John Waters

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John Samuel Waters Jr. (born April 22, 1946) is an American filmmaker, director, writer, actor and artist.

Born and raised in Baltimore, Waters rose to prominence in the early 1970s for his transgressive cult films, especially Multiple Maniacs (1970), Pink Flamingos (1972) and Female Trouble (1974).

He wrote and directed the 1988 film Hairspray, which became an international success and turned into a hit Broadway musical which has remained in almost continuous production, and a film adaptation of the Broadway musical was released in July 2007.

Waters has written and directed other successful films including Polyester (1981), Cry-Baby (1990), Serial Mom (1994), Pecker (1998) and Cecil B. Demented (2000). In 2015, the British Film Institute celebrated Waters’ films with a retrospective in honour of his 50 year-filmmaking career.

Later that year, he was nominated for a Grammy Award for the spoken word version of his book Carsick.

As an actor, Waters has appeared in films such as Sweet and Lowdown (1999), Seed of Chucky (2004), Mangus! (2011), Excision (2012) and Suburban Gothic (2014).

More recently, he performs in his ever-changing one-man show, This Filthy World.

Waters also has his own film production company, Dreamland Productions. In addition to filmmaking and acting, Waters also works as a visual artist and across different mediums such as installations, photography, and sculpture.

He has published multiple collections of his journalistic exploits, screenplays, ruminations and artwork.

Waters’ artwork exhibits regularly in galleries and museums around the world.

Early life

Waters was born April 22, 1946, in Baltimore, Maryland, one of four children born to Patricia Ann (née Whitaker) and John Samuel Waters, a manufacturer of fire-protection equipment. He was raised Roman Catholic by his mother, though his father was not. Through his mother, who immigrated to the United States from Victoria, British Columbia, Canada as a child, he is the great-great-great-grandson of George Price Whitaker of the Whitaker iron family. 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 film 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 Robrt 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).

Cry-Baby was also a product of Waters's boyhood, because of his fascination as a seven-year-old with the "drapes" then receiving intense news coverage because of the murder of Carolyn Wasilewski, a young "drapette", and his admiration for a young man living across the street who had a hot rod.

Waters was privately educated at the Calvert School in Baltimore. After attending Towson Jr. High School in Towson, Maryland, and Calvert Hall College High School in nearby Towson, he graduated from Boys' Latin School of Maryland. While still a teen, he made frequent trips into downtown Baltimore to visit Martick's, a beatnik bar, where he and Milstead met many of their later film collaborators. He was underage and couldn't enter the bar proper, but loitered in the adjacent alley, where he relied on the kindness of patrons to slip him drinks.

Personal life

Although he maintains apartments in New York City and (since 2008) in San Francisco's Nob Hill, as well as a summer home in Provincetown, Waters mainly resides in Baltimore. All his films are set and shot there, often in the working-class neighborhood of Hampden. He is recognizable by his trademark pencil moustache.

An openly gay man, Waters is an avid supporter of gay rights and gay pride. In a 2019 interview, he said that he dislikes publicly discussing his personal life, adding that he had a partner but that they both preferred to keep the relationship private.

Waters was a great fan of the music of Little Richard when growing up. He has said that, ever since he shoplifted a copy of the Little Richard song "Lucille" in 1957, at the age of 11, "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, then aged 41, to interview his idol, but the interview did not go well, with Waters later remarking: "It turned into kind of a disaster."

In 2009, Waters advocated the parole of former Manson family member Leslie Van Houten. He devotes a chapter to Van Houten in his book Role Models (2010).

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Career

Hag in a Black Leather Jacket was Waters' first short film.

The Wizard of Oz (1939) by MGM had a major influence on Waters' creative mind, according to him:

Waters has said that he derives an equal measure of joy and clout from high-brow "art" films and sleazy exploitation films.

Waters and some others were discovered smoking marijuana on the grounds of NYU in January 1966, and he was promptly kicked out of his dormitory. He returned to Baltimore, where he shot Roman Candles and Eat Your Makeup. Mondo Trasho and Multiple Maniacs were the two feature-length films to be followed.

Waters' films became Divine's key actor vehicles. All of Waters' early films were shot in the Baltimore area by his group, the Dreamlanders, who, in addition to Divine, included Mink Stole, Cookie Mueller, Edith Massey, David Lochary, Susan Walsh, and others. Edith Massey was a bartender at Pete's Hotel when she was a bartender.

In bizarre situations of hyperbolic dialogue, Waters' early campy films feature exaggerated characters. Pink Flamingos, Female Trouble, and Desperate Living, which he dubbed the Trash Trilogy, pushed hard at the boundaries of conventional propriety and censorship.

Polyester, a 1981 film starring former teenage idol Tab Hunter, appeared divine in the role of Waters. It was the first time that Waters wasn't the primary camera operator for his own projects as he began collaborating with local film student David Insley. Since then, his films have become less controversial and mainstream, although Hairspray, Cry-Baby, Serial Mom, Pecker, and Cecil B. Demented's films have all retained his signature inventiveness. Hairspray, his last film, received raves and commercial success in theaters on July 20, 2007. Cry-Baby, which itself was a musical, has since become a Broadway musical.

A Dirty Shame, a NC-17-rated work from the 1970s, marked a return to Waters' earlier, more controversial work. It is the most recent film he directed as of 2022.

Waters became the host ("The Groom Reaper") of 'Til Death Do Us Part,' a program on America's Court Television network in 2007.

Johnny Knoxville and Parker Posey appeared in Fruitcake, a children's Christmas film, in 2008. Filming was supposed to begin in November 2008, but it was postponed in January 2009. Waters told the Chicago Tribune in 2010 that "independence films that cost $5 million are very difficult to make." I pitched the idea, obtained a development contract, and now the firm is no longer around, as the case with many independent film firms these days."

Waters would make his book, Liarmouth, into a film in October 2022. Waters will produce and direct Village Roadshow Pictures, and Waters will write and direct.

Waters has often created characters for his films, including Corny Collins, Cuddles Kovinsky, Donald and Donna Dasher, Dawn Davenport, Fat Fuck Frank, Jonathon Fishpaw, Mark Larkin, Bethany Perry, Sandstone, Sandstone, Shannon Pingleton, Wade Walker, and Wanda Woodward. Corny Collins, Corny Collins, Corny Collins, Corny Collins, Cuddles Kovinsky, Donald and Donna Dasher, Kathryn Howard, Corny a

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