Words on Film, Part 7: 'Shock Value'

When I was a freshman at Kent State, way back in the fall of 1985, cult film director John Waters visited our campus as part of the Filmworks program. One night, they showed "Pink Flamingos" (and if you've never seen "Pink Flamingos," take it from me -- freshman year is the perfect time to experience that particular cinematic endurance test), then the next night, Waters himself introduced "Polyester," answered some questions and signed autographs. I got my "Polyester" Odorama scratch-and-sniff card signed (it still hangs above my desk almost 30 years later), but after hearing Waters' hilarious tales of filmmaking and fringe culture, what I really wanted him to do was write a book collecting all those stories. Imagine my surprise when a girl in line in front of me handed him a copy of "Shock Value" to sign.

The next day, I was at the campus bookstore, ordering a copy of my very own. (No Amazon.com back in those days, kids.) I devoured the book as soon as it arrived a week or so later, and was happy to discover it was just as funny as hearing him in person. I've always been a fan of Waters' films (especially "Female Trouble," his funnier follow up to "Pink Flamingos), but I honestly think his best work is his writing. "Shock Value," which is his first book, acts as both a hilarious autobiography and revealing look at the offbeat pleasures of cult films. Besides the chapters on his childhood, his love of Baltimore and the making of his movies, Waters also devotes pages to his cinematic heroes, Russ Meyer and Herschell Gordon Lewis. I'm pretty sure it was "Shock Value" that introduced me to Meyer's ode to violence, "Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!," and for that alone, it has my eternal gratitude.

Between reading Waters' book, Michael Weldon's "Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film" and Danny Peary's "Cult Movies," my film horizons expanded greatly during my first year of college. "Shock Value" is, for obvious reasons, the most narrowly focused of those books, but it's also (for more obvious reasons) the funniest and the most personal. Waters' movies are frequently horrifying and often disturbing (especially his early ones), but if you read "Shock Value," you come to realize that, transgressive or not, he's really a pretty nice guy.