John Waters

The Filmmaker Who Turned Trash into Art

John Waters never needed the industry's permission to become the absolute ruler of bad taste. In 1964, he bought his first 16mm camera with money his grandmother gave him. That teenager from Baltimore wasn't after academic beauty or the perfect shots of the era. He just wanted to annoy his neighbors and film his friends doing forbidden things in the city's alleyways.

Provocation was the only possible language.

During the 1960s, he formed the group known as the Dreamlanders. It was a band of misfits, and the standout was Glenn Milstead, a young man who, beneath layers of makeup and impossible dresses, became Divine. Together they made guerrilla pieces such as Mondo Trasho in 1969 and Multiple Maniacs in 1970. These films were shot without filming permits and on budgets that barely covered developing the film stock.

In 1972, Pink Flamingos premiered, and everything changed for Waters. The film caught on through word of mouth at midnight screenings in New York and Los Angeles. The final scene, in which Divine eats real dog feces, became a landmark of underground cinema. But beyond the disgust, that moment was a political statement against the morality imposed by the American middle class.

The Leap to Studio Budgets

Hollywood ended up buying his speech.

Waters decided to try his luck with a somewhat more conventional story, but he kept his obsessions intact. In 1981, he shot Polyester and used the Odorama system so audiences could smell the film. Viewers received a card with numbers to scratch whenever a signal appeared on screen. It was his first collaboration with Tab Hunter, a former star of the major studios who agreed to work in the mud of independent film.

Then Hairspray arrived in 1988. It was his brightest project and the one that let him into homes across the country without giving up his message about racial segregation. The film cost less than three million dollars and earned eight times that amount in theaters. But the joy was short-lived, because Divine died just a few days after the film's national release.

After the loss of his muse, Waters looked for new faces for his Baltimore stories. In 1990, he recruited Johnny Depp to star in Cry-Baby, and in 1994 he turned Kathleen Turner into a suburban killer in Serial Mom. His budgets grew noticeably over that decade. As a result, the director had to learn to negotiate with executives who did not always understand his dark sense of humor.

Silence and a Return to Roots

The studio system turned its back on him after A Dirty Shame premiered in 2004. The film received an NC-17 rating for its strong sexual content, which limited its distribution in most mainstream American theaters. It was a box office flop, taking in barely five million dollars against a budget of fifteen. Waters then decided he would not direct again unless he had complete control over the final cut of the project.

He spent almost twenty years away from the director's chair. During that time, he wrote memoirs such as Mr. Know-It-All and toured the world with his stand-up comedy show. But in 2022, the production company Village Roadshow Pictures announced that Waters would return to adapt his own novel, Liarmouth. The script centered on the story of a compulsive con artist who hates dogs and children.

In 2024, the project entered preproduction with the intention of shooting again on the streets of Baltimore. The budget was kept low to avoid the pressure of major mass-distribution studios. John Waters kept his thin mustache, like a pencil stroke, and his habit of living in the same city where it all began. Filming was scheduled for the winter months with a small crew.