Salton Sea is one of America's worst ecological disaster: a stagnant, fetid lake full of dead fish and birds. Created "accidentally" by a civil engineering error in 1905, it was developed in the 1950s as a tourist attraction for the rich and famous. Then, after a series of storms and floods, the tourist resort project was finally abandoned. Nowadays, very few believe the lake can be reclaimed. So while Plagues & Pleasures recounts the enormous historic, economical, political and social headaches Salton Sea has created, it also depicts an unusual portrait of the eccentric personalities inhabiting its shores. Narrated by John Waters, the master of trash, the film (part history lesson, part caustic commentary on the strangest communities ever seen) shows how the American Dream has gone the way of a fish in the Salton Sea: rotten and stinking...<%YOUTUBE=IeE5hjsCmYU%>