Director's Cut [Hardcover]

John Waters (Author, Photographer)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 1997

John Waters, famed underground director of such outrageous, cult classics as Pink Flamingos, Polyester, Hairspray, Cry Baby and Serial Mom, "re-directs" forgotten art films, obscure melodramas, lurid pot-boilers and his own early films in the form of photographic story boards made up of stills. The resulting work is this brilliant twist-off from Waters' absurd, comic view of life, and the images are as funny and delightfully edged as the very best of his films. Waters shakes the fantasies of normalcy into a new, often delicious, taste of Heaven. 165 photos, 150 in color.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

John Waters has been thumbing his nose at Hollywood for more than 30 years, creating movies that are both shocking and hilarious. Now he reveals another obsession, yet another string to his artistic bow. In this collection of photographs, Waters uses his camera to "re-direct" his favorite movies, juxtaposing images to create works that explore, expand upon, and sometimes overturn the intentions of the original directors. In Susan Slade, for example, he distills an early 1960s melodrama into 16 photographs. The resulting images manage somehow to combine kitschy appeal with a degree of emotional impact that transcends that of the film itself. Waters also works with images from his own life and movies--including a sequence filmed in 1966 where Divine plays Jackie Kennedy in a reenactment of JFK's assassination. In another bravura performance, Liz Taylor is transformed through plastic surgery into Waters himself.

Waters admits that his project is to photograph "a favorite movie the way I want to remember it, no matter what the original director had in mind." The result is a collection that documents one man's obsessive and deeply kinky love affair with movies--the kind of love affair in which one partner brings a whip and the other brings a gallon of olive oil and a volleyball team.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 287 pages
• Publisher: Scalo Publishers; 1st Scalo ed edition (December 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 393114156X
• ISBN-13: 978-3931141561
• Product Dimensions: 11.6 x 8.5 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,542,973 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

John Waters is an American filmmaker, actor, writer, and visual artist best known for his cult films, including Hairspray, Pink Flamingos, and Cecil B. DeMented. He lives in Baltimore, Maryland.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Magnificent Obsessions, October 20, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Director's Cut (Hardcover)

Waters once wrote that he never uttered the word 'art' "unless referring to Mr. Linkletter." In "Director's Cut", he has distilled a lifetime of obsessions down to a very artful collection of film and video stills that are simple and beautiful even if their meanings aren't apparent. The book is essentially a visual companion to his hilarious essays in "Shock Value" and "Crackpot", especially the ones about movies, his own and others. You don't necessarily need to be familiar with them to enjoy "Director's Cut" but it certainly helps. This is one of the more interesting art books I've seen in that most of the images are presented completely out of their original context; Waters lends his own sensibility to them and they become transfixing. Through Waters' eyes, the juxtaposition of Francis the Talking Mule and stills of Jessica Lange in "Frances" isn't merely a joke; the 'low' culture presumption of one image makes you question the 'high' (or middlebrow) presumption of the other. My favorite images in the book come from 'The Bad Seed", a Warner Brothers movie from the Fifites about a homicidal little girl that is the summation of everything Waters believes in: obsession with the outwardly mundane, willfullybad (or even murderous) behavior in social situations, crime as personal expression, the artist as outlaw and social misfit. And his stills from "The Tingler" have a mysterious beauty that remind you of early Surrealist photography; they have a depth to them not present in the original movie, which could be said of almost all the stills. Overall , the book is a triumph: it's extremely personal for Waters and yet vastly entertaining if you let his sensibility overtake you.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Waters' Art, January 4, 2008

By 

W. Davidson (Melbourne, Australia) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Director's Cut (Hardcover)

An essential purchase not only for John Waters' fans but also for art and cult movie lovers as well. Packed with Water's clever reimagining of stills painstakingly photographed from TV and put together with an excellent eye and wit. It's brilliant and a great document of his artistic work. I just wish I had an original for the wall as well!

5 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars More great obsession and desire from John Waters, August 5, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Director's Cut (Hardcover)

John Waters is one of the few artists who would accept acomplimentary comparison to Jeffrey Dahmer. "I didn't wantthem to leave," Dahmer said of his attempts at zombie-making. The simple poignancy of Dahmer's needy rationale and the horror of its expression are a jolting juxtaposition, an engrossing exhibition of desire and obsession. Director's Cut presents an engrossing exhibition of Waters' obsession: a highly twisted, idiosyncratic altar to celebrity and the movies. Waters doesn't want movies to leave. His photographs are almost exclusively movie stills taken off television screens, creating a marvelous freedom from the motion of motion pictures. Like VCR freeze-framing, they allow you to gaze to your scopophilic heart's content upon normally fleeting moments. As a specific memory detail may encapsulate a larger event, Waters' stills crystallize his vision of a film or career. A jock strap draped across a brass desk lamp stands for an entire sexual encounter; Baby Doll is reduced to Carroll Baker's empty crib. Like the crackling TV static in David Cronenberg's Videodrome, Waters' images are rough and sensually tactile. Moire patterns, pixels, and the curving black frame of the TV screen itself imbue the photographs with a lush, visceral texture absent from high-gloss art photography or porn. Jean Seberg burning at the stake, hypos puncturing veins, a**holes spread wide, Lana Turner's neck, the numeric countdown of a film leader: desire charges the innocuous and the explicit alike. The book elicits the same fascination as pornography for a fetish you don't share. Obese women or amputees may not send you, but expression of the obsession in and of itself is riveting. With comedic self-portraits and stills of famous, infamous, and mediocre director's credits (including Waters and the legendary pseudonym Allan Smithee), Director's Cut turns Waters' obsessive gaze back onto himself and his own filmic celebrity, extending his inquiry beyond even the scope of his films.