Independent filmmaker Steve Yeager came to Hopkins on Tuesday, Oct. 28 as part of the Baltimore Artists’ Meet-ups (BAM) speaker series.
“We had a great turn-out tonight, and we hope people continue to show up,” Landry said after the event.
Yeager’s presentation, held in Hodson Hall, marked the first-ever event for the BAM speaker series. Hosted by students and their faculty advisor, Film and Media studies lecturer Matthew Porterfield, the main goal of the series is to bring local artists from the Baltimore area to Hopkins and thus expose the student body to local arts.
Sophomores Meghan Killea and Chaconne Martin-Berkowicz gave a formal introduction to Yeager. They outlined his involvement with film and theater and his instructional roles in the local art community, both at Towson University and in Baltimore schools.
Savannah de Montesquiou and Ruth Landry, both sophomores who helped organize Tuesday’s event, were pleased with the audience that Yeager attracted.
Among the topics Yeager discussed were his major directorial achievements, including his first feature-length film, On the Block (1990), the 1998 Sundance Film Festival’s Best Documentary recipient, Divine Trash, and its 2000 sequel, In Bad Taste.
Divine Trash (1998) is a documentary on the life of Yeager’s fellow filmmaker John Waters. It is perhaps the film for which Yeager is most well-known. Named after Divine, an actor that Waters frequently cast, Divine Trash serves both as a cinematographic history of John Waters as well as a kind of eulogy for Divine, who had passed away 10 years earlier.
“The majority of the footage was shot behind the scenes of [John Waters] making Pink Flamingos, and I shot over six hours of John making Pink Flamingos,” Yeager said during his presentation.
Yeager remembered the circumstances under which he made Divine Trash, around 25 years after Waters actually filmed his Pink Flamingos. After hoarding rolls of archive footage for a quarter of a century in his refrigerator (to protect the emulsion), Yeager eventually sat down with Waters and received the filmmaker’s permission to make a documentary of his life up to and including the seminal film.
Pink Flamingos, according to Yeager, was a “rather raunchy film.” The defining moment of Pink Flamingos was the scene in which Divine ate dog waste, adding an unprecedented shock value to the film. Yeager certainly could not ignore this scene in his own documentary of Waters.
“Everyone who knows John or has seen Pink Flamingos knows about the ending scene,” Yeager said.
Aside from Divine Trash, one of Yeager’s favorite jobs is one for which he is less well- known: working on America’s Most Wanted.
“I did that for about six years and it was the best job I’ve ever had because not only did we get to have real production values, we got to use cranes and dollies. We got to use SAG actors, Screen Actors’ Guild professional actors, and we had decent budgets,” Yeager said.
Yeager’s films, which are shot mainly in Baltimore, are not the only aspects of his involvement in the local arts. Yeager also has an instructional role as a co-founder of the Young Filmmakers’ Workshop, where children ages nine through 17 can gain experience as filmmakers, complete with their own red carpet event held every October.
“The kids get to make some interesting little films,” Yeager said. “The older kids get to make the longer films. Each year it’s a different genre. This year it was Body Snatchers, in the past it’s been Zombies. We did a Bollywood musical one year.”
The Young Filmmakers’ Workshop gives early exposure to kids who might want to pursue careers in set design, filmmaking or acting later in life. Yeager described his high expectations for participants:
“I like to think that I set the bar high. I’m a filmmaker and I’m a professional, and I want the kids to know how to do it right. I want them to know that it’s not easy and that there’s a lot of luck and a lot of hard work involved in this business,” he said.
With both his critically acclaimed films and with his community involvement, Yeager represents the kind of local artist on which the BAM speaker series wishes to educate the Hopkins student body. Landry expressed BAM’s goal to integrate the art communities of Hopkins and that of Baltimore at large.
“We’re hoping that BAM encourages more dialogue with the arts community on campus and the greater Baltimore area,” she said.
Upcoming events held by this newly-launched organization include a presentation by Dr. Monica Lopez-Gonzalez, a filmmaker and postdoctorate in the Department of Otolaryngology: Head and Neck Surgery at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, as well as the experimental cellist Paul Rucker.
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