THIS FILTHY WORLD
Rating: *** (out of ****)
Cast: John Waters
Director: Jeff Garlin
On DVD from MPI

John Waters belongs to a small group of directors – including Otto Preminger and even Orson Welles – whose talk show appearances and side-projects are more responsible for their fame than their actual movies. More than most directors, Waters is a veritable cottage industry. He has hosted several TV shows (including the recent ‘Til Death do Us Part), produced CD compilations, authored some very funny books, written countless magazine articles, and even tried his hand at photography.

And then there are his films. High points of his filmography include 1981’s Polyester, which was presented in “Odorama” and which contains a love scene between Tab Hunter and Divine; 1988’s good-natured Hairspray, which spawned the Broadway musical and 2007 remake; and my favourite, 1977’s Desperate Living, which is completely indefensible but is very funny. Waters is also responsible, I’m afraid, for three of the worst films of the last decade: Pecker, Cecil B. Demented and A Dirty Shame. And, of course, no article about Waters would be complete without mentioning his 1975 “exercise in poor taste,” Pink Flamingos, which put him on the map for its notorious scene in which 300-pound transvestite Divine actually eats the byproduct of a poodle that one would least want to eat.

This Filthy World, directed by the actor/comedian Jeff Garlin, and which played at the 2006 Toronto Film Festival, presents Waters giving a so-called lecture at a university campus, although it’s really more of a stand-up act. “I tell my friends, ‘This is not a lecture, this is vaudeville’,” Waters says in the opening minutes.

Off the top of my head, I can’t think of any other major film director who is a more amusing personality than Waters, and This Filthy World is a lot of fun. Waters’ act is loosely structured around his life and films, but with tangents about topics that catch Waters’ fancy, like visiting famous trials (Waters was at the Watergate and Patty Hearst trials), strange sexual fetishes, his old friends (including Divine and Edith Massey), and odd pop culture subjects. Waters’ approach is the material is surprisingly whimsical, although his fondness for bad taste creeps in sometimes, especially in a joke about Michael Jackson that is so disgusting that he actually looked guilty about it afterwards. There are also a lot of anecdotes about the making of his films, my favourite of which are about The Diane Linkletter Story, which Waters and company filmed the same say they read about Diane Linkletter’s death in the newspaper

Waters is a funny speaker, particularly when talking about the schlockmeister directors of his childhood who influenced him, like Kroger Babb, who Waters says would release noxious gases into theatres where his films were playing so that the first person who passed out would be guaranteed front-page coverage. Waters reserves special fondness for William Castle, another director whose films were secondary to his ridiculous gimmicks, like wiring buzzers into the seats during showings of The Tingler and simulating a tingler attack in the theatre. “When it finally came to the theatre in my neighbourhood, they only bothered to wire about two or three of the seats, so I’d go early and look under every seat until I found the Percepto buzzer, and then just sit there, getting my ass buzzed all day long.” Waters continues, saying, “That’s when I realized there could be such a thing as art in the cinema.” Now there’s a statement that goes a long way to explaining his body of work.