Shock Value

by John Waters

""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."" "Thus begins Shock Value. And what a story it is. Packed into these pages are moments of incomparable humor, tenderness, and revelation, all suffused with Waters's sweet charm and mad-genius wit. Also included is a new foreword by fashion writer Simon Doonan, a close friend of Waters's and a fellow cultural icon." "John Waters, perhaps America's most successful trash filmmaker, achieved a new ironic sense of public acceptance in 2003 with the runaway success of the Broadway musical Hairspray. He first achieved notoriety with his films, and he's written and directed fifteen, including Pink Flamingos, Polyester, Cry-Baby, and A Dirty Shame." Readers familiar only with Waters's movies may be surprised at just how extraordinary a prose writer he is; he's as gifted a memoirist as he is a filmmaker. Here is a true love letter from a legendary director to his friends, family, and fans.

Genres: Nonfiction, Film, Biography, Memoir, Humor, Essays, Art

256 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1981

About the author

John Samuel Waters, Jr. is an American filmmaker, actor, writer, personality, visual artist and art collector, who rose to fame in the early 1970s for his transgressive cult films: Pink Flamingos and Hairspray. He is recognizable by his pencil-thin moustache.

Reviews

[N · Rating 4 out of 5]

Just like watching any manic John Waters movie- (Serial Mom is one of my favorite movies of all time, A Dirty Shame, Pink Flamingos, and Multiple Maniacs are all weird and hilariously campy) his writing comes across as witty, grotesque and charming all at once.

It's a disarming look into this demented genius' mind, and I loved every awful and outlandish anecdote, his adventures with Divine and Mink Stole come to mind; and a man who has an unapologetic love for Baltimore, the mecca of his dreams, demented plots, and ultimately, it is a valentine to low budget movies that critics and audiences alike might think as trash- but I think of it as art, which is meant to shock, entertain and make us think of ourselves and our own thought processes.

It's a wonderful, schlocky modern classic, and every sentence just drips with love and affection for all the gross things he's done, for all the hilarious things he's accomplished.

For anyone who hasn’t watched any Waters: to be safe, start with Hairspray, or Crybaby. Then Serial Mom, Pink Flamingos, Multiple Maniacs, A Dirty Shame, Cecil B Demented, Pecker and Female Trouble.

[Tosh · Rating 5 out of 5]

Strange enough I think I almost like John Water's writings better then his films. For sure more than his early films i.e. Pink Flamingos, etc. And I am one of the odd one's that love his later films more than his early work.

Nevertheless this is a mid-life John Waters looking back at his early career and it's hysterical. I think he's a great man. i wished he wrote more articles, essays, reviews, etc. He's a great wit.

[Veronica · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm just like, really sad to be finished this book. John Waters is an exceptional story teller and that one hundy percent translates to the page. I have never felt so understood, and so inspired as I did while reading the thoughts, opinions, and stories in this book. Currently googling everything he's ever done. Which book should I read next. So excite. Already want to reread.

[Veronica Rooney · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you need to kick a reading slump I recommend at least 12 hours of travel by Greyhound bus
One of 2 books I bought during my New York trip and I enjoyed it immensely
The outward desire to be so bad will never not be endearing to me
I am sure I will reread

[Christopher · Rating 5 out of 5]

Everyone needs their ultimate flagship book of wisdom and life instruction.

For some, it's the Tao Te Ching. For others, it's The Prophet. I know people who even take solace in that one Jesus book.

On a more asthetic level, I think we all choose one book in our youth that colors how we want to look at the world and how we want to be seen. Think On the Road . The Bell Jar. Catcher in the Rye.

For me, well, John Waters' Shock Value fits the latter requirement, and maybe even a little bit of the former.

Waters explains the infamous crudeness of his work with such charming articulation and understated wit that at the end of your first readthrough of his book (believe me, you'll read it again and again), you'll be chucking out all your Nora Ephron DVDs to make room on your movie shelf for "Multiple Maniacs" and the collected films of Russ Meyer.

Waters' philosophy is exactly what he puts into his movies - outsiders are the heroes of the world, and to lead a "normal" live is to lead a boring life (not to mention "normal" people usually tend to be far more dysfunctional than a typical flag-waving freak). His manifesto is tight as a drum in this book, which is damn near thirty years old and still as edgy and clever as ever.

