John Waters

April 15, 1996

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John Waters is considered one of the most bizarre (next to David Lynch) and most tasteless directors in the movie world. Waters was born in Baltimore, in 1946. He grew up on many of the low-budget exploitation films of the 50's and 60's. When he was a teenager, he started making 8mm, which were influenced by the hilariously awful films for which he used to skip school. When he was older, he formed his own company called Dreamland Productions. The troup was made up of Waters' friends and neighbors. Among them was his most frequent actor (actress?), Divine, a 300-lb transvestite.

They worked together on many smaller features before they made one of the most notoriously gross films of all time, Pink Flamingos (1972). It was the first film of Waters to receive national distribution and became a popular movie among the midnight crowd. Waters' recent works have been interesting, but not as repellently gross as some of his earliest films. Polyester (1981) used a device which would have made William Castle proud. Using "Odorama", Waters allowed the audience to "smell" various things in the movies. Hairspray (1988) is a funny musical nostalgia trip about the bigone days of the early 60's and the music shows that appeared at the time. Waters has been known to make fun of the bourgeois attitudes in America, and his satirical approach has worked to a degree. However, his work is mostly for one type of audience, preferably the oddballs of the midnight crowd. This has been the thing that has pretty much blocked Waters' way into the mainstream crowd.

My rating on a scale of 1 to 10: 6

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