Trivia: Hands down one of the most popular broadcast journalists in America during the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, Tom Brokaw began his reporting career in 1962, at Omaha, Nebraska's KMTV, then enjoyed stints on the Late Evening News at WSB-TV in Atlanta and KNBC-TV in Los Angeles before moving to NBC News as an anchor in 1966 -- a post that witnessed him covering such events as national presidential elections and the Watergate scandal (from 1973-1976). From 1976-1981, Brokaw served as an anchor on NBC's popular morning talk program Today, but he is best known to millions for his subsequent roles as the managing editor and anchor on the NBC Nightly News. In addition, Brokaw made international headlines in 2008, when he agreed to temporarily moderate the political discussion program Meet the Press following the unanticipated death of longtime anchor Tim Russert. Alongside his on-camera activity, Brokaw also authored numerous nonfiction books, including The Greatest Generation (1998), The Greatest Generation Speaks (1999), and A Long Way from Home (2002), and created documentaries including Why Can't We Live Together? (1997) and America Remembers: 9/11 Air Traffic Controllers (2003).

Trivia: New York native and playwright Tony Kushner began producing his own works in New York in the 1970s. Though he was still in college, Kushner received immense praise for his writing. He would go on to write several books and many plays, winning more than one Tony and Pulitzer for his work, especially the Angels in America series, which was adapted into a mini-series in the early 2000s. Kushner also helped pen the screenplay for 2005's Munich.

Trivia: Known for his outrageous, divinely comedic performances on stage and screen, Nathan Lane has led a career encompassing Broadway, television, and film. Born Joe Lane in Jersey City, New Jersey on February 3, 1956, Lane took his stage name from Nathan Detroit, the character he played to great acclaim in the 1992 Broadway version of Guys and Dolls.Lane made his film debut in 1987's Ironweed, and he spent the rest of the 1980s and early 1990s playing secondary roles in films like Joe Versus the Volcano (1990), Frankie and Johnny (1991), and Addams Family Values (1993). During this time, his stage career was thriving; in addition to his celebrated turn in Guys and Dolls (for which he won a Tony nomination, as well as Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle Awards), he frequently collaborated with playwright Terrence McNally, who cast him in a number of his plays, including The Lisbon Traviata, in which Lane played an opera queen, and Love! Valour! Compassion!, in which he starred as Buzz, an HIV-positive musical aficionado who provides much of the play's comic relief and genuine anger. The actor won particular acclaim for his portrayal of the latter character, taking home Obie and Drama Desk Awards, as well as other honors, for his work.In 1994, the same year that he starred in the stage version of Love! Valour! Compassion! (his role was played in the film version by Jason Alexander), Lane gained fame of a different sort, lending his voice to Timon, a hyperactive meerkat in Disney's animated The Lion King. He reprised the role for the extremely successful movie's 1998 sequel. Two years after playing a meerkat, Lane finally became widely visible to screen audiences as Robin Williams' flamboyantly limp-wristed lover in The Birdcage, Mike Nichols' remake of La Cage aux Folles. The film helped to establish Lane--who was at the time starring on Broadway in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum--as a comic actor worthy of big-screen exposure, and in 1997 he was given his own vehicle to display his talents, Mouse Hunt. Unfortunately, the film was a relative disappointment, as was Encore! Encore!, a 1998 sitcom that cast the actor as a Pavorotti-like opera singer alongside Glenne Headly and Joan Plowright. However, Lane continued to work steadily, appearing both on stage and in film. In 1999, he could be seen in At First Sight and Get Bruce, a documentary about comic writer Bruce Vilanch. The same year, he could also be heard in Stuart Little, a live action/animated adaptation of E.B White's celebrated children's book.Over the coming years, Lane would appear in several films, including a new big screen adaptation of The Producers and the fairy tale Mirror Mirror.

Trivia: Actor Lee Pace was born in Oklahoma, but spent some of his childhood living overseas with his family. While studying back in the states, he got involved in regional theater and was accepted to the Juilliard School. His early stage credits include Romeo and Juliet, King Richard III, and Julius Caesar. After receiving his BFA, he made his professional stage debut in the off-Broadway play The Credeux Canvas. His striking television debut came the next year in the Showtime original movie A Soldier's Girl, based on a true story. He received recognition at the Golden Globes, Gotham Awards, and the Independent Spirit Awards for his portrayal of transgendered nightclub singer Calpernia Addams. The same year, Pace could also be seen in the Los Angeles regional theater production of Blackout.Riding high on the buzz from A Soldier's Girl, in 2004 Pace landed a role on the Fox dramedy Wonderfalls. While the show gained a cult-following, it only lasted half a season, but Pace's rise continued with roles in such well-received features as Infamous and The Good Shepherd. The coming years would find particular success for Pace in movies like A Single Man, Marmaduke, and When in Rome, not to mention franchise films like The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 2 and The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey.

