TSPDT

Key Production Country: USA
Key Genres: Comedy, Trash Film, Satire, Gay & Lesbian Films, Media Satire, Musical Comedy, Teen Movie, Domestic Comedy, Drama
Key Collaborators: Mink Stole (Character Actress), Mary Vivian Pearce (Character Actress), Vincent Peranio (Production Designer), Divine (Leading Actor), Edith Massey (Leading Character Actress), Janice Hampton (Editor), Ricki Lake (Character Actress), Patty Hearst (Character Actress), David Lochary (Leading Actor), Mark Tarlov (Producer), John Fiedler (Producer), Robert M. Stevens (Cinematographer)

"Audacious director of generally shocking modern satires. Raised in Baltimore in a comfortable Catholic family, he schooled himself in marginal cinema at the local XXX houses and eventually by making his own 8mm exploitation shorts (Hag in a Black Leather Jacket, Eat Your Makeup). Over the course of making these early films, some of which were screened in the city, he came to form an acting ensemble that included Mink Stole and a 300-pound high school friend named Harris Glenn Milstead, or Divine. His first features, Mondo Trasho (1970) and Multiple Maniacs (1971), introduced the high satire depicted through offensiveness that would come to permeate (in all senses of the word) his films." - The Film Encyclopedia, 2012

"From the moment that Baltimore’s self-proclaimed filth elder entered the cinematic scene, the campy films of John Waters have proven to be consistently delightful and disgusting, fusing trash aesthetics and shock humor with inventive and oftentimes sweet human stories" - Benjamin Crabtree (Collider, 2022)

"This darling of the midnight-movie set has a somewhat skewed (some say deranged) worldview. many cineastes are hard pressed to find merit in his work, but there's no denying that he's turned out some of the most original, offbeat films of the post-Vietnam era." - Leonard Maltin's Movie Encyclopedia, 1995

"The pope of trash, the prince of puke, the ayatollah of crud – in his 50-year career, film director John Waters has accrued an enviable array of hideous honorifics, all worn with pride. He is best known for his seminal countercultural comedies, each of them – from Pink Flamingos to Hairspray to Serial Mom – celebrating delicious deviance and alternative family values." - Ben Walters (The Guardian, 2018)

"If lack of taste is a virtue, John Waters is a saint. Asked for his guilty pleasure once, Waters admitted that he secretly enjoys art films, against his better judgment. The turning of the taste tables is typical of his attitude and oeuvre. Waters's first feature, Mondo Trasho (1969), sets the tone with its insane plot and the deliciously outrageous drag queen, Divine, a high school friend of Waters, in sexual, blasphemous, and filthy actions." - Ernest Mathijs (501 Movie Directors, 2007)

"I’ll tell you my influences. I was a puppeteer for children’s birthday parties, and so William Castle was an influence. I’d try to throw all of those gimmicks in there. Somehow I got my hand on the Village Voice and started reading Jonas Mekas’s column and that opened up the world of underground movies that I knew nothing about. I read about Warhol and Paul Morrissey and Kenneth Anger and, more than anybody, the Kuchar brothers." - John Waters (Sight & Sound, 2022)