The Academy Museum's "John Waters: Pope of Trash” exhibit and films on view September 17 thru August 4, 2024
Photos by Karen Ostlund
(WestHollywoodToday.blogspot.com, CA, Los Angeles - September 16 2023)
#AcademyMuseum #PopeOfTrash
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| Opening "Pope Of Trash" speakers: Director of Academy Museum Jacqueline Stewart, Co-curator Jenny He, filmmaker John Waters, Co-curator Dara Jaffe and CEO of Academy Museum Bill Kramer. |
The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures latest exhibit "John Waters: Pope of Trash" is the first comprehensive exhibition dedicated to the artist’s contributions to cinema. It opens on September 17, 2023 thru August 4 2024.. It’s exploring Walter's themes and unmatched movie-making approach.
The exhibition traces the grotesque, daring, deliberately tacky, hilarious, and salacious elements that recur throughout Waters’s sixty-year career of film-making and reveals how his movies have redefined independent cinema.
FILM SCREENING SERIES:
John Waters: Pope of Trash will be accompanied by a retrospective film screening series from September 17 to October 28, 2023, programmed by Interim director of film programs K.J. Relth-Miller. On the exhibition’s opening day, the museum will present the ultra-rare silent screening of Waters’s third film, Eat Your Makeup (1968), about women who are forced to model to the point of death, with live commentary from Waters at 3pm. This rarely screened short, which first premiered in Baltimore’s Emmanuel Episcopal Church in 1968, was shot on 16mm with a Bell & Howell camera on view in the exhibition and was recently restored by the Academy Film Archive. That evening at 7:30pm, the museum will also present a 35mm screening of Serial Mom (1994), preceded by a conversation with Waters and Peaches Christ.
Additional screenings include Multiple Maniacs (Sept. 21), Pink Flamingos (Sept. 23), Female Trouble (Sept. 28), Polyester (Sept. 29), Hairspray (Oct. 5), Desperate Living (Oct. 20), double feature screenings of Pecker and Cry-Baby (Oct. 26), and double feature screenings of Cecil B. Demented with A Dirty Shame (Oct. 28). For information about these programs and tickets, visit AcademyMuseum.org
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| Costumes from movie HAIRSPRAY 1988. |
John Waters: Pope of Trash is organized by exhibitions curator Jenny He and associate curator Dara Jaffe, with the support of research assistant Emily Rauber Rodriguez and former curatorial assistant Esme Douglas. It will be the museum’s third large-scale temporary exhibition, following Hayao Miyazaki (2021–22) and Regeneration: Black Cinema 1898–1971 (2022–23) in the museum’s 11,000-square-foot Marilyn and Jeffrey Katzenberg Gallery.
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| Divine's dress and Fishpaw's cart in the Polyester movie 1981. |
On view through August 4, 2024, John Waters: Pope of Trash journeys through Waters’s complete filmography, from his do-it-yourself independent beginnings to his rebellious Hollywood productions, including four shorts and twelve feature films. Collaborating closely with Waters—anointed the “Pope of Trash” by author William S. Burroughs—as well as members of his casts and crews, the co-curators selected more than 400 works for the exhibition, many of which have never been displayed publicly.
Director and President of the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures Jacqueline Stewart said, “I offer my deep gratitude to John for trusting our museum with the formidable endeavor of telling the story of his vast film career. As the subject of numerous exhibitions on his visual art and photography, John is accustomed to the process of exhibition making. For John Waters: Pope of Trash, he has uniquely plumbed decades of remembrances and searched high and low—literally attics and basements— for the works seen in this exhibition”.
“Known for pushing the boundaries of ‘good taste,’ Waters has created a canon of high shock-value, high-entertainment movies that have cemented his position as one of the most revered independent auteurs in the history of American movies,” said Academy Museum exhibitions curator Jenny He and associate curator Dara Jaffe. “Waters’s subversive audacity is matched only by his loving treatment of his characters. His cinematic worlds, consistently set in his hometown of Baltimore, Maryland—are absent of mean spirit, which could account for his current phase of respectability, garnered despite decades of gleefully making ‘trash films'.
