Desperate Visions, an essential introduction to the wild world of cult film director John Waters, and the important influence of the Kuchar brothers on his career. Deeply affected by their visionary, low-budget, trashy aesthetic, Waters insists that the Kuchars “made me want to make films… THEY are the reason.” Featuring rare photographs and extensive interviews with Waters, members of his notorious entourage (including Divine and Mink Stole), and with George and Mike Kuchar, the book documents a fascinating period of extreme underground filmmaking taking place in New York, Baltimore, and San Francisco in the 1960s and 70s. Variously known as ‘The King of Kink’, ‘The Sultan of Sleaze’  and ‘The Prince of Puke’, Waters was willingly, gleefully typecast as America’s beastliest movie maker, with his mutant, hybrid cinema of exploitation and underground. Desperate Visions is a bumper, bibliographic publication for fans of the Pink Flamingos, Female Trouble and Desperate Living director.