READ THIS. NOW. Own it. Learn it. Live it.

[Stephanie · Rating 5 out of 5]

You may know John Waters's film work, which includesHairspray, Serial Mom, and Cecil B. Demented. But if you haven't read his books, you don't understand the full extent of his talent.

Shock Value is a series of essays exploring Waters's reverence for everything from serial killers to Russ Meyer movies to bloody amusement park disasters. After reading this book, you'll stop believing there can be such a thing as "guilty pleasures" and start displaying your taped collection of Manson Family parole hearings with pride.

Filled with such gems as, "All people look better under arrest," "I couldn't wait to become a teenager so I could get pimples," and "Whenever I hear a friend casually mention interest in a sporting event, I immediately reconsider our friendship," Shock Value reveals other critics of contemporary culture like Oswald Spengler to be the petty whiners they really are.

If I had my way, every high school guidance counsellor would hand a copy of this book to seniors. The thought of steering kids away from college, respectable jobs, and massive student loan debt gives me hope for the future. Call me a dreamer. I'm in good company with John Waters.

[John Bruni · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another excellent book from John Waters. I loved his description of growing up because it reminded me of me. When I was a kid I had a lot of weird obsessions, things that separated me from my peers. Things that made my parents and grandparents very nervous. I set myself down a certain path, and they begged me to do something cleaner, more "respectable." That just wasn't for me, and it certainly wasn't for John Waters. My favorite part, though, is when he talks about parents. A common question he gets is, "Do you have parents?" I understand his frustration with this question, and he has decided that the real question is, "What do your parents think of your work?" It leads to a few thoughts on his friends' parents and their feelings toward him. For me, it's been weird. I'm pretty out there, but for some reason all of my friends' parents like me. Sometimes more than they like their own kids. I have a charm that I believe I inherited from my father despite not knowing him for most of my life. People were just drawn to him no matter how dirty his jokes got. The same for me. I can say horrible things, but people accept it because that's just John Bruni being John Bruni. It's a good thing I don't use this power for evil. It's the same for John Waters. He isn't the way he is just to hurt people. He's that way because it's fun and transgressive. For example, he wanted to make an X rated feature that had no sex in it. That's the kind of thing I think about, myself. I can't tell you how much I enjoyed this book.

[Erin the Avid Reader ⚜BFF's with the Cheshire Cat⚜ · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a great, fun read! John Waters is one of the coolest men in the world today. Even though his films are probably some of the most revolting in the world behind the disgust there is always genius. Do not judge a book by it's cover.

One of my favorite chapters in the book was his interviews with Russ Meyer's and Herschel Gordon Lewis. While I personally thought Russ Meyer's was a dirty old man Herschel Lewis was probably one of the nicest guys I've ever read about...and he's been labeled the king of gore!

My other favorite chapter is about Edith Massey, one of the actors that made up John Waters' acting troupe "The Dreamlanders". She was an obese, small, crooked-toothed lady yet had a beautiful heart and on the inside was a lovely, kind lady.

This book made me find the beauty inside the ugly. I'm not joking. I think that was Waters' goal here, and he did a pretty damn good job fulfilling it. A great read of you want a smile on your face and a few chuckles here and there.

[Phil Overeem · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you have ever watched an early Waters film (pre-HAIRSPRAY) and wondered, "WTF????" this book answers the question. Eminently readable, hilarious and outrageous, full of love for the beast called America and its bizarre offspring named Baltimore, SHOCK VALUE also captures forever the last moment in our culture when we could be shocked. Waters' recent struggles to make a decent film are a testament to a burned-out, numbed audience that has already gone over the edge and doesn't know it. Also, as I noted in my review of CRACKPOT, Waters is an even better essayist than he is a filmmaker, so prepare to be impressed by his erudition. Great new cover photo, too! And for the obsessive, seek out the books on tape for both this one and CRACKPOT--they're abridged, but delicious.

[Evan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Five multicolored beehive hairdos and five stiff white pointy bra cups for this.

