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John Waters

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ï:For other people with the same name, see John Waters.

John Waters
Waters at the 2007 Edinburgh International Film Festival
Born
John Samuel Waters, Jr.

(1946-04-22) April 22, 1946 (age 78)
Baltimore, Maryland, U.S.
NationalityAmerican
EducationCalvert Hall College High School
Alma materNew York University
Occupation(s)Director, producer, actor, screenwriter
Years active1964–present
Known forHairspray (1988 film),
cult films à la Pink Flamingos
Parent(s)John Samuel Waters,
Patricia Ann (nee Whitaker)

John Samuel Waters, Jr. (born April 22, 1946) is an American filmmaker, actor, stand-up comedian, writer, journalist, visual artist, and art collector, who rose to fame in the early 1970s for his transgressive cult films. Waters' 1970s and early '80s trash films feature his regular troupe of actors known as the Dreamlanders—among them Divine, Mink Stole, David Lochary, Mary Vivian Pearce, and Edith Massey. Starting with Desperate Living (1977), Waters began casting real-life convicted criminals (Liz Renay, Patricia Hearst) and infamous people (Traci Lords, a former porn star).

Waters skirted mainstream film making with Hairspray (1988), which introduced Ricki Lake and earned a modest gross of $8 million domestically. In 2002, Hairspray was adapted to a long-running Broadway musical, which itself was adapted to a hit musical film which earned more than $200 million worldwide. After the crossover success of the original film version of Hairspray, Waters's films began featuring familiar actors and celebrities such as Johnny Depp, Edward Furlong, Melanie Griffith, Chris Isaak, Johnny Knoxville, Martha Plimpton, Christina Ricci, Lili Taylor, Kathleen Turner, John Travolta, and Tracey Ullman.

Although he has apartments in New York City and San Francisco, as well as a summer home in Provincetown, Waters still mainly resides in his hometown of Baltimore, Maryland, where all his films are set. He is recognizable by his trademark pencil-thin moustache, a look he has retained since the early 1970s.

Early life

Waters was born in Baltimore, Maryland, the son of Patricia Ann (née Whitaker) and John Samuel Waters, who was a manufacturer of fire-protection equipment.[1] Waters grew up in Lutherville, Maryland, a suburb of Baltimore. His boyhood friend and muse Glenn Milstead, later known as Divine, also lived in Lutherville.

The movie Lili inspired an interest in puppets in the seven-year-old Waters, who proceeded to stage violent versions of Punch and Judy for children's birthday parties. Biographer Robert L. Pela says that Waters's mother believes the puppets in Lili had the greatest influence on Waters's subsequent career (though Pela believes tacky films at a local drive-in, which the young Waters watched from a distance through binoculars, had a greater effect).[2]

Waters attended the Calvert School in Baltimore and Calvert Hall College High School in nearby Towson but he ultimately graduated from Boys' Latin School of Maryland. For his sixteenth birthday, Waters received an 8mm movie camera from his maternal grandmother, Stella Whitaker.

Career

Early career

John Waters at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival.

His first short film was Hag in a Black Leather Jacket. According to Waters, the film was shown only once in a "beatnik coffee house" in Baltimore, although in later years he has included it in his traveling photography exhibit.

Waters enrolled at New York University (NYU). The school, however, was not what Waters had in mind:

NYU...I was there for about five minutes. I don't know what I was thinking about. I went to one class and they kept talking about Potemkin and that isn't what I wanted to talk about. I had just gone to see Olga's House of Shame. That was what I was more into.

Extremely influential to his creative mind, Waters tells Robert K. Elder in an interview for The Film That Changed My Life, was The Wizard of Oz.

I was always drawn to forbidden subject matter in the very, very beginning. The Wizard of Oz opened me up because it was one of the first movies I ever saw. It opened me up to villainy, to screenwriting, to costumes. And great dialogue. I think the witch has great, great dialogue.[3]

Waters has further credited his influences as, among others, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Herschell Gordon Lewis, Federico Fellini, William Castle and Ingmar Bergman. He has stated that he takes an equal amount of joy and influence from high-brow "art" films and sleazy exploitation films: "I love Bergman and I Dismember Mama".[citation needed]

In January 1966, Waters and some friends were caught smoking marijuana on the grounds of NYU; he was soon kicked out of his NYU dormitory. Waters returned to Baltimore, where he completed his next two short films Roman Candles and Eat Your Makeup.[1] These were followed by the feature-length films Mondo Trasho and Multiple Maniacs.

