Trash Trio: Three Screenplays

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.… (more)