But why not five stars, you might well ask? We can thank Miss Goody Two Shoes Prissy Boots Junior Achievement 4-H Club snooty britches Angel with her perfect coiffure and sensible shoes, standing there on my shoulder, wrestling with the Devil on my other shoulder while whispering lies into my ears and staying my nasty prone hands. But really, I think it's my fallen Catholic guilt coming back to the fore. Something this fun and funny can't possibly be good. If only I could find my childhood rosary and cleanse myself, but it is deeply buried in a drawer somewhere. Oh wait, that's right, it's buried up Divine's backside. Don't ask me how it got there. For that, see Multiple Maniacs, John Waters, 1970 -- if you dare.

John Waters is a guy who has looked at bland America for almost 50 years now and said, "What the fuck?" That bland America still exists -- though not quite in the same way, since trashy bad taste has come to permeate all entertainment to the point of respectability, cutting into Waters' raison d'etre. Yet, for all that, nobody has ever done bad taste with the same sense of wicked, cheeky subversion.

To date, America still has a U.S. Poet Laureate, something that would undoubtedly make Waters yawn. What the country sorely lacks and really needs is an official U.S. Badass Laureate. And John Waters should be the first inductee. Why Baltimore hasn't already erected an 80-story phallic monument to the guy is beyond me.

Herein we have a hybrid autobiography, unconventional in the way you would expect from Waters; stories of a life making films not only guerilla style but in the manner of a felon on the run, trailing blood and no remorse.

The book is outright, laugh-out-loud hilarious; a laugh in every graph. The stories and the quotes are priceless. Waters' reminiscences are so matter-of-fact in drawing from the pages of life that their very familiarity seems off kilter. After reading it, I felt even more corrupted than usual. I trust he would take that as a compliment.

This book finds Waters at the early mid-life of his career, at the end of his gonzo, mondo '70s phase of legendary no-budget home movies; the really bold and degenerate ones: the ones graced by his repertory circle known as the Dreamlanders: Divine and David Lochary and Mink Stole and Susan Lowe and Edith Massey. The sick ones. The freaking funny ones. At press time in this book, Waters was graduating to B-movie status with a whole $300,000 budget for Polyester in 1980. The closer-to-A-grade stuff was still several years in the offing.

And yet for that, Waters had already lived a very eventful and strange life by this point, with plenty enough juicy stories for this first autobiographical stab.

The Baltimore of Waters' youth and young manhood could hardly be better described in all its sleazy, seamy glory. We learn of the budding director's weird obsessions with death and disaster and all things ugly, to the chagrin of his remarkably tolerant conservative parents.

Along the way, while waxing rhapsodic about pimples and druggies and scam artists and pimps and sleazy carnies and murderers and cross-dressers and suburban girls gone bad and beehive sporters, Waters offers simultaneous instruction on the finer points of what is and what is not proper bad taste. The book shouldn't be filed under film, or biography, or humor, but under philosophy.

Waters is one of the wonderful rare birds who pisses off family-values-righteous white-bread conservatives and PC liberals equally. Since I aspire to this as well, I can only harbor the greatest admiration. I was pleased to read that, as an aspiring showman in his childhood, he had bilked the neighborhood kids of their nickels by staging a gross haunted house in his garage. I had done the very same thing. No wonder I like the guy. Part of Waters' subversion is in his disarming genteel demeanor, poised smartly with that devious pencil-thin mustache, smiling and good-humored in his impertinence. (Waters always seems so marvelously in control; just watch his many guest lectures and interviews on Youtube where he seems both comfortable and alert at the same time, head held high with the knees of his crossed legs thrust forward. He's a rebel with good posture.)

Unlike Waters, I never gravitated to the "bad crowd" but he did so with gusto, always studying carefully these dregs for movie ideas. He describes his scripts as coming from "a mind in a state of putrefaction." Of his film audiences, critic Rex Reed once wondered, "Where do they come from?"

It's no surprise, then, that drive-in-movie king, Russ Meyer, is his icon. Meyer's 1966 magnum opus Faster, Pussycat! Kil! Kill! was seen on first run by Waters and which now seems a glaringly obvious influence. Waters' declaration that it was the greatest movie ever made came decades before anyone would even remotely think to proclaim such a thing. Waters' recognition of it as a masterwork was astute and way ahead of the curve. And this not the only instance of his trend-setting ways, about which he gleefully boasts and proves over and over in this book. The book's interviews with Russ Meyer and Herschell Gordon Lewis are delightful tributes to the grindhouse/exploitation cinema traditions that inspired Waters.

