By JOHN WATERS (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 2019)
John Waters is a filmmaker I’ve always found more entertaining than the films he makes. Those films include trash classics like MULTIPLE MANIACS (1970), PINK FLAMINGOS (1972) (trailer below) and FEMALE TROUBLE (1974), whose virtues remain a matter of debate. Evidently I’m not the only one who believes that Waters’ true talent is for self-promotion, as his last feature was made nearly twenty years ago and yet he, now an old man, continues to thrive in the form of speaking engagements and TV appearances. He’s also been a prolific writer, with this being the latest of several Waters penned tomes.
John Waters is a filmmaker I’ve always found more entertaining than the films he makes.
MR. KNOW-IT-ALL presents itself as a guidebook for aspiring provocateurs. It also serves as a sequel to Waters’ 1981 memoir SHOCK VALUE, which covered Waters’ life and career up to POLYESTER (1981). That production, on which Waters tried (and failed) to bring back the moribund “Smell-O-Vision” gimmick, is detailed here, as are its follow-ups, which include HAIRSPRAY (1988) and its successful Broadway incarnation, the Kathleen Turner starrer SERIAL MOM (1994), PECKER (1998) and A DIRTY SHAME (2004), which saw Waters facing down the MPAA (and losing).
…Waters tried (and failed) to bring back the moribund “Smell-O-Vision” gimmick..
It was during the 1981-2019 period in which this underground wunderkind found that “Somehow I became respectable,” but he also assures us “I always wanted to be “commercial,” and that doesn’t have to be a dirty word.” We also get Waters’ pithy and sarcastic views on art, fashion, drugs and bad taste in all its forms (a major obsession of his, we learn, was finding out what inflight movies were playing on the airplanes that hit the World Trade Center on 9/11).
“Somehow I became respectable…”
One crucial aspect of this book that wasn’t aired in SHOCK VALUE is Waters’ sexuality. Back in 1981 he was still technically closeted (although gay in-jokes are sprinkled throughout his oeuvre), but that’s definitely not the case now. He eagerly details his sexual proclivities (“I’ve had sex watching THE BLUE ANGEL at the Bleecker Street Cinema in New York City and made out with a male inside the Crookedest Man’s House in the Enchanted Village children’s theme park outside Baltimore”) and some of his love affairs (although his partners go unnamed), two things about which he’s always been especially tight-lipped in public.
For Waters fans this book is required reading. It’s good to see that, even as the culture has changed greatly since Waters’ 1970s-80s heyday, the man himself remains the same loveably acerbic, politically incorrect firebrand he always was. That he’s managed to maintain his success (and evade the woke mobs) well into his seventies is cause for celebration.
See Also: LOW BUDGET HELL: MAKING UNDERGROUND MOVIES WITH JOHN WATERS,
MULTIPLE MANIACS