Filthy: The Weird World Of John Waters FROM THE PUBLISHER
John Waters was kicked out of film school -- and pop culture has never recovered! Only a few years later, Waters unleashed his unique talents on an unsuspecting public with 1972's Pink Flamingos, a film about the filthiest people alive that broke every rule of good taste and cinematic lighting. Waters didn't stop there: The man who fantasized about car crashes and killer Ferris wheels as a child went on to make underground trash masterpieces (Female Trouble, Desperate Living) and mainstream hits (Hairspray, Serial Mom) that firmly established him as a Hollywood icon, revered as an avant-garde director whose over-the-top antics have changed the way the world laughs. Along the way, Waters discovered Ricki Lake, Mink Stole, and a 300-pound drag queen named Divine. And he's become an obsession for his fans -- people like Suki, who has a shrine to the director in her bathroom and won't let you into her house unless you recite a line from one of Waters's films. And people like Earl, who claims Waters enters his cat's rear as a puff of smoke and extracts movie plots from the feline's tiny brain. Author Robert L. Pela met Suki and Earl and dozens of other oddballs who've worked and played with -- or just plain obsessed on -- John Waters. Pela traces the famous filmmaker's life from weird little boy-dom to his salad days as the Prince of Puke. He visits Baltimore, Waters's hometown and the setting for each of his films, in search of the mean-spirited hillbillies of whom Waters is so enamored. He even interviews Divine from beyond the grave, where he's apparently whopping it up with a lot of forgotten movie stars and eating himself into a stupor. Whether you're a John Waters fan or a film enthusiast, Filthy will delight you with zany stories of the filmmaker's eccentric career and insights into the ways in which Waters has changed pop culture forever.
FROM THE CRITICS
Publishers Weekly
Late last year, Alyson published My Son Divine by the late drag performer's mother with ace assistance by two filmmakers who shot In Bad Taste and Divine Trash, two documentaries about Waters. This breezy guide to the life and films of the Baltimore filmmaker lacks the research and thoroughness of the earlier effort. Waters's own Shock Value (1981) is still the definitive book on his life and career. Shock covered his early short films and first five full-length features (including Pink Flamingos and Female Trouble). Since the publication of that book, Waters has made six more films (including Hairspray, Polyester and Cecil B. Demented). Instead of offering Waters fans a useful update, Pela recycles information about the earlier films. The author's interest wanes during the later films (the Johnny Depp musical Cry Baby merits a mere three pages and Serial Mom with Kathleen Turner is brushed off in three paragraphs). Equally frustrating are the chapters where Pela makes himself the focus: his disappointing visit to Baltimore; his trip to a spiritual medium to speak with the deceased Divine and his talk with scary, obsessive fans of Waters. A misplaced bluffers guide, which reads more like an appendix, interrupts the chronology midway through to wax on rats, shoplifting, vomit, fat women and other recurring imagery and motifs in John Waters films. The useful filmography (running more than 50 pages) contains fun facts (Best Moment, Low Point, Best Dialogue) and brief reviews. (June) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
Delightfully free-form text tracing the career of bad-boy filmmaker John Waters. Never quite comfortable with his middle-class Baltimore background or rigid Catholic schooling, young Waters began to walk on the wild side in earnest during his teenage years, when he surrounded himself with juvenile delinquents who inducted him into adolescent hooliganism and formed the kernel of what would later be his moviemaking circle. A semester at NYU's film school brought him in contact with the real counterculture, and time spent with Andy Warhol convinced Waters that he could make movies with his friends for no money: America's strangest film auteur was on his way. Drawing on the reminiscences of the original Dreamland crew (his drug-taking/shoplifting pals from the '60s and '70s), the ravings of his most fanatical adherents, and an eerily convincing interview with his muse, the deceased Divine, as channeled by medium Calvin Sharpee, freelance journalist Pela traces the evolution of Waters's style from Hag in a Black Leather Jacket through Eat Your Makeup (Divine portrays Jackie Kennedy in a reenactment of the Kennedy assassination) to the 1973 opening of Pink Flamingos (Divine eats dog excrement on camera). Pela spends less time on the films that followed, with a single chapter dedicated to Waters's mainstream works: Hairspray (his most successful film, which made Ricki Lake famous), Cry Baby, Serial Mom, Pecker, and Cecil B. Demented. He does, however, offer a chapter entitled "Faggots, Fat Women, and Puke: The Bluffer's Guide to Recurring Imagery and Motifs in John Waters Films." That's as close as we get to Waters's deepest motivations, which remain mysterious. A brisk, informative, andentertaining portrait.
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