Interestingly, some scofflaw library patron ripped out some of the photo pages, presumably depicting sick and/or nudie stuff. I think Waters would probably be proud of this.

About halfway through reading this, I just had to re-experience Waters' infamous Multiple Maniacs, possibly his most inspired work of degeneracy (OK, maybe Pink Flamingos wins that one), and was delighted by its utter lack of tact and decorum, gleefully slaying sacred cows left and right. Jesus feeds the multitudes, but the loaves and fishes are cans of tuna and Wonder bread. For good measure, there's cannibalism and disembowelment, a lesbian rosary rape, a puke eater, a reenactment of the Charles Manson-Sharon Tate murder (then "too soon", but that's Waters!), a gratuitous depiction of Christ's crucifixion, and the legendary giant lobster rape of Divine. With its ample religious overtones, it's all something a fallen Catholic can appreciate.

I have to admit, when I first saw these films in the early '80s at retrospective art houses, I hated them. I was just the kind of snooty pants that Waters wanted to affront. It worked. Luckily, I've become more juvenile as I've gotten older. It's more fun this way, trust me.

The book is a palate cleanser, and the laughter it elicits will wipe away all the scumminess.

So, I give it five stars after all, Miss Prissy Pants. Whatcha gotta say about that now, Bitch? Oh, and seriously, lose the silk wings. I mean, really, how uppity gauche?

(KevinR@Ky 2016)

[Taylor · Rating 4 out of 5]

4/5 - I love this man. Another hilarious telling of his life, early career, and his friendships. What I would do to meet Edith.

[Drew · Rating 4 out of 5]

This strange and thoroughly entertaining book was less like a biography of John Waters (how it was initially explained to me) and more like a zine he'd written and turned into a book. There is no real chronology to the stories in the book; instead, it begins with a chapter about the making of "Pink Flamingos", then jumps around from chapter to chapter without any real rhyme or reason. A chapter about Waters's childhood fascination with disasters is followed by chapters about how much he loves Baltimore, his cross-country pilgrimages to attend highly publicized trials, interviews with his favorite movie directors (Russ Meyer and Herschell Gordon Lewis), and chapters devoted to his favorite actors to work with, Divine and Edith Massey. Interspersed between these chapters are chapters that tell about the making of his other movies and about his struggles with censor boards, but at least half of the book is less an autobiography than Waters excitedly discussing his various fascinations. None of this is a negative thing, however--all of the chapters are equally entertaining, and Waters is just as good at expounding upon his unique worldview as he is at telling stories from his life. The many pictures distributed throughout the book are also great fun to look at, mixing images from his hard to find early movies with pictures of his bizarre company of actors in their day to day lives, without all the crazy makeup and costumes in which he generally decks them out. Unfortunately, the book ends in 1981, the year he wrote it, and other than an introduction written in 1995, we get nothing about the last 25+ years of his life. I doubt there are as many good stories from that period as there are from his early days, but nonetheless I'd like to hear them. I hear he has other books, so I should probably track them down and see if they can fill in the holes left by "Shock Value". That said, this book is incredibly entertaining, and anyone with a taste for "bad taste" will enjoy it thoroughly.

[Christopher · Rating 3 out of 5]

John Waters is not only a legendary filmmaker - purveyor of self-proclaimed cinematic trash like Pink Flamingos, Female Trouble and Polyester before he became more mainstream with Hairspray in 1988 - as well as a Baltimore institution. This, his first book, published in 1981, is a memoir of his life and work up until that point, looking back on his demented origins and musing on what is to come. It is a must-read for all fans of Waters and his films, though one cannot but wish that he - a gifted writer - were prone to a little more introspection on the irony of a man who spent his formative years showing contempt for rules and laws with his shoplifting friends becoming - even by 1981 - more of an establishment figure keen on making sure others did not steal from him. There is also a certain class and race blindness to the text, where Waters seems oblivious to how only a middle-class white kid could have gotten away with what he got away with, but perhaps the 2016 Waters is more self-aware. Leaving that aside, Shock Value is a truly fun-filled collection of autobiographical anecdotes, revealing the backstory (or what he wants you to know/think about that backstory) behind the "King of Puke" and his fabled Dreamland players.

