Massive thank you to writer and Russ Meyer fan Justine Smith for giving me permission to re-post this piece of hers on this blog as part of MEYER MONTH. The original, and lots of other fantastic writing on film, can be found on the Little White Lies website.
There was no sex in Russ Meyer’s early films. Throughout the 1950s, some filmmakers found a loophole in America’s strict censorship laws: documentary. By shooting films in nudist colonies, filmmakers were able to bring nudity to the big screen. While censor boards attempted to stifle these attempts, legally, they had very little to ground to stand on. With the opportunity of a lifetime, Meyer was about to transform the genre and change the landscape of American film forever.
During World War Two, Meyer worked as a wartime photographer, and after returning to the US he planned on starting up a career in Hollywood. He had little success, and it was only in the late-’50s that his career took a turn as the nudist colony films, often referred to as ‘naturalist’ movies, started to gain prominence. Although Meyer was initially reticent when offered to make one of these films for $24,000, he had a plan.
Combining the adolescent fantasy of x-ray glasses with the basic tenants of the naturalist film, Meyer came up with the concept for his first film, The Immoral Mr. Teas. In the film, the titular Mr. Teas acquires x-ray powers after visiting the dentist and can now see women naked. While shot in full colour, the film is relatively primitive; it features no sync-sound and is little more than a series of vignettes. Working within the scope of what was allowed in naturalist films, the nudity features no sexual touching and, despite the lechery of Mr. Teas, was relatively chaste.
While even the naturalist films were screened in underground cinemas, The Immoral Mr. Teaswas given a wider release. Its meagre budget produced a healthy profit, and independent producers raced to imitate it, spurring a new genre which came to be known as ‘nudie-cuties’. These films would feature female nudity within the scope of light-hearted comic premises and proved relatively successful, if not continually controversial. Mr. Teas would also initiate Meyer to the court system, as he had to defend the film against obscenity charges. In one Philadelphia case, a judge ruled that the film was not pornography but was ‘vulgar, pointless and in bad taste’.
After the success of The Immoral Mr. Teas, Meyer made two more nudie-cutie films, Eve and the Handyman and Wild Gals of the Naked West. With thousands of imitators, it was clear why Meyer’s films rose to the top: he had a cinematic eye, boundless imagination and an ironic sense of humour. Inspired by his fantasies, Meyer felt that what turned him on would translate to a broader audience. But he quickly grew tired of the achingly adorable genre he invented and began taking even greater risks.
Among these new films were Lorna and Mudhoney, gritty black-and-white Southern Gothic noirs that integrated nudity into the storylines. Inspired, improbably by Italian neo-realism, these are among Meyer’s most earnest efforts. Gone were the goofy antics, and the more camp aesthetics he’d refine over the decade were also absent. Both films were big successes and required Meyer to defend his projects against new obscenity charges, paving the way for other filmmakers looking to take risks in terms of nudity and sex on the big screen.
While the immediate benefactors from his success were other sexploitation filmmakers, the reality was that Meyer’s films (and their subsequent obscenity cases) were paving the way for post-Code Hollywood and the New American Wave of the 1970s that integrated sex and nudity into dramatic plots.
Meyer’s work only gained in prominence over the ensuing decade, gradually refining his style with Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, Vixen! and Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. While his films are not for all tastes, his travails in pushing the boundaries of sex on screen brought about significant changes, forever altering the look and feel of American film.
I found this article on The Criterion Collection website and thought it would be great to share on what would have been Russ Meyer’s 100th birthday. You can find the original here but I’ve typed it out below as well. Happy 100th Birthday Russ!
The following account of a visit to the Beyond the Valley of the Dolls set is excerpted from a piece that originally appeared in the January 7, 1970, issue of the University of California, Los Angeles, newspaper, the Daily Bruin, under the headline “18—Count ’Em—18 Couplings and an R Rating: Russ Meyer in Hollywood.”Its author, who went on to become a television writer as well as a friend of Meyer’s, was a UCLA student at the time.
Countless boring and laughable sexploitation films prove that it takes more than naked women to make arousing nude scenes. Surprisingly, many of Hollywood’s best directors have been unable to make use of their talents when dealing with nude scenes—probably because of lack of experience in that field. Realizing this, Richard Zanuck, president of Twentieth Century-Fox, started looking in some unlikely places to find a man to direct a sequel to Valley of the Dolls. In his travels, Zanuck evidently took in quite a few films which did not meet the traditional Hollywood standards of “good” movies. One of the films was Vixen!, a dazzling assortment of adultery, incest, lesbianism, racism, violence, and even politics, all photographed well enough to rival any Hollywood production—a rare achievement for a sexploitation film.
Production values aside, the most impressive thing about Vixen! is a matter of simple economics. The film cost $70,000 to make and its estimated gross is in the neighborhood of $6 million. This arithmetic did not escape Zanuck, and so he invited Vixen!’s creator, Russ Meyer, to come to Twentieth to produce, direct, and help write Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.
