When John Waters' Pink Flamingos was reissued for its 25th anniversary in 1997, gross-out comedy was just beginning to regain momentum in American multiplexes, with each new entry shrewdly calculated to tip the sacred cows left standing by the previous one. In an environment in which no taboos were left unshattered, the remarkable thing about the underground classic is that it hadn't lost its eternal power to shock. Waters' backwoods carnival of horrors—Edith Massey's shrill woman-child devouring eggs in a crib, the singing asshole, drag queen Divine's notorious shit-eating grin—drove a new generation of jaded viewers to the exits. A fellow Baltimore resident and longtime friend of the director, Steve Yeager brought his camera on set, and his revealing behind-the-scenes footage threads Divine Trash, an exhaustive and laudable documentary that carves out a niche for Pink Flamingos in cinema history. Yeager, who appeared briefly in the film as a reporter, spends a lot of time addressing Waters' formative years, from his boyhood obsession with The Howdy Doody Show to his first viewing of Herschell Gordon Lewis' Blood Feast through binoculars outside a drive-in. At a time when Lewis, Andy Warhol, Kenneth Anger, Russ Meyer, and Jonas Mekas were emerging as cult icons, Waters and his growing troupe of outcasts were pushing well beyond the boundaries of good taste. Though Pink Flamingos is no more shocking in content than the giant-lobster rape or the crucifixion/rosary-job sequence in his earlier Multiple Maniacs, its puerile genius marked Waters' newfound discipline as a sleaze auteur. Divine Trash assembles a fascinating gallery of talking heads, including cast and crew members, film critics (Mekas, J. Hoberman, Dennis Darmody), and indie stalwarts (Jim Jarmusch, Steve Buscemi, Hal Hartley, David O. Russell) indebted to his on-the-fly, outsider aesthetic. And, of course, there's Waters himself, who handles his role in Yeager's tribute with characteristic modesty and wit. Opening and closing with the dog-feces scene in Pink Flamingos—one subject calls it "the gulp heard 'round the world"—Divine Trash makes a good case for this moment as the ultimate showstopper, a pinnacle never to be equaled or repeated.