Gender: Male Race or Ethnicity: White Sexual orientation:Gay[1] Occupation:Film Director, Actor Party Affiliation: Democratic [2]
Nationality: United States Executive summary:Hairspray
At 12, John Waters subscribed to Variety, mastering its lexicon of filmmakers' language. He staged bizarre but hilarious puppet shows at children's' birthday parties. Inspired after reading Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and armed with an 8mm camera, Waters and several high school weirdoes formed a repertory troupe called the Dreamland Players, and began filming the most vile crap Waters could imagine. He has said that his goal was to smash every middle-class value that good citizens hold dear. His early works included Hag in a Black Leather Jacket and Eat Your Makeup, in which models are kidnapped and forced to, yes, eat their make-up.
Waters was expelled from New York University for smoking marijuana. In the school's official letter of expulsion, they told Waters' parents that he needed extensive psychiatric therapy, but Waters resumed making movies instead. In 1969, borrowing $2,000 from his father, Waters made his first full-length feature film, Mondo Trasho. In one memorable scene, the big-boned female impersonator Divine crawls through a pig wallow wearing a gold lame dress, while pigs copulate on camera. It got Waters arrested for conspiracy to commit indecent exposure. His other early films include hard-to-find gems like Multiple Maniacs (in which Mink Stole gives "rosaryjobs" to strangers in Catholic churches) and the scratch-and-sniff classic Polyester.
In Pink Flamingos, his 1972 classic about the battle to be named "Filthiest person alive", Divine is asked to describe her political positions. Scripted by Waters, her answer is often quoted as the director's manifesto: "Kill everyone now. Condone first degree murder. Advocate cannibalism. Eat shit. Filth is my politics -- filth is my life!" William S. Burroughs once called Waters "the pope of trash". Hairspray, his 1988 rock'n'roll comedy starring a fat Ricki Lake, was his first film to play outside of art house cinemas and midnight showings. Waters' other moderately mainstream films include Cry Baby, Pecker, and A Dirty Shame.
Now mostly retired from movie-making, Waters has referred to himself as a "filth elder".
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AKA John Waters Jr.