Waters's films would become Divine's primary star vehicles. All of Waters's early films were shot in the Baltimore area with his company of local actors, the Dreamlanders. In addition to Divine, the group included Mink Stole, Cookie Mueller, Edith Massey, David Lochary, Mary Vivian Pearce, Susan Walsh, and others. These early films were among the first picked up for distribution by the fledgling New Line Cinema. Waters's films premiered at Baltimore's Senator Theatre and sometimes at the Charles Theatre.

Waters's early campy movies present filthily lovable characters in outrageous situations with hyperbolic dialogue. Pink Flamingos, Female Trouble, and Desperate Living, which he labeled the Trash Trilogy, pushed hard at the boundaries of conventional propriety and movie censorship. A particularly notorious scene from Pink Flamingos, added as a non sequitur to the film's end, featured—in one continuous take without special effects—a small dog defecating and Divine eating its feces.

Move towards the mainstream

Waters in New York City.

Waters's 1981 film Polyester starred Divine opposite former teen idol Tab Hunter. Since then, his films have become less controversial and more mainstream, although works such as Hairspray, Cry-Baby, Serial Mom, Pecker, and Cecil B. Demented still retain his trademark inventiveness. The film Hairspray was turned into a hit Broadway musical which swept the 2003 Tony Awards, and a film adaptation of the Broadway musical was released in theaters on July 20, 2007 to positive reviews and commercial success. Cry-Baby, itself a musical, was also converted into a Broadway musical.

In 2004, the NC-17-rated A Dirty Shame marked a return to his earlier, more controversial work of the 1970s. He had a cameo in Jackass: Number Two, which starred Dirty Shame co-star Johnny Knoxville, and another small role as paparazzo Pete Peters in 2004's Seed of Chucky.

In 2007, he became the host ("The Groom Reaper") of 'Til Death Do Us Part, a program on America's Court TV network featuring dramatizations of marriages that soured and ended in murder.

In 2008, Waters was planning to make a children's Christmas film called Fruitcake[4] starring Johnny Knoxville and Parker Posey.[5] Filming was planned for November 2008,[6] but it was shelved in January 2009.[7] In 2010, Waters told the Chicago Tribune that "Independent films that cost $5 million are very hard to get made. I sold the idea, got a development deal, got paid a great salary to write it — and now the company is no longer around, which is the case with many independent film companies these days."[8]

Waters has been known to create characters with alliterated names for his films including Corny Collins, Donald and Donna Dasher, Dawn Davenport, Fat Fuck Frank, Francine Fishpaw, Link Larkin, Motormouth Maybelle, Mole McHenry, Penny and Prudy Pingleton, Ramona Rickettes, Sylvia Stickles, Todd Tomorrow, Tracy Turnblad, Ursula Udders, Wade Walker, and Wanda Woodward.

Fine art

Since the early 1990s, Waters has been making photo-based artwork and installations that have been internationally exhibited in galleries and museums. In 2004, the New Museum in NYC presented a retrospective of his artwork curated by Marvin Heiferman and Lisa Phillips. His most recent exhibition was Rear Projection in April, 2009, at the Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York and the Gagosian Gallery in Los Angeles.

Waters’s pieces are often comical, such as Rush (2009), a super-sized, tipped-over bottle of poppers (nitrite inhalants) and Hardy Har (2006), a photograph of flowers that squirts water at anyone who traverses a taped line on the floor. Waters has characterized his art as conceptual, saying that “the craft is not the issue here. The idea is. And the presentation."[9]

Other interests

Puffing constantly on a cigarette, Waters appeared in a short film shown in film art houses announcing that "no smoking" is permitted in the theaters. This short spot was filmed by Waters for the Nuart Theatre (a Landmark Theater) in West Los Angeles, California, in appreciation to the theater for showing Pink Flamingos for many years. It is shown immediately before any of his films, and before the midnight movie showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

He played a minister in Blood Feast 2: All U Can Eat, which was directed by one of his idols, Herschell Gordon Lewis, and is a sequel to one of his favorite exploitation films.

Waters is also a board member of Maryland Film Festival, and has selected and hosted one favorite feature film within each Maryland Film Festival since its launch in 1999. Waters' picks have ranged from Joseph Losey's Boom! to Gaspar Noé's I Stand Alone.