Trivia: It isn't likely that Nancy Davis will be remembered by posterity as a film actress, though this was the career she pursued with moderate success from 1949 to 1958. Educated at Smith College, Davis decided to emulate her mother, a former actress, by trying her luck in the theater. Her first professional engagement was as the kidnapped ingénue who wandered through the action in a daze while clad in a flimsy nightgown in ZaSu Pitts' touring stage vehicle Ramshackle Inn. Signed to an MGM contract in 1949, she essayed supporting roles in such films as East Side West Side (1949) and Shadow on the Wall (1951) before graduating to leads. Perhaps her best screen assignment was The Next Voice You Hear (1951) in which she played a pregnant housewife whose life is profoundly altered when the voice of God is heard over the radio. Distressed by the Red Scare sweeping through Hollywood in the early '50s, Davis went directly to the president of the Screen Actors Guild with proof that she'd never participated in anything remotely Communistic. The SAG president at the time was a journeyman actor named Ronald Reagan with whom Davis fell in love; they were married in 1952, four years after Reagan's divorce from actress Jane Wyman. Devoting herself to her husband and two children, Davis curtailed her acting career; among her final assignments were a handful of TV appearances on GE Theater, hosted by Reagan, and the 1957 war drama Hellcats of the Navy, in which she co-starred with her husband. She stood steadfastly by Reagan's side during his nine-year tenure as Governor of California and shared his triumph when he was elected President of the United States in 1980. In addition to her duties as First Lady, Mrs. Reagan spearheaded the anti-drug "Just Say No" program, which though widely ridiculed proved much more effective than most other projects of its kind. Enduring the slings and arrows of many critics (including, briefly, her own daughter Patti), Nancy Davis Reagan has proven herself a tower of strength and a true survivor; she withdrew from public life to provide full-time care for her husband, who was suffering from Alzheimer's Disease. After the former president died in 2004, she remained active in politics until her own death, in 2016, at age 94.

Trivia: It is a fairly safe assumption that if not for a career change which, ironically enough, took him out of the motion picture industry, Ronald Reagan would not rank among Hollywood's best-known stars; a genial if not highly skilled actor, he made few memorable films, and even then he rarely left much of a lasting impression. Of course, in 1980 Reagan became the President of the United States, and with his political ascendancy came a flurry of new interest in his film career. His acting work -- especially the infamous Bedtime for Bonzo -- became the subject of much discussion, the majority of it highly satirical. Still, there is no denying that he enjoyed a long and prolific movie career. Moreover, he remains among the first and most famous actors to make the move into politics, a trend which grew more and more prevalent in the wake of his rise to power.Born February 6, 1911, in Tampico, IL, Ronald Wilson Reagan began his acting career while studying economics at Eureka College. He broke into show business as a sportscaster at a Des Moines, IA, radio station, and from there assumed the position of play-by-play announcer for the Chicago Cubs. By the mid-'30s, he relocated to Hollywood, signing with Warner Bros. in 1937 and making his screen debut later that year in Love Is on the Air. Reagan made over a dozen more films over the course of the next two years, almost all of them B-movies. In 1939, however, he won a prominent role in the Bette Davis tearjerker Dark Victory, a performance which greatly increased his visibility throughout the Hollywood community. It helped him win his most famous role, as the ill-fated Notre Dame football hero George Gipp in the 1940 film biography Knute Rockne: All American. At the film's climax he delivered the immortal line "Win one for the Gipper!," an oft-quoted catchphrase throughout his White House tenure.In 1940, Reagan married actress Jane Wyman, with whom he had two children. The following year, he co-starred in Sam Wood's acclaimed Kings Row, arguably his most accomplished picture. During World War II, he served as a non-combative captain in the Army Air Corps, producing a number of training films. Upon returning to Hollywood in 1947, he began a five-year term as president of the Screen Actors Guild, a position he again assumed in 1959. It was during this period that Reagan, long a prominent liberal voice in Hollywood politics, became embroiled in McCarthy-era battles over communism in the film industry, and gradually his views shifted from the left to the right. He also continued appearing in films and in 1950 co-starred in the well-received melodrama The Hasty Heart. A year later, Reagan accepted perhaps his most notorious role, in Bedtime for Bonzo, in which he portrayed a college professor who befriends his test subject, a chimpanzee; throughout his political career, the picture was the butt of a never-ending series of jokes. During the 1950s, Reagan freelanced among a variety of studios. Still, his film career began to wane, and in 1954 he began an eight-year stint as the host of the television series General Electric Theater. Among Reagan's final film appearances was 1957's Hellcats of the Navy, where he appeared with actress Nancy Davis, his second wife. He did not make another film prior to narrating 1961's The Young Doctors, and with 1964's remake of The Killers, he effectively ended his performing career. That same year he entered politics, actively campaigning for Republican Presidential candidate Barry Goldwater. In 1966, Reagan was elected Governor of California, and over the course of his eight-year gubernatorial stint emerged as one of the Republican party's most powerful and well-recognized voices. In 1976, Reagan ran against Gerald Ford in the Republican Presidential primary, but was unsuccessful; four years later, however, he defeated Jimmy Carter to become the nation's 40th President. The rest, as they say, is history.

