Best News Ever: The Film Society of Lincoln Center To Present Complete John Waters Retrospective This September

Um, were not sure it gets any better than this: The Film Society of Lincoln Center announced today that it will present “Fifty Years of John Waters: How Much You Take?” — a complete retrospective of the legend’s work — from September 5-14, 2014.

The retrospective will include all 12 Waters features, a special “scentsational” odorama screening of “Polyester,” free screenings of rare shorts, and a special sidebar “John Waters Presents: Movies I’m Jealous I Didn’t Make.”

What’s more: Waters will be making appearances throughout the series!

Said Waters in an official statement: “Are you kidding?  I’m beyond excited!  It took me fifty years to claw my way up from the cinematic gutters of Baltimore to Lincoln Center.  Finally I’m filthy and respectable!”
 
Check out the full schedule below and start clearing your early September schedules:

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OPENING NIGHT
Female Trouble
John Waters, USA, 1974, 35mm, 89m
Waters’s hysterical, full-throated assault on celebrity culture pivots on an unforgettable performance by Divine as Dawn Davenport, a runaway teen who falls into a life of petty thievery only to becomes a media icon with the help of a pair of sexually repressed, upper-crust hairdressers. Divine called Female Trouble his favorite of his own films, and it’s not hard to see why: everything about the film, from the theme song down, is marked by his electric, gender-defying presence. (He also plays the male truck driver who, in one of the movie’s most grotesque scenes, knocks Dawn up.) But it’s the couple, played by David Lochary (“we rarely eat any form of noodle”) and Mary Vivian Pearce (“spare me your anatomy”), who become both the chief targets of Waters’s satire and, with their theory of beauty’s relationship to transgression and crime, improbable mouthpieces for his filmmaking philosophy. With memorable turns by Mink Stole as Dawn’s ill-fated daughter and Edith Massey as their hot-blooded next-door neighbor.
September 5, 6:30pm (discussion with John Waters and critic J. Hoberman)
September 10, 9:00pm
 
Cecil B. Demented
John Waters, USA, 2000, 35mm, 87m
“We ain’t got no budget,” goes a line in the tongue-in-cheek hip-hop theme song to Waters’s freewheeling attack on the Hollywood star system. Stephen Dorff and Melanie Griffith star as, respectively, the leader of a guerrilla band of horny misfit filmmakers (the Sprocket Holes), and the A-list Hollywood star they kidnap and coerce, Patty Hearst–style, into a string of terrorist activities. (Hearst, in fact, had a cameo in the film, her fourth for Waters.) With its movie premiere abduction scene, its passages of show biz mayhem, and its bloody penultimate sequence—a shootout on the set of aForrest Gump sequel—Cecil B. Demented is Waters’s most extreme and sustained attempt to bite the hand that once fed him.
September 12, 7:00pm (discussion with John Waters)
 
Cry-Baby
John Waters, USA, 1990, 35mm, 85m
Johnny Depp—already a teen icon for playing the lead on TV’s 21 Jump Street—appears as the titular bad-boy hero of Waters’s raucous, exuberant salute to the teen rock ’n’ roll films of the 1950s. What Hairspray had done for the message movie, Cry-Baby did for the likes of Rebel Without a Cause and Jailhouse Rock, with Depp playing a parentless, leather-jacketed “drape” (think “greaser”) bent on edging out his high school’s leading square for the affections of a beautiful, conflicted good girl (Amy Locane)—she too, in a typical Waters twist, orphaned under bizarre circumstances. Even when playing it soft, Waters never plays it straight, and Cry-Baby, for all its affectionate evocations of Baltimore’s past, continues the director’s fascination with the way people transform themselves (often grotesquely) for the sake of social acceptance, recognition, and fame. With supporting turns by Polly Bergen, Joe Dallesandro, Troy Donahue, Joey Heatherton, Traci Lords, Susan Tyrrell, and Iggy Pop.
September 13, 3:00pm
September 14, 8:00pm
 
