John Waters

John Samuel Waters Jr. (born April 22, 1946) is an American filmmaker, actor, writer, and artist. Born and raised in Baltimore, Waters rose to fame in the early 1970s for his transgressive cult films, including "Multiple Maniacs" (1970), "Pink Flamingos" (1972), and "Female Trouble" (1974). He wrote and directed the 1988 film "Hairspray" which became an international success and was later adapted into a hit Broadway musical. Waters has written and directed other successful films, including "Polyester" (1981), "Cry-Baby" (1990), "Serial Mom" (1994), "Pecker" (1998), and "Cecil B. Demented" (2000).
As an actor, Waters appeared in the television series "'Til Death Do Us Part" (2007), and in the films "Sweet and Lowdown" (1999), "Seed of Chucky" (2004), "Excision" (2012), and "Suburban Gothic" (2014). More recently, Waters performs in his touring one-man show, This Filthy World. He has often worked with actor Divine and his regular cast of the Dreamlanders.
Waters also works as a visual artist and across different mediums, such as installations, photography, and sculpture. In 2016, he received an honorary degree from the Maryland Institute College of Art. His books "Carsick" (2015) and "Mr. Know-It-All" (2020) were both nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album. In 2018, Waters was named Officer of Order of Arts and Letters in France.
Early life.
Waters was born April 22, 1946 in Baltimore, Maryland, the son of Patricia Ann (née Whitaker; 1924–2014) and John Samuel Waters (1916–2008), who was a manufacturer of fire-protection equipment. He was raised Roman Catholic by his mother, who was an adherent to the faith, though his father was not. Through his mother, 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' mother believes the puppets in "Lili" had the greatest influence on Waters' 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' boyhood, because of his fascination as a seven-year-old with the "drapes" then receiving intense news coverage because of the murder of a young "drapette", coupled with his awed admiration for a young man who lived across the street and who possessed 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 ultimately graduated from Boys' Latin School of Maryland. While still a teenager, Waters made frequent trips into the city to visit Martick's, a beatnik bar in downtown Baltimore. He and Milstead met many of their later film collaborators there. Although underage and therefore not admitted into the bar proper, Waters loitered in the adjacent alley, where he relied on the kindness of patrons to slip him drinks.
Career.
Early career.
Waters' first short film was "Hag in a Black Leather Jacket".
Extremely influential to his creative mind, Waters said the following about seeing the film,"The Wizard of Oz" (1939):
I was always drawn to forbidden subject matter in the very, very beginning. "The Wizard of Oz" opened me up because it was one of the first movies I ever saw. It opened me up to villainy, to screenwriting, to costumes. And great dialogue. I think the witch has great, great dialogue.
Waters has stated that he takes an equal amount of joy and influence from high-brow "art" films and sleazy exploitation films.
In January 1966, Waters and some friends were caught smoking marijuana on the grounds of NYU; he was soon kicked out of his NYU dormitory. Waters returned to Baltimore, where he completed his next two short films "Roman Candles" and "Eat Your Makeup". These were followed by the feature-length films "Mondo Trasho" and "Multiple Maniacs".
Waters' films became Divine's primary star vehicles. All of Waters' early films were shot in the Baltimore area with his company of local actors, the Dreamlanders. In addition to Divine, the group included Mink Stole, Cookie Mueller, Edith Massey, David Lochary, Mary Vivian Pearce, Susan Walsh, and others.
Waters' early campy movies present exaggerated characters in outrageous situations with hyperbolic dialogue. "Pink Flamingos", "Female Trouble", and "Desperate Living", which he labeled the "Trash Trilogy", pushed hard at the boundaries of conventional propriety and movie censorship.
Move toward the mainstream.
Waters' 1981 film "Polyester" starred Divine opposite former teen idol Tab Hunter. Since then, his films have become less controversial and more mainstream, although works such as "Hairspray", "Cry-Baby", "Serial Mom", "Pecker", and "Cecil B. Demented" still retain his trademark inventiveness. The film "Hairspray", the last movie he produced, was turned into a hit Broadway musical that swept the 2003 Tony Awards, and a film adaptation of the Broadway musical was released in theaters on July 20, 2007, to positive reviews and commercial success. "Cry-Baby", itself a musical, was also converted into a Broadway musical.
In 2004, the NC-17-rated "A Dirty Shame" marked a return to his earlier, more controversial work of the 1970s. As of 2021, it is the most recent film Waters directed.
In 2007, Waters became the host ("The Groom Reaper") of "'Til Death Do Us Part", a program on America's Court TV network.
In 2008, Waters was planning to make a children's Christmas film called "Fruitcake" starring Johnny Knoxville and Parker Posey. Filming was planned for November 2008, but it was shelved in January 2009. In 2010, Waters told the "Chicago Tribune" that "Independent films that cost $5 million are very hard to get made. I sold the idea, got a development deal, got paid a great salary to write it—and now the company is no longer around, which is the case with many independent film companies these days."
Waters has often created characters with alliterated names for his films including Corny Collins, Cuddles Kovinsky, Donald and Donna Dasher, Dawn Davenport, Fat Fuck Frank, Francine Fishpaw, Link Larkin, Motormouth Maybelle, Mole McHenry, Penny and Prudy Pingleton, Ramona Ricketts, Sandy Sandstone, Sylvia Stickles, Todd Tomorrow, Tracy Turnblad, Ursula Udders, Wade Walker, and Wanda Woodward.
Other ventures.
