Different Class

A new exhibition, ‘Pope of Trash’, celebrates the weird and wonderful world of cult filmmaker John Waters

- By Hunter Drohojowska-Philp

When LA’s Academy Museum of Motion Pictures opened in 2021, its most popular exhibit spotlighted the ruby slippers from The Wizard of Oz. It’s a shame they’re no longer on view because, in September, John Waters will follow an alternative yellow brick road to his own Emerald City – Hollywood – when the museum honours him with the first comprehensive exhibition of his artefacts, photographs, scrapbooks and movies.

Waters quips, ‘The Wizard of Oz is still my favourite movie, but I never understood why Dorothy wanted to go back home to that dreary farm when she had gay lions, winged monkeys and magic shoes.’

Since the 1960s, the Baltimore-born filmmaker has borrowed from the trashiest of B-movies, gore and sex laden offerings by the likes of Herschell Gordon Lewis and Russ Meyer, while contributing his own low-brow humour, high-camp style and elements of fantasy. His early inspirations were basic. ‘I watched foreign movies because they broke all the censorship laws, and I watched exploitation movies. Baltimore was a treasure trove of exploitation distribution.’

From the underground success of Pink Flamingos (1972), starring the voluptuous and coprophiliac Divine (the pseudonym of his principle star Harris Glenn Milstead) to