Director John Waters is set to begin filming his first feature film in 20 years with part-time Marin County resident Aubrey Plaza as his lead.
The legendary director and gay icon whose boundary pushing in underground classics such as “Pink Flamingos,” “Polyester” and “Female Trouble” earned him the nickname “the Pope of Trash,” will be adapting his 2022 novel “Liarmouth.”
Plaza (“Emily the Criminal” and HBO’s “The White Lotus”) will play Marsha Sprinkle, described on the novel’s book jacket as “a suitcase thief, scammer, and master of disguise. Dogs and children hate her. Her own family wants her dead. She’s smart, she’s desperate, she’s disturbed, and she’s on the run with a big chip on her shoulder. They call her Liarmouth ― until one insane man makes her tell the truth.”
“Liarmouth,” subtitled “A Feel-Bad Romance,” is set in Waters’ hometown of Baltimore, where he splits his time along with San Francisco. It was announced as his next film — the first since “A Dirty Shame” in 2004 — shortly after the novel came out, but filming was delayed.
Plaza’s casting, first reported by the movie website A World of Reel, comes after two years of campaigning by the actress. In 2022, she told British magazine Dazed that when “Liarmouth” was first announced, “I emailed (Waters) immediately and said, ‘You better let me audition for you.’ I even look like the girl on the cover (of the book). I’m throwing myself at his feet. I’ll do anything to get the part. I mean anything.”
At a private party at a San Francisco condo in January, Waters and Plaza were spotted in a deep, long conversation that began in the dining room and moved to the front porch. The film is apparently still in preproduction and there is not yet a start date for filming.
In September, Waters received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, quipping “Here I am, closer to the gutter than ever.” That same week, a 400-item exhibit of memorabilia from his films, called “John Waters: Pope of Trash,” opened at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles and is slated to run through Aug. 4.
Waters, who owns an apartment in Nob Hill, told the Chronicle in 2021, “I consider San Francisco my home.” Across the Golden Gate Bridge, Plaza and her husband, writer and filmmaker Jeff Baena, own a house in West Marin, which they bought during the pandemic. (They also own a house in Hollywood Hills.) She told C magazine in January 2023 that her West Marin home is “just a wild, dreamlike place that is really my happy place. I honestly feel like there’s no more beautiful place on earth. And the oysters are the best in the world.”
She added that she is better suited to the mist and fuzzy sweaters of Northern California, noting “I’m not an L.A. scene-y person.”
Plaza even did a live reading of her children’s book “The Legend of the Christmas Witch” on her favorite community radio station, KWMR of Point Reyes, in 2021.
And Waters isn’t the only Bay Area-based director she is working with. Plaza is a star in Francis Ford Coppola’s highly anticipated epic “Megalopolis,” due out later this year, telling C magazine that working with the legendary director of “The Godfather” and “Apocalypse Now” was “like working with an excited child.”
“He’s not jaded in any way,” she said. “He loves actors, and you’d think that all directors would, but it’s not true. … Francis has the No. 1 quality that I think makes a successful director: He lets the movie evolve. He has no preciousness about what he has written. He’s the first person to throw it out the window and say, ‘You know what? Do what you did just there again.’ That’s why I like him.”
Plaza has been plenty busy lately. She was in an off-Broadway revival of John Patrick Shanley’s 1984 play “Danny and the Deep Blue Sea” last year, and she is also set to star alongside Kathryn Hahn in the Marvel series “Agatha: Coven of Chaos,” a spinoff of “WandaVision” set to premiere on Disney+ in the fall.
But for now, she’s in full Waters mode.
“Got to strike while the iron is hot, you know?” Plaza told C magazine of her busy schedule.
Reach G. Allen Johnson: ajohnson@sfchronicle.com