Waters’ ‘Liarmouth,’ partially set in city, optioned for the big screen
John Waters, Baltimore’s bard of bad behavior, is tentatively scheduled to return to the big screen, after nearly two decades.
The cult filmmaker confirmed in an emailed statement to The Baltimore Sun that his 2022 novel, “Liarmouth: A Feel-Bad Romance,” has been optioned as a feature film by Village Roadside Pictures. Waters will write the screenplay and direct the film.
“‘Liarmouth’ is the craziest thing I’ve written in a while, so maybe it’s fitting that my novel was shocking enough to jumpstart the engine of my film career” after sitting idle for so long, wrote Waters, 76, in the statement.
He added that he is “thrilled to be back in the movie business, hopefully to spread demented joy to adventuresome moviegoers around the world.”
The news was reported first by the online entertainment news site “Deadline.”
Like all of Waters’ films, “Liarmouth” is set partially in Baltimore; it begins in the baggage claim area of the Baltimore/ Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport and ends in the LGBTQ-friendly mecca of Provincetown, Massachusetts.
But that doesn’t necessarily mean filming will take place in Charm City. Waters wrote in the email that it’s too early to know.
“Let’s wait until I write the screenplay,” he wrote.
“Liarmouth” tells the story of Marsha Sprinkle, a suitcase thief and a weaver of sadistic but entertaining lies.
Marsha is on the lam from the airport police, her daughter’s sect of trampoline-bouncing enthusiasts and her own mother, who performs cosmetic surgery on pets. A former employee of Marsha’s is determined to collect the sexual salary
he’s been promised for providing a year of free labor, but his talking penis (aptly named “Richard”) has ideas of its own.
Though Waters has certainly been staying busy between exhibits of his visual art, his live performances and his guest star appearances on television shows, it is arguably on the big screen that the filmmaker’s vision reaches its gloriously filthy, err, climax.
Waters’ films include “Hairspray,” “Pink Flamingos,” “Cry-Baby” and “Pecker.” All of them feature his hometown of Baltimore and its characters to some extent and all were included in a two-month showcase of 11 films from Waters’ oeuvre that wrapped up at the Charles Theatre in late August. Earlier this year, Waters — long the consummate outsider — received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in Los Angeles.
But Waters has been inexplicably absent from the big screen for nearly two decades. His last movie was 2004’s “A Dirty Shame,” starring Tracey Ullmann, Johnny Knoxville, Selma Blair and Mink Stole.
In 2021, he told The Sun that he previously had been paid to write four screenplays that never got made.
“So what?” he said at the time. “It’s better than unemployment.”
Not that Waters ever left the film industry behind, exactly. Much of his visual art consists of old film stills that have been repurposed in a different context.
And in the 2021 interview, he told The Sun that he drew on four decades of writing movie scripts in creating “Liarmouth,” his first novel.
“It’s all part of how I think visually,” he said. “The novel is fiction, but all of my movies were fiction. Writing ‘Liarmouth’ wasn’t that much of a stretch.”
Waters also is keeping mum, for now, about potential casting choices, which must have the “Dreamlanders” on edge; they’re the cast and crew of regulars Waters has used in a film career spanning four decades.
So, let the speculation begin:
Who — or what — will play Richard?