Desperate Living
John Waters, USA, 1977, 35mm, 90m
Mortville—the fictional setting of Waters’s mid-career masterpiece—is a dangerous place. Ruled by a despotic queen (Edith Massey) and her small army of leathered-up Nazi enforcers, overrun with ruin, dilapidation, and decay, and populated by a motley crew of outlaws and outcasts, it’s a vision of what the world might look like if Waters were God. When two runaways, a mentally unstable suburban housewife (Mink Stole) and her obese maid (Jean Hill), disrupt the town’s already unstable balance of power, chaos and revolution ensue. Amateur sex-change-operation reversals, attempts at biological warfare, cross-dressing highway patrolmen, butch-lesbian wrestlers, frozen babies, and nudist-colony digressions: Waters’s first feature made without Divine or David Lochary—the latter passed away the year of the film’s release—is a catalogue of horrors that veers between comedy and disgust, or, as Waters himself described it, “a fairy tale for fucked-up children.”
September 7, 6:30pm
 
A Dirty Shame
John Waters, USA, 2004, 35mm, 89m
After taking on the suburban melodrama, the message picture, and the rock ’n’ roll film, Waters tried his hand at making an old-fashioned sexploitation movie (the kind, he recalled, that “all the nuns told him he would go to hell” for watching). Tracey Ullman plays a frigid housewife who suffers a concussion that fills her with a sudden, extreme sexual appetite. Most of the movie’s characters—including a voracious sex-addicted mechanic (Johnny Knoxville) and a go-go dancer with breasts the size of life rafts (Selma Blair)—follow suit, each developing their own peculiar (and, according to Waters, entirely genuine) fetish. A Dirty Shame has the encyclopedic, freak-show flair of Waters’s earlier movies, coupled with the nostalgic tinge of his recent work—a fitting balance for the director’s last completed film to date.
September 13, 5:00pm
 
Hairspray
John Waters, USA, 1988, 35mm, 92m
After spending six films and 20 years overturning the principles and conventions of his middle-class Catholic upbringing, Waters made this affectionate, PG-rated tribute to growing up in early-1960s Baltimore—and promptly became a crossover sensation. A bundle of narratives centered around Tracy (Ricki Lake), a heavyset teenager who dances a mean Limbo Rock, and her fight to integrate a local TV dance show—inspired by the real-life The Buddy Deane Show, which ended its run in 1964 after a series of NAACP protests—Hairspray proudly carried over the sharp-edged, often self-incriminating irony of Waters’s earlier films. The movie’s tone, on the other hand, was warmer, gentler, and more reflective than those movies ever would have allowed. What seemed like a new beginning for Waters turned out to be a farewell for Divine, whose dual role as both Tracy’s mom and the TV station’s bigoted owner was his final Dreamland screen performance.
September 7, 4:30pm
 
Pecker
John Waters, USA, 1998, 35mm, 87m
Waters’s send-up of the New York art world is also a loving, detailed portrait of working-class life in Baltimore—where Waters, by the time of Pecker’s production, had become a bona fide local hero—and a sort-of allegory for his own rise to fame. Edward Furlong plays an irrepressible teen photographer whose grainy snapshots of local outcasts unexpectedly make him and his girlfriend (Christina Ricci) heroes of the Manhattan cognoscenti (among them Cindy Sherman, playing herself). Whitney exhibits and magazine cover offers follow, but Pecker, in the end, stays true to his roots—in this case, his sister’s gay strip club and his grandmother’s talking statue of the Virgin Mary. At the time of its making, Pecker, despite Waters’s public protests to the contrary, was likely the closest he had come to expressing his own attitude toward the Hollywood system that embraced him.
September 14, 4:00pm
 
