Cecil B.Demented

Few directors have been as faithful to their birthplaces as John Waters was to Baltimore. It was the home-town setting for several Barry Levinson films too (and TV's The Wire), but Waters really put the city on the cinematic map. In 2000, with Cecil B.Demented, the subversive writer-director made the Maryland capital a farcical exemplar of American movie-making mayhem as "The Hollywood of the East" and the proud location for sequels such as "Gump Again".

One of Waters' less appreciated comic fantasies, the DeMille pastiche earned only one award nomination, given to Melanie Griffith for the Worst Actress Razzie (luckily for her, it was the year Madonna made The Next Best Thing).

She's not that bad, and the opening scenes of her arrival in Baltimore as the star of a mainstream Hollywood drama at its premiere are enjoyable depictions of a bitchy foul-mouthed two-faced actress at work. After she's kidnapped by a gang of anarchic young film-lovers, led by Cecil B.Demented (dead-eyed Stephen Dorff), to be the lead actress in their reality "cinema terror" epic attacking the industry, the focal point shifts woefully.

Waters' screenplay bogs itself down in non-funny verbiage and antics, trying to give juicy cameo roles to a dozen actors (including Maggie Gyllenhaal) instructed to ham and camp as wildly as possible. Griffith does her best to play a professional mainstream actress swimming in a tide of amateur theatrics, directed forcefully by the obsessive Dorff character, who insists on sexual abstinence until the movie's completed.

His adopted name, and the names of other directors tattooed on the cast's bodies or scattered around the outre sets in a dilapidated movie theatre, cannot be seen as in-jokes. They are petty name-dropping examples of Waters' failure to create valid satire from a potentially rich concept: "We believe technique to be nothing more than failed style ... there are no rules in outlaw cinema". There is one rule, that Waters obeyed well at other times: amuse a mainstream audience even if you shock it, as he did with Hairspray, Pecker and Cry-Baby.

One appropriate casting touch is the use of Waters regular Patricia Hearst (the notorious victim of a real-life kidnapping) as one of the film crew's mums. Among the young cast, Andrew Grenier later found long-term employment on TV in Entourage, Lawrence Gilliard Jr appeared in The Wire for two years, Michael Shannon (and Gyllenhaal) enjoyed mainstream careers. Ricki Lake was another member of Waters' own entourage.

He made another unsuccessful film four years later, in 2004 (Dirty Shame), but has been visible more often this century in documentaries, providing first-person accounts of America's gay and cultural revolutions. He was one of their flag-bearers, ironically using good technique to display fun-filled messages much of the time. Not so well this time.