Rolling The Ball~ would like to extend a very special Happy Birthday to the greatest filmmaker of a generation and the filthiest man alive...John Waters!
John Samuel Waters. (born April 22, 1946) is an American filmmaker, actor, writer, journalist, visual artist and art collector, who rose to fame in the early 1970s for his transgressive cult films. Waters's 1970s and early '80s trash films feature his regular troupe of actors known as Dreamlanders—among them Divine, Mink Stole, David Lochary, Mary Vivian Pearce, and Edith Massey—often committing cinematic crimes. Starting with Desperate Living (1977), Waters began casting real-life convicted criminals (Liz Renay, Patricia Hearst) and infamous people (Traci Lords, a former porn star).
Waters's early campy movies present filthily lovable characters in outrageous situations with hyperbolic dialogue. Pink Flamingos, Female Trouble, and Desperate Living, which he labeled the Trash Trilogy, pushed hard at the boundaries of conventional propriety and movie censorship. A particularly notorious scene from Pink Flamingos, simply added as a non sequitur to film's end, featured—in one continuous take without special effects—a small dog defecating and Divine eating its feces.
Happy 64th, John...keep it filthy!