Russ Meyer
Russ Meyer | |
---|---|
Born | Russell Albion Meyer March 21, 1922 San Leandro, California, U.S. |
Died | September 18, 2004 Los Angeles, California, U.S. | (aged 82)
Years active | 1947–2001 |
Spouses |
Russell Albion Meyer (March 21, 1922 – September 18, 2004) was an American film director, producer, screenwriter, cinematographer, and editor. He is known primarily for writing and directing a series of successful sexploitation films that featured campy humor, sly satire and large-breasted women, such as Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!. Meyer often named Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970) as his definitive work.
Early years
Russ Meyer was born in
In the Army Meyer forged his strongest friendships, and he would later ask many of his fellow combat cameramen to work on his films. Much of Meyer's work during World War II can be seen in newsreels and in the film Patton (1970).[4]
On his return to civilian life, he was unable to secure cinematography work in Hollywood due to a lack of industry connections. He made industrial films, freelanced as a still photographer for mainstream films (including Giant), and became a well-known glamour photographer whose work included some of the initial shoots for Hugh Hefner's Playboy magazine. Meyer would go on to shoot three Playboy centerfolds during the magazine's early years, including one of his then-wife Eve Meyer in 1955. He also shot a pictorial of then-wife Edy Williams in March 1973.[5]
Film career
Early films
Meyer was the cinematographer for the 1950 Pete DeCenzie film French Peep Show, and the 1954 Samuel Newman production, The Desperate Women, among the few Hollywood films to depict a woman dying from an illegal abortion in pre–Roe v. Wade America,[6] the original version of which is believed lost.[7]
The Immoral Mr. Teas and "nudie cuties"
His first feature, the naughty comedy The Immoral Mr. Teas (1959), cost $24,000 to produce and eventually grossed more than $1 million on the independent/exploitation circuit, enthroning Meyer as "King of the Nudies." It is considered one of the first nudie-cuties.[8]
Russ Meyer was an auteur who wrote, directed, edited, photographed and distributed all his own films. He was able to finance each new film from the proceeds of the earlier ones, and became very wealthy in the process.[9]
Meyer followed Teas with some shorts, This Is My Body (1960) and The Naked Camera, then made a second nudie cutie, Eve and the Handyman (1960). This starred Meyer's wife Eve and Anthony-James Ryan, both of whom would be crucial to the production of Meyer's films.
His next features were Erotica (1961) and Wild Gals of the Naked West (1962). Audience reception of "Wild Gals" was lukewarm, and Meyer decided to change genres.
He did a documentary, Europe in the Raw (1963), and tried a comedy, Heavenly Bodies! (1963).[8]
He then directed a version of Fanny Hill (1964) in Europe.
Lorna and the "Gothic" period
Lorna (1964) marked the end of Meyer's "nudies" and his first foray into serious film making.
He followed this with three other similar films, and would call this his "
(1965).Lorna was very successful commercially, making almost a million dollars. Mudhoney was more ambitious, based on a novel, and did not perform as well. Motorpsycho, about three men terrorising the countryside, was a big hit—so much so Meyer decided to make a film about three bad girls, Faster Pussycat. Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! was commercially underwhelming but would eventually be acclaimed as a cult classic. It has a following all over the world and has inspired countless imitations, music videos and tributes[citation needed].
Color melodramas
Meyer made the popular
Meyer made headlines once again[clarification needed] in 1968 with the controversial Vixen!. Although its lesbian overtones are tame by today's standards, the film—envisaged by Meyer and longtime producer Jim Ryan as a reaction to provocative European art films—grossed millions on a five-figure budget and captured the zeitgeist just as The Immoral Mr. Teas had a decade earlier.
He followed it with Finders Keepers, Lovers Weepers! (1969), and Cherry, Harry & Raquel! (1970), which utilized long montages of the California landscape (replete with anti-marijuana voiceovers) and Uschi Digard dancing in the desert as the film's "lost soul." These plot devices were necessitated after lead actress Linda Ashton left the shoot early, forcing Meyer to compensate for 20 minutes of unshot footage.[10]
20th Century Fox: Beyond the Valley of the Dolls and The Seven Minutes
After the unexpected success of
The film bears no relation to the novel or film adaptation's continuity, a development necessitated when
The executives at Fox were delighted with the box office success of Dolls and signed a contract with Meyer to make three more films: The Seven Minutes, from a bestseller by Irving Wallace; Everything in the Garden, from a play by Edward Albee; and The Final Steal, from a 1966 novel by Peter George. "We've discovered that he's very talented and cost conscious", said Zanuck. "He can put his finger on the commercial ingredients of a film and do it exceedingly well. We feel he can do more than undress people."[12]
Per his new contract, Meyer then made a faithful adaptation of The Seven Minutes (1971). Featuring loquacious courtroom scenes alongside little nudity, the comparatively subdued film was commercially unsuccessful, and his oeuvre would be disowned by the studio for decades after Zanuck and Brown departed to form an independent production company in 1972.