Meyer’s progress in the studio system is of special interest because his background as a one-man show puts him in the same position as many of the talented young people who are graduating from film schools. Prevented by odd hiring practices from working for the studios, Meyer had to go into independent production. Constrained by lack of funds, he had to do his best with very little. In the process, he became adept in directing, editing, writing, and in most of the other skills that are required between the time a film is conceived and the time it appears on the screen.
For Meyer, the offer from Twentieth was the fulfillment of a long-standing ambition. As a fourteen-year-old in Oakland, he was given an 8 mm movie camera and projector by his mother as a Christmas present. Captured by the thrill of making his very own movies, Meyer started shooting what would have to be called documentaries. One of them, shot on Catalina, won an award from Kodak. In 1942, at the age of eighteen, Meyer joined the army and was trained as a combat photographer by Art Lloyd (who filmed the Our Gang comedies) and Joe Ruttenberg, another noted cinematographer. For all his subsequent achievements, Meyer still rates the time he spent shooting combat newsreels as the most memorable time of his life. “It was real action and excitement! Nothing could compare to it!” Meyer said with boyish enthusiasm.
After his discharge, things didn’t go so well for Meyer. He came to Hollywood to work as a cinematographer, but he couldn’t get into the union, so he had to go to work making industrial films in San Francisco. (When he returned to Hollywood more than twenty years later, he had little difficulty entering the screen directors’ union. “You just pay them your two thousand dollars, and they’re glad to have you,” he said.) Spending his time making educational films for employees of supermarket chains, oil companies, and others, Meyer grew bored and took up magazine photography. His glamour photography appeared in Playboy and similar magazines, as he rose to the top of the field. But Meyer didn’t stay away from movies for long.
Meyer’s first girlie film was little more than a recording of a burlesque show. Called The French Peep Show, it was done for Pete DeCenzie, owner of Oakland’s El Rey burlesque theater. In 1959, DeCenzie decided to break from current trends in nudies and make one with a story. Meyer more or less took over the project, and the result was the most famous girlie film up to its time—The Immoral Mr. Teas. In it, one of Meyer’s old Army friends played a delivery boy who sees all the women he encounters as naked. For the film’s finale, there is a fifteen-minute sequence in which Teas sees the three principal girls sunbathe, swim, and hike through the woods—in the nude, of course.
Mr. Teas was filmed in four days, and it cost $24,000 to make. Its gross of $1 million enabled Meyer to make more films, refining his techniques and developing his skills all the while. In films like Eve and the Handyman (which starred his wife); Erotica; Wild Gals of the Naked West; The Naked Camera; Heavenly Bodies; Europe in the Raw!; Lorna; Mudhoney; Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!; Motorpsycho; Good Morning . . . and Goodbye!; and Finders Keepers, Lovers Weepers!, Meyer shows what amounts to an overriding concern for exteriors, which goes beyond the attractive (and inexpensive) natural scenery that graces most of his films and his perfectionistic photography. His concern for surfaces also affects his characters, for they rarely turn out to be more than they appear to be. A puffy delivery boy turns out to be a harmless voyeur, even in his own fantasies; the ubiquitous busty women are invariably oversexed; and an evil-looking dark-haired girl is capable of breaking a man’s back with her bare hands. “I don’t pretend to be some kind of sensitive artist,” Meyer sneered. “Give me a movie where a car crashes into a building and the driver gets stabbed by a bosomy blonde, who gets carried away by a dwarf musician. Films should run like express trains!”
Among the arts, movies would seem to be particularly hospitable to object-oriented people. Not that these people can compete with Bergman or Antonioni, but they have the potential to make exciting action films, broad comedies—and good nudies. Not too surprisingly, Meyer has indicated that he wants to work on action films (one possible project: The Final Steal, which may star Johnny Cash), and later, perhaps, comedies, “if I can ever find someone like Bill Fields.”
The as yet unreleased Cherry, Harry & Raquel!, which may be Meyer’s last low-budget sexploitation film, reflects its creator’s changing interests. To be sure, there is still the element of comedy, which has been present to one extent or another in most of Meyer’s work, from the wisecracking narration of Mr. Teas to the sexual parody of Vixen!. Cherry also boasts plenty of action—a couple of gunfights and an exciting car chase. The action, in fact, overshadows the sex when at the film’s end Meyer intercuts Cherry and Raquel’s gratuitous love scene with Harry’s tense gunfight. Despite the fact that the scene is a very revealing view of lesbian lovemaking, it comes off as a distraction to the important action of the shoot-out.
Cherry, of course, doesn’t lack the ingredient that has made Meyer famous. There’s enough nudity to satisfy the patrons of any “art house.” Unlike Meyer’s earliest films, Cherry depicts a number of sex acts. “Did you notice?” Meyer asked. “We had a very frank blow job at the beginning.” Nevertheless, the shift in emphasis from sex to the relatively new field of violence is revealing of Meyer’s basic orientation in objects and exteriors. “I’m tired of sex. I’ve shown every position and combination of partners, and there’s not much else to do, is there?” Of course there is. For one thing, relatively few films have contributed any sort of psychological insight to sexual matters. But Meyer’s interest is in what people do, not why they do it, and so he goes to Twentieth Century-Fox to film Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.