Pink Flamingos
John Waters, USA, 1972, 35mm, 93m
The movie’s long lineup of abuses—bestiality, indecent public exposure, cannibalism, sexual violence, forced impregnation, incest, castration, and, in the movie’s infamous finale, on-screen coprophagia—made it an instant sensation on the midnight-movie circuit. But the story of ferocious trailer-park resident Babs Johnson (Divine) and her quest to upstage her neighbors as the “filthiest person alive” is, at its heart, a warped celebration of community and a showcase for Waters’s particular brand of pitch-black humor. The result is a classic of transgressive cinema, less a scream against convention than a gleeful laugh in its face.
September 13, 9:15pm
September 14, 6:00pm
 
Polyester
John Waters, USA, 1981, 86m
For his typically subversive take on the Hollywood melodrama, Waters shifted his focus from Baltimore’s urban crannies to its middle-class suburbs. Divine—in his penultimate performance for Waters—plays a sharp-nosed suburban housewife caught between the demands of her philandering porn-hawking husband, her go-go dancer daughter, and her glue-sniffing son, a foot-fetishist wanted for mangling the toes of a series of women. Her only solace is in the company of her old friend Cuddles (Edith Massey) and in her new covert romance with the dashing art-house movie theater owner Todd Tomorrow (Tab Hunter, a Hollywood star whose old-fashioned good looks make him hilariously—and pointedly—out of place among Waters’s Dreamlanders). Presented in Odorama, a system Waters devised in which theatergoers were handed scratch-and-sniff cards to use during the film, Polyester is a key transitional film in Waters’s career, and a pivotal entry in the history of the sordid-suburbia black comedy. (Todd Solondz, eat your heart out!)
Audience members will receive a free rare ODORAMA card to scratch and sniff their way through the film.
September 6, 7:30 pm 
 
Serial Mom
John Waters, USA, 1994, 35mm, 95m
In this scathing suburban satire—a kind of spiritual sequel to Polyester—Waters continued to develop his interest in unorthodox, tight-knit domestic groups, his obsession with the connections between cruelty, criminality, and fame, and his deep feeling for the closeness of humor to disgust. Serial Mom, like its immediate predecessors, was another polished Hollywood production, but with a harsher MPAA rating than Hairspray or Cry-Baby to go along with its edgier premise: a conscientious mother of two (Kathleen Turner, in a rafter-shaking performance) casually takes up serial murder out of a combination of boredom and mild irradiation at perceived slights and faux pas. The result is one of Waters’s most sustained critiques of a world in which life is supposedly safe and secure—unless, that is, you wear white shoes after Labor Day.
September 5, 9:15pm (Introduction by John Waters)
September 6, 3:00pm
 

CELLULOID ATROCITY NIGHT!
 
Join us for a once-in-a-lifetime evening as John Waters presents his first two features, Mondo Trasho and Multiple Maniacs, along with early short The Diane Linkletter Story, all on 16mm. These exceedingly rare prints are from Waters’s personal collection, and probably screening for the last time ever! Waters will be joined onstage for a conversation with critic Dennis Dermody. 
 
