Opening Night

Q&A with John Waters on September 5 moderated by critic J. Hoberman.

This hysterical, full-throated assault on celebrity culture might be the fullest expression of Waters’s career-long interest in the relationship of beauty to transgression and crime.

On-stage conversation with John Waters moderated by critic Dennis Dermody.

Join us for a once-in-a-lifetime evening as John Waters presents his first two features, Mondo Trasho and Multiple Maniacs, along with early short The Diane Linkletter Story, all on 16mm. These exceedingly rare prints are from Waters’s personal collection, and probably screening for the last time ever!

Special Ticket Price: $25 General Public / $20 Member, Student & Senior

Free and open to the public!

Join us for free screenings of the young Waters's very first forays into filmmaking—Hag in a Black Leather Jacket (1964), Roman Candles (1966), and Eat Your Makeup (1968). Made in his late teens and early twenties, these embryonic, DIY shorts are wildly subversive and scandalously irreverent, a glimpse of an already prodigious talent.

Q&A with John Waters.

Stephen Dorff and Melanie Griffith star as, respectively, the leader of a guerrilla band of horny misfit filmmakers and the A-list movie star they kidnap in Waters’s freewheeling attack on the Hollywood star system.

Johnny Depp stars as the titular bad-boy hero of Waters’s raucous, exuberant salute to the teen rock ’n’ roll films of the 1950s.

Waters’s self-described “fairy tale for fucked-up children” was the last of his truly independent productions: a catalogue of horrors in which no taboo is left unbroken.

For his last completed film to date, Waters combined the encyclopedic, freak-show flair of his earlier movies with the gentler tone of his later tributes to specific, defunct genres—in this case, the sexploitation film.

This affectionate, PG-rated tribute to growing up in early-1960s Baltimore gave Waters an unexpected breakthrough hit—and featured Divine’s final screen performance.

A send-up of the New York art world that is also a loving, detailed portrait of working-class life in Baltimore, and a sort-of allegory for Waters’s own rise to fame.

For his typically subversive take on the Hollywood melodrama, employing his scintillating Odorama™, Waters shifted his focus from Baltimore’s urban crannies to its middle-class suburbs.

Introduction by John Waters and Kathleen Turner on September 5.

A conscientious mother of two casually takes up serial murder in Waters’s scathing suburban satire, a kind of spiritual sequel to Polyester.

This wonderfully depressing movie about an older HIV-positive man is brave, funny, gayly incorrect, and smart as a whip. The shitting-in-your-pants-when-you-try-to-go-out-cruising scene is one I will never be able to shake.

A hilariously brilliant and erotic movie about car crashes and the sexual cultists who fetishize them.

Introduction by John Waters.

I’m a sucker for plane-crash scenes, and the opening of this “you can’t cheat death” nail-biter was so suspenseful and horrifying that it spawned four sequels (all good, too!). You’ll never tell anyone to “have a safe flight” again.

The best Russ Meyer film of the decade—only it’s directed by an 80-year-old William Friedkin, proving the adage “old chickens make good soup.” Gina Gershon, your performance here shocked me raw!

A recently widowed grandmother turns horny and has a secret affair with her daughter’s much younger, loutish boyfriend (played by pre-Bond Daniel Craig). Gerontophilia never seemed so exciting.

The Swedish art shocker that made board member Shirley Temple Black quit the San Francisco International Film Festival in protest over their refusal to pull it from the screening schedule.

The best rat movie ever. Period. End of discussion.

The insane life of nutcase Saint Theresa, told in a haunting, minimalist way. Yes, she was in love with Jesus—but does that make her a bad person? Catholic lunacy at its most disturbing.