shock value a tasteful book about bad taste

Divine, Waters, and the Dreamlanders achieved new levels of notoriety with the director’s next feature, Pink Flamingos (1972), whose jaw-dropping portrayals of taboo-busting behavior led to it being acquired by burgeoning independent distributor New Line Cinema.

While all of Waters’s “Dreamland” acting troupe proved essential for these films’ successes, the breakout star was the corpulent and gleefully debauched drag queen Divine, whom Waters had known since adolescence. Waters moved into feature filmmaking by the late 1960s, producing two films- Mondo Trasho (1969) and Multiple Maniacs (1970)-that started to circulate on college campuses and in countercultural screening venues outside of Baltimore. After briefly attending New York University, where he was expelled for drug use, he returned to Baltimore and began making low-budget independent short films with local friends and collaborators-works that emphasized scandalous imagery, camp humor, and winking social transgression. A rebellious high schooler, Waters formed close friendships with fellow queer adolescents and social misfits and would hitchhike to New York City where he saw influential works of 1960s-era underground filmmaking.

He was raised in the suburb of Lutherville, Maryland, and developed an early adolescent interest in the exploitation movies screened at local drive-ins. One of the most influential and idiosyncratic American independent filmmakers of the last fifty years, John Waters was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on 22 April 1946.

Shock value a tasteful book about bad taste