College credit for watching the films of John Waters? That’s what some students will receive next spring, if they sign up for an English class at The College of DuPage in Glen Ellyn, Illinois.
Waters, 78, is scheduled to teach a masterclass on filmmaking as the highlight of a semester-long course, ENGLI 2234: Film Directors and Authorship. Led by English professor (and Waters fan) Michelle Moore, the class will meet once a week to screen and discuss Waters’ work as well as other movies and books that have influenced him. Available only for the Spring of 2025, the class will run from Jan. 27 to March 23 at the public community college. Waters is helping to prepare the syllabus and will come to campus to host his masterclass with the students in March.
“We will be covering all of his films, including his early ones that are not his completed films,” Moore said in an interview with The Courier, a college publication. “We will also be watching films that provide the context for the kind of work he is doing. We will also be thinking about Waters against the commercial popular culture he was lampooning in the ‘80s and ‘90s. He is an icon in the LGBTQ world. There are so many people who have said that he’s saved their lives by presenting a place where outsiders are on top. That legacy continues to this day.”
According to The Courier, Waters’ in-person masterclass has a limit of 35 students. First priority will go to students enrolled in Moore’s English course, and any remaining seats will be available to the wider college community.
A book about ‘The Films of John Waters’
In addition to the class, Moore is co-editing a book of essays entitled “ReFocus: The Films of John Waters.” The latest in a series of ‘ReFocus’ books about filmmakers, it’s scheduled to come out in mid-2025, with Edinburgh University Press as the publisher. It follows the release of a lavish coffee table book that the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles published in 2023 to go along with its 11-month retrospective, “John Waters: Pope of Trash.”
“ReFocus: The Films of John Waters” will offer a scholarly examination of Waters’ work and impact, with essays by Moore and others. “I have been a giant John Waters fan for as long as I can remember,” Moore told The Courier. “When it came time to write another book with my co-editor, Professor Brian Brems, it just popped into my head: John Waters. Who else has been so beloved for so long and has not received their due in the academic world?”
According to a Call for Papers that Moore and Brems issued in 2023, “ReFocus: The Films of John Waters” is part of a series of anthologies examining “overlooked American film directors.” The same editors published “Refocus: The Films of Paul Schrader,” in 2020.
“John Waters’s career has been prolific: directing and writing over 17 feature films and shorts over five decades, as well as writing a handful of books about filmmaking, popular culture and most recently, a novel,” Moore and Brems wrote. “And yet, because of his outsider status, which he has maintained by staying rooted in his hometown of Baltimore, his creation of “trash cinema,” an ongoing fascination with the borders of sex and violence, and an emphasis on a do-it-yourself aesthetic and approach to art making and directing, his contributions to the American cinema as a director have been largely overlooked by established film academics. In addition, his work demands new analysis in light of the last decade of LGBTQ film analysis.”
The book will contain essays of roughly 5,000 to 8,000 words. The goal, the editors say, is: “to analyze Waters’s role as an independent filmmaker working from a queer point of view, positioning him in parallel, though not exactly within, the New Hollywood trajectory of the late 1960s and 1970s. It will argue for Waters’s significance as an auteur and a film provocateur whose contributions to queer culture played a major role in bringing marginalized people to the screen.”
Recipient of the 2024 Coolidge Award
Waters’ life and career are also getting attention in Massachusetts, where the filmmaker will receive the 2024 Coolidge Award on Thursday from the Coolidge Corner Theatre in Brookline.
Established in 2004, the annual award recognizes an artist whose work is consistently original and challenging. The celebration begins at 3 p.m. with a presentation of Waters’ 2000 black comedy “Cecil B. Demented,” featuring an introduction and post-screening Q&A with the filmmaker. Then at 8 p.m., Waters will take part in an onstage conversation about his work, moderated by arts editor and radio program host Jared Bowen. The conversation will include a tribute clip reel and will be followed by the presentation of the Coolidge Award.
Located at 290 Harvard Street in Brookline, the Coolidge Corner Theatre (Coolidge.org) is an independent cinema and cultural institution with four screens and the capacity to seat more than 700 people. Founded in 1933, it became a non-profit in 1989 and is operated by a foundation known for its contemporary independent film, repertory and educational programming.
After Thursday’s award presentation, The Coolidge will show four other John Waters films between Nov. 22 and Dec. 5: “Female Trouble,” “Desperate Living,” “A Dirty Shame,” and “Pecker.”
Past recipients of the Coolidge Award include Meryl Streep; Jonathan Demme; Michael Douglas; Julianne Moore; Liv Ullmann; Ruth E. Carter; Jane Fonda; Viggo Mortensen and Werner Herzog, among others.
