- Born
- Birth nameJohn Samuel Waters Jr.
- Nicknames
- Pope of Trash
- Prince of Puke
- Height1.88 m
- Growing up in Baltimore in the 1950s, John Waters was not like other children; he was obsessed by violence and gore, both real and on the screen. With his weird counter-culture friends as his cast, he began making silent 8mm and 16mm films in the mid-'60s; he screened these in rented Baltimore church halls to underground audiences drawn by word of mouth and street leafleting campaigns. As his filmmaking grew more polished and his subject matter more shocking, his audiences grew bigger, and his write-ups in the Baltimore papers more outraged. By the early 1970s he was making features, which he managed to get shown in midnight screenings in art cinemas by sheer perseverance. Success came when Pink Flamingos (1972) - a deliberate exercise in ultra-bad taste - took off in 1973, helped no doubt by lead actor Divine's infamous dog-crap eating scene.
Waters continued to make low-budget shocking movies with his Dreamland repertory company until Hollywood crossover success came with Hairspray (1988), and although his movies nowadays might now appear cleaned up and professional, they retain Waters' playfulness, and reflect his lifelong obsessions.- IMDb mini biography by: Stuart Young <Stuart.Young@ed.ac.uk>
- Parents
- RelativesSteve Waters(Sibling)Kathy Waters(Sibling)Trish Waters(Sibling)
- All his movies are set in Baltimore
- Frequently casts Patricia Hearst
- Casts Mink Stole and Mary Vivian Pearce in nearly all of his films
- Transgressive films that combine outrageous subject matter with a sense of bad taste
- Many of his characters have alliterated names (Dawn Davenport, Francine Fishpaw, Tracy Turnblad, Penny Pingleton, Sylvia Stickles).
- Has taught classes at the Patuxent Institution, a correctional facility located halfway between Baltimore and Washington, D.C. The classes are meant as rehabilitation therapy for convicted killers, in which they learn to write about their violent fantasies rather than act them out.
- Grew his thin pencil-line mustache in honor of Little Richard.
- Bears such a strong resemblance to actor Steve Buscemi that as a joke, John Waters sent out cards with a photo of Buscemi made up to look like Waters.
- Subscribes to more than 80 magazines. Also goes to see just about every movie that comes out and hardly ever rents movies.
- He is obsessed with true-crime and used to regularly attend gory trials all over the United States, where he often saw the same faces in the public galleries.
- "My hobby is extreme Catholic behavior -- BEFORE the Reformation." (2000)
- "If you can make someone laugh who's dead set against you, that's the first step to winning them over to your side." (2000)
- Some call me director, producer, filmmaker. I prefer to call myself pube-king.
- Strive for art in reverse.
- To me, bad taste is what entertainment is all about. If someone vomits watching one of my films, it's like getting a standing ovation. But one must remember that there is such a thing as good bad taste and bad bad taste.
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