Ed. Note: Author Irv Slifkin was a particular admirer of sexploitation filmmaker Russ Meyer, who died last Saturday at 82. He has given AVN.com exclusive permission to excerpt an essay on the director from his book, VideoHound's Groovy Movies: Far-Out Films of the Psychedelic Era, published July 2004 by Visible Ink Press. For more info, visit
Russ Meyer was given a movie camera by his policeman father and nurse mother when he was eight years old, and the world has never been the same since. Meyer began to shoot whatever he could in and around his Oakland, California, neighborhood. When he got older and World War II began, he became a member of the Army Signal Corps, the division of the military assigned to photograph the war. Russ graduated to 16 mm and helped capture the landing of Normandy and other key events in Europe.
After the war, Meyer settled in Los Angeles and took jobs working in the publicity departments of Warner Bros. and other studios. At night he'd moonlight as a fashion photographer, clicking pictures of near-naked and naked women for a host of cheap girlie 'zines. Eventually he found work shooting layouts for Hugh Hefner's young but classy Playboy magazine.
But there was still something about movie cameras and the movie industry that intrigued Meyer. With help from a friend named Peter DeCenzie, a burlesque entrepreneur in San Francisco, Meyer made his first film in 1959, a nudie-cutie called The Immoral Mr. Teas. The movie centers on a dental appliance salesman who keeps imagining he sees women in the buff. A playful naiveté permeated the often-naked proceedings, helping Teas become a hit on the art-house circuit. Meyer went into the movie business full-time, cranking out low-budget and highly profitable skin flicks like Eve and the Handyman, featuring his wife, former Playboy Playmate Eve Meyer, and Naked Gals of the Wild West.
After a handful of these live-action burlesques, Meyer, along with his now-producer wife, turned his attention to more dramatic tales, focusing on overheated melodramas like Mudhoney and Lorna. These B&W films boasted big-breasted heroines with big sexual appetites. As the films played around the country, they often ran into legal troubles, and Meyer found himself battling obscenity charges on several occasions.
| More on Russ Meyer |
| Roger Ebert Remembers Meyer |
After knocking out a sexed-up cycle flick called Motor Psycho in '65, Meyer delivered Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, a twisted tale of a trio of leather-clad strippers on a sadistic rampage in the desert. Later in the decade, Russ aroused studio interest in Hollywood when the X-rated Vixen!, a tale of a nymphomaniac running rampant in the Great White North, brought in $7 million on a budget of $76,000.
Major studios came calling, and Meyer signed on to a three-picture deal at 20th Century Fox. Quickly, he caused a ruckus, teaming with young Chicago film critic Roger Ebert to write Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, a spoof of Jacqueline Susann's best-selling novel, Valley of the Dolls, a property Fox owned. Susann and husband-manager Irving Mansfield sued, but the film went into production anyway. Meyer's take on the project was to put the basic storyline—a trashy soap opera of pill-dependent actresses—through a satiric, X-rated, '60s kaleidescope fueled by LSD, cult murders and rock music. The result was an ahead-of-its-time masterpiece that had studio suits and unhip audiences scratching their heads. But an X rating, pre-release ballyhoo, and young audiences who wouldn't be caught dead watching Valley of the Dolls helped the $1 million production rake in $9 million at the box office.
Meyer's next studio effort, an R-rated adaptation of Irving Wallace's best-seller, The Seven Minutes, features such veterans as John Carradine and Yvonne De Carlo, but this film about an obscenity trial never took off. Fox subsequently bought Meyer out of his contract, allowing the filmmaker to return to his personal brand of down-and-dirty, self-financed filmmaking. Meyer also divorced Eve (who died in 1977 in a plane crash) around this time and began a tumultuous five-year marriage to actress Edy Williams, best known for her paparazzi-pleasing, near-naked appearances at the Oscar ceremony and at the Cannes Film Festival.
Supervixens!, Meyer's first film upon returning to independent turf, marked the beginning of a new period for the filmmaker. While his directing style has never been subtle, this 1974 effort plays like a live-action X-rated Li'l Abner cartoon on Viagra and espresso. The editing is maniacally quick, the female characters display ludicrously large bosoms, the sex scenes are grunt-a-thons that take place on mattress coils or scenic mountaintops, and the violence goes way over the top. No wonder Meyer, a no-nonsense taskmaster on the set, was gaining such detractors as critic John Simon, who characterized the director, his fans, and his films as "demented hillbillies." Spokespeople for the women's movement also cried foul, claiming Meyer's films were sexist works portraying women in an ugly, unrealistic light. Of course, this had little effect on Meyer, who pointed to Pussycat as an example of a film where women were not only strong, positive role models, they could also kick the stuffing out of men if necessary.
So Meyer continued the Supervixens! pattern of outrageousness with Up! and Beneath the Valley of the Ultravixens, both featuring real-life girlfriend Kitten Natividad and both co-scripted anonymously by Ebert.
Over the years, Meyer had several projects that looked great on paper but never got off the ground. At one time, he was to make a film with the Sex Pistols called Who Killed Bambi?, based on a script he co-wrote with Ebert, but problems with the notorious punk group's manager Malcolm McLaren derailed it. An Edy Williams vehicle called Foxy, The Jaws of Lorna, a sequel to Supervixens!, and a documentary he began shooting about his life, never saw the light of day, either.
Writing in his classic book, Adventures in the Screen Trade, screenwriter-novelist William Goldman called Russ Meyer Hollywood's "only true auteur." Goldman pointed out that for Meyer's independent projects, Meyer handled all creative and business aspects of filmmaking—editing, cinematography, producing, directing, theatrical distribution and video distribution—something few in the movie business have ever attempted. And, except for one of them (1973's racial potboiler Blacksnake), all of his indie films turned a tremendous profit. Not bad for a kid from Oakland who started out with a crank-it-up 8-mm camera.
