INTERVIEWS WITH JOHN WATERS

John Waters Shares His Favorite Love Songs 

All Songs Considered, February 8, 2007 - Guest DJ John Waters spins his favorite love songs, offering an utterly charming and sometimes irreverent mix of music for Valentine's Day. He's just released a CD of love songs called A Date with John Waters, featuring Ray Charles, Dean Martin and more obscure artists like Mink Stole and Edith Massey. Waters chats with All Songs Considered host Bob Boilen and shares some of his favorite tunes.


A John Waters Valentine's Day Treat 

Fresh Air from WHYY, February 14, 2007 - The filmmaker has released a new Valentine's Day album called A Date with John Waters. It's a compilation of love songs including Mink Stole's "Sometimes I Wish I Had a Gun" and the late Edith Massey (aka the Egg Lady) singing "Big Girls Don't Cry."


Catchy and Rare: 'A John Waters Christmas' 

Fresh Air from WHYY, December 14, 2004 - Director John Waters, known for making art from sleaze, has a new CD for the season, A John Waters Christmas. It includes such songs as "Here Comes Fatty Claus," "Little Mary Christmas," and "Santa Claus is a Black Man." Waters was once crowned the "Pope of Trash" by William Burroughs. 
Waters' 1988 film Hairspray was made into a Tony Award-winning Broadway musical. In addition, Waters started photographing video stills off his television screen that became the raw material for his artwork. Many of the images are collected in his recent book, John Waters: Change of Life.


Trash Talking: Director John Waters 

Fresh Air from WHYY, August 27, 2004 ╖ He was once crowned "The Pope of Trash" by William Burroughs. Waters started photographing video stills off his television screen that became the raw material for his artwork. Many of those are collected in his book John Waters: Change of Life. His 1988 film Hairspray was made into a Tony award-winning Broadway musical. Waters' new film, A Dirty Shame, opens next month. (Rebroadcast from Feb. 25, 2004)


John Waters' Extremely Strange DVD Favorites

Morning Edition, November 27, 2007 ╖ Ask filmmaker John Waters to name his favorite movies and he'll tell you that just about nothing is off-limits. The Baltimore native, best known for Pink Flamingoes and the original Hairspray, says his DVD-watching habits tend toward the strange, the shocking and the exploitative. 
Oh, and the extreme.
"I like extreme art movies, I like underground movies, I like exploitation movies," Waters tells Steve Inskeep. "So I like all genres. The only genre I'm not too crazy about is romantic comedies."
"I'm looking for extreme behavior that I might never commit but that interests me," Waters says. "And I'm always interested in behavior that I don't understand. I run to that."


 Scenes I Wish I Had Written: For John Waters, 'The Tingler' Still Resonates

Morning Edition, November 16, 2004 ╖ John Waters' films, including Pink Flamingos, Polyester and Hairspray, have been described as raunchy, perverse and hilarious. The director has relished making audiences howl and cringe -- often simultaneously. 
So it comes as no surprise that Waters would pick a scene from a 1959 William Castle horror movie as one of his own favorites. 
In The Tingler, starring Vincent Price, the monster is an organism that lives inside your body. As Waters describes it, "the Tingler... grows when you're frightened and the only way to kill it is to scream." In one scene, the Tingler gets loose in a movie theater. 
In the real theater, the audience was sent jumping by buzzers wired under the seats. "Every kid went crazy," Waters tells NPR's Susan Stamberg. "It was cinema mayhem." 
Waters also has a favorite playwright: Edward Albee (The Zoo Story, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and The Goat). As a rebellious youth, Waters says he read Albee and thought "there was another value system, there was another kind of beauty and smartness and coolness..."
Stamberg's report is part of a series, Scenes I Wish I Had Written.
 
http://www.npr.org/