Trivia: One of the decades-long mainstays of the CBS news magazine 60 Minutes, Canadian broadcast journalist Morley Safer single-handedly altered the face of live and pre-taped correspondence. In particular, Safer's 1965 piece on American escalation in Vietnam (with its indelible image of Cam Ne blazing to the ground at the hand of U.S. Marines) is credited with doing much to turn the tide of public opinion against that miscalculated conflict. This and other similar efforts virtually established Safer as a household name. Born in Toronto, Ontario, Safer attended Harbord Collegiate Institute and the University of Western Ontario as a young man, and quickly launched his reporting career, first in traditional print journalism for several English and Canadian newspapers and wire services, then in broadcasting, as a correspondent for the CBC. Following a stint at the London CBS bureau, Safer traveled to Vietnam to open up the CBS Saigon office (1965) and received a promotion to CBS London bureau chief in 1967 -- a position from which he covered Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. Safer joined the weekly anchorage of 60 Minutes in December 1970, following the departure of Harry Reasoner, and the program's producers appointed him as the premier documentary reporter. Over the following decades, Safer helped bring numerous unforgettable accounts into the nation's homes, via that series. In addition to his broadcast work, Safer appeared as an interviewee in the 1981 documentary Vietnam: Chronicle of a War. He also joined many of his 60 Minutes colleagues for amusing cameos on a 1993 episode of the Diane English/Candice Bergen series Murphy Brown, "All the Life That's Fit to Print."Safer continued to work for CBS and 60 Minutes up until 2016; he filed his last report in March of that year and passed away in May, at age 84.

