Background

John Waters, Jr. was born on April 22, 1946, in Baltimore, Maryland, the son of John Samuel Waters, Sr., who was a manufacturer of fire-protection equipment, and Patricia Ann Whitaker. His family were upper-middle class Roman Catholics. Waters, Jr. grew up in Lutherville, Maryland, a suburb of Baltimore.

Education

Waters, Jr. 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.

From a very young age, Waters, Jr. was drawn towards movies. When he was seven years old, he was enthused by the film Lili, which inspired an interest in puppets. He also used to perform violent adaptations of Punch and Judy at children’s birthday parties. In 1962, on his sixteenth birthday, John Waters, Jr. got an 8mm film camera gifted by his grandmother.

Waters’ friends, just like him, had a taste for counter culture art. They were anti-mainstream culture and in the 1960s together they started to shoot silent 8mm and 16mm films in Baltimore. These movies were secretly screened in Baltimore church to an underground audience. Audiences were drawn through secret word of mouth and leaflet campaigns on the street. Steadily his filmmaking technique started growing more mature and polished and the subject of his movies was becoming more and more bizarre. This attracted more young and creative audience to his underground screenings.

Waters' first ever proper short film was Hag in a Black Leather Jacket (1964) and it was screened only once in a coffee shop known as "Beatnik Coffee House" but in his later years, he exhibited the movie for a travelling photography exhibition.

In 1966, Waters, Jr. went to New York University, but his heart was not in it. According to him, the kind of art and creativity was completely opposite to what preferred at New York University. In several days after joining the university, Waters, Jr. and his friends were expelled as they were caught smoking marijuana on New York University grounds.

In 2016, John Waters, Jr. received an honorary degree from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore during the college's undergraduate commencement ceremony.

Career

Getting thrown out of NYU compelled Waters, Jr. to come back to Baltimore and there he started filming short films like Roman Candles (1966) and Eat Your Makeup (1968). Later he began to make films of longer length like Mondo Trasho (1969) and Multiple Maniacs (1970). His childhood friend Glenn Milstead, also known as Divine, became the chief actor in Waters' experimental movies. 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, Jr. first formal success came with Pink Flamingos in 1973. The movie is said to have stretched the peripheries of propriety and had extreme characterization. It contained inflated situations, very far off reality and the dialogues of the movie were also hyperbolic. A particularly notorious scene from Pink Flamingos, added as a non sequitur to the film's end, featured - in one continuous take without special effects - a small dog defecating and Divine eating its feces.

In 1981, Waters, Jr. made a move from bizarre creativity to more controlled and mainstream cinema. His first mainstream film was Polyester (1981) with Divine and Tab Hunter, a movie star from the 1950s. After Polyester, Waters, Jr. came up with many mainstream movies like Hairspray (1988), Cry-Baby (1990), Serial Mom (1994), Pecker (1998) and Cecil B. Demented (2000). Although these movies complied with the basics of the commercial cinema, they still had Waters’ patent creative strangeness.

In 2004, the NC-17-rated A Dirty Shame marked a return to his earlier, more controversial work of the 1970s. He had a cameo in Jackass Number Two, which starred Dirty Shame co-star Johnny Knoxville, and another small role as paparazzo Pete Peters in 2004's Seed of Chucky.

In 2007, John Waters, Jr. became the host ("The Groom Reaper") of Til Death Do Us Part, a program on America's Court TV network featuring dramatizations of marriages that soured and ended in murder.

In 2008, Waters, Jr. decided 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. Later Waters, Jr. told that independent films that cost $5 million are very hard to get made. Therefore, he sold the idea to an independent film making company and made money out of it.

With A Dirty Shame (2014), portraying a repressed woman becoming a sex addict, Waters, Jr. turned his back on mainstream and, one year later, produced Kiddie Flamingos (2015), a "censored" table read of the original Pink Flamingos performed by children.

Waters, Jr. also works as a visual artist and across different mediums such as installations, photography, or sculpture.

In 2004, Waters, Jr. had his first retrospective in the New Museum in New York, including photographic and sculptural works and three early and previously unreleased films.

John Waters: Indecent Exposure (2018 - 2019) was the first retrospective of John Waters's visual arts career in his hometown of Baltimore. It presented more than 160 provocative photographs, sculptures, and video and sound works. The exhibition concluded with a gallery devoted to ephemera, including objects from Waters’s home and studio that inspired him, and three peep-shows featuring footage from his rarely seen underground movies of the 1960s.

Besides, Waters, Jr. has authored several books, including Shock Value: A Tasteful Book about Bad Taste (Running Press Adult; 1981) and Crackpot: The Obsessions of John Waters (Scribner, 1983). In 2017, the artist’s commencement speech for the Rhode Island School of Design was turned into the book Make Trouble (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill). On May 21, 2019, a collection of essays entitled Mr. Know-It-All: The Tarnished Wisdom of a Filth Elder was released.

Achievements

• 

  John Samuel Waters, Jr. is considered one of the greatest American film directors, photographer, sculptor and public persona, who is known to shock his viewers with his unusual movies, photographs and installations. His work is full of humor and puns while it addresses the universal yet provocative issues such as race, sex, gender, consumerism and religion.
  
  In September 2015, the British Film Institute ran a programme to celebrate 50 years of Waters, Jr. films which included all of his early films, some previously unscreened in the UK. Waters, Jr. also programmed a side-bar including six of his favourite British films and took part in an on-stage interview with BFI season curator Justin Johnson.
  