[Matt · Rating 5 out of 5]

So happy I decided to dig this one out and read it again. Waters' stuff (especially the stuff pre-1980, which is what this book is all about) is really a life-line for me. When I'm feeling low, he picks me right up. There's so much perverse joy to be found here. Buy a copy for your niece. It'll be the best humanitarian effort you put forth all year. And when you're through with it, do yourself a favor: Re-read the Edith Massey chapter. Life's too short not to...

[clarenina · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great insight into the early years of John Waters' life and career, with detailed background information about the making of such cult classics as "Pink Flamingos" and "Desperate Living". Mandatory reading for fans of not only Waters, but trash, gore and cult cinema, as it features interviews with Waters' muse, Divine, and influences, filmmakers Hershell Gordon Lewis and Russ Meyer.

[Ian · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm not going to try to convince you that John Waters is a brilliant writer, or that the structure of this book always makes sense, but if you are a fan you're going to enjoy this anyway. Read it because you love John Waters and you want to spend a few hours hearing him talk about his career and his friends.

[Natalie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I finally just bought this; I couldn't put it off any longer because I'm going to see Uncle John give a lecture this Thursday, and there's a book signing afterwards. My goddamned book is getting SIGNED.

ETA: My goddamn book did get signed. :)

[Andy · Rating 5 out of 5]

We can forgive Waters' horrible stand-up comedian act he's been fronting because this book is entertaining and funny. I liked the pieces on Russ Meyer, Herschell Gordon Lewis, and anything about the late Divine is immensely readable.

[Sean Kottke · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cruise read #9: each cruise, I try to pick a Hollywood gossip or true crime book (previous selections include Hollywood Babylon 1 & 2). Although he's a true Hollywood outsider, Waters' work fits the bill perfectly. He's a class-A ranconteur.

[lilias · Rating 5 out of 5]

He's a dear with a fantastic sense of humor, and it was a pleasure to read this book.

[David Cerda · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best Waters book.

[Hank Stuever · Rating 4 out of 5]

Heroic defense of trash, bad taste, subversion, but never misanthropic or cruel. It's rebellious out of a sense of joy. Which turns out to be a perfectly fine way to approach life.

[Dan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Unsurprisingly, John Waters is a remarkably gifted raconteur, endlessly charming and sweetly subversive in his endearingly self-conscious weirdness. A truly delightful read.

[Hailey Skinner · Rating 2 out of 5]

John Waters's face is sticky-tacked to my wall so duh I needed to explore his lore

Bro lives to shock & I'm giving this 2 stars because I am easily shocked.

This book is filled with all things disgusting/bizarre/icky/silly/lightly offensive, but it's written as if with a heart emoji after each distasteful anecdote. <3

John genuinely seems like a nice man with jarringly bad taste & a "Prince of Puke" title he wears like a CROWN. (I love that for him but at a safe distance of any movies involving defecation.)

One day I'll probably get around to watching Hairspray & Cry Baby but until then back I go into my role as fake fan who really just loves knowing everything about any underground 70s icon with a book. <3 Luv u john! xx

[Tobias Cobbaert · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rare gast, die John Waters (dat bedoel ik als een compliment en na dit boek te lezen ben ik er zeker van dat hij dat ook zo zou opvatten)

[Alex · Rating 4 out of 5]

"I think my parents should relax and realize that today, in my old age and maturity, I only think terrible thoughts, I do not live them. Thank God I am not my films. If audiences can laugh at my twisted ideas, what's the great harm? I can't imagine anyone being influenced enough by my work to actually try to emulate the characters' misery in real life. At least I've never done anything really decadent, like waste millions of dollars of other peoples' money and come up with a movie as dumb as The Deep or 1941. The budgets of my films could hardly feed the starving children of India."

my last john waters book! one of his best, ive collected my thoughts and passages i particularly enjoyed:

"...Rex Reed's comments: "Where do these people come from?
Where do they go when the sun goes down? Isn't there a law or something""

"I took my mother to the Watergate trial and we had to wait in the rain for twelve hours before getting in.
"You're crazy to wait in line to experience another man's misery," my father grumbled, but my mother later said, "I had cocktail chatter for a month." At the Watergate trial they had earphones, and I got to hear the famous tapes, at last satisfying my desire to hear Nixon say the word asshole."