In early December, I wanted on to the Dolls set where the Westmont High senior prom was being filmed. The set was unimaginably sleazy and cheap, and the extras looked extremely uncomfortable. In other words, it looked just like a real high school dance. Onstage were two graduates from Playboy’s centerfold, Dolly Read (May 1966) and Cynthia Myers (December 1968). Along with dancer Marcia McBroom on drums, the girls comprised a rock trio which, through the course of the film, makes it big and then goes to pot—literally and figuratively. According to the script, the prom scene is preceded by a flash-forward which may never be filmed if Meyer wants an “R” rating, as he claims he does. In this earlier scene, we are treated to an extreme close-up in which a gun barrel traces its way up the middle of a sleeping girl’s naked body. The barrel is then inserted into the girl’s mouth and only after a few enormously suggestive seconds does she realize that what has been thrust into her mouth is cold steel and not something else. She screams, and her scream becomes that of Dolly Read singing at the prom.
The prom scene was filmed in a way that must have seemed strange to a man who in the past had to be so careful about budgetary restrictions. The one song that the girls perform was shot at least a dozen times, all from different angles. Later, during the editing, pieces of each shot will be incorporated into the sequence. “We’re getting a lot of coverage,” Meyer said, and he can well afford it, as his budget is somewhere between one and two million dollars. But what about the old ways that had served him so well in the past? Did he feel that the forty assistants required by studio production would prevent him from controlling every aspect of his film, as he was used to doing in the past? “I love it here. With all these people helping you, you’re not so tired at night. I’d never go back to the old way.” His previous experience had been quite an asset to him, though. The film has been progressing right along on schedule, and it has not exceeded its budget. Meyer’s work in low-budget films has also enabled him to juggle shooting schedules, so that if an actress brings the wrong costume, for instance, he can shoot a completely different scene without so much as a day’s warning.
Meyer may like the studios, but there’s evidence that he may not fit in as well as he would like. Invariably dressed in Levi’s, a pullover sweater, and track shoes, Meyer is six feet tall and, at 240 pounds, is not a roly-poly fat man, but rather a wrestler or maybe an ex–football player—in other words, mean-looking. And the uncompromising toughness that is required by a one-man show is no asset in an industry where a bruised ego can mean a ruined career. Therefore, Meyer is making a special effort to be “diplomatic.” One afternoon, an actor kept forgetting his lines, through some fourteen takes. Not once did Meyer lose his temper, and instead, after every few takes, he offered the actor an opportunity to sit down and rest. Meyer’s patience was rewarded by take fifteen, a flawless glimpse of a dirty old high school principal. In addition, Meyer allots a generous share of his time to the press, even though he is resigned to being portrayed by them as a “casting-couch director.”
A few days later, Dolls was being filmed on the “French” street of the Twentieth Century lot. To save money, Meyer is shooting most of the film on the lot, and he is using sets that were originally built for other films. For this film, the French street was an alley behind a nightclub. As one of the girls in the rock trio leaves by taxi, a bisexual girl emerges from the back door and stares hungrily at the departing cab. “Who’s that girl in the doorway?” asked one of the technicians. “She’s the reason I’m here,” answered Meyer.
“That girl” was Erica Gavin, the star of Vixen!, the film which finally made the industry take notice of its director. Fortuitous as the film was for Meyer, its star has not even been able to use it as a credit when looking for acting assignments . . . which is hard to believe, because her portrayal of Vixen will long be remembered by anyone who has seen the film.
[ . . . ]
Who would believe that I had been on the set of a Russ Meyer movie and had not seen him film one of the scenes that had made him famous? I mentioned this to Meyer, and he replied that whenever one of the principal actresses is involved in a nude scene, outsiders and even some of the crew were barred from the set, “but this Wednesday we’re filming some stuff you might like.” Meyer’s estimation of my taste was accurate. Along with about forty members of the crew, a dozen actors and actresses, a few janitors, and assorted others, I watched Meyer direct a photo studio sequence which required a model to remove her bra for the critical appraisal of her female employer—and the admiring stares of the rest of us. It wasn’t much compared to Vixen!, but in keeping with Meyer’s policy of maximum coverage (or uncoverage), the sequence was shot about nine times.
Later that day, I saw the familiar face and even more familiar body of Haji, who has appeared in two of Meyer’s earlier films. She is one of the more than half dozen actors and actresses in Dolls who have worked for Meyer before. “They’ve done some-thing nice for me, so I thought I’d give them an opportunity to appear in a big film,” Meyer said. In addition to his own troupe of actors and actresses, Meyer used unknowns to fill out the cast of Dolls, because they don’t ask for as much money as “names,” and they’re less likely to become prima donnas. If the unknowns don’t have the acting experience of their more famous colleagues—well, as Meyer says, he relies heavily on action, quick cutting, and “express-train pacing,” which make sensitive performances unnecessary anyway.
