“Or … humbled.” He is still, after all, the Pope of Trash – a description the novelist William S Burroughs came up with in the 1980s, now the title of the exhibition. “I promise I won’t use the word … journey,” he says, with eyes twinkling. Still, he has no intention of going soft or making any boilerplate Oscars-style thank-you speeches for the honors bestowed on him. “I make fun of things I love, not hate,” he says.Ī still from Waters’ 1974 film Female Trouble starring Waters’ friend and regular muse, Divine. Whatever shock his films stirred up on their release – one critic once referred to them as “celluloid atrocities” – has tended to give way, over time, to a recognition of his originality, the subversive brilliance of his writing and directing, and his surprisingly warm-hearted embrace of misfits and deviants. He has long since established himself as one of the US’s most beloved wits and storytellers, instantly recognizable by his trademark pencil mustache and reliably eye-catching line of colorful, perfectly cut jackets. The difference, of course, is that Waters is no longer a long-haired rebel risking arrest along with his devoted gang of oddball art student friends for shooting without permits on the streets of Baltimore, Maryland. It’s the same irony, the same surprise to people.” “Being here, at the Academy, reminds me of the start of my career, when the only place I was showing my films was in churches. “But it’s nuts in a great way,” he said, clearly at home mingling with reporters and posing for photograph after photograph in a space devoted exclusively to him. “Yes, it’s nuts,” he told the Guardian, as the first visitors streamed into an advance viewing of the exhibit and he observed them poring over such quirky artefacts as an ultra-gay pack of Husky toilet paper, with tongue hole, from the 2007 sex comedy A Dirty Shame, or an order issued by the Maryland film censorship board in 1974 to remove a cunnilingus scene from Female Trouble. Costumes from John Waters’ film Hairspray on display at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles, California.
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