"I'm glad I got to be bad when I was young. My generation was lucky; stealing could be politically correct, rioting was a great way to meet people, the worst sexual disease was scabies, and it was cool to be poor. Nobody worked much, hitchhiking was easy, and you could make a movie for nothing, starring your friends and selling it by word of mouth. The only trouble was, everybody died."

"My mother's eighty-year-old mother, Stella Whitaker, is my favorite relative.
She has blue hair and used to drive an Imperial before she got a gold Wildcat.
She tells all the family, "All you need in life is the four Bs-Beauty, Brains, Breeding, and Bounty,""

"My own favorite review came from the Detroit Free Press:
"Like a septic tank explosion, it has to be seen to be believed.""

on one of his first stars, Maelcum Soul: "A few weeks after the opening, Maelcum Soul died. Maelcum's death totally numbed us, so great was her influence on our attitudes toward the world.
We fought our way to her funeral through the riots following Martin Luther King's death and were shocked to see her laid out without her usual makeup.
Everyone wanted to sneak up to the coffin and draw on her crease lines, but her mother managed to soothe the mourners by pulling out eight-by-ten-inch glamour shots of Maelcum saying "Maelcum was everything I wanted to be in life, but didn't have the nerve."

"Word spread quickly that Marina had. turned the boutique into a "free store," and some even hauled off the display racks. When the owner of the boutique came back and discovered the depleted stock, she, not surprisingly, had a fit and screamed, "Never again will I ever hire anyone that has even stepped foot in Baltimore —they're all hillbilly ripoffs!"

some absolutely insane story clippings he mentions:
""Woman Beheads Mother, Slashes Own Throat: Police say a woman wished a state trooper 'Merry Christmas,' then tossed what authorities said was her mother's head on the sidewalk in front of the New Jersey Statehouse. Then the woman pulled out a razor and slashed her own throat." All sorts of questions pop into my mind: Did the head hit anybody? Did it roll and the cops had to chase it?
"Suicide Hotline Tells Woman to Drop Dead: A Queens woman who telephoned a suicide prevention hotline early today said she was advised to go ahead and kill yourself' When she called back she said she was told by the man on the other end "drop dead, I'm sleeping.' " I excitedly clip these stories and scribe notes to myself, reminding me of the great comic material hidden beneath these depressing facts.
"13,000 Turkeys Commit Suicide: State authorities are investigating a mass suicide by 13,000 turkeys at the Ruth Mitchell Ranch.""

im obsessed with the rat lady of baltimore story:
"I'm not always attracted to the bad element in society. One local do-good-er has my complete respect, and I think the city of Baltimore should give her an honorary dinner and place her in their Hall of Fame. Her name is Mrs. Mac, but she is more widely known as the Rat Lady. Every day she climbs into her van, the Ratmobile, and searches slum neighborhoods for rats to kill. Concerned citizens call her to alert her to any rat trouble spots. Her volunteer helpers kill the rats with sticks, but Mrs. Mac actually chases the rats and grabs them with her bare hands. "They wouldn't dare bite me," she is often quoted in the newspapers and on TV. I'm incredibly jealous of her mission in life, and if someday I decide to retire from film making, I hope Mrs. Mac will find room for me aboard her rat patrol.
Although she is quite serious about her one-woman crusade, Mrs. Mac has managed to keep a great sense of humor about her profession. She used to be a registered nurse, but decided that being a rat executioner was more rewarding.
"Nursing was a twenty-four-hour-a-day job," she explained. "This way, the hours aren't as long, but I'm still helping people." She initially became interested in rat eradication after discovering rats crawling over her small sleeping chil-dren. "My family was terrified by rats, so I decided to do something about it." She estimates, "There are three rats to every person in Baltimore," and she claims to be able to "smell them out." "My husband thinks I'm crazy when we're somewhere and I tell him I can smell the presence of rats," she said.
Mrs. Mac's rat knowledge is legendary; she's like a walking rat encyclopedia. She knows that "a rat's favorite food is chicken bones or peanut butter" and she can spot a rat hole a mile away. I love to quiz her on her favorite rat horror stories."