Multiple Maniacs
John Waters, USA, 1970, 16mm, 90m
Poised between the grimy black-and-white chaos of Mondo Trasho and the fierce, demented intelligence of Pink Flamingos, Waters’s second feature is an equal-opportunity assault on conventional morality and the virtues of hippiedom. Divine is the haughty proprietress of a traveling freak show—“Lady Divine’s Cavalcade of Perversions”—that exists as little more than an excuse for her and her lover (David Lochary) to rob and kill their bourgeois patrons. When her partner turns against her, she embarks on a dark night (and day) of the soul that includes a confrontation with the National Guard, a burst of cannibalism, a giant lobster, and a vision of the Stations of the Cross as only Waters could film them. For all its outré sacrileges, Multiple Maniacs ultimately arrives at its own kind of religious ecstasy.
+
The Diane Linkletter Story
John Waters, USA, 1970, 10m
The day after conservative radio host and TV celebrity Art Linkletter’s 20-year-old daughter committed suicide, Waters whipped up—“by accident,” he later said—this improvised, deliciously nasty satire of the girl’s final days, with David Lochary and Mary Vivian Pearce as the victim’s fretful parents and Divine as Diane.
+
Mondo Trasho
John Waters, USA, 1969, 16mm, 95m
Waters’s first feature—a ragged, nearly dialogue-free fable shot guerrilla-style in the streets, alleyways, laundromats and immediate surroundings of Baltimore for just over $2,000—introduced moviegoers to his recurring company of players and caught his singular trash-opera style in full bloom. A mysterious blonde (Mary Vivian Pearce) passes through a series of nightmarish encounters with (among others) a foot fetishist, a diva with questionable driving skills seeking salvation (Divine), a topless tap dancer, a hacksaw-wielding mad scientist and his sickness-prone nurse, and, eventually, the Virgin Mary, accompanied by a soundtrack of traditional liturgical music, bells, whistles, moans, gossip, and prayers. Mondo Trasho’s plot setup comes from a rich tradition of grimy women-in-trouble cult films, from Daughter of Horror to Carnival of Souls, but its skewed comic sensibility is all Waters’s own.
September 11, 7:00pm (including a conversation between John Waters and Dennis Dermody)
 
 
SHORTS PROGRAM (FREE)
 
Eat Your Makeup
John Waters, USA, 1968, digital projection, 45m
Maelcum Soul—“the Kiki of Baltimore”—plays a governess who kidnaps young women and forces them to model themselves to death. Waters’ first narrative short, also includes a 21-year old Divine doing his best Jackie Kennedy impersonation in a startling reenactment of John F. Kennedy’s assassination.
 
Hag in a Black Leather Jacket
John Waters, USA, 1964, digital projection, 17m
In Waters’s first short—shot on stolen 8mm film for $30 on his parents’ rooftop when he was still a teenager, and screened precisely once after its completion—a wedding ceremony between an African-American man and a white ballerina performed by a Ku Klux Klan minister takes a turn for the surreal.
 
Roman Candles
John Waters, USA, 1966, digital projection, 40m
Under the influence of Warhol’s Chelsea Girls, Waters designed this free-form, disruptive collage of image and sound to be triple-projected on three screens side by side. Roman Candles found Waters, then fresh out of film school, testing out a handful of techniques he’d refine in his first two features, not to mention working for the first time with many of the actors—Divine, David Lochary, Mink Stole, Mary Vivian Pearce—who were constant presences in his life and work.
September 5, 4:00pm; September 6, 5:00pm and 9:30pm; September 7, 6:30pm and 8:30pm; September 11, 5:00pm
 

JOHN WATERS PRESENTS: “MOVIES I’M JEALOUS I DIDN’T MAKE”
 
Here they are—eight extreme, astoundingly perverse, darkly funny, and, most importantly, supremely surprising films that turn me green with envy. Every day I feel inadequate thinking of these fanatically obsessive, ludicrously sexual, unfathomably criminal, melodramatically misguided cinematic gems. Why oh why can’t I make films like these—ones that jolted me out of all cinematic lethargy? Exploitation, art, horror? There’s no such thing as genre when you’ve slipped to the other side of cinema-sanity. See for yourself the movies that drove me beyond the pale of normal movie madness. Jealousy over other directors’ careers is a terrible thing to waste. — John Waters

Before I Forget
Jacques Nolot, France, 2007, 35mm, 108m
French with English subtitles
This wonderfully depressing movie about an older HIV-positive man is brave, funny, gayly incorrect, and smart as a whip. The shitting-in-your-pants-when-you-try-to-go-out-cruising scene is one I will never be able to shake.
September 14, 1:45pm
 
