
John Waters
2 FOLLOWERS • 41 CREDITS • APR 22, 1946 • 78
Biography
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.
Known For

Law & Order: Special Victims Unit

Saturday Night Live

Late Night with Seth Meyers

Real Time with Bill Maher

RuPaul's Drag Race

Tony Awards

The Blacklist

Search Party

My Name Is Earl

The Daily Show

Frasier

Finding Your Roots

E! True Hollywood Story

SNL Digital Shorts

Chucky

Explained

Homicide: Life on the Street

21 Jump Street

The Graham Norton Show

The New Yorker Presents

HBO First Look

The Simpsons

FEUD

Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Road Chip

The Andy Warhol Diaries

Hairspray

Thinking XXX

Jackass Number Two

Hairspray

Family Album

Living with Chucky

Doc of Chucky

Jackass 2.5

Seed of Chucky

Pride

Bully. Coward. Victim. The Story of Roy Cohn
Production Credits
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