Trivia: His no-nonsense glare and distinctive comb-over as instantly recognizable as his landmark, the Fifth Avenue skyscraper, Donald Trump, born on June 14th, 1946, established himself as one of Manhattan's most successful real-estate developers before moving on to become the catchphrase-spouting host of reality television's most competitive series -- The Apprentice, and eventually, politics.As a young, aspiring businessman the Queens, NYC native wheeled and dealed alongside his father, Fred, in the pair's Sheepshead Bay office for five years, later striking out on his own to construct not only the world-renowned Trump Tower, but such luxury residential building as Trump Palace, Trump Plaza, Trump Parc, Trump World Tower, and Trump Park Avenue as well. Of course, Trump was never one to shy away from a challenge, so in addition to the residential construction he also found success in the gaming arena by establishing The Trump Organization as one of the world's largest operators of hotels and casinos. After opening three world-class casinos and hotels in Atlantic City, NJ (including Trump Plaza, Trump Marina, and Trump Taj Mahal), Trump boldly began expanding westward with the construction of The Trump Casino in Buffington, IN, and Trump 29 Casino in Palm Springs, CA. Trump also catered to the wealthy elite with construction of various high-profile golf clubs and luxury private clubs throughout the United States.Trump's outspoken nature repeatedly found the tireless business tycoon making headlines throughout the 1990s, and moving into the new millennium it began to appear that Trump's high-profile career in real estate was taking a back seat to his increasingly prolific public persona. Trump also became the subject of much gossip as a result of his turbulent marriages to former wives Ivana Trump and Marla Maples. He expounded on his personal philosophy of profit in such best-selling books including The Art of the Deal, Surviving at the Top, and The America We Deserve. However popular his writings were, it was his stint as the host of the Miss USA and Miss Universe pageants that began to move Trump to the forefront of popular culture. In 2004, any question of Trump's status as a media icon was instantly put to rest with the premiere of the hit reality television series The Apprentice. An instant hit with audiences, The Apprentice showcased the heated competition between a variety of contestants as they vied for the coveted position of personal assistant to The Donald himself. Each episode, one unfortunate contestant would be coldly dispatched by Trump with the decidedly curt and unmistakable catchphrase "You're Fired," which instantly became as essential a component of the public lexicon as The Fonzie's "Heeeeeeeeey!," Arnold's "Whatch talkin' 'bout Willis?" or Ralph Kramden's "One of these days, Alice" had in decades previous. Trump's position in popular culture only grew in the years following, as The Apprentice continued to fare well, despite a notorious feud with Martha Stewart following poor ratings on her season hosting the series in 2005. Trump openly discussed the possibility of running for public office many times over the course of the 2000's, suggesting himself as a candidate for everything from Governor of New York to President of the United States, and considering affiliations ranging from the Reform Party to the GOP. Always looking for the most attention grabbing position, Trump registered with the Democratic Party in 2001, but later sided with the Republicans in 2009. In 2011, he announced he was beginning a primary campaign to run for president on the Republican ticket in 2012, and subsequently began seeking publicity through stunts like affiliating himself with the conspiracy-theorist "birther" movement, and dropping the f-bomb in public statements about gas prices. He eventually ran for president in 2016, and garnered enough electoral college votes to become the presumptive candidate for the Republican party. After defeating Hillary Clinton in the 2016 general election, Trump became the 45th President of the United States on January 20, 2017.

Trivia: Socialite Ivana Trump initially gained national recognition as the first wife of billionaire Donald Trump, to whom she was wed from 1977 to 1992. Born Ivana Marie Zelnickova in 1949, she grew up in Gottwaldov, Czechoslovakia, just south of Prague, and established herself as a champion skier at an early age. After earning her masters in the dual arenas of physical education and languages, Ivana spent a number of years professionally coaching ski racers with then-paramour George Syrovatka in Montréal, Canada, then shifted gears and moved into modeling for the Audrey Morris agency during the 1970s -- a line of work that inadvertently brought her to New York City and introduced her to Donald Trump in 1976. The two married within a year and had three children: Ivanka Trump, Donald Trump Jr., and Eric Trump. As Mrs. Trump, Ivana worked for many years as vice president of interior design for the Trump Organization. Following their much-publicized and ballyhooed divorce (an event that occupied an inordinate number of tabloid pages and headlines), she established two of her own companies, Ivana, Inc. and Ivana Haute Couture; graced numerous print advertisements for a plethora of brands; and significantly (like her ex-husband) moved into work as on-camera talent, as the subject of her own Lifetime network biography special, Intimate Portrait: Ivana Trump (2001) and the host of her own reality television special, Ivana Young Man on the Oxygen Channel. The program traveled behind the scenes to witness Trump guiding an affluent young socialite into marriage with the proper suitor.

