Waters also works as a visual artist and across different mediums such as installations, photography, or sculpture. With A Dirty Shame (2014), portraying a repressed woman becoming a sex addict, he turned his back on mainstream and, one year later, produced Kiddie Flamingos (2015), a “censored” table read of the original Pink Flamingos performed by children. In the 1980s Waters’ films became more mainstream: Hairspray (1988) was turned into a Broadway musical (a film version of the musical was, in turn, released in 2007) the musical Cry-Baby (1990 starring Johnny Depp) also found its way to Broadway. Together with Pink Flamingos, the features Female Trouble (1974) and Desperate Living (1977) form part of the so-called “Trash trilogy”. Waters raids de Sade in pursuit of extremes, but the difference between him and Warhol (or that other arch-exponent of extreme disgust, Otto Muehl) is that Waters’ grotesquerie is decidedly trivial.” The cast camp it up as if auditioning for some long-gone Warhol project. Labelled an “exercise in deliberately appalling taste” by Time Out, the film is set around “a plot in which a villainous couple attempt to wrest from Divine her claim to be the most disgusting person alive. Īfter his first sixteen-millimetre film- Eat Your Makeup (1968), about a nanny kidnapping young girls- and the feature films Mondo Trasho (1969) and Multiple Maniacas (1970), Waters came to fame with Pink Flamingos in 1972. Named the “Pope of Trash” by William Burroughs and frequently called the “ Prince of Puke”, Waters himself affirms: “I’m interested in extreme human behavior”. April 1946 in Baltimore, United States) is a filmmaker, author, and artist.

Shock Value by John Waters