John Waters

Born in Baltimore, MD in 1946, John Waters was drawn to movies at an early age, particularly exploitation movies with lurid ad campaigns. He subscribed to Variety at the age of twelve, absorbing the magazine’s factual information and its lexicon of insider lingo. This early education would prove useful as the future director began his career giving puppet shows for children’s birthday parties. As a teenager, Waters began making 8-mm underground movies influenced by the likes of Jean-Luc Godard, Walt Disney, Andy Warhol, Russ Meyer, Ingmar Bergman, and Herschell Gordon Lewis.

Using Baltimore, which he fondly dubbed the “Hairdo Capitol of the World,” as the setting for all his films, Waters assembled a cast of ensemble players, mostly native Baltimoreans, and friends of long standing: Divine, David Lochary, Mary Vivian Pearce, Mink Stole and Edith Massey. Waters also established lasting relationships with key production people, such as production designer Vincent Peranio, costume designer Van Smith, and casting director Pat Moran, helping to give his films that trademark Waters “look.”

Waters made his first film, an 8-mm short, Hag in a Black Leather Jacket in 1964, starring Mary Vivian Pearce. Waters followed with Roman Candles in 1967, the first of his films to star Divine and Mink Stole. In 1968, he made his first 16-mm film with Eat Your Makeup, the story of a deranged governess and her lover who kidnap fashion models and force them to model themselves to death. Mondo Trasho, Waters’ first feature length film, was completed in 1969 despite the fact that the production ground to a halt when the director and two actors were arrested for “participating in a misdemeanor, to wit: indecent exposure.”

In 1970, Waters completed what he described as his first “celluloid atrocity,” Multiple Maniacs. The film told the story of Lady Divine and her lover, Mr. David, proprietors of a freak show who lure unsuspecting suburbanites into their tents to witness “The Cavalcade of Perversions.”

In 1972 Waters created what would become the most “notorious” film in the American independent cinema of the 1970’s, Pink Flamingos. Centered on the great battle to secure the title “Filthiest People Alive,” Pink Flamingos pitted Divine’s Babs Johnson against Mink Stole and David Lochary’s truly evil Connie and Raymond Marble, while turning Waters into a cult celebrity. Pink Flamingos went on to become a smash success at midnight screenings in the U.S. and all over the world. Pink Flamingos, called “a paragon of bad taste” by the Museum of Modern Art, was added to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress, one of only 25 films earmarked in 2021 year for preservation “as works of enduring importance to American culture.”

Waters followed the success of Pink Flamingos with three more pictures, spanning the remainder of the decade. In 1974 he created Female Trouble, the story of Dawn Davenport (Divine), a criminal who wanted to be famous so badly she committed murder. 1977 marked the premier of Desperate Living, a monstrous fairytale comedy starring the notorious Mafia moll turned stripper Liz Renay. In 1981 Waters completed Polyester, a wide-screen comic melodrama starring Divine and Tab Hunter. Filmed in glorious “Odorama,” ticket buyers were given scratch ‘n’ sniff cards that allowed the audience to smell along with the characters in their fragrant search for romantic happiness.

In Hairspray (1988), Waters created “an almost big-budget comedy extravaganza about star-struck teen-age celebrities in 1962, their stage mothers and their quest for mental health.” The film was a box office and critical success and starred the then unknown Ricki Lake, Deborah Harry, Sonny Bono, Jerry Stiller, Pia Zadora, and Ric Ocasek. The U.S. Library of Congress added Hairspray to the National Film Registry in 2022, Librarian of Congress calling it …”an irresistible look at Baltimore’s teen dance scene in 1962, as well as a moving plea for racial integration.”

The success of Hairspray brought Waters major Hollywood backing for his next feature, Cry-Baby (1990), a juvenile delinquent musical comedy satire, starring Johnny Depp. In 1994, Waters released Serial Mom, the well-reviewed, socially un-redeeming comedy starring Kathleen Turner and Sam Waterston, which was the closing night attraction at that year’s Cannes Film Festival.

Pecker, a feel-good movie about lesbian strippers, pubic-hair harassment, and amateur photography, was released in 1998.  It starred Edward Furlong and Christina Ricci. The Japan Times called it “a Disney film for perverts.”

