John Waters

Wholesome little Appleton, Wis., slips past the passenger window without arousing any visible interest in tonight's guest lecturer. A shop selling sewing machines. A Christian bookstore. The Martin School of Hair Design. Not very promising. The speaker fidgets in his seat for a few minutes and then abruptly turns to his student hosts. "So," he says, a conspiratorial smile spreading like a fissure across his face, "is there an underside to Appleton?" The kids dart complicit glances at one another, as if they have studied for this very question.

The title character of "Pecker," John Waters' 13th film, is a teen-age sandwich-maker in Hampden who is nicknamed Pecker because as a child he pecked at his food. But just as the film's title flashes on screen, Waters assures us that his dirty mind is still working, when he flashes a shot of Baltimore's Washington monument, photographed at an angle that renders the father of our country an unwitting spokesman for Viagra. Welcome to the world of John Waters, who at 52 remains in giggly thrall to the naughty appeal of sex, vice and all-around rude behavior.

Andy Warhol, Rodney King, Kenneth Anger, the Waco siege, David Begelman, the Weather Underground, the Danish film collective Dogma 95. If that confluence of names strikes you as humorous, you're the ideal audience for "Cecil B. DeMented," John Waters' playful skewering of Hollywood and its fringes. Stephen Dorff plays the title character in "Cecil B. DeMented," a wild-eyed cinema radical who rails against mainstream, profit-mongering movies and is trying to make his own celluloid manifesto, a no-budget, cinema verite screed against the Hollywood studios that are dedicated to "remaking foreign films and greenlighting movies based on video games," and perpetuating "phony life-affirming endings.

While John Waters filmed "Pink Flamingos" a quarter century ago, Steve Yeager, another young moviemaker, filmed him filming "Pink Flamingos. " We know what happened to Waters' footage. After its general release in 1973, "Pink Flamingos" became one the most celebrated underground movies in American film history, a depraved, subversive and altogether hilarious bit of celluloid that established Waters as one of the truly original voices in American cinema. The footage shot by Waters' friend Yeager had a more drawn-out trip to prominence.

Still, Waters runs deep. Unchanged, unrepentant, unabashed, the bad boy of Baltimore underground -- and eventually aboveground -- movie making, now looks back exactly as he looks forward. While he works on developing his new film, "Pecker," he's also celebrating the release a quarter-century ago -- a quarter-century ago!! -- of the movie that put him on the new map of American culture, "Pink Flamingos. " That work, hated, adored, banned, censored, mutilated, worshiped, but completely impossible to ignore, will be rereleased next Friday in an anniversary edition, with new footage.

You might think you know John Waters, but until you read his latest book, "Role Models" - well, to quote Jeremy Irons' Claus von Bulow, "You have no idea. " Waters avidly links his "Baltimore heroes," like the lesbian stripper Lady Zorro ("My kind of burlesque queen"), to far-flung friends and influences. They include "genius fashion dictator" Rei Kawakubo, who once brought him to Paris to model her work, and "outsider pornographers" like David Hurles. They also include artists and entertainers as popular as Johnny Mathis and as widely acclaimed as the psychological novelist Lionel Shriver ("We Need to Talk About Kevin")

If only she'd asked. There'll be no "Female Trouble" on the CD by Hustler magazine cover girl Candye Kane, after director-songwriter-sleaze raconteur John Waters denied her permission to include an update of the title song from his 1974 movie of the same name. Kane recorded the song last year. But Waters, who co-wrote the song with Bob Harvey, said he didn't know about it until he received her e-mail saying it was going to be on her CD. "She never asked ... permission," he said yesterday from his Baltimore home, "and you don't get permission by writing new lyrics and changing the whole thing."

Two people who've made great careers out of Baltimore's dark side - best-selling mystery novelist Laura Lippman and Wire creator David Simon - chose a third for their preacher when they tied the knot. The Rev. John Waters presided. It wasn't the first time that the director, who stars as The Groom Reaper in a Court TV show about marriages gone murderously wrong, has officiated at a wedding. "I've done it 13 times, and only one couple's been divorced," Waters said. Pretty good track record, considering that so many marriages end in divorce - and that Waters got into the wedding biz for one that never even happened.

John Waters, the actor, is on a roll. 'TIL DEATH DO US PART / / Premiere is 10 p.m. tomorrow on Court TV

John Waters always bases his films in Baltimore, has already made a film about a teen dance show, is hardly the kind of guy who'd stage a press conference at Planet Hollywood and has never met a would-be screenwriter named Ben Castro.So what was Castro doing at the New Orleans Planet Hollywood last month, announcing that his screenplay, "Electric Carousel: The Movie," about the rise and fall of a New Orleans dance show, would be made into a film starring Judd Nelson and directed by Baltimore's favorite cult film director?