Divine Trash
A documentary about John Waters’ early career up to and including Pink Flamingos, the first of his movies to have a main stream distributer. The filmmaker, Steve Yeager, does an excellent job of cobbling together contemporary and present day interviews into a film that does a creditable job of explaining where the films come from. Its’ as much about Divine as about Waters (because there couldn’t really be one without the other). Divine’s mother and Waters’ mother, father and brother are all interviewed, as is an Espiscopal priest who lent his church basement to screenings of his movies, the Boston porn theatre owner who was one of the first to show his films (was that the Art Cinema in the background?), and even the guy who processed the films are all interviewed to great effect.
It’s not groundbreaking in style or method, but it’s a movie with interesting things to say and very much worth watching. I’ve seen many of Waters’ later films (Polyester, Lust in the Dust) but I regret to say that Pink Flamingos is a movie I have never seen. I’ll have to rectify that.