Cecil B. DeMented, a comedy action-thriller about a young lunatic film director (Stephen Dorff) and his gang of film cultists who kidnap a real-life Hollywood movie goddess (Melanie Griffith) and force her to act in their own Super 8 underground movie, was released in 2000. Kevin Thomas of The LA Times, called Cecil B. DeMented “a fast, furious and funny fusillade of a movie.”

A Dirty Shame concerns head-injury sufferers who, after their concussion, experience a carnal lust they cannot control.  It stars Tracey Ullman, Johnny Knoxville, Selma Blair, and Chris Isaak. Rated NC-17 by the Motion Picture Association of America, Peter Travers of Rolling Stone called the film “wicked, kinky fun.”

September 2023 the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures opened John Waters: Pope of Trash, the first comprehensive exhibition dedicated to John Waters’ contributions to cinema. The accompanying exhibition catalog was edited with text by Jenny He and Dara Jaffe and published by DelMonico Books/Academy Museum of Motion Pictures. That same month he was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

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In addition to writing and directing feature films, Waters is the author of ten books, including Shock Value, Crackpot, Pink Flamingos and Other Filth, Hairspray, Female Trouble and Multiple Maniacs, and Art: A Sex Book(co-written with art critic Bruce Hainley). In 2025 the screenplay books are reissued in individual editions from Picador. His book Role Models was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2010 and earned spots on the best seller lists for the New York Times, Los Angeles Times and the San Francisco Chronicle. Carsick, John Waters’ book chronicling his preparations and adventure hitchhiking from Baltimore to San Francisco in the Spring of 2012, was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2014 and debuted on the NY Times Bestseller list at #12 and on the Los Angeles Times Bestseller list in the #7 position. The Grammy nominated audiobook version of Carsick, as read by John Waters, was a featured pick by AudioFile Magazine, Publisher’s Weekly and the L.A. Times Summer Reading list, among others. Algonquin Books released a small gift-sized hardback, Make Trouble, in 2017, made up of the text, with illustrations, of Waters’ commencement speech delivered at the 2015 Rhode Island School of Design graduation ceremony. John’s reading of that book was also released as a 7” single by Third Man Records. In May 2019 Farrar, Straus and Giroux published Mr. Know-It-All, The Tarnished Wisdom of a Filth Elder in USA. The audio version, another read by the author, was also nominated for a Grammy award. Waters authored and recorded a spoken-word EP, Prayer to Pasolini, in 2021 on the Sub Pop label. His first novel, Liarmouth: A Feel Bad Romance, was published in May 2022 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux and optioned the same year by Village Roadshow Pictures for John to write the screenplay adaptation and direct the film version.

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Concurrent to his careers as a filmmaker and author, John Waters is also a photographer whose work, first represented by American Fine Arts and presently by The Marianne Boesky Galley in New York and Sprüth Magers in Berlin and London, has been shown in galleries all over the world since 1992. Four art catalogs have been published on John Waters’ photographs and sculpture beginning with Director’s Cut in 1997 (Scalo Books).  John Waters: Change of Life followed in 2004 (Harry N. Abrams) to accompany a Waters retrospective exhibition at The New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York.  The exhibition traveled to the Fotomuseum Winterthur in Switzerland, the Orange County Museum of Art and The Andy Warhol Museum. In 2006, the catalog, Unwatchable was published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same name that opened simultaneously at The Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York and de Pury & Luxembourg Gallery in Zurich. In January 2015, Waters’ exhibition, “Beverly Hills John” opened at the Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York and Sprüth Magers Gallery in London. Waters was invited to guest curate an exhibition at The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in 2011-2012 as part of their Event Horizon ongoing project and his “Absentee Landlord” exhibition was held over by popular demand. A retrospective of Waters’ art, “Indecent Exposure,” was held at the Baltimore Museum of Art from October 2018 to January 2019 and travelled to The Wexner Center for the Arts later that year. University of California press published a catalog, Indecent Exposure, in conjunction with this exhibition. From February to April 2021 his show “Hollywood’s Greatest Hits” was on view at Sprüth Magers gallery in Los Angeles.

John Waters’ one man spoken-word lectures with titles such as “The End of the World,” “This Filthy World,” “False Negative,” “Make Trouble” and “The Naked Truth” as well as his annual Christmas show “A John Waters Christmas,” are performed at colleges, museums, film-festivals and comedy clubs around the world. He has played to sold out audiences at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, Bonnaroo, the Sydney Opera House, Volksbühne Berlin, and both the Southbank Centre and Barbican Hall in London. He has hosted the Mosswood Meltdown punk rock music festival for over a decade and has been the centerpiece of the annual Camp John Waters. His speaking tours have brought him in front of American MENSA and the American Association of Law Libraries as well as the Tennessee Williams New Orleans Literary Festival.