After the day’s shooting, Meyer confirmed that his days as the foremost maker of exploitation films had left him relatively free of money worries. “I’ll tell you one thing, last year my company paid more than $400,000 in corporate taxes.” Why then does he continue making films? “I’d like to be recognized as a good filmmaker.” But could his desire for recognition drive him to make a film which might enhance his reputation but nevertheless be a financial failure? “No . . . absolutely not. There’s nothing more sad than a film that doesn’t do well at the box office. A couple of years ago, I made a film called Mudhoney. It got good reviews, but no one went to see it. Critiques aren’t worth shit.”
Meyer apparently wants to be recognized as a good filmmaker not by the critics but by the moviegoers, who show their appreciation in cold cash. Meyer is careful not to enter into any ventures which look like they might be unprofitable, but once he has selected a project, his only concern is the quality of the film. One of the reasons for this is that the profits, large as they often are, sometimes take years to come in. Money aside, though, if he were given a large sum of money and asked to do the film of his choice, what kind of a movie would he make? “Oh hell, I wouldn’t make one—I’d go fishing.”
On the 21st of March this year legendary Director Russ Meyer would have celebrated his 100th Birthday. I am delighted to bring back MEYER MONTH for this special occasion and am very excited to share a variety of articles on the man which I hope you will all find interesting and enjoyable. Whilst looking for some additional pieces online I came across this fantastic write up on Meyer’s 1970 release Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls by Joshua Ray, who has kindly given me permission to re-post it on this site. It was originally written as a supplement piece to an online screening and discussion of the film at Cinema St. Louis in September 2020 celebrating the films 50th Anniversary, the original post can be found here.
Beyond the Valley of the Dolls: In a Scene Like This, You Get a Contact High
Altman, Scorsese, Coppola, Bogdanovich, May, Nichols, Ashby, Friedkin, Mazursky, De Palma, and even Speilberg and Lucas: These are the names most commonly associated with New Hollywood. The movement – as it can be seen now – was born when the long-established American studios failed to keep up with radical cultural shifts during the ’60s and began to follow the money. Audiences were flocking to products from the tightened purse strings of the likes of Roger Corman, who spat out films quickly and on the cheap with total budgets comparable to one studio picture’s craft services.
With themes and content catering to increasingly liberal cultural values, some of these B-movies eventually moved away from the bottom half of a double bill at drive-ins and onto more accessible neighborhood screens. The Trip, the 1967 Peter Fonda-starring, LSD-fueled road movie directed and produced by Corman for independent studio American International Pictures, reportedly sold 60 times its original budget of $100,000 in tickets. Soon after, the next Zeitgeist-tapping, Peter Fonda-starring motorcycle odyssey, the inexpensive and independently produced Easy Rider, took the fourth spot at the 1969 box office – just above 20th Century Fox’s costly Broadway musical adaptation of Hello, Dolly!. In looking at their shrinking profit margins against the indies’ growing ones, all bets were called off for the major studios.
They let the outsiders in – the aforementioned film-school “movie brats,” television directors, comedians, and film critics among them – to exercise their cinematic creativity within budgetary limitations, mimicking producers like Corman by giving opportunities to the hip unproved. Many of the 1970 titles in Cinema St. Louis’ 2020 edition of Golden Anniversaries are, in one way or another, beneficiaries of the old guard’s new school of thought – including M.A.S.H., The Traveling Executioner, Performance, Husbands, and even eventual Best Picture Oscar winner Patton (co-written by pioneering movie brat Francis Ford Coppola).
“King Leer” himself, the breast-obsessed auteur Russ Meyer, is almost never mentioned among this New Hollywood elite. However, his Beyond the Valley of the Dolls – one of the most profitable films featured in this year’s festival’s crop – is wholly representative of the time and the conditions that sparked the movement. Half a century on, the satire fueled by sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll has grown in stature, but mostly only among those willing to accept that trash can also be nurturing. Purveyors of great cinema, the Criterion Collection has released the film under its exalted banner, but, again, even that seems to come with caveats. Beyond the Valley of the Dolls is largely – and, with its sexploitation-satire origins and hyper-horny telling, understandably – regarded as a kitsch object suprême. The Pope of Trash himself, John Waters, has said that Meyer made the greatest movie ever made – and ever will be made – in Faster, Pussycat, Kill! Kill! (1965). Admittedly, Waters is as erudite and knowledgeable a cinephile as any, but his claim can open the door for dismissal from those with “refined” “good” “taste.”
Who needs those squares anyway? Meyer and his first Dream Factory foray (his second, The Seven Minutes [1971], is a fans-only curio) may represent a small blip on the timeline of narrative American filmmaking during the ’70s, but this color-splashed, widescreen spectacle is among the most incredible products to ever come from the studio system.
