JOHN WATERS

Filmmaker John Waters is perhaps best known for his campy 1998 film, Hairspray, which spawned a long-running Broadway musical and film starring John Travolta. But it is Waters’s decades of off-beat, highly original independent films set in his hometown of Baltimore that have earned him cult status, beginning with his first short film, Hag in a Black Leather Jacket, to 1972’s Pink Flamingos and beyond. In his films, as well as through acting, writing, and visual art, Waters explores the macabre, kitsch, hilarity, horror, exploitation, and the joyfully trashy with an artist’s eye. In an industry where complete creative control is the rare exception, Waters has managed to make films on his own terms for more than 30 years. Of his newest book, Carsick, Lawrence Osborne of The New York Times Book Review wrote, “Fantastical and plush . . . Carsick becomes a portrait not just of America’s desolate freeway nodes—though they are brilliantly evoked—but of American fame itself.