Birthday: at 70, John Waters still claims, "I'd love to sell out completely. It's just that nobody has been willing to buy."

John Samuel Waters, Jr (1946-  )

Author, director, artist, actor, book collector

In June 2008, the film director John Waters gave a speech in Seattle. I forget where, but according to The Stranger, this is a list of the things he talked about, in order:

Jugglers with hard-ons, vaudeville, junkie strippers, Johnny Cash, Zorro, butch girls, Catholic schools, pig latin, Pootie Tang, auto-erotic stimulation, negative influences, filthy elders, The Tingler, Kroger Babb, Hell, nuns in prison, birth as masturbation, niche filmmaking, Father Bingo, nude ushers, whack stacks, Lysol, Warhol, Larry Clark, mullets, libraries, Freud, parental love, shrinks, blowjobs for school teachers, ebonics, Kenneth Anger, Dogma 95, roman candles, politically correct shoplifting, eating your makeup, Jacqueline Kennedy, Sotheby’s, suicide, LSD, seances, instant movies, Michael Jackson, burn units, Joan Crawford, flaccid penises, Anna Nicole Smith, necrophilia....eating shit for anarchy, radio contests, testing limits, bears, fag-hags, second closets, adult babies, anal bleaching, ultimate nudity, blossoms, female troubles, metallic fringe, electric chairs, lesbian fairy-tales, free face-lifts, Las Vegas, corpse grinders, Edie Massey, gift-bags, thrift stores, odor-rama, Rugrats, Burger King, ascots, Satin versus Satan, Sonny Bono, gay marriage, an all-lesbian volunteer army, re-born babies, Nan Goldin, power ballads, Traci Lords, juvenile delinquents, killing the rich, welfare fraud, crab meat, classism, hetero-flexibles, anti-airport yoga-ism, Boy George, cocksuckers, film terrorism, autographed tampons, Disney films for perverts, voting, voting multiple times, head injuries, carnal lust, vagina hedges, NC-17 film ratings, Netflix, plate-jobs, censorship, turd terrorism, New Orleans, trailer park bars, fat girls, Eminem, racists, jazz musicians on heroin, eavesdropping, trading deer meat for crack cocaine, lazy susans, mayonnaise, Schindlers Fist, Bride of Chucky, Alvin and the Chipmunks, ipecac, amusement parks, Diane Arbus, carnies, mosquito bite scabs, Vogue magazine, car accidents, Liberace, Don Knotts, Steve Buscemi, cult leaders, poppers, Christianity, Joan Rivers, Jesus, delusions of grandeur, AIDS, virgin birth, speaking in tongues, levitation, spontaneous combustion, Danielle Steele, Farrah Fawcett, Jessica the Hippo, and role models.

Seventy years old today, John Waters has lived his life pretty much in Baltimore, Maryland, where he was born. HIs first decade overlapped with the last of the city’s previous celebrity provocateur, H.L. Mencken.

With his boyhood- and lifelong- friend, Glenn Milstead (who became his artistic muse and star of his films as Divine), Waters experienced an epiphany after seeing the 1953 movie, Lili. The puppets in that film, who acted as intermediaries between the Amelie-like Leslie Caron and cramped, embittered puppeteer Mel Ferrer struck him like an angry Catholic parent (he sympathized with critic Pauline Kael’s review that chided the film that called it a "sickly whimsy" and referred to Mel Ferrer's "narcissistic, masochistic smiles”), and before long Waters and Milstead were creating puppet shows of their own, savage Punch ‘n Judy-meets-Sam-Peckinpah affairs.

A relative gave Waters an 8mm film camera at sixteen; he was a student at the NYU Film School for a couple of minutes, and began making his own works, beginning with the shorts Hag In A Leather Jacket, and Eat Your Makeup.

In the Seventies, Waters blazed a trail of tastelessness through Nixonian Middle America with low-budget, feature-length satires of the Silent Majority. With films like Mondo Trasho, Multiple Maniacs, Female Trouble, Pink Flamingos, Desperate Living and Polyester, all you had to do was read the titles and start feeling transgressive. It helped that Waters never saw a boundary to good taste he couldn’t batter down (Pink Flamingos featured a stunningly gross scene co-starring Divine and a small dog; another Waters innovation was Smellovision, a scratch and sniff card for his movies).

Hairspray, which unleashed Ricki Lake on an unsuspecting planet and made $8 million, launched Waters to the fringes of respectable film-making, and he began attracting big-name stars. A musical based on the movie has made over $200 million and Waters a cult figure. All told, Waters has made 17 movies.

He has appeared, mostly as himself, in dozens of movies and television programs (in one outing, he was The Groom Reaper, host of a Court TV series about couples’ varied paths from marriage to murder), and is a regular contributor to animated features’ voiceovers. His art has been the subject of  major gallery shows, and he is the author of six books: Shock Value: A Tasteful Book About Bad Taste (1981); Crackpot: The Obsessions of John Waters (1987); Art: A Sex Book (2003) (With Bruce Hainley); Role Models (2010); and Carsick: John Waters Hitchhikes Across America (2014), as well as two collections of his screenplays and two photo anthologies.

A keen book collector, Waters’s nearly 10,000-volume library ranges from high art to high camp; for decades he used a Baltimore book dealer, Atomic Books, as the drop for his fan mail. Book Riot celebrated his birthday today by sharing Water’s list of favorite books, and that is how we end our salute to the most commercially successful purveyor of bad taste not to run for President:

My Prizes: An Accounting by Thomas Bernhard (Author), Carol Janeway (Translator)

Narrow Rooms by James Purdy

Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare by Philip Short

Genet: A Biography by Edmund White

The Ghastly One: The Sex-Gore Netherworld of Filmmaker Andy Milligan by Jimmy McDonough

The Sluts by Dennis Cooper

Good Morning, Midnight by Jean Rhys

Still Holding by Bruce Wagner

Serious Pleasures: The Life of Stephen Tennant by Philip Hoare

The Beard by Michael McClure
(As listed in the New York Times Magazine, Nov. 20, 2015)

The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell

Swimming Underground by Mary Woronov

Suicide in the Entertainment Industry by David K. Frasier

The Possibility of an Island by Michel Houellebecq (Author), Gavin Bowd (Translator)

Sita by Kate Millett

(As listed in The Week, May 21, 2010.)

American Pastoral by Philip Roth

And I Don’t Want to Live This Life: A Mother’s Story of Her Daughter’s Murder by Deborah Spungen

Consider the Oyster by M. F. K. Fisher

Inferno (A Poet’s Novel) by Eileen Myles

Jernigan by David Gates

Ladder of Years by Anne Tyler

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

Platform by Michel Houellebecq (Author), Frank Wynne (Author)

So Much for That by Lionel Shriver

The Assistant by Robert Walser (Author), Susan Bernofsky (Translator)

The End of Alice by A.M. Homes

The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast by Douglas Brinkley

The Naked Civil Servant by Quentin Crisp

The Ravishing of Lol Stein by Marguerite Duras  (Author), Richard Seaver (Translator)

Time Remaining by James McCourt

Voss by Patrick White

We Disappear by Scott Heim

(As listed in The Strand’s Curated Collections)

In Youth Is Pleasure by Denton Welch

The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead

Two Serious Ladies by Jane Bowles

Darkness and Day by Ivy Compton-Burnett

We Need to Talk about Kevin by Lionel Shriver