After Jacqueline Susann failed twice at writing a sequel to the 1967 film based on her sensational book Valley of the Dolls, 20th Century Fox had to do something with the Beyond title to which they owned the rights. In comes Meyer, a World War II battleground cameraman turned independent filmmaker whose 1968 sexploitation flick, Vixen!, reportedly had a profit margin even wider than that of The Trip. He and his screenwriting recruit Roger Ebert, who had written positively about the director’s cinematic prowess in the pages of the Chicago Sun-Times, were invited behind the studio gates to take a stab at something original. (To be fair, Mark Robson’s adaptation of Susann’s book might fit in well with Meyer’s backwoods hothouse melodramas Lorna [1964] and Mudhoney [1965] if it changed locales, added some large bare breasts, and were more self-aware.)
The idea that the contemporary king of pornography and the future’s most well-known film critic – along with a cast of Playboy Playmates, nonprofessional actors, scenesters, and the Strawberry Alarm Clock – successfully invaded the system is so outlandish, a script of the making of Beyond has been circulating around Hollywood for the past few years as its own feature – at one point with Will Ferrell attached to play Meyer. But the concept seems redundant because the film itself is already one of the most evocative of its era. Straddling (ahem) the line between parody of and homage to traditional Hollywood tropes, Meyer’s anarchic sex romp signaled a death knell for both old-fashioned modes of filmmaking and the “All You Need is Love” era that had already violently soured since its inception.
Screenwriter Ebert has said that during the writing process he and Meyer threw in everything and the kitchen sink, and, within mere weeks, gleefully banged out a satire with no real basis in reality other than that of movie genres. Intentions be damned, the fiendishly funny finished product has its sights perfectly calibrated toward contemporary American mores, a culture of capitalism, and at the great gender divide.
The two outsiders decided to lambast everything 1970 LA – or at least their perception of it – by retaining the 1967 melodrama’s trio of fame and fortune-seeking Hollywood ingénues and turning everything else on its head. Here, the central trio (played by Playboy Playmates Dolly Read and Cynthia Myers, and aspiring actress Marcia McBroom) are a band called The Carrie Nations, a psych-rock/pop outfit (with actually good music written for the film by Stu Phillips) who are about to encounter the seven deadly sins in their grooviest of forms: drug-fueled “happenings” live-soundtracked by the Strawberry Alarm Clock; an ever-revolving roundabout of lovers of any gender; hangers-on who want a piece of the pie; and a fateful night that erupts in horrific violence a little too familiar after 1969’s Tate/LaBianca murders perpetrated by Charles Manson’s clan. Ebert and Meyer really do find a place for nearly every genre and genre trope, so much so that if a viewer were to experience all of the bodily reactions film scholar Linda Williams assigns to melodrama, pornography, and horror, they might end up like John Cassavetes at the end of Brian De Palma’s The Fury (1978).
A possible full body explosion would also be aided by Meyer’s over-the-top style. Every element of his mise-en-scène here is so far-out that it might appear that 20th Century Fox allowed Meyer to supply his cast and crew with an unending supply of amphetamines. His cuts are as fast as today’s action films, with Eisensteinian montage thrown in for good measure and providing some of the best laughs present. There are practical reasons for the Meyer filmic rhythms, various justifications bandied about from those close to and knowledgeable about the filmmaker. Supposedly, footage from his previous indie, Cherry, Harry & Raquel!, was destroyed, causing the director to edit around the missing footage. The whiplash-inducing results fit so well within his aesthetic and values, Meyer simply continued increasing his tempos. Another might say that he hated seeing actors blink, so he’d cut around them doing so, adding to their already turned-up performances. Meanwhile, others say budgetary constraints made camera movement impossible, so Meyer adapted and created the illusion of movement through rapid editing.
These reasons seem to point to Meyer as an auteur by accident. Although happenstance and working conditions may certainly have influenced Meyer’s choices, when reviewing his filmography, one can clearly see a gradual development of an artist working in an imitable mode. Yes, his camera is stationary, but the innumerable set-ups are also purposefully composed and artful, somehow colorful even when they’re in black-and-white. Meyer claimed his major filmmaking influence was Al Capp’s “Li’l Abner” comic strip, and this cartoon tutelage aligns his style closer to other film satirists like Frank Tashlin or Jerry Lewis than his softcore pornographic brethren.
But Beyond the Valley of the Dolls is more like Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers (1998) than any of Tashlin’s or Lewis’ work. Like the fascist space opera, Meyer’s knotty satire is both wagging a finger at the thing and a supreme example of the thing. His films had increasingly become aware of their effects on an audience looking for titillation, and Meyer and his screenwriters started mixing them with social satire. Vixen!, for example, surely aroused viewers in spades, but even though Erica Gavin (playing lesbian lover to Cynthia Myers’ Casey here) has all kinds of sex – straight, gay, and even incestual – throughout Vixen!, that same audience is challenged to confront her stridently racist and downright deplorable actions.
