They've smeared themselves with molasses, spent days searching for iron lungs and pulled all-nighters with 5,000 flies.

When you belong to John Waters' cinematic inner circle, this is what's asked of you -- and more.

In a business where friendships often fade with the final credits, Baltimore's bad boy of film has cultivated a group of like-minded cohorts who have helped translate his oddball vision onto the big screen for nearly three decades.

They were there when the budgets were thin, the acting questionable and the audience nonexistent. Many are still around today as Mr. Waters' latest film, "Serial Mom," opens across the country.

Like many friends, they've weathered adversity together -- particularly the deaths of friends such as Divine, Edith Massey and Cookie Muller. Pat Moran, Mr. Waters' sidekick, refers to the remaining clan as "the relics."

Mr. Waters prefers a more endearing term.

"I think of us as an extended family," he says.

His role in the family?

"Oooh," he says bashfully. "Don't make me use the F-word."

PAT MORAN

"Serial Mom" role: Associate producer and casting director. Role in the John Waters family: "If he's the father, I guess you'd call me the mother."

Before Pat Moran met John Waters, she was headed for the Peace Corps. Instead, she wound up making movies starring Patty Hearst, Iggy Pop and a 300-pound drag queen.

In the process, she became a successful casting director who has worked not only on Mr. Waters' films but "Avalon," "Her Alibi" and Barry Levinson's "Homicide" TV series.

The center of the inner circle, Ms. Moran knows "everything" about Mr. Waters, a fact even the filmmaker confirms.

But don't ask the loquacious Ms. Moran -- who used to run the Charles Theatre -- to dish about her confidante.

"Now," she says, "I wouldn't be much of a friend if I told" his secrets.

The two met 30 years ago at the Mount Vernon Flower Mart. Her first impression: "I remember he was awfully skinny and had an awfully long neck."

In addition to casting most of his movies, she's had a small acting part in nearly every one. "I've done everything -- acting, casting, producing, catering," says Ms. Moran, who lives in Mount Vernon and says she's "a few years older" than Mr. Waters, 47.

Although she's never attended film school, she believes working with John Waters is a crash course in movie-making.

Take "Desperate Living." Mr. Waters was shooting in rural Maryland on a sub-freezing day. With filming going slowly, Ms. Moran feared the extras would start leaving.

Her solution: She commandeered a school bus they were using and blocked in all the parked cars. No one could get away until the scene was over.

"In this business," she says, "you wake up with a sword and shield to get through the day."

"Serial Mom" role: Prop coordinator. Role in the John Waters family: Archivist brother.

As the "archivist brother," Bob Adams doesn't keep the family history tucked away in a drawer or closet. He splashes it across his Fells Point shop, Flashback, where the shelves are stocked with videos, soundtracks and memorabilia from John Waters' movies.

Behind the register is his most precious commodity -- film scrapbooks and photo albums featuring never-before-published photos, including one of Johnny Depp wearing nothing but a smirk and his briefs.

Mr. Adams, who met Mr. Waters in the late '60s, says it's a twisted sense of humor that keeps their friendship going.

"He makes killing funny. Is that wrong?" asks Mr. Adams, who lives in Fells Point.

As a friend, he protects Mr. Waters from "undesirables," he says. "You don't ever give out his phone number or address."

With his network of antique dealers and collectors across the country, Mr. Adams is often given the job of finding props that seem unfindable. Among the toughest things he's located are a 1920s motorcycle muffler and an antique Old Maid card for "Cry-Baby."

"I've been through it all with him," says Mr. Adams, 48. "When you're out there working for nothing for weeks and weeks, you realize there's a special bond."

The bond is so special he allowed Mr. Waters to christen him "Pugue" after a radio riff Mr. Adams used to do called "the Psychedelic Pig."

At the moment, though, it's not his name -- but Mr. Waters' reputation -- he's concentrating on.

Mr. Adams is optimistic about the film's chances, but he worries about its reception in the South.

"Will the Bible Belt see a teacher getting run over as funny?" he wonders. "We'll have to wait and see."

"Serial Mom" role: Production designer. Role in the John Waters family: Decorator uncle.

Vincent Peranio makes his way through his Fells Point warehouse, past the antique wheelchair from "Desperate Living" and the plastic driftwood lamp from "Hairspray," talking about his beginnings in the movie business.

"John was filming 'Multiple Maniacs,' " he says. "He needed a giant lobster and asked me to make one. I have a problem saying no, and that was the start of my career."

After graduating from the Maryland Institute, College of Art, he became part of the influx of artists into Fells Point in the late '60s. "I met this whole bizarre family and became part of it," he says of being introduced to Mr. Waters.

Ten sets and 26 years later, Mr. Peranio has crafted a professional life out of finding props and building sets for movies. "I give the characters history and John gives them the moment," says Mr. Peranio, 48, who lives in Fells Point.

"Serial Mom," however, represented a first. It was the only time he's created a contemporary setting for a Waters film.

Even though he and Mr. Waters have similar tastes, they occasionally disagree over, well, wallpaper. In the bedroom of Kathleen Turner's character, Mr. Peranio wanted florals; Mr. Waters preferred more masculine stripes. They compromised and used both.

Working with the filmmaker has led Mr. Peranio to other projects, including doing sets for commercials and other features.