"I had always wanted to use Female Trouble as the title for a film after visiting Cookie Mueller in the hopital. She had mysteriously collapsed and was rushed from her Provincetown home to Cape Cod General. When I arrived, I was much relieved to see Cookie sitting up in bed, wearing makeup and applying her favorite tint, "White Minx," to the bleached-out streaks in her hair.
"God, what happened, Cook?" I asked.
"Oh, just female trouble, hon," she answered, and we both broke into hysteria at the archaic sound of that expression."

"Sometimes he (Divine) would crash the most fashionable parties, but as soon as the host recognized the infamous drag, another door was opened. Big stars began to notice and whisper and some, like Ann-Margret, could only do a double take and blurt: "What the ...I?? My God, hideous!"

Divine on where his parent's lived: "big old Victorian house with thirty acres outside of Baltimore. F. Scot Fitzgerald had lived there when Zelda was in the mental hospital nearby. She set the third floor on fire once— you could see part of the roof was much newer than the other half."

"JW: Have you ever had a big star be rude to you?
D: Yeah. Cher. I was at this party in L.A. for Three Dog Night. I was in drag in a white cocktail dress. So this photographer said, "Come on, Cher's here go over and stand with her so I can get a picture." Cher said.: "Wait a minute! Wait a minute! What are these pictures for?" and the photographer said, "Italian Vogue," and Cher said: "Oh, come on. I might have been born yesterday, but it wasn't in Poland!" and she dismissed me with a wave of her hand. I just looked at her and wanted to snap her nails off."

On Liz Renay's book: "I loved the ads for the book, especially the copy line that referred to Liz as "per-haps the most beautiful woman of our time." Perhaps was the key word here at least the press agents were humble enough to leave this startling statement open for debate."

"Liz immediately made friends with the cast and we soon realized she could even outchatter Edith. Van claims he saw Edith and Liz both talking about themselves to each other at the same time without listening to what the other was saying."

edith is my favorite Dreamlander (with Mink, Jean, and Pat not too far behind) but i need to seek out her alleged cameo in Arise, My Love

"After Pink Flamingos becane a success, Edith hit the publicity trail with gus-to. Since Edith was so completely unaffected, she seemed to charm even the most cynical reporters and, to my knowledge, not one mean word has ever been written about her. Totally unfamiliar with the big names in New York, she could be counted on to act exactly the same, no matter if she was talking to The New York Times or a high school film critic. When Warhol had a screening of Pink Flamingos at the Factory, Edith chattered away to all the guests. Even Andy seemed impressed and took me aside and whispered, "Where did you find her!" After we left, Edith innocently asked, "Well, which one was Mr. Warhol?" She had been talking to him all night, posing for his Polaroids, and had absolutely no idea who he was. Curious, l asked Edie, "If you could meet any celebrity in the world, who would it be?" Without missing a beat, she answered, "Bob Barker.""

i want the details on JW's feud with Katherine Hepburn and Barbara Streisand

"but I especially loved to watch Gloria Swanson in action. Always using proper star etiquette, she would be deep in conversation, pretending not to notice the horde of photographers who were blinding her with flashbulbs. Whenever, out of the corner of her eye, she'd spot a paparazzi about ready to snap her from an unflattering angle, she'd throw her hands in front of her face and ruin the shot.
She'd talk, throw her hands over her face, continue talking, and then do it again, without ever acknowledging the riot she was causing."

i want to learn more about this: "President Carter's nephew, who calls himself the "bad peanut" and served time in San Quentin Prison for robbing gay bars;"

and two Fran quotes:
"Finally, the truth behind the glamour. Shock Value is funny, informative, and suffused with boyish charm."
—Fran Lebowitz
"and Fran Lebowitz, then a film reviewer for Andy Warhol's Interview magazine, cinched its (P. Flamingo's) success by describing it as "one of the sickest movies ever made. And one of the funniest.""

[Daniel Maggio · Rating 5 out of 5]

An inspiration to all!

[Kyle Burley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Funny, and surprisingly charming, memoir of Director John Waters' early life and career. Given how transgressive, and confrontational (and hilarious) his first features are, it's always nice to be reminded what an affable personality he is in real life. Highly recommended to fans of both independent cinema and trash culture.

[Raz · Rating 4 out of 5]

I would have given this 5 stars if it had come out after Polyester so we could get a chapter on that as well!

[Hugo Rios-Cordero · Rating 5 out of 5]

Waters being Waters. Fun and over the top.