Although Beyond earned an X rating, its prurience is tame compared to Meyer’s previous films – something the director regretted after aiming for an R rating by tamping down the sex and nudity. Nevertheless, the film is filled to the brim with “transgressive” behaviors: drugs are ever present; free love is performed without regard to emotion; queerness is (to an extent for the time) normalized; and gender roles are completely deconstructed and remixed. Meyer may moralize these notions in his intentionally silly coda, but even the punishments for said transgressions aren’t moral judgments. Instead, they’re a prompt for his audience to negotiate between being turned on by both the scene and the way he and Ebert destroy it.
In 2020, however, some of the problematizing present is troubling. In the climax, the Shakespeare-spouting record producer Ronnie “Z-Man” Barzell (John Lazar) is revealed to be a trans man just before lopping off the head of Lance (Michael Blodgett), his sexual conquest, set to the Fox-logo fanfare. He then proceeds to murder the film’s other queer characters. Ebert, who claims to have invented Z-Man’s great reveal in a moment of inspiration, says Meyer approved because “you can never have too many tits.” Clearly, the two were unaware of the accumulation of years of cinematic doomed queer characters and queer murderers and were working toward pure shock. B. Ruby Rich, the great feminist and queer-film theorist, once justified the portrayal as an act of queer revenge.
More viable is her linking Meyer’s personal predilection for assertive women with a deconstruction of gender norms present in his work. The director’s fantasies are thrust upon the screen, which grants his female characters power largely unseen in cinema before this: They’re hypersexual, smarter than their weak male counterparts, and always take center stage in the narrative. The image of Ashley St. Ives (Playboy Playmate Edy Williams and future Mrs. Meyer) from the perspective of impotent Harris (David Gurian) as she towers over him likens her to a superhero, with her femininity as her superpower. Beyond also affords its Black characters, another often marginalized group, a fully fleshed out narrative of love, betrayal, and reconciliation – complete with an idyllic roll in the grass for two of them, a sight rarely seen in mainstream films of the time.
With these more progressive representations, the dizzying kaleidoscopic construction, and slightly askew potent quotables, the prominence of Meyer’s mainstream outing among cult films is understandable, particularly when it comes to queer audiences. For that group, the bald-faced transgressions against pervasive cultural norms are as identifiable as the “closeted” layers of truth buried deep within its satire. Beyond the Valley of the Dolls is indeed riotously enjoyable, but also contains complex multitudes that, for the enlightened few, are as invigorating and rewarding as more well-respected films in the hallowed canon. Those who are blind to its richness are welcome to, well, to quote the film itself, either “Find it!” or “Go screw.”
This was originally written as an assignment when I was studying Film and Journalism at University over 12 years ago, and was one of the first things I posted on this blog 10 years ago. As I’ve decided to re-organise this blog into more of a Russ Meyer-centric hub of information I thought I’d re-blog this as it serves as a very basic and brief overview of Meyer, whether one needs a little refresher on him or is completely new to this blog or the man himself.
Russ Meyer is a lot like marmite. You either accept him at face value, appreciating his filmography for what it is, or you loathe him, and fail to see any cinematic worth in his work. Dubbed ‘The King of the Nudies’ by the Press, Meyer had a prolific career in independent cinema. Using his previous experience as a Pin Up and Army…
A belated post but as part of this years MEYER MONTH I was forwarded this nice little article via twitter. The original post can be found here but I’ve included it below, and you can also follow its author Syvology on twitter here!
A dual biopic exploring the friendship between Roger Ebert and Russ Meyer is apparently in the works. Simpsons/SNL writer Christopher Cluess penned the script, which focuses on Meyer and Ebert’s formative collaboration on Fox’s big-budget fiasco Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970). Though it will be fun to see young Ebert in his humble side-burned glory, the most interesting character in this story is Russ Meyer.
An ongoing fascination of mine, Russ Meyer is one of the most misunderstood figures in film history. To fans of sleaze and camp, he’s a deity. He invented the sexploitation genre as we know it with The Immoral Mr. Teas (1959), a hallucinatory exploration of compulsive voyeurism. According to John Waters, the iconic Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965) is “beyond a doubt, the best movie ever made. It is possibly better than any film that will be made in the future.” To other, more genteel audiences however, Meyer is often thought of as a seedy proto-pornographer whose films trade in adolescent prurience, irredeemable violence, and general bad taste. Meyer himself subscribed to the latter characterization, rejecting intellectual interpretations of his work and insisting that he only made movies for two reasons: “lust and profit.” But as any true student of his films can attest, Meyer’s bizarre career encompassed much more than that. To appreciate the thought-provoking complexities inherent in Meyer’s work, one must first confront its most frustrating contradiction: that his films are simultaneously misogynist and feminist.