Return to independent film making
Richard Zanuck, who brought Meyer to Fox, had moved to Warner Bros and there was some talk Meyer would make a film at that studio.[13] However, Meyer would never make a studio film again. He returned to grindhouse-style independent cinema in 1973 with the blaxploitation period piece Black Snake, which was dismissed by critics and audiences as incoherent.
Foxy, a proposed vehicle for Edy Williams, was cancelled in the wake of the
"Those years were very confusing to me", said Meyer. "But instead of rushing off and throwing myself out the window, I was able to psychoanalyze myself and discern what was best for me. I looked myself square in the face and realized I couldn't do everything."[15]
In 1975, he released Supervixens, a return to the world of big bosoms, square jaws, and the Sonoran Desert that earned $17 million in the United States on a shoestring budget.
Meyer's theatrical career ended with the release of the surreal
In 1977,
Later years
Despite hardcore pornographic films overtaking Meyer's softcore market share, he retired from filmmaking in the late 1970s a very wealthy man.[16] He made a one-off return to filmmaking in 2001 to direct Russ Meyer's Pandora Peaks, featuring the nude glamour model of the same name. Around the same time, he also participated in Voluptuous Vixens II, a made-for-video softcore production by Playboy.
Use of satire
Russ Meyer was also adept at mocking moral
Meyer was also known for his quick wit. While participating with Ebert in a panel discussion at Yale University, he was confronted by an angry woman who accused him of being "nothing but a breast man." His immediate reply: "That's only the half of it."[17]
The Meyer physical archetype
Russ Meyer's lifelong unabashed fixation on large breasts featured prominently in all his films and is his best-known character trait both as an artist and as a person. His discoveries include Kitten Natividad, Erica Gavin, Lorna Maitland, Tura Satana, and Uschi Digard among many others. The majority of them were naturally large-breasted and he occasionally cast women in their first trimesters of pregnancy as it enhanced their breast size even further.[18]
Rarely were there cosmetically enhanced breasts in any of his films until Up! (1976) and Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens (1979). However, by the early 1980s, when surgical advancements had made the gargantuan breasts of Meyer's fantasies a reality, many felt he had started viewing the female body as simply a "tit transportation device"[19] and that his aesthetic vision was no longer attractive or vibrant. Darlene Gray, a natural 36H-22-33 from Great Britain who appeared in Mondo Topless (1966), is said to be Russ Meyer's most busty discovery.[20]
The Russ Meyer female physical archetype is fairly complex to decipher. Firstly, it's not to be confused with today's surgically enhanced Hollywood porn starlets or even slim, naturally endowed actresses. Russ Meyer was almost as much about a shapely 1950s
In his films such as Vixen! and Cherry, Harry & Raquel!, some of the actresses do not have large (by Russ Meyer standards) breasts yet their chests are always accentuated by use of camera angles and well-constructed bras. Reportedly, Erica Gavin was cast as the lead in Vixen! because her "smaller" bust would make the character "more relatable to women."[21]
He went on record numerous times to say that Anita Ekberg was the most beautiful woman he ever photographed and that her 39DD breasts were the biggest in A-list Hollywood history, dwarfing both Jayne Mansfield and Sabrina.[22][23]Dolly Parton was the only modern Hollywood actress Meyer ever expressed interest in working with.[24]
While he often referred to his actresses as "Junoesque" and "Amazonian",[19] this was probably more in their spirit than their actual physiques"[25] as Meyer rarely cast very tall or symmetrically built actresses with strong legs and large posteriors.
