 The film premiered in late 1972 at the third Annual Baltimore Film Festival, held on the campus of the University of Baltimore, where it sold out tickets for three successive screenings; the film aroused particular interest among underground cinema fans following the success of Multiple Maniacs, which had begun to be screened in New York City, Philadelphia, and San Francisco. Being picked up by the small independent company New Line Cinema, Pink Flamingos was distributed to Ben Barenholtz, the owner of the Elgin Theater in New York City. At the Elgin Theater, Barenholtz had been promoting the midnight movie scene, primarily by screening Alejandro Jodorowsky's acid western film El Topo (1970). Barenholtz felt that being of an avant-garde nature, Pink Flamingos would fit in well with this crowd, screening it at midnight on Friday and Saturday nights. The film soon gained a cult following at the Elgin Theatre. Barenholtz characterized its early fans as primarily being "downtown gay people, more of the hipper set," but after a while he noted that this group broadened, with the film becoming popular with "working-class kids from New Jersey who would become a little rowdy". Many of these cult cinema fans learned all of the film's lines, reciting them at the screenings, a phenomenon which became associated with another popular midnight movie of the era, The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975).