Meyer’s career unfolded concomitantly with second-wave feminism, but it’s primarily third-wave (or so-called “sex-positive”) feminists that appreciate his aesthetic. B. Ruby Rich famously labeled Meyer “the first feminist American director”, praising his progressive sense of female empowerment in Faster, Pussycat! and his bold rejection of hetero-normativity in Vixen! (1968). Similarly, quasi-feminist cultural critic Camille Paglia laments, “his women had an exuberance and vitality you rarely see in film anymore.” Roger Ebert has always been Meyer’s most high-profile apologist on this point, encouraging critics to appreciate “the quintessential Russ Meyer image: a towering woman with enormous breasts, who dominates all the men around her, demands sexual satisfaction, and casts off men in the same way that, in mainstream sexual fantasies, men cast aside women.” Indeed, Meyer himself credited much of his success to the fact that many women enjoyed his movies just as much as men. But things get tricky once you contrast these progressive interpretations with some of the director’s own words. He described his ideal target audience as “some guy…in the theater with semen seeping out of his dick.” When asked whether his films exploit women, Meyer responded plainly, “I’m prone to say, yes, I do exploit women. I exploit them with zeal and gusto.” On feminist thought itself, Meyer was pretty vile: “I don’t care to comment about what might be inside a lady’s head. Hopefully it’s my dick.” There’s really no question that Meyer was at all times primarily concerned with delivering male sexual gratification, not promoting feminist ideology. But he was the first American filmmaker to consistently depict and celebrate women who were in charge of their own sexuality. So what, then, was the connection?
Whatever is incidentally pro-feminist in Meyer’s work was likely an accidental, albeit fascinating, side effect of his idiosyncratic sexual appetite. The theoretical disconnect in his treatment of gender may be explained by the extent to which Meyer’s films are exceedingly personal, one might say solipsistic, expressive vehicles for exploring his own masturbatory fantasies. Describing his creative process, he once said, “each film must begin with me. I am the idea. I’ve got to have the hard-on.” The relationship between his sexual personality and the feminist overtones of his work gets clearer once one acknowledges that Meyer’s obsession with female dominance was always complemented by another, perhaps even more continual thematic hallmark of his narratives: male inadequacy. Themes of sexual impotence permeate his entire career. In Lorna (1964), the title character’s husband is a sexually inept wimp that bores her into infidelity and recklessness. In Common Law Cabin (1967), a female character cuckolds and basically murders her husband as ostensible punishment for being, essentially, a pussy. Meyer’s failed attempt at First Amendment proselytizing, The Seven Minutes (1971), features a rape defendant vindicated at trial by the stunning revelation that the crime was physically impossible for him to commit. Charles Napier’s utterly despicable villain in Supervixens (1975) brutally murders a woman after she taunts his inability to perform. Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens (1979) is a preposterous and anarchic profile of a hopeless idiot who can’t bring himself to have anything but anal sex.
What’s more is that his focus on male inadequacy was no doubt a highly personal topic. In addition to his reputation for being decidedly wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am in the sack (corroborated by multiple former lovers), one particular episode of performance anxiety is instructive. Just as his filmmaking career was getting started, Meyer’s obsession with busty burlesque icon Tempest Storm caused him to abandon his first wife and nearly ruin his own life. But when it came time to go to bed with Ms. Storm, Meyer’s manhood was nowhere to be found. He described it thus: “When I first met Tempest Storm I was so in awe of her great big cans that thoughts like performing badly or ejaculating prematurely ran through my mind –all connected to the dick bone. So when I made my move to hump the buxotic after the last show in her Figueroa Street scatter, I felt inadequate, plain and simple. Fuck, what can I say?”.
Tempest Storm happens to be the star of Meyer’s first short film (now lost), The French Peep Show (1954), and her breasts make a cameo in his first feature-length film, The Immoral Mr. Teas (1959) (As far as I’m aware, this isn’t actually true. It was June Wilkinson’s breasts that had an uncredited cameo, Storm was not involved in the film at all – Lydia). To a significant extent, she was the sex symbol that launched his whole career. So quite literally, feelings of sexual inadequacy were at the very root of his development as an artist.
Meyer’s brand of transgressive femininity may be thought of as the natural result of his own self-loathing, which subliminally translated into deep skepticism for contemporary masculinity at large. It’s likely he viewed female sexuality as something hopelessly out of his personal control, and ultimately out of society’s control as well. That’s why his work exhibits what UC Irvine film professor Kristen Hatch called “an ambivalence toward the traditional authority figures that classical Hollywood had helped to reinforce, showing masculine social authority to be in a state of disarray.” Characters like Varla and Vixen don’t just transgress rules associated with physical gender norms like strength and sex drive; they represent the rejection of all rules that paternalistic society is stupid enough to rely on. At its best, Meyer’s work subverts traditional sexual power dynamics and celebrates the disorienting sexual chaos that results. Female liberation in Meyer’s universe is not the product of paternalistic sympathy or cliché moral epiphany. Rather, he depicts female sexuality as being by its very nature violently irrepressible and self-actualizing. Socio-masculine anxiety about this threat to male sexual hegemony is the principal component of Meyer’s continuing subversive appeal. But as Ebert once put it, that’s only apparent to viewers “if they can see past the heaving bosoms.” Not likely.
So, you’re a UK-based film club/film society/cinema and want to show a Russ Meyer film at your venue? Splendid! You truly haven’t seen all those big heaving bosoms until you’ve seen them on the big screen, where they belong.
