📅 Friday, November 29th – Wednesday, December 4th
🕓 Multiple showings: 2:30 PM, 7:00 PM, 9:30 PM | Check for specific daily times
📍 Grand Illusion Cinema: 1403 NE 50th St, Seattle
💰 $9 – $12 | Reserve your seat
🎬 35mm film presentation, 97 minutes
Sometimes, you just wanna feel filthy during the holidays. Enter the “Pope of Trash” John Waters’ mischievous, campy masterpiece returning to Seattle’s oldest continuously running movie theater in glorious 35mm for the film’s 50th anniversary.
What makes it special:
- 💫 Divine‘s explosive performance as Dawn Davenport, a teenage rebel turned criminal glamour queen
- 🏙️ Shot in Waters’ beloved Baltimore with his crew of regular collaborators
- 🎭 Features the director’s signature troupe including Mink Stole, David Lochary, and Edith Massey
- 😍 Waters’ personal favorite among his early works
- 🎉 Part of Grand Illusion’s 20th anniversary celebration series
📽️ Last chance!
After 50+ years in the U District, Grand Illusion Cinema will screen its final films at this location on January 31st, 2025. The volunteer-run nonprofit isn’t closing for good—they’re planning to relocate and rebuild. Read more about their final month of programming and how to support their next chapter.
Female Trouble follows the unwieldy Dawn Davenport (played by Waters’ equally filthy muse/genius Divine), a troubled, feisty teenager who goes off the deep end after not getting a pair of cha-cha heels for Christmas from her boring parents. She runs away, gets knocked up, and becomes intricately involved in a life of wild crime. “I can’t wait to get out there,” cries Dawn at one point. “I can feel exhibitionism throbbing in my veins!”
Waters says it’s his favorite among his early works and it’s not hard to understand why. He filmed the movie around his native Baltimore and cast his weird crew/collaborators—David Lochary, Mink Stole, Edith Massey, Cookie Mueller, and Mary Vivian Pearce—in supporting parts. But it’s Divine who steals the show. She basically explodes off the screen with her raw, energetic performance and grimy glamor. Billed as a “new high in low taste,” Female Trouble is deeply perverse in its humor and feels electrically dangerous even five decades later.
Pro tips:
- 🕥 Runtime: 97 minutes
- 📿 Bring your pearls—you might need to clutch them.
- 🎄 For more Waters holiday chaos, catch his Christmas show nearby.
💌 Be Our Pen Pal! Find out what’s happening in Seattle by subscribing to our newsletter.