Trivia: Forever associated with the 60 Minutes Sunday-night news magazine on CBS -- which he anchored for an astonishing 38 years (1968-2006) -- Mike Wallace became synonymous with on-air trustworthiness and reliability, and the nation's preeminent guide to outstanding, documentary-style probes of contemporary issues and global phenomena. Born May 9, 1918, in the posh Boston suburb of Brookline, MA, Wallace attended the University of Michigan as a young man, and later accepted a job as announcer at WOOD-AM radio in nearby Grand Rapids (in 1939). Wallace segued from this into a stint manning radio commercials and announcing serialized radio dramas at stations in Detroit and Chicago. Within a decade, Wallace leapt into the then-nascent medium of television with full abandon, working in any and every capacity allowed him, including dramatic roles, game shows, and the occasional assignment hosting a talk show, such as the now-forgotten Mike and Buff. In 1963, Wallace grew sick of non-news interests and reported to CBS News president Richard Salent, asserting that he had "sanitized" himself of all television matters unconnected to nonfiction reportage. Salent allegedly hired Wallace with a 65-percent pay deduction, but the burgeoning newsman persisted, and in time received title credit on the CBS morning news broadcasts; The CBS Morning News With Mike Wallace ran from 1963 through 1966 and garnered enormous popularity. But Wallace's greatest legacy was still at least two years away. On Tuesday evening, September 24, 1968, 60 Minutes premiered at 10:00 p.m., with Wallace as its chief anchor and Harry Reasoner as his co-host. According to Broadcasting magazine, the format itself developed out of Night Beat, a local talk program hosted by Wallace in 1956, in which he had exhibited a trademark "adversarial style" of journalism. 60 Minutes producers' strategy involved counterbalancing this aggression with Reasoner's genial "nice guy" approach. The plan worked, and the program's ratings shot up to astronomical levels, qualifying it as nothing less than a national phenomenon. As noted, Wallace remained on 60 Minutes for decades, but even after he retired, he returned from time to time to man periodic interviews. In addition to his role on 60 Minutes, Wallace occasionally dabbled in acting, with a cameo in Elia Kazan's shattering indictment of television, A Face in the Crowd (1957), as well as a humorous 1993 guest appearance on Murphy Brown (a series that a number of his colleagues also appeared on). Wallace hosted the popular documentary series The 20th Century With Mike Wallace (1994-2000), which investigated everything from the Gulf War to celebrity murders to gun control and hurricanes. He also appears as an interviewee in the documentaries Vietnam: Chronicle of a War (1981) and Watergate: The Secret Story (1992).Wallace died in 2012 at the age of 93.

Trivia: American pop artist Andy Warhol became a pop icon himself, symbolizing the wild decadence of the "beautiful people" of the 1970s. Born Andrew Warhola in Pennsylvania, he studied at the Carnegie Institute of Technology before designing advertisements for women's shoes. After gaining notoriety for his pop-art renditions of things such as Campbell's Soup cans and silk screens of Marilyn Monroe, Warhol began making experimental films during the early '60s. Most of his early works were little more than passive chronicles of the ordinary. For example, in the film Sleep, he simple recorded a man sleeping for several hours. Such endeavors were heralded as groundbreaking by other experimental filmmakers, but the public and most critics generally regarded them as wastes of film, and their time. Still, Warhol continued making these plotless films until he eventually began adding crude soundtracks and sketchy scripts. Many of these films are filled with his "players": the beautiful people, "freaks," and wealthy dilettantes that constantly surrounded the artist and his "Factory," an art studio he founded in 1962. His films became a form of cinéma vérité, a voyeur's delight of strange people doing equally strange things. Some of the players Warhol turned into underground celebrities included Candy Darling, Viva, Holly Woodlawn, and Ingrid Superstar. Simply playing versions of themselves, they left the viewer to decide if they were, in fact, real people or simply fantastical figures. Many of Warhol's films were centered on sex and death, and the sex in his films was often explicit and transcended traditional gender boundaries. In 1968, Warhol was wounded by a disgruntled Factory reject, an incident which inspired the 1996 movie I Shot Andy Warhol. While healing, he began to withdraw from filmmaking, closed the Factory, and turned the reins of his operation over to filmmakers such as Paul Morrissey, who helped make subsequent movies more commercially accessible. Morrissey was behind Warhol's best known films Flesh for Frankenstein and Blood for Dracula, both of which were shot while in Rome in 1973. Although Warhol never fully recovered from the attempt on his life and had stopped making films, he did continue his voyeurism of the strange lives of his illustrious friends via the Polaroid camera he carried with him until he died in 1987 from complications following surgery.

