2022/11/28 by Matt Connolly · 1 citation
Economics, Econometrics and Finance · Arts and Humanities · #Cinema and Media Studies #Theater, Performance, and Music History #Music History and Culture #Filmmaking #Movie theater #Queer #Taboo #Art history #Media studies #Gray (unit) #Yesterday #History #Art #Sociology #Gender studies #Anthropology
paper · doi:10.1093/obo/9780199791286-0359
openalex publication_date 2022/11/28 · openalex created_date 2022/11/30 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/05
One of the most influential and idiosyncratic American independent filmmakers of the last fifty years, John Waters was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on 22 April 1946. He was raised in the suburb of Lutherville, Maryland, and developed an early adolescent interest in the exploitation movies screened at local drive-ins. A rebellious high schooler, Waters formed close friendships with fellow queer adolescents and social misfits and would hitchhike to New York City where he saw influential works of 1960s-era underground filmmaking. After briefly attending New York University, where he was expelled for drug use, he returned to Baltimore and began making low-budget independent short films with local friends and collaborators—works that emphasized scandalous imagery, camp humor, and winking social transgression. Waters moved into feature filmmaking by the late 1960s, producing two films—Mondo Trasho (1969) and Multiple Maniacs (1970)—that started to circulate on college campuses and in countercultural screening venues outside of Baltimore. While all of Waters’s “Dreamland” acting troupe proved essential for these films’ successes, the breakout star was the corpulent and gleefully debauched drag queen Divine, whom Waters had known since adolescence. Divine, Waters, and the Dreamlanders achieved new levels of notoriety with the director’s next feature, Pink Flamingos (1972), whose jaw-dropping portrayals of taboo-busting behavior led to it being acquired by burgeoning independent distributor New Line Cinema. The film became a midnight-movie sensation and gave Waters the ability to make two more monuments to trash and social deviance: Female Trouble (1974) and Desperate Living (1977). In the 1980s, Waters modulated his approach to subversion, putting out his first non-X-rated feature (Polyester, 1981) and publishing two books that chronicled his life, career, and irreverent musings on contemporary society, Shock Value (1981) and Crackpot (1986). His 1988 feature Hairspray, a cheeky but largely family-friendly tale of 1960s-era teen angst and racial integration, revived his filmmaking career and became arguably his best-known work, inspiring a Broadway musical that itself led to a 2007 film adaptation. Waters continued to make films throughout the 1990s and into the 2000s, though he increasingly supplemented cinematic output with his work in visual art, acting, live performance, cultural commentary, and writing (with four books published since 2010). Regardless of medium, Waters has satirized social mores, upended traditional hierarchies, and celebrated the queer, anarchic, and disreputable in ways that have permanently changed American cinema and culture.