“Filth is my politics, filth is my life!”
— Babs Johnson
The script for Pink Flamingos, by John Waters, was published this month as Pink Flamingos: A Screenplay. (It was previously available as part of Trash Trio and Pink Flamingos and Other Filth, collections of three Waters screenplays.) The script begins with a note of self-deprecation, describing “the atrocious voice of the Narrator” — the film was narrated by Waters himself. It ends with a description of the film’s infamous final sequence, involving what was intended to be “a Hungarian sheepdog.”
Pink Flamingos is a masterpiece of bad taste. On its first release in 1972, it was described as obscene and compared to Luis Buñuel’s notoriously shocking silent film Un chien andalou (‘an Andalusian dog’). It remains the ultimate example of transgressive cinema, breaking every cultural taboo, and it’s been shown twice in Thailand: in 2017 at the Bad Taste Café in Bangkok, and in 2023 at the Thai Film Archive in Salaya.
— Babs Johnson
The script for Pink Flamingos, by John Waters, was published this month as Pink Flamingos: A Screenplay. (It was previously available as part of Trash Trio and Pink Flamingos and Other Filth, collections of three Waters screenplays.) The script begins with a note of self-deprecation, describing “the atrocious voice of the Narrator” — the film was narrated by Waters himself. It ends with a description of the film’s infamous final sequence, involving what was intended to be “a Hungarian sheepdog.”
Pink Flamingos is a masterpiece of bad taste. On its first release in 1972, it was described as obscene and compared to Luis Buñuel’s notoriously shocking silent film Un chien andalou (‘an Andalusian dog’). It remains the ultimate example of transgressive cinema, breaking every cultural taboo, and it’s been shown twice in Thailand: in 2017 at the Bad Taste Café in Bangkok, and in 2023 at the Thai Film Archive in Salaya.