John Waters was born in 1946, the oldest son of conservative Catholics, in Baltimore, the "hairdo capital of the world," where all his films are made, and where Waters has proudly been a lifelong resident. (Baltimore's mayor declared Feb. 7, 1985, "John Waters Day.") The final chapter of "Shock Value," his autobiography, is titled "Do You Have Parents?" and includes a picture of a droll Waters posing in the living room with Mom and Dad, who look as knowing as he does, as if all three of them are in on the joke. (At this point, they would have to be.)

Though he says he loves his parents very much, he has also acknowledged their utter mortification of him; it must have been a bitch to have your son spending his youth as an eternal truant, getting kicked out of the Catholic Youth Organization for lewd dancing, taking LSD and reading "anything published by Grove Press" (including Sade, Genet and Burroughs), as well as Freud's case histories of abnormal psychology. And what parents wouldn't blanch at having their son's next-door-neighbor friend in their living room if that neighbor boy was Harris Glenn Milstead, who would soon be known to the world as Divine?

After terrorizing his parents with his teenage delinquent exploits, Waters deigned to briefly attend NYU, then was expelled for smoking pot. The university suggested to Waters' parents that he undergo psychiatric treatment; instead, he started making movies.

It was actually his grandmother who, knowing that he was a movie fan, gave him, for his 17th birthday, his first camera, an 8 mm Brownie, and it was his father who bankrolled Waters' initial efforts, including "Hag in a Black Leather Jacket," "Eat Your Makeup," "Mondo Trasho" and "Multiple Maniacs." Local churches were somehow conned into providing their hallowed halls as the locales for his first screenings. The fledgling filmmaker's adventures included getting busted for "conspiracy to commit indecent exposure," by filming a nude hitchhiker on the campus of Johns Hopkins University, his father's alma mater, which even made the front page of Variety: "Balto Mondo Trasho in Campus Pincho of Its Figleaved Hero." "Multiple Maniacs" was quickly picked up for a tour of midnight shows in 16 cities.

Cecil B. Demented

Then came "Pink Flamingos," unleashed upon an unsuspecting world. "I've always tried to please and satisfy an audience that thinks they've seen everything. I try to force them to laugh at their own ability to still be shocked by something. This reaction has always been the reason I make movies ... I like to think I make American comedies," Waters wrote about "Pink Flamingos" in "Shock Value." "Pink Flamingos" (first released in 1972, and splashily rereleased for its 25th anniversary) "is a very American film." Billed as "an exercise in poor taste," it deals, said Waters, with "very American subjects -- competitiveness and war."

Shot over a period of six months, one day a week, on a budget of $10,000, the movie is a cinefest of depravity: Babs Johnson (Divine) and her family, also known as the "Filthiest People Alive," have their benignly disgusting existence shattered when they find themselves under attack by a rival couple, the Marbles, who seek to claim the title of "Filthiest People" for themselves. While the upstart Marbles are well on their way to legitimately claiming that distinction through such crimes as kidnapping young women, impregnating them and selling their babies to lesbian couples, they don't stop there; the Marbles mount an offensive against Babs herself, sending her a turd in the mail and burning down her trailer home. Angered into aggressive retaliation, Babs and kin hunt down the Marbles, convict them of "assholism," hold a press conference of the sleaziest newspapers and shoot them to death. In a final scene that cemented the reputation of Waters and Divine forever, Babs/Divine indeed proves herself the Queen of Filth by ingesting excrement freshly dropped from a dog.

"Surely one of the most vile, stupid and repulsive films ever made," harrumphed Variety. Waters himself said that his favorite review came from the Detroit Free Press: "Like a septic tank explosion, it has to be seen to be believed." In 1976, it was shown at Cannes, and exhibited all over the world, and the Museum of Modern Art included it in a Bicentennial Salute to American Humor.

Though Waters had once flirted with the idea of making a sequel, he admitted that such a "pure" vision cannot be touched: "It would have to end with Divine taking a shit and the dog eating it." It is also his signature work. "Even if I discover a cure for cancer, the first line of my obituary is bound to mention that I once made a film where Divine eats dog shit. Which would be OK with me."

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