Personal life

In 2009, he advocated the parole of former Manson family member Leslie Van Houten. He devotes a chapter to Van Houten in his book Role Models published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in May 2010.[10][11][12]

An openly gay man, Waters is also an avid supporter of gay rights and gay pride.[13]

Waters was a great fan of the music of Little Richard when growing up, claiming that ever since shoplifting a copy of his song "Lucille" in 1957, "I've wished I could somehow climb into Little Richard's body, hook up his heart and vocal cords to my own, and switch identities." In 1987, Playboy magazine employed Waters to interview his idol, but the interview did not go well, with Waters later remarking that "it turned into kind of a disaster."[14]

Recurring cast members

Waters often casts certain actors/actresses more than once in his films.

Actor Mondo Trasho (1969) Multiple Maniacs (1970) Pink Flamingos (1972) Female Trouble (1974) Desperate Living (1977) Polyester (1981) Hairspray (1988) Cry-Baby (1990) Serial Mom (1994) Pecker (1998) Cecil B. Demented (2000) A Dirty Shame (2004)
Divine
Patricia Hearst
Ricki Lake
David Lochary
Traci Lords
Susan Lowe
Edith Massey
Cookie Mueller
Mary Vivian Pearce
Mink Stole
Susan Walsh
Alan J. Wendl
Channing Wilroy

Filmography

Writer/director

Writer

As voice actor

Acting

Television

Acting

Voice

Other appearances

Documentary appearances

Other works

Bibliography

  • Shock Value (1981)
  • Crackpot: The Obsessions of John Waters (1987, Revised Edition 2003)
  • Trash Trio: Three Screenplays: Pink Flamingos, Desperate Living, Flamingos Forever (1988)
  • Art: A Sex Book (2003) (with Bruce Hainley)
  • Hairspray, Female Trouble and Multiple Maniacs: Three More Screenplays (2005)
  • Role Models (2010)

Photo collections

  • Director's Cut (1997)
  • John Waters: Change of Life (2004)
  • Unwatchable (2006)

Books about Waters

  • Ives, John G. John Waters (American Originals) (1992)
  • Pela, Robrt L. Filthy: The Weird World of John Waters (2002)
  • Stevenson, Jack. Desperate Visions 1: Camp America: The Films of John Waters & the Kuchar Brothers: Interviews & Essays (1996)

References

  1. ^ a b John Waters Biography (1946–)
  2. ^ Pela, Robert L (2002). Filthy: The Weird World of John Waters. Alyson Publishing. ISBN 1-55583-625-9.
  3. ^ Waters, John. Interview by Robert K. Elder. The Film That Changed My Life by Robert K. Elder. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2011. N. p281. Print.
  4. ^ Indyweek.com Interview
  5. ^ Guarino, David R (2008-05-22). "Yuletide Indigestion: John Waters Makes Fruitcake". Gay Chicago magazine. pp. 56–61.
  6. ^ Stewart, Sara (15 June 2008). "John Waters. The director comes to New York for his [[one-man show]], and savors another big night at the Tonys". New York Post. Retrieved 31 March 2011. {{cite news}}: URL–wikilink conflict (help)
  7. ^ "Waters' Kids Movie Scrapped". Contactmusic. 16 January 2009. Retrieved 31 March 2011.
  8. ^ Metz, Nina (3 December 2010). "John Waters loves Christmas. Really". Chicago Tribune. Retrieved 31 March 2011.
  9. ^ Levi, Lawrence. "Inside Man." Modern Painters, September 2009.
  10. ^ Leslie Van Houten: A Friendship 2009-08-03
  11. ^ John Waters gets serious: Usually droll director sets aside the sarcasm as he writes about his friendship with Manson family member Leslie Van Houten 2009-08-07
  12. ^ John Waters Argues For Murderer's Release 2009-08-10
  13. ^ Dreamland News: Fans
  14. ^ Waters, John (28 November 2010). "When John Waters met Little Richard". The Guardian. Retrieved 30 November 2009. {{cite news}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
  15. ^ "Pope of trash and princess of pop". Q&A. Australian Broadcasting Corporation. 24 October 2011. Retrieved 25 October 2011.
  16. ^ "Guest of Cindy Sherman (2008)". www.imdb.com. Retrieved 2009-09-08.
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