Hello, my name is Justin the Klu, and I'm here today with Will Sloan.

And we have a very special guest today.

We have in the important cinema club offices.

Rochelle Charcot.

We're going to be talking about John Waters, a filmmaker that I will admit I'm a neophyte of,

but we have two experts here today.

Oh, we should maybe mention that Rochelle is programming the retrospective of John Waters that's happening at the Royal in December.

Yeah, it's December 7th to the 9th.

And I hear that you have introductions for every film by John Waters.

I have one introduction, but it's adorable.

John Carpenter did an intro for us

about a month ago, and it's like, it's really sweet that he did that. John Waters did like a full

script with like art direction, and it's really, really cute. So I'm really excited. So today, we're

going to talk about John Waters in relation to two of his films, female trouble and polyester. Is there a reason that you guys wanted to go in that direction? I think they're his two best films. Yeah, I think so, too. Or I think there are at least his two most representative ones. Yeah. Particularly female trouble, I think, is the one that is the kind of fullest flowering of his aesthetic and his ideas.

So how long have you been a John Waters fan, Rochelle? And how did you get like into him?

I think since I was a teenager, I mean, it's not an abnormal story about growing up in a small town

and then seeing some kind of like freaky movie and feeling kind of understood for being a little bit weird.

I probably watched Pink Flamingos when I was like 15 and it blew my mind.

I kind of got to him through this book that he wrote, Crackpot, The Obsessions of John Waters,

which was a series of essays or his journalism that he wrote for various magazines.

And I mean, I didn't get to Susan Sontag's notes on camp until later, but I feel like I got a lot of

those sorts of ideas through that book.

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