had a brief but extremely memorable role as a good-looking drifter who romances and then robs Geena Davis in Thelma & Louise. Just a handful of years before, however, he auditioned for the role of Milton in Cry-Baby — and was passed over in favor of Darren E. Burrows, who was then co-starring on Northern Exposure. As Waters wrote in his memoir, “We all knew somebody this handsome couldn’t be cast as Johnny Depp’s goofy sidekick — I needed a guy with a quirkier look … I may be the only director who turned down Brad Pitt in a casting session.”
3Patty Hearst’s family tried to bribe her to quit the film
(c) Universal Pictures/Courtesy: Everett Collection.
Even today, over 50 years after she was kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army, Patty Hearst is best known for the multi-year ordeal she went through while being held captive by the radical group. But in the late ’80s, Hearst — who had served a jail sentence for a bank robbery she had participated with while captive by the SLA, and released a memoir, 1982’s Every Secret Thing — wanted to start a new chapter of her life. She met Waters in 1988, while she was promoting a movie about her kidnapping; Waters greeted her by cheekily telling her of the movie, “It made me think you weren’t guilty for the first time.” He then asked her to appear in Cry-Baby. Hearst said yes; she was ready to be known as something other than a famous kidnapping victim.
But her family was reportedly appalled; in his memoir, Waters writes that Hearst’s sister asked “Why would you want to attract more attention to yourself after what you’ve been through?” and her father “offered to pay her to not take the part.” But Hearst “understood why she wanted to do it,” wrote Waters. “She was famous for something she didn’t want to be famous for.”
Hearst went on to not only appear in several of Waters’ other movies, like Serial Mom and Pecker, but in guest roles on Frasier, The Adventures of Pete and Pete, and Veronica Mars.
4Hatchet Face became a lawyer
(c) Universal Pictures/Courtesy: Everett Collection.
Kim McGuire mad a serious impression with viewers as Hatchet Face, a member of Cry-Baby’s girl gang. In the 2005 making-of featurette about the film, McGuire said, “I had just randomly sent my picture to six casting directors that week. I sent it to [casting director] Paula Herold, who was casting for a film called Reversal of Fortune, which I had no idea what it was about. And I guess I had a reversal of fortune, because they called me in for Cry-Baby.” (For any concerned viewers: McGuire’s visage in the film was crafted from special effects makeup; in real life, the actress simply had very light coloring and a pronounced nose).
McGuire appeared in a handful of films and TV shows after the movie, including David Lynch’s unsuccessful 1992 sitcom, On The Air; but by the late ’90s, she began studying law, and was admitted to the California Bar Association in 1997. Later in life, she relocated to Mississippi and Alabama, continuing her law career. She and her husband survived Hurricane Katrina, but lost their home and all their worldly goods in the process. In 2016, she was admitted to the hospital suffering complications from pneumonia; she died the next day at age 60.
5Traci Lords got raided by law enforcement while on set
©Universal Pictures/Courtesy: Everett Collection.
Though today Traci Lords is a character actress who’s appeared in everything from Blade and the Stephen King TV movie The Tommyknockers to Roseanne and Melrose Place, she infamously began her career in the adult film industry, where she made porn movies while underage by using a fake ID. When Lords’ real age was discovered shortly after her 18th birthday in 1986, federal prosecutors arrested members of the production company that worked on Lords’ films, and took Lords herself into protective custody.
Lords soon decided to pursue a career in mainstream acting, taking classes at the Lee Strasberg Institute and landing the lead in the B movie Not of This Earth. By early 1989, she was cast in Cry-Baby as girl gang member Wanda — her first major mainstream role. But even though Traci had put the world of porn in her rearview mirror, Waters wrote that during the shooting of Cry-Baby, “Feds raided the set and served Traci Lords with papers trying to force her to return to L.A. to testify against the mob for distributing all her underage porn films.” The director recalled Hearst, who played Lords’ mother on the film, comforting the 21-year-old actress as she wept.
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