Pink Flamingos and Other Filth: Three Screenplays by John Waters

Here are three of the filthiest-and yet, in their own way, sweetest—screenplays ever written: Pink Flamingos, Desperate Living, and Flamingos Forever. Intermixed with the scripts are dozens of classic stills from the films.

In Pink Flamingos, Waters's muse and leading lady, Divine, a 300-pound cross-dresser who could turn your stomach in one scene and break your heart in the next, competes with her family for the title of "filthiest people alive"—as readers will see, it's really anyone's game. Desperate Living is a perverse fairy tale featuring gun-toting lesbians, leather-clad castle guards, and a repulsive queen who has her own daughter gang-raped among other atrocities. Flamingos Forever is the unproduced sequel to Pink Flamingos, set fifteen years after the original, when the rivalry for "filthiest people alive" is revived; it was never filmed, Waters tells us, because by the time it was written, too many of the original cast had died—this book is the only chance for Water's fans to read it.