![]() ![]() Waters borrowed $12,000 from his father to make Pink Flamingos and maintains his parents never saw it. It redrew the boundaries of gross out humor, paving the way for National Lampoon’s Animal House, Porky’s, and all their mainstream imitators. ![]() The characters confront traditional perceptions of taste, challenge sexuality, gender, culture, and intestinal fortitude. It skewered middle-class conformity, family values, and suburban similitude. Pink Flamingos was repulsion with a cause. After Pink Flamingos, Divine complained that people believed the character ate dog shit on a regular basis. “It was just a little piece of dogshit, and it made her a star,” Waters gleefully told reporters at press conferences. Mel Brooks only had to use sound effects to get his bean-fart scene in Blazing Saddles on every list of classic “gross-out films.” No one mistook the hair gel in Cameron Diaz’s doo in There’s Something About Mary to be anything but a lookalike product from a prop department. ![]() It is cinema verité at its vilest veracity. She bends over, scoops it up, puts in her mouth, chews, and smiles, all to the tune of “How Much Is That Doggie in the Window.” There are no cuts. Babs Johnson (Glenn Milstead, better known as Divine), walks her dog down a Baltimore sidewalk until it does its thing. The film’s most infamous scene is a single-take shot. I always knew that eating dog shit was going to be the kicker ending.” “So I tried thinking up things that weren’t illegal on film yet, but should be. “Pornography was also just becoming legal, which left exploitation and art films with nowhere else to go,” Waters told The Guardian. ![]() It was pilloried for featuring rape, murder, incest, cannibalism, cop-killing, bestiality, necrophilia, sadism, masochism, and coprophagy, the last of which was included, the director has said, just so critics would have to look it up. Pink Flamingos is filled with such cheer. “If someone vomits watching one of my films, it’s like getting a standing ovation.” “There are just two kinds of people, my kind and assholes.” “To me, bad taste is what entertainment is all about,” Waters wrote in his memoir Shock Value. When it first came out, Variety called it “one of the most vile, stupid, and repulsive films ever made.” Waters, who dubbed himself “the king of sleaze,” “the prince of puke,” and “the godfather of gross,” featured the quote prominently on the movie posters. Pink Flamingos was campy, kitschy, grotesque, and disgusting, designed to have audiences gagging in the aisles. Written and directed by Paul Morrissey, about a heroin addict looking to score and screw, that 1970 film made an impact on Waters, and Andy Warhol paid it forward, recommending Pink Flamingos to cinema legend Federico Fellini. Burroughs to declare Waters the “Pope of Trash,” and was even trashier than Andy Warhol’s Trash. Pink Flamingos was the first of Waters’ “Trash Trilogy,” which would go on to include Female Trouble (1974) and Desperate Living (1977). Written, directed, produced, shot, edited, and narrated by counterculture icon John Waters, the film features singing assholes, chicken-crushing sexcapades, and dog-doo finger foods. Pink Flamingos, which premiered on a single screen in a rented theater in Baltimore 50 years ago, is an antisocial commentary. Social commentary in motion pictures implies high art. TW: This article contains references to fictional depictions of sexual assault and animal cruelty that some readers may find disturbing. ![]()
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