The John Waters Screenplays: A Reading and Conversation
Cult filmmaker John Waters celebrates six reissued screenplays—including Pink Flamingos and Hairspray—with a career-spanning conversation and live reading at the CHF Northwestern festival.
Why we picked this
John Waters has been making the transgressive feel joyful for fifty years. A reading from his own screenplays, voiced entirely by himself, is exactly as chaotic and wonderful as it sounds.
Six of John Waters’s screenplays—Multiple Maniacs, Pink Flamingos, Female Trouble, Desperate Living, Flamingos Forever, and Hairspray—have been reissued, and Waters is touring with them. The format for this Chicago Humanities Festival event is characteristically his own: a career-spanning conversation, a live reading from a selected scene with Waters voicing all characters himself, and an opportunity for one audience member to be selected to read on stage with him.
Waters has been making films since the 1960s, working out of Baltimore with a deliberately disreputable aesthetic that turned transgression into art comedy. He has also written several bestselling books, including Role Models, Carsick, and Mr. Know-It-All, as well as the novel Liarmouth. He is, by any measure, a significant American artist who has been entertaining himself and everyone else for fifty years.
A signing follows the presentation. Part of the Chicago Humanities Festival’s Northwestern University festival day at Pick-Staiger Concert Hall. Ticket purchasers may enter a drawing to read on stage with Waters.