Mr. Know-It-All

March 25, 2019
In this delightful hybrid memoir/advice book, film director Waters shares highlights from his 40-year career and musings on a random assortment of subjects, including music, architecture, and the best vacation spots. Waters, a self-described “garbage guru,” begins by providing a wealth of tips for aspiring filmmakers and other artists, such as “Believe your own grandiosity and go wrong to make your career go right.” He also dishes on some of his most memorable acting hires, including Serial Mom’s Kathleen Turner, who taught him to “pay attention to your stars as if your life depended on it,” and Cry-Baby’s Joey Heatherton, who, while auditioning, “spoke in tongues convincingly as the script called, but seemed unable to stop.” The book’s second half gives Waters more freedom to riff, with endlessly entertaining results, whether he is ruminating on his favorite music (including 1960s “car-accident teen novelty records”) or imagining opening a restaurant that serves kittens. In a punctuationless ode to Andy Warhol styled after Warhol’s “novel” A, Waters asserts provocatively that, as a filmmaker, “Andy was more important than Thomas Alva Edison and D.W. Griffith.” Though not quite as surreal, Waters’s musings are as funny and eccentric as his films; longtime fans will be delighted with the treasure trove of insights into his brilliant oeuvre.

April 1, 2019
Waters may not be making any more movies (the last few flopped), but he's a hot stand-up act, and nothing can squelch his outrageous imagination. In a third of this collection, he recalls making Polyester, Hairspray, Cry-Baby, Serial Mom, Pecker, Cecil B. Demented, and A Dirty Shame. These tales are packed with anecdotes about Waters' stock company of eccentrics, beginning with transvestite bombshell Divine and including what amounted to that old gang of his from the 1960s as well as Hollywoodians?Tab Hunter, Ricki Lake, Johnny Depp, Kathleen Turner, and many others in supporting roles and cameos?added to all seven later films. This is great stuff for fans, many of whom may shiver with in-group delight on reading that Waters' favorites are Polyester (Yes!) and Serial Mom (Yes, yes!). The rest of the contents are rants and memoirs on, to cite a handful, Brutalist architecture, acting up, weird pop songs, My Son, Bill (a lifelike baby sculpture), indiscriminate sex, and death (his own). If you don't laugh loud and often, check your pulse, then your breath on a mirror.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)

Starred review from April 1, 2019
An exuberantly transgressive American filmmaker gets down, dirty, and weird about life, art, and career. In this collection of loosely connected, photo-illustrated essays, Waters (Make Trouble, 2017, etc.) ponders his improbable state of respectability after years on the artistic fringe. He begins by reflecting on his first major Hollywood success, Hairspray (1988). The film catapulted Waters, along with such colorful actors as Divine and Mink Stole, from the world of underground filmmaking to at least the edges of the mainstream. The author's newfound status as Hollywood insider allowed him to direct such A-list celebrities as Johnny Depp and Kathleen Turner and make films that enjoyed marginal success in the 1990s. After several box office failures that included Cecil B. Demented (2000), a film about an insane movie director who kidnaps an A-list actress to star in an underground film, and A Dirty Shame (2004), a "sexploitation satire" that he "was amazed got made at all," Waters cheerfully slid back into the gutter to cash in on his fall from mainstream grace. Waters discusses everything from his wide-ranging musical tastes, which include the Nutty Squirrels, jazz vocalists who predated Alvin and the Chipmunks, to his latter-day yippie political leanings. He also shares his fantasies of his perfect "Stalinist chic" home and dispenses remarkably sound advice on how to invest in art made by monkeys. A lifelong "drug enthusiast," Waters tells the story of an LSD trip he took at age 70. Aware of--and perhaps reveling in--the gruesomeness of his own mortality, he includes a letter to his "son," a plastic baby doll named Bill, and a meditation on a "lunatic resurrection" after death as the "Duke of Dirt." Comic and rude but always compulsively readable, Waters' book demonstrates that he is not only first among Filth Elders; he is also a keen observer of American culture. Wickedly smart and consistently laugh-out-loud funny.

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May 1, 2019

Movie director/artist/lecture circuit speaker/all-around trash-talking raconteur Waters has aged, but he hasn't lost his power to provoke. Now in his 70s, Waters still dishes the dirt, outrages and offends, and snarks wonderfully. This collection of essays and musings (after his hitchhiking memoir Carsick) goes on a somewhat chronological path from well-polished tales of cult filmmaking and trashy indulgence to mainstream success, infamy to fame, reminiscences of a pre-AIDS sex and drugs era, even a fantasy of his death and burial. Interspersed are chapters calling for filth activism, gossiping about on-set behavior, serving up sex tips, throwing Hollywood bouquets and bombs, hectoring a malformed baby doll, and considering an acid trip. Some of the longer pieces read more like movie storyboards and get bogged down in excess--Waters even manages to make his own death into an extended zombie apocalypse movie. But the man in the Maybelline mustache will have readers laughing one minute and gagging the next, all while rejoicing that this "filth elder" still walks (or crawls) the earth. VERDICT For once and future Waters fans. [See Prepub Alert, 12/6/18; "Editors' Spring Picks," LJ 2/1/19.]--Liz French, Library Journal

Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 1, 2019

Pink Flamingos directorial genius, New York Times best-selling author, and a budding novelist (stay tuned), Waters gives advice from nurturing extreme musical taste to building a house in which only you would dare live. His final word: "Whatever you might have heard, there is absolutely no downside to being famous.