  In 2014, John Waters, Jr. 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.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Role Models

    (Role Models is, in fact, a self-portrait told through int...)

    2010
  • Make Trouble

    (From an icon of popular culture, here is inspiring advice...)

    2017
  • Carsick: John Waters Hitchhikes Across America

    (Carsick is the New York Times bestselling chronicle of a ...)

    2014
  • Mr. Know-It-All: The Tarnished Wisdom of a Filth Elder

    (No one knows more about everything — especially everythin...)

    2019
  • Shock Value: A Tasteful Book About Bad Taste

    ("To me, bad taste is what entertainment is all about. If ...)

    1995

• movie

  • Homer And Eddie

    (A mentally challenged man gets help from a sociopathic wo...)

    1989
  • The Junior Defenders

    (The Junior Defenders is a quirky, off-beat, cult-style co...)

    2007
  • Excision

    (Pauline (AnnaLynne McCord) is a frumpy social leper at ho...)

    2012
  • Suburban Gothic

    (Raymond (Matthew Gray Gubler) has an MBA, but no work and...)

    2014
  • Mangus!

    (Mangus Spedgwick has had one dream his whole life... He w...)

    2011
  • Multiple Maniacs 1970
  • Pink Flamingos 1972
  • Female Trouble 1974
  • Desperate Living 1977
  • Polyester 1981
  • Hairspray 1988
  • Cry-Baby 1990
  • Serial Mom 1994
  • Pecker 1998
  • Sweet and Lowdown 1999
  • Cecil B. Demented 2000
  • Seed of Chucky 2004
  • A Dirty Shame 2004
  • Hairspray 2007
  • Of Dolls And Murder 2011

Views

Quotations: "Being rich is not about how much money you have or how many homes you own; it's the freedom to buy any book you want without looking at the price and wondering if you can afford it."

"I like hard movies; I like ones that are basically the opposite of a date movie."

"True success is figuring out your life and career so you never have to be around jerks."

"I never rewatch the great films of my favorite directors because I'm afraid they won't hold up."

"When I started making movies about weird people, I knew they were weird, I was infected with irony, and I wanted New York to notice."

Personality

John Waters, Jr. is almost as recognizable for his razor-thin pencil moustache as he is for his films. He grew his iconic facial hair when he was 24 or 25 because he wanted to look like Little Richard. Waters, Jr. was a great fan of the music of Little Richard when growing up.

In addition, Waters, Jr. is way more than just your average bookworm. He collects books, and has over 8000 titles in his Baltimore home.

Interests

• books

• Music & Bands

  Little Richard

Connections

John Waters, Sr. is quite open about his sexuality. He is a homosexual and has never shied away from publically accepting it. Also, he is an active supporter of gay rights and gay pride.

Father:

John Samuel Waters, Sr.

Mother:

Patricia Ann Waters (Whitaker)

Friend:

Harris Glenn Milstead

Harris Glenn Milstead, better known by his stage name Divine, was an American actor, singer, and drag queen. Closely associated with the independent filmmaker John Waters, Jr., Divine was a character actor, usually performing female roles in cinematic and theatrical productions, and adopted a female drag persona for his music career.

Brother:

Stephen Bosley Waters, Sr.

Stephen Bosley Waters, Sr. was an owner of a fire protection business.

Sister:

Kathleen M. Waters (Weatherly)

Sister:

Patricia W. Waters

References

• Filthy: The Weird World of John Waters To call John Waters a cultural icon is almost insulting. This is, after all, a man who's entire career has been dedicated to the explosion of mainstream culture. But nonetheless, from his earliest films he has been the center of controversy, acclaim, revilement, and reverence.
  2002
• John Waters: Change Of Life John Waters: Change of Life, published on the occasion of Waters's first major exhibition, presents a survey of his still photographic works and stills from his earliest and seldom seen no-budget films: Hag in a Black Leather Jacket, Roman Candles, and Eat Your Makeup. The book also includes images of objects from Water's personal collection that reflect his ongoing fascination with photographic imagery, the mass media, and some of the more outrageous expressions of American popular culture.
  2004
• John Waters (Place Space) This series of photography books by designer Oldham highlights remarkable people, places, and spaces and feature essays by noted critics and cultural figures.
  2008
• John Waters: Interviews (Conversations with Filmmakers Series) The films of John Waters (b. 1946) are some of the most powerful send-ups of conventional film forms and expectations since Luis Bu-uel and Salvador Dali's Un Chien Andalou. In attempting to reinvigorate the experience of movie-going with his shock comedy, Waters has been willing to take the chance of offending nearly everyone. The interviews collected here span John Waters's career from 1965 to 2010 and include a new one exclusive to this edition.
  2011
• John Waters: Indecent Exposure It has been more than fifty years since John Waters filmed his first short on the roof of his parents’ Baltimore home. Over the following decades, Waters has developed a reputation as an uncompromising cultural force not only in cinema, but also in visual art, writing, and performance. This major retrospective examines the artist’s influential career through more than 160 photographs, sculptures, sound works, and videos he has made since the early 1990s.
  2018
• John Waters FAQ: All That's Left to Know About the Provocateur of Bad Taste John Waters FAQ looks at how a nice boy from the right side of the tracks would end up becoming a demon of society and the influences that drove his ambition in moviemaking. Also featured are biographical information of the Dreamlanders - the actors and crew members who would join Waters on his adventures in filmland over the years, including Waters's best-remembered find Divine.
  2019