Trivia: Of all the dubious titles awarded him -- "The Sultan of Sleaze," "The Baron of Bad Taste," and so forth -- filmmaker John Waters prefers "The Pope of Trash." Born in Baltimore to an upper-middle-class Catholic family, Waters has always been fascinated (obsessed, actually) with violence and gore. He claims that the biggest rush of his childhood occurred when he found dried blood on the squashed remains of a derelict automobile (he also claims to have used binoculars to watch X-rated movies at his local drive-in). For his 17th birthday, Waters was given an 8mm camera. Wasting no time, he gathered together a group of his like-minded chums -- including obese high-school classmate Harris Milstead, better known as female impersonator Divine -- into a repertory troupe called the Dreamland Players, then began churning out his own films. Unlike other teenaged amateurs whose first films consist of warmed-over Godzilla movies and stop-motion GI Joe dolls, Waters' oeuvre was the basest, most vomit-inducing form of poor taste. His avowed purpose in life was to smash every middle-class value that his uptight Baltimore brethren held dear. After completing such early short-subject gems as Hag in a Black Leather Jacket and Eat Your Makeup!, Waters would screen his films in rented church basements, heralding their showings by blanketing the town with mimeographed invitations. Borrowing 2,000 dollars from his father, Waters put together his first feature film, Mondo Trasho, in 1969 -- and was arrested on the eve of its premiere on a charge of "conspiracy to commit indecent exposure" (say what?). As in all of his films, Mondo Trasho pokes fun at its offensiveness even while wallowing in it. In 1972, Waters outdid himself with his midnight-movie masterpiece Pink Flamingos (lensed on a reported budget of 10,000 dollars), wherein faithful Dreamland players Divine, Mink Stole, and David Lochary vie for the title of "World's Filthiest Person" (Divine wins by a mile and a furlong by ingesting a handful of doggy doo-doo). The film went on to become known as one of the most revolting movies of all time, as well as a timeless cult classic. Waters finally got into first-run theaters with Polyester (1981), which not only featured a mainstream actor (Tab Hunter) but revived the old promotional trick of handing out scratch-'n'-sniff cards to the patrons. The director then backed off from filmmaking for about six years, writing witty, perceptive articles for such publications as National Lampoon and teaching courses in film humor to prison inmates. He returned with Hairspray (1988), a 1950s piece set in Baltimore which, despite Waters' claim that he prides himself in the fact that his work has "no socially redeeming value," carries a strong and well-articulated plea for racial tolerance (Waters' star in Hairspray was future talk show host Ricki Lake, who played Divine's daughter). With the exception of Mink Stole, most of Waters' stock company have vanished from his later films; in their stead are such pop-culture icons as Johnny Depp, Pia Zadora, Deborah Harry, Troy Donahue, Iggy Pop, Sonny Bono, and even Patty Hearst, whom Waters once described as "The Lindbergh Baby who lived." Indeed, the director had even managed to accumulate enough respectability over the years that his 1994 Serial Mom starred no less than Kathleen Turner. Though comparatively highly budgeted, the film displays the same energetic, class-clown tackiness as Waters' earliest, cheapest films. His next effort, the 1998 film Pecker, brought him a little further into the mainstream -- or at least into respectable arthouses everywhere. The story of a young Baltimore photographer (Edward Furlong) who becomes a reluctant art-world darling, Pecker managed to be surprisingly sweet while retaining the usual Waters trademarks, such as amiable dysfunction, public copulation, and casually graphic shots of genitalia. The film premiered at the Toronto Film Festival and went on to win wide praise. The praise leveled at the film mirrored the director's real-life ascent into relative respectability: although he continued to dress and comport himself like a potential child molester, Waters matriculated from "fringie" to one of Baltimore's leading citizens. When audiences learned that Waters' next project was to be a film concerning a renegade director who kidnaps a top Hollywood starlet in order to force her to act in his latest feature, advance word no doubt had audiences recalling such Waters classics as Multiple Maniacs. Edgier than Pecker but lacking the sharp satire of Serial Mom (and sadly lacking the sleazy-listening tunes that highlighted his early efforts), Cecil B. Demented ultimately fell somewhere in the middle of trash cinema purgatory; though it certainly spat in the face of traditional mainstream cinema values, it still wasn't quite outrageous enough to be truly effective. While Cecil B. Demented may not have been the film that once again found Waters winning back his "Prince of Puke" crown (that award would likely have gone to Takashi Miike at that point) it was never dull and certainly showed that the spark was still there and that Waters still had a few tricks up his sleeve. For his next effort, entitled A Dirty Shame, Waters rounded up an impressive cast that included the likes of Tracey Ullman, Johnny Knoxville, Chris Isaak, and Selma Blair. Though A Dirty Shame failed to make any big waves at the box-office, Waters' fans did manage to get a few smutty laughs (as long as they didn't catch the butchered "Neuter Version") from this lighthearted tale of sexual debauchery. Three years later, the director got to feed his love for true crime as host of 'Til Death Do Us Part -- a morbid look at unions that ended in murder. The wit, wisdom, and philosophy of John Waters has been distilled in his books Shock Value: A Tasteful Book About Bad Taste (1981) and Crackpot: The Obsession of John Waters (1986). Furthermore, those wanting additional insight into the director's outlook would do well to check out Divine Trash, the acclaimed 1998 documentary about Waters' life.