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In 2004, the music compilation CD “A John Waters Christmas” was released by New Line Records and was followed up in 2007 by “A Date With John Waters.” 2021 the vinyl single “Prayer to Pasolini,” which was recorded outside Rome, came out on Sub Pop Records and 2022 saw the Sub Pop 7” single “It’s In The Book,” Waters’ cover of a 1952 hit comedy recording by Johnny Standley. In 2024 Sub Pop released a new 7” single, “John Waters Covers ‘The Singing Dogs’ “Jingle Bells’” b/w “It’s a Punk Rock Christmas.”

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As an actor, Waters has appeared in many motion pictures including Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild, Woody Allen’s Sweet and Lowdown, Herschell Gordon Lewis’ Blood Feast 2: All You Can Eat, and Don Mancini’s Seed of Chucky, and the 20^th Century Fox film Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Road Chip. In 2006, Waters hosted a 13-episode television series on the Here! TV Network called John Waters Presents Movies That Will Corrupt You. He also appeared in an episode of NBC’s hit show, My Name Is Earl, for which he was ranked among the Ten Best TV Cameos by a Director, according to Collider. Waters played “The Groom Reaper” in the CourtTV series Til Death Do Us Part. He has provided animation or narration voiceovers for The Simpsons, Disney Channel’s Fish Hooks and Mickey Mouse Shorts, Monster High, Superjail!, Digman (Season 2), and Animal Planet and Turner Classic Movies. John played William Castle in an episode of Ryan Murphy’s HBO series Feud in 2017. His cameo in the season five finale of the NBC-TV series The Blacklist in 2018 was described as “every bit as fun and strange as you would hope.” Law & Order Special Victims Unit now counts John among their recurring cast members as “Floyd Cougat.” In 2021 The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel invited Waters to guest star in their fourth season. The series Search Party crafted the role of Sheffield for John in their fifth and final season in 2022. Waters returned to the Chucky domain in 2024 in the season three finale episode, Final Destination, of the TV series Chucky.

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Waters is an invited member of The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences. Additionally, he is a past member of the boards of The Andy Warhol Foundation and Printed Matter, a former member of the Wexner Center International Arts Advisory Council and was selected as a juror for the 48^th Cannes Film Festival and the 2011 Venice Biennale. He is a member of the Board of Directors for the Maryland Film Festival, the Board of Trustees for the Baltimore Museum of Art and has been a key participant in the Provincetown International Film Festival since it began in 1999, the same year Waters was honored as the first recipient of PIFF’s “Filmmaker on the Edge” award. In September 2014, Film Society of Lincoln Center honored John Waters’ fifty years in filmmaking with a 10-day celebration entitled “Fifty Years of John Waters: How Much Can You Take?” featuring a complete retrospective of his film work. In 2015, Waters was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). During the month of September 2015, Waters’ body of work as a filmmaker was celebrated at the British Film Institute with a program called “The Complete Films of John Waters…Every Goddam One of Them.” The French Minister of Culture bestowed the rank of Officer in the Order of Arts and Letters on Mr. Waters in 2015. In May 2016, Waters received an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts from the Maryland Institute College of Arts (MICA). In 2017 John Waters was given the Writers Guild of America East’s Ian McLellan Hunter Award honoring his work as a writer in motion pictures. In 2019 the Locarno Film Festival awarded him the Career Golden Leopard and the Thessaloniki International Film Festival recognized his contribution to the Art of Cinema with the Golden Alexander. In  2022 and 2023, the School of Visual Arts in New York (SVA) awarded John his third and fourth Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts when he delivered first a virtual commencement speech during lockdown of 2020 and later, in person, at Radio City Music Hall another. American Cinema Editors selected Waters to receive the ACE Golden Eddie Filmmaker of the Year Award in 2024. John Waters was featured, along with Olympic gold medalist Megan Rapinoe, in the 2019 Nike x Olivia Kim commercial. With Mink Stole, he was part of the 2022 Calvin Klein Pride campaign, and Waters was a face of the Saint Laurent campaigns in Fall/Winter2020 and Fall/Winter 2024.