So while the general public could easily perceive Jane Russell or Sophia Loren as "Russ Meyer material", their balanced bodies did not mesh with Meyer's precise aesthetic preferences."[26] And indeed, Meyer said many times that it was Gina Lollobrigida's smaller-breasted figure that he preferred visually over her larger-breasted, taller and bigger-hipped rival, Sophia Loren.[17] Thus, Meyer's oeuvre shows the viewer that while his actresses could easily be described as voluptuous, buxom and curvaceous, it's debatable to some if they were strapping, stately or even statuesque as Meyer readily proclaimed.[17][27]
The tallest actress Meyer ever cast in a lead was the 1.75 m (5 ft 9 in), slim-hipped, huge-breasted Lorna Maitland[28] (working with whom he admitted he found intimidating).[29][30] Nearly all the other women he featured were no taller than 1.71 m (5 ft 7 in).[31] Tura Satana's performance as Varla in Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! was Meyer's only true portrayal of the large, strong and aggressive Amazonian archetype in the classic visual sense.[31][32]
Female empowerment
Film historian and Meyer biographer
In many of Meyer's films, women eventually defeat men, winning sexual fulfillment as their reward, e.g., Super Vixen (Supervixens), Margo Winchester (Up!) and Lavonia Shedd (Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens).[17] Even in the 1950s and 1960s, his films were sometimes centered on a woman's need and struggle for sexual satisfaction (Lorna, Good Morning and... Goodbye! and Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens).[17] Additionally, Russ Meyer's female characters were often allowed to express anger and violence towards men (Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! and Supervixens).[19]
Yet in his research, McDonough also notes that Meyer's female characters were limited in how powerful they could appear;[33] often the female lead is raped (Up! and Lorna) or brutally murdered (Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, Supervixens, Lorna and Blacksnake). While Russ Meyer may have championed powerful woman characters, he also forced them into violent and terrifying situations, making them prove their physical and mental strength against tremendous odds.[33] He also ensured that women's breasts were at least semi-exposed during these ordeals for comic or erotic effect.[34] Furthermore, according to frequent collaborator and longtime lover Kitten Natividad, Meyer's love of dominant women extended to his personal life, and he was almost always in a tumultuous relationship.[35][36]
Personal and family life
During World War II, according to Meyer, he was in a French brothel with Ernest Hemingway who, upon finding out that Meyer was a virgin, offered him the prostitute of his choice. Meyer picked the one with the largest breasts.[18]
Despite his reputation, Meyer never employed the casting couch during his career's peak years, though that shifted during his post-1980 unfinished projects, and rarely had sex with any of his actresses.[18] He had no children, though there were rumored unsuccessful pregnancies with his second wife Edy Williams and last serious girlfriend, Melissa Mounds, who was also found guilty of assaulting him in 1999. There is a long-standing rumor among his closest friends and at least one biographer that he had a son in 1964 with a secret lover who he would refer to only as "Miss Mattress" or "Janet Buxton."[37]
Meyer was very upfront throughout his life about being too selfish to be a father or even a caring partner or husband. Yet he is also said to have been very generous with all his friends and acquaintances, and never isolated friends from one another. Biographers have attributed most of his brutish and eccentric nature to the fact that he was abandoned by his father, an
Meyer was married to:
- Betty Valdovinos (born 1922, divorced)
- Eve Meyer (December 13, 1928 – March 27, 1977, died in the Tenerife airport disaster)
- Edy Williams (born July 9, 1942, divorced)
Contrary to some accounts, Meyer was never married to Kitten Natividad, his longtime companion and the star of his final two films.
Final years
Meyer owned the rights to nearly all of his films and spent the majority of the 1980s and 1990s making millions reselling his films on the home video and DVD market. He worked out of his Los Angeles home and usually took telephone orders in person. A major retrospective of his work was given at the British Film Institute which Meyer attended in 1982. The Chicago Film Festival honored his work in 1985, for which he also made a personal appearance, and many revival movie houses booked his films for midnight movie marathons.
He also worked obsessively for over a decade on a massive three-volume autobiography, titled A Clean Breast. Finally printed in 2000, it features numerous excerpts of reviews, clever details of each of his films and countless photos and erotic musings.
Starting in the mid-1990s, Meyer had frequent fits and bouts of memory loss. By 2000, he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, and his health and well-being were thereafter looked after by Janice Cowart, his secretary and estate executor. That same year, with no wife or children to claim his wealth, Meyer willed that the majority of his money and estate would be sent to the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in honor of his late mother.
Russ Meyer died at his home in the Hollywood Hills (from complications of pneumonia), on September 18, 2004, at the age of 82.[38] Meyer's grave is located at Stockton Rural Cemetery in San Joaquin County, California.[39]
Filmography
- The French Peep Show (1950, short)
- The Desperate Women (1954)
- The Immoral Mr. Teas (1959)
- The Naked Camera (1961, short)
- Erotica (1961, short)
- Eve and the Handyman (1961)
- Wild Gals of the Naked West (1962)
- Europe in the Raw (1963)
- Heavenly Bodies! (1963, short)
- Skyscrapers & Brassieres (1963, short)
- Fanny Hill (1964)
- Lorna (1964)
- Mudhoney (1965)
- Motorpsycho (1965)
- Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965)
- Mondo Topless (1966, mockumentary)
- Common Law Cabin (1967)
- Good Morning and... Goodbye! (1967)
- Finders Keepers, Lovers Weepers! (1968)
- Vixen! (1968)
- Cherry, Harry & Raquel! (1969)
- Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970)
- The Seven Minutes (1971)
- Foxy/Viva Foxy" (1972/73, trailer only)
- Black Snake (1973)
- Supervixens (1975)
- Up! (1976)
- Who Killed Bambi?(1978, unfinished)
- Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens (1979)
- The Breast of Russ Meyer (1979-2001, mockumentary, unfinished)
- All the Way In!" (1984, actor only)
- Amazon Women on the Moon (1987, actor only)
- Faster Pussycat: Don't Change That Song (1987, music video)
- Jean Park: Soultwister (1991, music video)
- Pandora Peaks (2001, mockumentary)
Notes
- ^ McDonough 2004, p. 24.