Waters is a bibliophile, with a collection of over 8,000 books. In 2011, during a visit to the Waters house in Baltimore, Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson observed:
Bookshelves line the walls but they are not enough. The coffee table, desk and side tables are heaped with books, as is the replica electric chair in the hall. They range from Taschen art tomes such as "The Big Butt Book" to Jean Genet paperbacks and a Hungarian translation of Tennessee Williams with a pulp fiction cover. In one corner sits a doll from the horror spoof "Seed of Chucky", in which Waters appeared. It feels like an eccentric professor's study, or a carefully curated exhibition based on the life of a fictional character. 
Waters has had his fan mail delivered to Atomic Books, an independent bookstore in Baltimore, for over 20 years.
Puffing constantly on a cigarette, Waters appeared in a short film shown in film art houses announcing that "no smoking" is permitted in the theaters. The 'No Smoking' spot, starring Waters, was directed by Douglas Brian Martin and produced by Douglas Brian Martin and Steven M. Martin along with two other short films, for the Nuart Theatre (a Landmark Theater) in West Los Angeles, California, in appreciation to the theater for showing "Pink Flamingos" for many years. It is shown immediately before any of his films, and before the midnight movie showing of "The Rocky Horror Picture Show".
Waters played a minister in "", which was directed by Herschell Gordon Lewis.
Waters serves as a board member of Maryland Film Festival, and has selected and hosted one favorite feature film within each Maryland Film Festival since its launch in 1999. He also serves on the advisory board of the Provincetown International Film Festival and has hosted events or presented awards at PIFF every year since it was founded in 1999.
He is a contributor to "Artforum" magazine and author of its annual year-end list of top-ten films.
Waters hosts an annual performance titled "A John Waters Christmas", which was launched in 1996 at the Castro Theatre in San Francisco, and in 2018 toured 17 cities over 23 days.
In 2019, the Film Society of Lincoln Center celebrated its 50th anniversary at a gala where John Waters spoke in tribute to the Center along with Martin Scorsese, Dee Rees, Pedro Almodovar, Tilda Swinton, Jake Gyllenhaal, Michael Moore, Paul Dano and Zoe Kazan.
Fine art.
Since the early 1990s, Waters has been making photo-based artwork and installations that have been internationally exhibited in galleries and museums. In 2004, the New Museum in New York City presented a retrospective of his artwork curated by Marvin Heiferman and Lisa Phillips. His most recent exhibition "John Waters: Indecent Exposure" was exhibited at the Baltimore Museum of Art from October 2018 to January 2019 and later traveled to the Wexner Center for the Arts. Prior to that, Waters exhibited "Rear Projection" in April 2009, at the Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York and the Gagosian Gallery in Los Angeles. Waters has been represented by C. Grimaldis Gallery in Baltimore, Maryland, since 2002 and by Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York since 2006.
Waters' pieces are often comical, such as "Rush" (2009), a super-sized, tipped-over bottle of poppers (nitrite inhalants) and "Hardy Har" (2006), a photograph of flowers that squirts water at anyone who traverses a taped line on the floor. Waters has characterized his art as conceptual: "The craft is not the issue here. The idea is. And the presentation."
In November 2020 Waters promised to donate 372 artworks from his personal collection,
including some of his own work as well as pieces by 125 artists, including Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Cy Twombly, Cindy Sherman and more, to the Baltimore Museum of Art. In recognition of the donation the museum will name its rotunda and (at Waters' request) bathrooms after him.
"Carsick".
With the motif "My life is so over-scheduled, what will happen if I give up control?", Waters completed a hitchhiking journey across the United States from Baltimore to San Francisco, turning his adventures into a book titled "Carsick". On May 15, 2012, while on the hitchhiking trip, Waters was picked up by 20-year-old Myersville, Maryland, councilman Brett Bidle, who thought Waters was a homeless hitchhiker standing in the pouring rain. Feeling bad for Waters, he agreed to drive him four hours to Ohio.
The next day, indie rock band Here We Go Magic tweeted that they had picked John Waters up hitchhiking in Ohio. He was wearing a hat with the text "Scum of the Earth". In Denver, Colorado, Waters reconnected with Bidle (who had made an effort to catch up with him); Bidle then drove him another to Reno, Nevada. Before parting ways, Waters arranged for Bidle to stay at his San Francisco apartment: "I thought, you know what, he wanted an adventure, too ... He's the first Republican I'd ever vote for."
Bidle later said: "We are polar opposites when it comes to our politics, religious beliefs. But that's what I loved about the whole trip. It was two people able to agree to disagree and still move on and have a great time. I think that's what America's all about."
Personal life.
Although he maintains apartments in New York City and (since 2008) in San Francisco's Nob Hill, and a summer home in Provincetown, he has mainly resided in his hometown of Baltimore, Maryland for his entire life. All his films are set (and shot) in Baltimore, 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 2018 interview Waters answered that while he is in a relationship, they both prefer to keep their relationship private: "If you don’t keep some things private, you don’t have a personal life." Waters stated that he always liked his partners having "their own life" and not being "groupies".
Waters was a great fan of the music of Little Richard when growing up. Ever since he shoplifted a copy of the Little Richard song "Lucille" in 1957, at the age of 11, Waters asserted, "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).
Filmography.
Television.
Documentary appearances
Awards and nominations.
In 1999, Waters was honored with the Filmmaker on the Edge Award at the Provincetown International Film Festival. In September 2015, the British Film Institute ran a programme to celebrate 50 years of Waters films which included all of his early films, some previously unscreened in the UK.
In 2014, Waters was nominated for a Grammy for the spoken word version of his book, "Carsick". His follow-up record, "Make Trouble", was produced by Grammy-winning producer, Ian Brennan, and released on Jack White's Third Man Records in the fall of 2017.
In 2016, Waters received an honorary degree from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore during the college's undergraduate commencement ceremony. In 2018, Waters was named an Officier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, a cultural award from the French government.
Recurring cast members.
Waters often casts certain actors/actresses more than once in his films.