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| Cry-Baby’s leather jackets worn by Johnny Depp. |
"Pope Of Trash" Exhibit Highlights:
Visitors enter the exhibition through an introductory gallery featuring an abstracted chapel setting that winks at several aspects of Waters’s personal history and film-making. The gallery explores the filmmaker’s early life and works includes Hag in a Black Leather Jacket (1964)—Waters’s first film, an 8mm short made when he was 17 years old—as well as Roman Candles (1967). These films, in addition to Eat Your Makeup (1968), Mondo Trasho (1969) and The Diane Linkletter Story (1970), have been restored by the Academy Film Archive for the exhibition with film materials on loan from the Museum of Modern Art, New York, for the latter three.
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| Movie posters from Pope Of Trash exhibit. |
Individual feature films—Mondo Trasho, Multiple Maniacs (1970), Pink Flamingos (1972), Female Trouble (1974), Desperate Living (1977), Polyester (1981), Hairspray (1988), Cry-Baby (1990), Serial Mom (1994), Pecker (1998), Cecil B. Demented (2000), and A Dirty Shame (2004)—are explored in depth through works such as handwritten scripts, set decoration, costumes, props, production design, posters, correspondence, scrapbooks, photographs, and film clips.
At the center of the exhibition is an experiential gallery highlighting the recurrence of music and dance throughout Waters’s films. The exhibition concludes with a gallery dedicated to Waters’s cult status, featuring fan art and other nods to the filmmaker’s career.
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| John Water's cover of L’Uomo Vogue, NY Film festival poster and Saint Laurent fall campaign. |
Highlights of never-before-exhibited objects on view include original handwritten scripts (on legal pads) from early films such as Multiple Maniacs and Pink Flamingos; eyeglasses from Pink Flamingos worn by Mink Stole as Connie Marble, which the Academy Museum has recently acquired and conserved; the electric chair from Female Trouble; Grizelda Brown’s tutu costume from Desperate Living worn by Jean Hill; scratch ’n’ sniff “Odorama” cards used for Polyester ’s theatrical gimmick; the exploding wig worn by Debbie Harry as Velma Von Tussle and Tracy Turnblad’s roach dress worn by Ricki Lake in Hairspray; Cry-Baby’s guitar and leather jackets worn by Johnny Depp and Jonathan Benya as Cry-Baby and Snare-Drum, respectively; the prop lamb leg weaponized by Beverly Sutphin (Kathleen Turner) in Serial Mom;the camera used by the titular character played by Edward Furlong in Pecker; the skeleton costume worn by Maggie Gyllenhaal as Raven in Cecil B. Demented; and a gas can prop used by Johnny Knoxville’s Ray Ray in A Dirty Shame.
Objects on view are from Waters’s personal collection; the John Waters Archive housed in the Ogden and Mary Louise Reid Cinema Archives at the Jeanine Basinger Center for Film Studies at Wesleyan University; the Academy’s Margaret Herrick Library; the Academy Film Archive; the Vincent Peranio Archive housed in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University; and the Irvin Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, University of South Carolina Libraries. Private lenders, among them Waters’s cast, crew, and supporters, include Bob Adams, Jonathan Benya, Noah Brodie and Divine Official Enterprises, David Davenport, Tony Gardner, Jeffrey Pratt Gordon, Traci Lords, Gene Mendez, Pat Moran and Charles K. Yeaton, Deborah Rausch, Scott Rutherford, Ted Sarandos, Emily Sienicki, Mink Stole, Rachel Talalay, and Brook H. Yeaton.
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| GLEN PUPPET from Pope of Trash exhibit. |
As part of John Waters: Pope of Trash, the museum presents an interactive augmented reality experience in which visitors can style themselves as John Waters or a character from his films. Using a set of selfie face filters, guests will transform themselves into some of Waters’s most iconic characters, including Tracy Turnblad in Hairspray and Divine (living under the alias of Babs Johnson) in Pink Flamingos. Access the filters https://www.academymuseum.org/en/johnwatersar
Adjacent to John Waters: Pope of Trash, in the Warner Bros. Gallery, the Academy Museum presents "Outside the Mainstream", an installation that pays homage to the work of other radically independent filmmakers—such as Kenneth Anger, Jack Smith, Andy Warhol, Gregg Araki, and Todd Haynes—who operate beyond the pale of mainstream cinema. Drawing from a vast list of non-conformists, this exhibition focuses on examples from the American avant-garde, underground film, and New Queer Cinema, movements that were supported by forward-thinking film journalists including Jonas Mekas and B. Ruby Rich.
"Outside the Mainstream" installation is organized by curator Jenny He, with the support of curatorial assistant Manouchka Kelly Labouba. AcademyMuseum.org
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