Fine Line Features is proud to launch upon an unsuspecting world the 25th Anniversary re-release of America's preeminent trash comedy classic, John Waters' Pink Flamingos. The medium of film has marked its centennial with the re-release of several motion picture milestones; now, on its 30th birthday, New Line Cinema, the parent company of Fine Line, has the occasion to make its singular contribution to the canon of rediscovered treasures. Like George Steven's Giant, Pink Flamingos vividly evokes a unique and enduring American landscape; like George Lucas's Star Wars, it portrays a mythic battle between good and evil; and like Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, it illustrates the importance of an arresting hairdo.

Aficionados of both cinema and trash will welcome never-before-seen footage and commentary by John Waters that has been added to the end of the original 1972 film. This archival after-dinner mint features the stars of Pink Flamingos and consists of entire scenes and subplots that were cut from the original film and were recently discovered in John Waters' attic.

Pink Flamingos stars Divine (Hairspray, Polyester), David Lochary, Mary Vivian Pearce, Mink Stole, Danny Mills, and Edith Massey. An all-American tale of competition and status, Pink Flamingos has as its towering heroine Divine (Divine), dubbed "the filthiest person alive" by the rabid tabloid Midnight. Taking a break from the limelight, Divine is living in peaceful, filthy obscurity under the name of "Babs Johnson" on the outskirts of Baltimore, MD (aka "Bawlamer") with her mentally feeble mother, Mama Edie (Edith Massey), her delinquent son Crackers (Danny Mills) and her traveling companion Cotton (Mary Vivian Pearce). But Divine is forced to defend her reputation when Connie and Raymond Marble (Mink Stole and David Lochary), proprietors of an illegal adoption ring, set in motion a diabolical plot to usurp her title. The jealous Marbles, however, are no match for the resourceful Divine and her family, and the matriarch triumphantly reasserts her status as the filthiest person alive. In the film's legendary epilogue, Divine, the actor, with the aid of a Hungarian sheepdog, proves s(h)e's no slouch when it comes to filth, either.

Shocking, funny and gleefully depraved, Pink Flamingos has been compared to the Bunuel/Dali landmark, Un Chien Andalou, as well as to an exploded septic tank. Waters himself subtitled it "an exercise in poor taste." Pink Flamingos was included in the 1976 Bicentennial Salute to American Film Comedy at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Often called "the granddaddy of midnight movies," Pink Flamingos opened at the Elgin Theater in New York in 1973, where it proceeded to run for 50 weeks. Over the next twelve years, the film continued to attract newcomers and repeat viewers to screenings at theaters across the country, and in many cities in Europe.

Discussing the re-release of Pink Flamingos, New Line Cinema founder and chairman Robert Shaye notes, "It's part of our roots and our off-beat heritage, and it pays homage to the iconoclastic and weird that in some context have always been part of New Line's corporate culture."

"I just wanted to make a movie that would make me and my friends laugh," says John Waters of his trash epic. "I certainly never thought that I would be talking about it 25 years later. But I'm very proud and I think it holds up. I've seen it with all kinds of audiences, and three generations later it still has the power to make people nervous. It's a little terrorist bomb, which is how I always wanted this movie to be."

Pink Flamingos was filmed during the winter of 1971-72 in Waters' hometown of Baltimore, MD. The movie shot only on weekends (Waters had to finish raising money during the week), generally in severe cold. There was no crew to speak of, and a mile long extension cord provided all the electricity for lighting on the mobile home set. The cast was composed of the director's closest friends, including his cross-dressing muse, Divine. Most of the actors had worked in Waters' earlier short and feature-length films.

"It was such a different time," John Waters says of that period, which saw the rise of "porno chic" (I Am Curious (Yellow) and Deep Throat) as well as the political triumph of Richard Nixon. "There was a kind of cultural war going on. It was the Yippie years of politics, with all those actions against the government by people like Abbie Hoffman. All that Yippie radicalism was done with theatrics, which certainly influenced me about style as terrorism."

"We definitely thought of ourselves as Yippies more than hippies. Well, he qualifies, Divine didn't think of himself as a hippie or a Yippie -- Divine thought of himself as a movie goddess."

The central character of Pink Flamingos, Divine/"Babs Johnson" (Divine) is, in fact, a kind of goddess: a deity of filth. Waters explains that Divine's title has less to do with matters of hygiene than with the ease and exuberance with which she and her family flaunt social mores. "With filth, I was trying to come up with a word that was a shocking word, that was a joyous word, a new word that incorporated all this kind of weirdness that we were celebrating. It was like what 'punk' meant, only much later in the 70s."

