From KCRW Santa Monica and KCRW.com, it's The Treatment.

Welcome to The Treatment.

I'm Elvis Mitchell.

Whenever I'm asked who I would number among the most stylish and urban people in the movie industry,

I always say John Waters and people laugh, and I don't know why, because he's certainly a stylized

individual who has a particular perspective about life and drama and comedy.

I've always thought he's being that rare person who has a sense of irony about snobbery.

My guest, of course, is the writer-director and novelist John Waters, although I thought his book

Carsick was kind of a short story collection, but his novel is the book, Lyer Mouth, A Feel Bad

Romance. John, welcome back. It's so good to talk to you.

Thank you. Good to hear your voice again, Elvis. One of the things that I love so much about this book is that it's about this thing that's

run so often through your movies, the way people prepare and stage themselves to go outside.

Well, that's the difference between writing a screenplay and a novel. With a screenplay, you have to

show it or they have to say it. But in a novel, you can go into sentence

after sentence about how they feel when they say it or why they're saying it or how they're

saying it, their tone of voice, everything. So it makes it much more intimate and at the same time,

not harder, just a different way. To me, writing a novel and writing my next screenplay is exactly the same in hardness or easiness. You just have to go in there and do it every day. But you are right. I had written fiction. They were short stories in Carcic, except I was in them. And when you're in them, it makes it much easier because there's always a little bit of truth of somebody knows who you are in the first place. In Liar Mouth, you're meeting a whole new

group of disreputable people all at once. Yeah, it's the world's most distinctive screwball comedy,

I think. There's a constant series of entrances going in that remind me of your movies,

too. People are constantly almost slamming doors coming in and out in this book the way they do

in your movies. Well, in this book, they're not only slamming doors, they're bouncing in because

there's a whole pack of, and a subplot about a cult of people that are beyond trampoline fanatics

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