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Review

To call John Waters a cultural icon is insulting. From his earliest films he has been the center of controversy, acclaim, revilement, and reverence. As a child, he fantasized about car crashes and killer Ferris wheels. As an adult, he convinced a 300-pound transvestite to eat poodle poop on camera. Still, somehow, he became a cultural icon--in spite of a life dedicated to the explosion of culture--and has inspired countless oddballs to devote their lives to him a fanatical ways.
Writer Robrt Pela embarked on a quest to find the world (and the inhabitants) immortalized in such Waters' classics as Pink Flamingos and Female Trouble.His findings are presented in the new book Filthy: The Weird World of John Waters
A few years after being kicked out of film school, John Waters unleashed his unique talents on an unsuspecting public with 1973's Pink Flamingos, a film about the filthiest people alive that broke every rule of good taste and cinematic lighting. He went on to make the underground trash masterpieces (Female Trouble, Desperate Living) and mainstream hits (Hairspray, Cry Baby, Serial Mom) that firmly established him as a Hollywood icon whose over-the-top antics have changed the way the world laughs. Along the way, Waters discovered Ricki Lake, Mink Stole, a 300-pound drag queen named Divine, and directed a wildly eclectic group of performers, including Johnny Depp, Deborah Harry, Sonny Bono, Tab Hunter, Iggy Pop, Patricia Hearst, Christina Ricci, and Kathleen Turner.
Pela traces the famous filmmaker's life from weird little boy-dom to his salad days as The Prince of Puke, and beyond to mainstream acceptance He visits Baltimore, Waters' hometown and the setting for each of his films, in search of the mean-spirited hillbillies with whom Waters is so enamored. He interviews numerous obsessed fans including:
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' films.
Earl, who claims Waters enters his cat's rear as a puff of smoke and extracts movie plots from the feline's tiny brain.
A spiritual medium who channels Divine and discovers she's apparently whooping it up with a lot of forgotten movie stars and eating herself into a stupor.
Also included is a chapter analyzing the recurrent themes in Waters's films (Faggots, Fat Women, and Puke), and another constructed entirely of quotes by Waters, Divine, Mink Stole, David Lochary and others, which gives a moment-by-moment breakdown of the filming of the notorious poodle scene in "Pink Flamingos."
From the days when the press wouldn't return his phone calls to the present, promoting his new films on network morning shows, and giving commentary on NPR, CNN, TNT, and The Sundance Channel, John Waters has consistently been the outrageous voice of underground cinema. Robrt Pela examines Waters's life and career in this remarkable, often hilarious, always illuminating look at his films, their impact, and the not-to-be-believed cult of Waters fans. Whether you're a John Waters fan or a cult 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.