Fund John Waters
John Waters built a career on pushing boundaries. With films under his belt like Hairspray, Crybaby, and Pink Flamingos, Waters is known for his beautifully strange taste. Yet today the famously acclaimed director can’t secure funding for any future films.
Making movies is tough for any director scraping together funding. The fact that a legendary filmmaker like John Waters faces the same struggle is wrong and a worrying sign for the future of art. If we want the weird stuff to survive, we have to support it, and that starts with a donation.
This campaign promotes the fictional '“Fund John Waters” and uses an outlandish mix of advertisements which mirror the absurdity of his work, viewers are directed to a foundation page to contribute directly. A push to keep art wonderfully weird.
In collaboration with Sarah Anish.
Pornhub is teaming up with the Fund John Waters campaign to offer exclusive free streaming of his entire filmography. While watching, users will be directed straight to the foundation page, supporting filthy cinema just got easy.
Trixie Cosmetics is collaborating with the John Waters Foundation to launch two perfectly strange products. The “Stashscara,” a dual mascara and eyeliner stick named after Waters’ iconic pencil thin stache, and “Ultra Clutch Hairspray,” the exact kind of can you’d catch Tracy Turnblad using on the Corny Collins Show. Camp is one purchase away.
A billboard that appears during the day as junk in a window, at night the silhouettes of the mess appear to be two naked people with overly sized private parts, a QR code glows in the dark and directs you to the Fund John Waters donation page.
A fake Vanity Fair article dramatically announces John Waters’ “death.” At the end, it reveals he’s very much alive, it was clickbait to show how people only care once someone’s gone. The article then directs readers to the Fund John Waters donation page to support his next film.
Outside the gates of Walt Disney Studios, an Iron Man suit lies staged like it’s been massacred. A QR code sign beside it directs people to the Fund John Waters page.
In a subway train, a few poles are decorated to look like cigarettes, with stickers of mouths on the floor “smoking” them. Writing on the poles guides viewers straight to the Fund John Waters donation page.