Hairspray director John Waters is looking to start production on his first feature film for 20 years, with Aubrey Plaza as the lead.
According to World of Reel, Emily the Criminal and The White Lotus star Plaza is confirmed for Liarmouth, Waters’ adaptation of his own 2022 novel. Subtitled “A Feel-Bad Romance” and described by its publishers as a “hilariously filthy tale of sex, crime, and family dysfunction”, Liarmouth centres on a scammer and compulsive liar called Marsha Sprinkle who splits from her partner Daryl and steals from both her daughter and her mother. The project was first announced in 2022 but appears to have been delayed by the writers’ and actors’ strikes.
A date for start of production has not been set. In a statement to the Guardian, Waters said: “We have no start date or green light to begin production but are working to, hopefully, make that happen.”
Waters’ last film as director was the poorly received 2004 release A Dirty Shame, starring Tracey Ullman, Johnny Knoxville and Selma Blair. A subsequent project, a children’s Christmas film called Fruitcake, was abandoned in 2009 after it lost its financing, but Waters’ profile was buoyed by a successful Broadway adaptation of Hairspray, his teen rock’n’roll musical released in 1988. A film version of the stage musical, starring John Travolta and Michelle Pfeiffer, was released in 2007.
Waters made his name on the “midnight movie” circuit in the 1970s with outrageously transgressive films such as Pink Flamingos and Polyester, made with a regular cast of collaborators including Divine, Mink Stole and Cookie Mueller, before moving into the mainstream with Hairspray, Cry-Baby (starring Johnny Depp) and Serial Mom.