Divine has retreated from the glare of publicity to a pink and gray trailer, where she lives with her playpen-dwelling, egg-obsessed mother Edie (Edith Massey); Cotton (Mary Vivian Pearce), her Harlow-esque traveling companion; and her son, Crackers (Danny Mills), who is always thinking up inventive new ways to have sex for Cotton's voyeuristic pleasure. The hefty matriarch goes happily about her business -- teasing hitchhikers, filching a steak and tenderizing it for the family meal and promenading through downtown Baltimore in a tight-fitting dress and spring-o-lator shoes -- unaware that a jealous couple, Raymond and Connie Marble (David Lochary and Mink Stole) are at that very moment plotting to seize her title of filth.

Like many an American couple, the Marbles are preoccupied with their "social standing" and feel that they deserve to be known as the "filthiest people alive." The couple kidnaps female hitchhikers, locking them in the basement of their rowhouse where they are impregnated by the Marbles' servant Channing (Channing Wilroy). When the babies are born (the mothers usually die in childbirth), the Marbles give them names like "Noodles" and sell them to lesbian couples. Profits from the illicit adoption racket then are funneled into the Marbles' other business ventures: pornography shops and an elementary school heroin ring.

Waters acknowledges that the baby/smut/drug-peddlers' claim to filth is not without merit, but points out a crucial distinction between the Marbles and the Divine clan. "Connie and Raymond are bitter and jealous whereas Divine and her family are joyous; they're living happily in their filth and not bothering anybody. They are good until someone fucks with them, basically."

"It's quite simple in my movies," he continues. "There's a good guy and there's a bad guy. The good people are outsiders that turn their eccentricities and their neuroses into a style and win. And the villains are always judgmental and don't mind their own business and are unhappy at others' success."

The Marbles hire a spy named Cookie (Cookie Mueller) to go on a lewd date with Crackers and get him to reveal the location of Divine's hideout. The Marbles then fire their first volley in the battle of filth, mailing Divine, via special delivery, the foulest gift they can imagine for her birthday. What's more, they call the police to bust up Divine's bacchanalian birthday party, a real fun-and-prizes event with some spectacularly muscular entertainment.

However, the police are easily outwitted by Divine and her many filthy friends, who merely turn the raid into another occasion for merry-making. Intent on revenge, Divine and Crackers descend upon the Marble residence. Mother and son put an extremely visceral curse on the couples' home and decor, while the Marbles, rather prosaically, are busy burning Divine's trailer to the ground. Again, Divine triumphs with an imaginative act: she seizes the Marbles, tries them for their crimes before a camera-ready audience of the tabloid press, and executes them.

Divine lays to rest the issue of filth once and for all in the final frames of Pink Flamingos, performing an act that is a cinematic first and, presumably, a last. Waters has often joked that he could never live up to that moment, and Divine could never live it down.

Naturally, Waters is still questioned about that scene, whose impact derives from the fact that it is so obviously real. "I always say, if there's anything shocking about that scene, it's that at the time it was no big deal to us. We knew going in that it was going to be the last shot in the movie. I remember the day we shot it, almost shaking from laughter because it was so weird to actually, finally see this. It was a magic, surreal day in our young lives. And Divine was a trouper. To me, it just proved what a really dedicated actor he was."

Pink Flamingos premiered at the Baltimore Film Festival III, playing nine sold-out shows. P.J. O'Rourke, writing for the entertainment weekly The New York Herald, dubbed Waters "America's most brilliant young underground filmmaker ... who wants to do nothing but entertain you, after his fashion."

Entertainment was indeed Waters' goal, and he felt certain he could do it on a national scale. He sent a print of the film to Robert Shaye, the founder of New Line Cinema. New Line had made a name for itself by distributing campy chestnuts like the 30s drug-scare flick Reefer Madness and rock movies to college campuses and midnight movie houses.

"When I first looked at Pink Flamingos on a 16mm projector in our office, I actually had to stop the projector at one point and run the film back to be sure that I actually saw what I thought I had seen," Shaye recalls. He kept watching, and liked what he saw. "It is shocking, but it's very good-natured in its shock effect. I just thought that it would be a hoot and that people would really get off on it."

Pink Flamingos was booked into the Elgin Theater in Chelsea for one Friday midnight show in February 1973. Waters drove up to New York, and he and David Lochary proceeded to phone as many people as they knew to come see the movie. Though it was the coldest night of that winter, the Elgin was half-full for Pink Flamingos; the producer Ben Barenholtz, then the owner of the Elgin, booked the film again.

