Wire report
‘The minute I had success, I stopped taking drugs’: John Waters on 60 years of screen carnage
As Hairspray and his ‘angriest movie’ Desperate Living are rereleased, the ‘Pope of Trash’ reflects on dead dogs, dirty rats, ‘that lunatic RFK’ and why there are no novelty dances any more John Waters still remembers the day his 1988 comedy Hairspray was awarded a PG certificate. “It was horrible,” he says. Until then, Waters, christened the “Pope of Trash” by the novelist William S Burroughs, was notorious for filming the unfilmable. In Eat Your Makeup , he recreated JFK’s assassination only five years after the event, casting the boisterous Divine in drag as Jackie Kennedy. He invented a blasphemous sex act called the “rosary job” in Multiple Maniacs , which also featured a rape-by-giant-lobster. Most repulsively, in Pink Flamingos , he persuaded Divine to scoff a fresh dog turd on camera. Continue reading...
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As Hairspray and his ‘angriest movie’ Desperate Living are rereleased, the ‘Pope of Trash’ reflects on dead dogs, dirty rats, ‘that lunatic RFK’ and why there are no novelty dances any more John Waters still remembers the day his 1988 comedy Hairspray was awarded a PG certificate. “It was horrible,” he says. Until then, Waters, christened the “Pope of Trash” by the novelist William S Burroughs, was notorious for filming the unfilmable. In Eat Your Makeup , he recreated JFK’s assassination only five years after the event, casting the boisterous Divine in drag as Jackie Kennedy. He invented a blasphemous sex act called the “rosary job” in Multiple Maniacs , which also featured a rape-by-giant-lobster. Most repulsively, in Pink Flamingos , he persuaded Divine to scoff a fresh dog turd on camera. Continue reading...
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What happened
According to The Guardian’s linked report, ‘The minute I had success, I stopped taking drugs’: John Waters on 60 years of screen carnage, As Hairspray and his ‘angriest movie’ Desperate Living are rereleased, the ‘Pope of Trash’ reflects on dead dogs, dirty rats, ‘that lunatic RFK’ and why there are no novelty dances any more John Waters still remembers the day his 1988 comedy Hairspray was awarded a PG certificate. “It was horrible,” he says. Until then, Waters, christened the “Pope of Trash” by the novelist William S Burroughs, was notorious for filming the unfilmable. In Eat Your Makeup , he recreated JFK’s assassination only five years after the event, casting the boisterous Divine in drag as Jackie Kennedy. He invented a blasphemous sex act called the “rosary job” in Multiple Maniacs , which also featured a rape-by-giant-lobster. Most repulsively, in Pink Flamingos , he persuaded Divine to scoff a fresh dog turd on camera. Continue reading…
Context
The development sits in VINI’s Culture coverage for readers following arts, entertainment, fashion, film, music, celebrity, and the business of culture. The original report is linked so readers can check the source account, follow later updates, and compare new coverage against the first published record. The linked report is dated 2026-07-16T04:00:14+00:00.
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Source
Primary source: ‘The minute I had success, I stopped taking drugs’: John Waters on 60 years of screen carnage via The Guardian. VINI cites and links the source; it does not reproduce the publisher’s full article text without rights clearance.
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- ‘The minute I had success, I stopped taking drugs’: John Waters on 60 years of screen carnageThe Guardian - 2026-07-16T04:00:14+00:00
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