Hairspray, Female Trouble, and Multiple Maniacs

Here are three more of John Waters’s most popular screenplays — for the first time in print, including an original introduction by Waters and dozens of fun film stills.John Waters, the writer and director of these movies, is a legendary filmmaker whose films occupy their own niche in cinema history. His muse and leading lady was Divine — a 300-pound transvestite who could eat dog shit in one scene and break your heart in the next.In 'Hairspray,' a 'pleasantly plump' teenager, played by Ricki Lake, and her big-hearted hairdresser mother, played by Divine, teach 1962 Baltimore about race relations by integrating a local TV dance show. 'Female Trouble' is a coming-of-age story gone terribly awry: Dawn Davenport (again, Divine), progresses from loving schoolgirl to crazed mass murderer destined for the electric chair — all because her parents wouldn’t buy her cha-cha heels for Christmas. In 'Multiple Maniacs,' dubbed by Waters a “celluloid atrocity,” the traveling sideshow 'Lady Divine’s Cavalcade of Perversions' is actually a front for a group of psychotic kidnappers, with Lady Divine herself the most vicious and depraved of all — but her life changes after she gets raped by a fifteen-foot lobster.