But of the movie sets he's designed, "Hairspray," with its cartoon-like '50s interiors, is still his favorite.

"It was cathartic to re-create our lives as teen-agers," says Mr. Peranio, who grew up in South Baltimore and Glen Burnie. "For us, these films are like home movies . . . It's been an amazing source of continuity in my life. Plus, it's a lot more fun than being an insurance agent."

"Serial Mom" role: Actress who played a book buyer. Role in the John Waters family: Kid sister.

When you let a guy bleach your hair with Clorox, you're destined to be friends forever.

And so it goes for John Waters and Mary Vivian Pearce, who have been close since childhood thanks to their fathers, who were best friends.

Their relationship got off to a rocky start, though, when Mr. Waters, then 9, refused to speak anything but Pig Latin.

"I thought: 'This guy is really weird. He refuses to speak English,'" recalls Ms. Pearce, 46, who lives in Mount Washington.

In between crashing parties, getting drunk and the Clorox incident, Ms. Pearce was forbidden by her parents to see "that Johnny Waters."

But it took more than disapproving parents to keep them apart, especially since they lived within blocks of each other (she in Riderwood; he in Lutherville). Ms. Pearce would set up fake dates and leave the boys at the driveway where Mr. Waters would be waiting.

And when she ran away at 18, it was Mr. Waters who picked her up in his parents' station wagon.

"John helped us decorate the apartment," she says of the place she shared with Ms. Moran and others. "We wallpapered with tin foil."

Ms. Pearce, a clocker who times horses' workouts for the Daily Racing Form, has appeared in every John Waters movie. Her most memorable roles include a comatose victim of a hit-and-run accident in "Mondo Trasho" and a kidnapped model forced to eat false eyelashes in "Eat Your Makeup."

But as the films have grown more successful, Ms. Pearce has become concerned: Her roles are getting smaller. She used to play the leads. In "Serial Mom," she had a bit part as a book buyer. "I started at the top," she says, "and I'm clawing my way to the bottom." "Serial Mom" role: Second Unit Cameraman. Role in the John Waters family: Cousin.

Dave Insley's Fells Point rowhouse isn't a home so much as a photo gallery.

In the living room, the walls are festooned with snapshots of Troy Donahue and Divine, Johnny Depp and Traci Lords, Pia Zadora and Ric Ocasek. And by the hallway is a poster from "Cry-Baby."

"To Dave," it reads, "who makes all my hideous ideas so beautiful. Love, John Waters."

As the cinematographer for "Polyester," "Hairspray" and "Cry-Baby," Mr. Insley has captured the action, humor and just plain weirdness in Mr. Waters' movies.

They might have never met if Mr. Insley hadn't signed up at the University of Maryland Baltimore County to avoid the draft and Mr. Waters hadn't dropped by a film class that the draft dodger was taking.

"I had never met anyone like that before," says Mr. Insley, 43, who with his sandy brown hair and plaid shirt looks quintessentially normal. Having worked on six films now, he has grown nonchalant about Mr. Waters' ways.

During "Serial Mom," Mr. Insley spent nine hours shooting close-ups of flies buzzing around breakfast food. (No fly was killed during filming, he says, although one did escape.) That assignment was challenging enough, but he had to work while Sam Waterston and Kathleen Turner were doing a noisy love scene nearby.

Before filming started, Mr. Waters and Mr. Insley had an awkward moment when the filmmaker informed him he'd hired Robert Stevens, who has worked with Clint Eastwood and Steven Spielberg, as the director of photography.

"It was more difficult for him than for me," says Mr. Insley. "He cared that I would be upset. It hurt me, but it wasn't earth-shattering." "Serial Mom" role: Actress who played suburban divorcee Dottie Hinkle.

Role in the John Waters family: Kid sister.

Of the 10 roles Mink Stole has played in John Waters movies, Taffy Davenport in "Female Trouble" was her runaway favorite.

"She was bratty and nasty and fun," says Ms. Stole. "Divine played both of my parents. I killed Divine as my father. And Divine killed me as my mother."

Growing up in Roland Park, she didn't meet Mr. Waters until she and some friends spent the summer of '66 in Provincetown, Mass. Outcasts in a town of outcasts, they quickly got a nickname -- The Hillbilly Ripoffs from Baltimore -- after several members were accused of shoplifting.

Going to the movies became their passion that summer, and Mr. Waters' had only one rule: No talking once the lights went down.

Although Ms. Stole and Mr. Waters moved to New York together, they lasted only one month as roommates. "Let's just say we both do better living alone," she says. "He's a strong personality. And I'm not a wimp in the personality department either."

For Ms. Stole, being in Mr. Waters' films has been a mixed bag. "It's given me access to some things and denied me access to others. I've scared a lot of casting directors because of the over-the-top characters I've played," says Ms. Stole, 40ish and currently living in Los Angeles.

But even in Mr. Waters' films, professionalism keeps personal relationships from interfering with work.

"If [costume designer] Van Smith chooses a costume I don't like, I say, 'Van, I hate that.' He says, 'Shut up.' So I wear it. I have to defer to his judgment," she says.

When it comes to her name, she deferred to Mr. Waters.

During the filming of "Roman Candles," she asked Mr. Waters to come up with a snappier name than the one her parents had given her -- Nancy Stoll.

"He came up with Mink," she recalls. "And it stuck."