Tracking down screening rights to cult films can often be quite a laborious process, especially films made independently; since, however, Meyer retained the copyright to most of his films, it is relatively cut-and-dry here. The issue of who can grant licenses to legally screen the films in the UK, however, is somewhat more thorny. I’ve written the below in a FAQ format that should be easy to follow for both new and experienced film programmers.
If you’re new to film programming and the below text confuses you completely, I would highly recommend getting in touch with the Independent Cinema Office, who offer excellent advice to both cinemas and amateur programmers alike.
Can I license the Russ Meyer film I want from Arrow Films/Video, since they released it on DVD?
Until earlier this year, it was possible to put on a screening – as long as you didn’t mind showing from DVD in most cases – of basically any of Russ Meyer’s films in the UK (1964’s Fanny Hill, a German-financed director-for-hire job for Meyer, is an exception as its worldwide rights are much more complex. But who in their right mind wants to show that?!). As well as having released an essential, comprehensive DVD boxset of Meyer’s work, Arrow Films also held theatrical rights to many of these films, licenses for which would be granted via Park Circus. This enabled Meyer’s work to stay active on the repertory cinema circuit well into the 21st century, often 50 years after these films were produced.
Unfortunately, Arrow‘s rights to the Meyer films lapsed in early 2013, which means that most of Meyer’s films are now unavailable to screen (at least easily) in the UK.
I still really want to show the film. Is there someone else who can grant me a screening license?
To clarify for those who don’t know much about copyright: the primary worldwide rights holder for most of Russ Meyer’s films is RM Films International, who sublicensed the UK rights to Arrow. Now that Arrow‘s rights have expired, RM Films are by default the UK copyright holder, at least until they sublicense the films to someone else. If you want to show one of the Meyer films previously distributed by Arrow, you will have to approach RM Films via the following contact details:
RM Films International
P.O. Box 3748 Hollywood, CA 90078 tel. (323) 466-7791 rmf@rmfilm.com
This writer contacted RM Films for a statement on UK rights availability, but a response from either Janice Cowart or Julio Dottavio was not forthcoming. If you do get a reply from them, it’s worth bearing in mind that their price would probably be considerable; think about your budgets, and whether the expense, time and effort to put on such a screening are factors you’re happy to incur. (Incidentally, Park Circus‘ site still lists a few Meyer films as being available for the UK; this is erroneous, and I would not recommend attempting to book the films through them.)
Are there any Russ Meyer films not owned by RM Films International that I can screen instead?
There are two main exceptions, however, and it’s no coincidence they are both titles not included in Arrow‘s boxset. Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls and The Seven Minutes were both made for 20thCentury Fox, who own all rights to both films in perpetuity, including for the UK. You can organise single screenings of both films via Hollywood Classics, who handle theatrical and DVD rights on library titles from Fox, MGM and other studios.
Are 35mm prints available for either of these films?
No 35mm prints of Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls are in active circulation in the UK, but one was shipped from Fox in LA specifically for a Somerset House screening in 2012; this may also be available should you want to pay for it. There are no materials available in the UK to screen of The Seven Minutes (not even a DVD or a DigiBeta tape), so unless you know where to find a print or you’re happy to screen one of the many fuzzy bootlegs of the latter, BVD is your easiest option for legal UK-based big-screen Meyer thrills. A license to screen either film from Hollywood Classics will usually cost you a £100 minimum guarantee (MG) and a 25% take from the box office, not including print hire or transport if this is applicable.
I want to screen BVD but in a pub/alternate screening space from DVD than a cinema. Does this require a different type of screening license?
If you are just screening BVD from DVD in a pub or similar venue and require a ‘non-theatrical’ screening license, you can also book it via Filmbank (which will normally cost around £100 inclusive of VAT), or it will be covered by an MPLC license.
I know where to find a 35mm print of one of the Meyer films previously released by Arrow. Can I screen it anyway, without a license?
Unfortunately not. Ownership of a film print is very different from ownership of the film’s copyright.; you will still need permission from RM Films to show the film, even if you own a print or have permission from someone who does.
If I don’t get a response from RM Films, can I just go ahead and screen the film anyway?
You can try, but it is at your own risk. If you are caught out by RM Films, there is nothing to stop them from demanding a penalty fee from you (even after the screening has taken place), or even threatening legal action. Having had a US-based rights holder do this to me in the past, I would strongly advise against it!
One hopes that RM Films will eventually sublicense the rest of the Meyer oeuvre back to Arrow (or some other enterprising UK distributor) so classics like Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! and Supervixens can be put back on UK screens.
James Flower runs Savage Cinema, a London-based cult night that has shown films such as William Friedkin’s SORCERER, the UK premiere of Bill Gunn’s GANJA & HESS and a night devoted to British filmmaker Philip Ridley. By day he works for UK independent film distributor Soda Pictures, and by night he thinks about how to win the annual FrightFest quiz, after coming second place in 2013.
Miss Meyer 