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Today self-described as a “filth elder,” Waters once took demonic-like delight in corrupting, angering and shocking us with his outrageous cinematic images: Divine eating freshly-minted dog excrement in Pink Flamingos, Mink Stole in Multiple Maniacs, penetrating Lady Divine with a set of rosary beads in a cathedral while reciting the Stations of The Cross.

From the start, John Waters' apple fell far from his Baltimore, Maryland, middle-class family tree. Born to John and Pat Waters on April 22, 1946, John's wonder years incorporated an obsession with automobile accidents, a love of Theatre of The Absurd, puppet shows, lip syncing, and experimental films.

By 12, Waters had his own subscription to Variety. He knew that the headline Ben-Hur Powerful Gotham B.O. didn't mean that New York stank.

Little wonder that young John, eavesdropping on his parents' conversation, overheard his mother describe him as an “odd duck.”

According to Waters, his parents were “always very supportive,” though, in the 1990s, they told Divine Trash documentary filmmaker Steve Yeager that they'd never seen Pink Flamingos, and they never would. About Mom and Dad, Waters adds, “…what I was doing as a kid was probably, to this day, horrifying to them. It was not exactly what they wished I was doing, but I guess they figured that puppet shows and lip syncing were better than prison.”

Entering high school, Waters connected with other odd ducks to form an 8mm movie company dubbed the Dreamland Players. Using the 8mm camera given to him by his grandmother, Waters' filmmaking goal was “to smash every middle-class value that good citizens hold dear.” He succeeded – and then some.

His first films, Hag in a Black Leather Jacket (1994), and Roman Candles (1996), (screening continuously at the Orange County Museum of Art until January 15), were shorts. Hag told the interracial tale of a black man and a white woman's rooftop wedding, the ceremony conducted by a Ku Klux Klansman. Roman Candles (1966), introduced Waters' transvestite superstar Divine, and featured David Lochary, a Waters' staple until his PCP overdose death in 1976. In the 45-minute featurette, Eat Your Makeup, kidnapped models were forced by their captors to eat their make-up. The early works were screened primarily in Baltimore area coffee houses and, ironically, in an Episcopal church.

Makeup was followed by a short stint at New York University, where Waters was expelled promptly for smoking weed. The university advised John 's parents that their son needed extensive psychiatric therapy. Instead, he returned to Baltimore – and filmmaking.

He borrowed $2,000 from his skeptical Dad to make his first feature length movie Mondo Trasho (1969), again starring Divine. The movie focused upon a day in the lives of a hit-and-run driver and her victims. After filming a scene with a nude male hitchhiker on a local campus, Waters was arrested for “conspiracy to commit indecent exposure.” The arrest story was picked up by the wire services. Thus began John 's high profile, yet underground, career as Pope of Trash. Today, he opines, “I don't think there's anything that's trash anymore. The Golden Age of Trash has long been over because irony ruined it.”

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