Thanks primarily to word-of-mouth (there was one small ad in The Village Voice), the line for the next screening of Pink Flamingos stretched halfway around the block. By March, Pink Flamingos was the talk of the town. James Brady wrote in the April 16, 1973 issue of New York magazine that the film went "beyond pornography" and had elicited comparisons to Dali and Bunuel's Un Chien Andalou (a comparison later made by the Museum of Modern Art, too). Andy Warhol broached the topic in a conversation with Federico Fellini in the pages of Interview, "There's a movie you should see in New York -- Pink Flamingos." Writing for The Village Voice, Jonas Mekas raved, "Pink Flamingos is ten times more interesting than Last Tango in Paris."

Of course, not everybody was entranced. Variety gave the film a memorable thumbs-down in 1974, calling it "monstrous," and Vincent Canby twice voiced his concern in The New York Times.

Waters was unperturbed by bad reviews. "The press were very fair to me. The right ones rose to the bait, and the alternative press certainly embraced it. And the kind of bad reviews we got really helped at the time. My favorite review said it went beyond humor to pure pathology. That always tickled me." Pink Flamingos ran for 50 weeks at the Elgin, eventually expanding from one midnight show a week to seven; then it moved uptown to the New Yorker for another 45 weeks. New Line began opening the film in other cities: Boston, Washington, Philadelphia, Chicago, and more. Recalls Waters, "It was thrilling because they all had really long runs." It played at midnight for ten consecutive years at the Nuart Theater in West Los Angeles. "That's legs," the director laughs.

In 1976, New York's Museum of Modern Art included Pink Flamingos in its Bicentennial Salute to American Film Comedy. "That it is an American film comedy there is no doubt. It has made audiences - particularly at midnight - laugh for years." wrote curators Larry Kardish and Adrienne Mancia. "It is almost unprecedented that a film without any journalistic or critical support should attract and sustain such a large and enthusiastic audience. People are sent to the theatre by friends who tell them the film is funny, that they will enjoy it - and most seem to."

J. Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum write in their book, Midnight Movies "Polemically, Pink Flamingos cut across the gay, hippie, and teen-age subcultures to invent its own category, 'the filthiest people alive.'" Waters, who as a teenager had thrilled to the underground films of Andy Warhol, Kenneth Anger and Jack Smith, had made a movie that "would take the midnight circuit by storm."

"It was a cultural phenomenon," says Robert Shaye. "Unfortunately, people have become more familiar with watching movies on television, even if they're cassettes that they pop into a VCR. The shared lunacy of going to see Pink Flamingos at midnight with a bunch of people who have seen it 15 times before has sort of gone out of fashion. I hope the re-release reminds people of the joy of the communal experience."

"It's hard to guess what audiences are going to think about this movie 25 years later." Shaye muses. "One thing you can say is that, as opposed to some of the genuine pornography that gets circulated in weird places these days, Pink Flamingos is not vicious; it's not a nasty movie. It's offbeat with more than a soupçon of imagination. In the spirit of John Waters' films as a whole, it's essentially light-hearted."

Yes, but that doesn't mean Pink Flamingos is a warm, safe, fuzzy beast. In the words of MOMA's Kardish and Mancia. "Its appearance ... belies its power. Its shaggy air is camouflage. But, careful, this is no mere joke from the underground: Pink Flamingos is truly subversive. It does take us by surprise."

That is what John Waters had in mind 25 years ago. "I was trying to make a movie for my audience at the time - the midnight movie audience, which I knew would be fairly eccentric. I wanted to prove to them there was something left that could still surprise them and make them laugh, because they all thought they had seen everything."

So, have audiences today really seen everything?

From 1972, comes the siren song of Divine/Babs Johnson: "I'm all dressed up and ready to fall in love."

Pink Flamingos is the story of two families, both competing for the title, "The Filthiest People Alive." As the movie opens, Divine (Divine), current holder of this title, is living under the assumed name of Babs Johnson in a pink and gray house trailer. With her live her traveling companion, Cotton (Mary Vivian Pearce), her delinquent son Crackers (Danny Mills), and her mentally ill mother Edie (Edith Massey).

Across town (in the Waverly area) live Connie and Raymond Marble (Mink Stole and David Lochary), proprietors of an illegal adoption ring. They, with the help of their servant Channing (Channing Wilroy) kidnap young girls, impregnate them and sell the children to lesbian couples. The Marbles use the proceeds of the adoption racket to finance heroin dealers at elementary schools.

The Marbles are extremely jealous of Divine's fame and notoriety and attempt to seize her title by "out-filthing" her; they send her the foulest birthday gift imaginable, have her party raided by the police, and finally burn her home to ground.

But Connie and Raymond Marble are no match for Divine and her family. Divine learns of the plot and puts them under arrest, tarring and feathering them in front of the media for revenge. Satisfied that she is still the filthiest person alive, she packs up her family and movies to Boise, Idaho to set up headquarters once again.