- ^ Russell A Meyer, Born 03/21/1922 in California | CaliforniaBirthIndex.org
- ^ McDonough, Jimmy (July 24, 2005). "Big Bosoms and Square Jaws". The New York Times.
- ^ McDonough 2004, p. 44.
- ^ McDonough 2004, chapters 1–3.
- ^ Schaefer, E. (1999). Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!: a history of exploitation films, 1919–1959. Duke University Press.
- IMDb
- ^ a b Thomas, Kevin (November 30, 1969). "King of the Nudies on Biggest Film Caper Yet". Los Angeles Times. p. s18.
- ^ McDonough 2004, Chapter 5.
- ^ McDonough 2004, p. 246.
- ^ McDonough 2004, p. 272.
- ^ A.H. WEILER (February 17, 1970). "Meyer to Make 3 More Films for Fox". The New York Times. p. 34.
- ^ "Alexis Smith to Stay With 'Follies'". Los Angeles Times. July 1, 1971. p. f12.
- ^ EARL C. GOTTSCHALK JR. (July 16, 1973). "A Dirty Deal?: Pornography Ruling Causing Confusion and Chaos, Many Traditional Publishers and Filmmakers Say". The Wall Street Journal. p. 28.
- ^ Kenneth Turan (November 9, 1976). "Russ Meyer, Almost An American Institution: Russ Meyer, Almost an American Institution". The Washington Post. p. B1.
- ^ a b Green 2004.
- ^ a b c d e f Woods 2004.
- ^ a b c d e f Meyer 2000.
- ^ a b c d e McDonough 2004.
- ^ McDonough 2004, p. 182.
- ^ McDonough 2004, Chapter 10, p. 213.
- ^ Sullivan, Steve (1995). VaVaVa Voom!: Glamour Girls of The Pinup Era.
- ^ McDonough 2004, Chapter 4, p. 83.
- ^ Frasier 1998.
- ^ "McDonough 2004, Chapter 14. p. 321".
- ^ McDonough 2004, Chapter 3.
- ^ McDonough 2004, chapters 14–15.
- ^ Meyer 2000, Volume 2, p. 165.
- ^ McDonough 2004, p. 134.
- ^ Ross, Glen (June 1987), Adult Video News, Volume 2, number 4.
- ^ a b Meyer 2000, Volume 1.
- ^ McDonough 2004, Chapter 8.
- ^ a b McDonough 2004, Chapter 8, p. 305.
- ^ McDonough 2004, p. 238.
- ^ McDonough 2004, chapters 14–16.
- ^ Sullivan, Steve, "Kitten Natividad: Russ Meyer's Most Bodacious Babe", Glamour Girls Then and Now, number 11, 4-5/86, 8/17/90.
- ^ Meyer 2000, Volume 3, p. 48.
- ^ Martin, Douglas (September 23, 2004). "Russ Meyer, 82, a Filmmaker of Classics in a Lusty Genre, Dies". The New York Times. Retrieved August 1, 2008.
- ^ Big Bosoms and Square Jaws
References
- Frasier, David K. (1998). Russ Meyer: The Life and Films :A Biography and A Comprehensive, Illustrated, and Annotated Filmography and Bibliography. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Co. ISBN 0-7864-0472-8.
- Greene, Doyle (2004). Lips Hips Tits Power: The Films Of Russ Meyer. Persistence of Vision, Volume 4. New York: Creation Books. ISBN 1-84068-095-4.
- McDonough, Jimmy (2005). Big Bosoms and Square Jaws: The Biography of Russ Meyer, King of the Sex Film. London: Jonathan Cape. ISBN 0-224-07250-1.
- Meyer, Russ (2000). A Clean Breast: The Life and Loves of Russ Meyer (3 volume set). (Under the pseudonym "Adolph Albion Schwartz"). El Rio, Texas: Hauck Pub Co. ISBN 0-9621797-2-8.
- Woods, Paul A. (2004). The Very Breast of Russ Meyer. London: Plexus Publishing. ISBN 0-85965-309-9.
Further reading
- Jack Stevenson. "Russ Meyer: The Movie Man Who Would Be King" in Jack Stevenson (ed), Fleshpot: Cinema's Sexual Myth Makers and Taboo Breakers. Manchester: Critical Vision/Headpress, 2002, pp; 163-175
- Vagg, Stephen (December 16, 2018). "The A to Z of Russ Meyer". Filmink.