The Mighty McGurk

John Samuel Waters, Jr. is an American filmmaker, actor, stand-up comedian, writer, journalist, visual artist, and art collector, who rose to fame in the early 1970s for his transgressive cult films. Waters' 1970s and early '80s trash films feature his regular troupe of actors known as the... Dreamlanders—among them Divine, Mink Stole, David Lochary, Mary Vivian Pearce, and Edith Massey. Starting with Desperate Living , Waters began casting real-life convicted criminals and infamous people . Waters skirted mainstream film making with Hairspray , which introduced Ricki Lake and earned a modest gross of $8 million domestically. In 2002, Hairspray was adapted to a long-running Broadway musical, which itself was adapted to a hit musical film which earned more than $200 million worldwide.
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John Waters was an American filmmaker whose career began in the early days of silent film and culminated in two consecutive Academy Award nominations in the newly-instituted category of Best Assistant Director with the second nomination for MGM's Viva Villa!. Waters won the award at the 7th... Academy Awards on February 27, 1935. A native of New York City, John Waters entered the motion picture industry in its formative years. Only a few of his assistant director credits from the 1910s have been recorded, with vehicles for Carlyle Blackwell and Harold Lockwood listed among the earliest titles. During this initial phase of his career, he was billed on at least two occasions as John S. Waters and on at least one occasion as Johnnie Waters. In 1926 he was offered a position as director with Famous Players-Lasky and, over a two-year period, turned out ten films, seven of which were based on the series of popular western fiction novels by Zane Grey. An eighth western, 1927's Arizona Bound, Waters' sole sagebrush saga not based on Zane Grey, starred Gary Cooper in his first leading role.
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