Crash
David Cronenberg, Canada/UK, 1996, 35mm, 100m
A hilariously brilliant and erotic movie about car crashes and the sexual cultists who fetishize them.
September 13, 7:00pm
 
Final Destination
James Wong, USA/Canada, 2000, 35mm, 98m
I’m a sucker for plane-crash scenes, and the opening of this “you can’t cheat death” nail-biter was so suspenseful and horrifying that it spawned four sequels (all good, too!). You’ll never tell anyone to “have a safe flight” again.
September 12, 9:30pm (introduction by John Waters)
 
Killer Joe
William Friedkin, USA, 2011, 35mm, 102m
The best Russ Meyer film of the decade—only it’s directed by an 80-year-old William Friedkin, proving the adage “old chickens make good soup.” Gina Gershon, your performance here shocked me raw!
September 7, 8:30pm
 
The Mother
Roger Michell, USA, 2003, 35mm, 112m
A recently widowed grandmother turns horny and has a secret affair with her daughter’s much younger, loutish boyfriend (played by pre-Bond Daniel Craig). Gerontophilia never seemed so exciting.
September 6, 5:00pm
 
Night Games
Mai Zetterling, Sweden, 1966, 35mm, 105m
Swedish with English subtitles
The Swedish art shocker that made board member Shirley Temple Black quit the San Francisco International Film Festival in protest over their refusal to pull it from the screening schedule.
September 6, 9:30pm
 
Of Unknown Origin
George P. Cosmatos, Canada/USA, 1983, 35mm, 88m
The best rat movie ever. Period. End of discussion.
September 10, 7:00pm
 
Thérèse
Alain Cavalier, France, 1986, 35mm, 94m
French with English subtitles
The insane life of nutcase Saint Theresa, told in a haunting, minimalist way. Yes, she was in love with Jesus—but does that make her a bad person? Catholic lunacy at its most disturbing.
September 7, 2:30pm
 
 

 
Friday, September 5
4:00PM Shorts Program: Eat Your Makeup (45m) + Hag in a Black Leather Jacket (17m) + Roman Candles (40m)
6:30PM OPENING NIGHT: Female Trouble (89m) + Discussion with John Waters and J. Hoberman
9:15PM Serial Mom (95m) + Introduction by John Waters
 
Saturday, September 6
3:00PM Serial Mom (95m)
5:00PM The Mother (112m)
5:00PM and 9:30PM Shorts Program: Eat Your Makeup (45m) + Hag in a Black Leather Jacket (17m) + Roman Candles (40m)
7:30PM Polyester (86m)
9:30PM Night Games (105m)
 
Sunday, September 7
2:30PM Thérèse (94m)
4:30PM Hairspray (92m)
6:30PM Desperate Living (90m)
6:30PM and 8:30PM Shorts Program: Eat Your Makeup (45m) + Hag in a Black Leather Jacket (17m) + Roman Candles (40m)
8:30PM Killer Joe (102m)
 
Wednesday, September 10
7:00PM Of Unknown Origin (88m)
9:00PM Female Trouble (89m)
 
Thursday, September 11
5:30PM Shorts Program: Eat Your Makeup (45m) + Hag in a Black Leather Jacket (17m) + Roman Candles (40m)
7:00PM Celluloid Atrocity Night: Multiple Maniacs (90m) + The Diane Linkletter Story (10m) + Mondo Trasho (95m) + Conversation with John Waters & Dennis Dermody
 
Friday, September 12
7:00PM Cecil B. Demented (87m) + Discussion with John Waters
9:30PM Final Destination (98m) + Introduction by John Waters
 
Saturday, September 13
3:00PM Cry-Baby (85m)
5:00PM A Dirty Shame (89m)
7:00PM Crash (100m)
9:15PM Pink Flamingos (93m)
 
Sunday, September 14
1:45PM Before I Forget (108m)
4:00PM Pecker (87m)
6:00PM Pink Flamingos (93m)
8:00PM Cry-Baby (85m)