Saturday 24 August 2019


Russ Meyer

Russ Meyer, who has died aged 82, directed the sadomasochistic soft-porn cult classics Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!; Supervixens and Beyond the Valley of the Dolls; he was the "King Leer" of film-making.

Meyer's films reflected his fixation with phenomenally busty women and featured awful acting, cartoonish storylines and ludicrous dialogue. In Faster, Pussycat, one character says: "Your old man's been blasted out of his wheels, and your king-size brother's been twisted like a pretzel. You're all that's left, lover, and you won't be around for long."

But the nonsense was superbly shot, fast-moving, stylish and could be seen as satire. Meyer's work was discussed in classes at Yale and Harvard and bought by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. William Goldman rated Meyer as perhaps the only American auteur director.

Meyer wrote, produced, directed and edited his films, and his determination to keep control meant that he refused to have his work cut by the British Board of Film Censors. Without a general certificate the films could only be shown under certain licensing restrictions, which meant in sex cinemas or at the National Film Theatre, which accorded Meyer two retrospectives.

Meyer made much of his male chauvinism. "I'm prone to say, yes, I do exploit women," he said. "I exploit them with zeal and gusto. A woman's place is primarily in the kitchen and the bath and the bedroom. Not necessarily in that order." Yet he received little criticism from feminists. "The women in my films are always super-vixens," he explained, "the men are always wimps. Feminists love that."

While he eagerly promoted the image of a man filming his own sexual fantasies, Meyer's success was due as much to his business acumen and technical craftsmanship. He was as obsessed with budgets and shooting schedules as he was with the breast size of his leading lady ("We generally go for a double F"). He chose all locations himself and also selected and bought the costumes. The films were shot on a very low budget, around $50,000, using non-union crews with friends in the cast.

Meyer's lack of funds also resulted in his unusual camera technique. Instead of using tracking and panning shots which involved the use of expensive equipment, Meyer used a handheld camera and shot each scene repeatedly from different angles. These were later cut together to form the finished scene.

In the famous underwater lesbian scene in Cherry, Harry and Raquel (1969), he filmed the scene himself using an underwater camera mount. Meyer waited until the actresses were ready, took a deep breath and went under; his assistant Fred stood on his shoulders to stop him floating to the surface. When he needed to breathe, he tapped Fred on the ankle. On surfacing, Meyer shouted: "Cut! You don't see Otto Preminger doing that!"

Russ Meyer was born at Oakland, California, on March 21 1922. When he was 12 his mother pawned her engagement ring to buy him an eight millimetre Univex camera, and three years later he won his first amateur film award.

In 1942 he joined the Army Signal Corps and was sent to MGM in Hollywood to train as a combat photographer. He went on to shoot some of the most famous combat footage of the Second World War. Some of his film of General Patton was used in the screen biography Patton: Lust for Glory (1969). In 1943, during the build-up to D-Day, he was sent to Southampton to shoot silent footage of 12 GIs who had been convicted of capital offences but were promised pardons if they went to France on a particularly dangerous mission.

All 12 GIs absconded as soon as they set foot on French soil, and Meyer lost what film he had halfway between England and France. But his memories served as the basis for Robert Aldrich's film The Dirty Dozen (1967), which Meyer hated. In France Meyer's commanding officer was Ernest Hemingway, who enabled the shy young cameraman to lose his virginity. Major Hemingway escorted Meyer to a brothel outside Paris which he controlled, and told him to take his pick of the 15 staff. "I picked the girl with the biggest tits," Meyer recalled.

After the war, Meyer returned to America, where he became an industrial filmmaker in San Francisco, but soon became bored. Don Ornitz, a friend from the Signal Corps, suggested that Meyer try "cheesecake photos". Almost immediately after starting as a pin-up photographer, Meyer was acknowledged as one of the best in the field. His speciality was "leg-art" and he became well known for his photos of various Playmates in Playboy.

Meyer's first film was commissioned by Pete De Cenzie for presentation at his El Rey burlesque theatre. The story, albeit flimsy, was based around a film star who wants to insure her breasts and has a plaster cast made. The film was a great success with De Cenzie's clientele and he suggested a second film, this time with a stronger plot.

The Immoral Mr Teas was filmed in four days in 1959 at a cost of $24,000. A lot of the filming took place in the office of a dentist friend of Meyer's and dealt with a man who rode a bicycle around Oakland delivering false teeth. The fact that his X-Ray eyes could see through clothes to naked flesh underneath was almost incidental. The film is now considered a minor classic, stored in the archives of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Mr Teas was the pioneer of "permissive films" and inspired more than 150 imitations in a year, more than the genre had produced in the past 10. One of the reasons Meyer's films were so successful was that they eliminated furtiveness from X-rated cinemas. Meyer had a particular dislike for all-male audiences or, as he called them, "one-arm bandits".

His next film, Eve and the Handyman (1961), starred Meyer's second wife Eve and was filmed at the side of a motorway. The hitchhiking Eve, unable to find a lift, removes layer after layer of clothing in the hope of attracting a driver. In the same year, Meyer made the semi-documentary Eroticom, showing himself at work. The next year he filmed Wild Gals of the Naked West.

This was not a box office success. Deciding that he now wanted to develop a new style of "skin flick", Meyer made a series of four black and white movies set in the deep South, depicting religious fanatics, deranged hillbillies and over-sexed baby dolls. The films were sado-masochistic, containing only incidental nudity but an enormous amount of violence and action. They were Lorna (1964); Mudhoney (1965); Motor Psycho (1965) and Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1966), described by one critic as "possibly the most ammoral film of all time". Meyer called this his "Steinbeck period".

Meyer's most successful film was Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970), which took its title from the Jaqueline Susann novel. Neither Meyer nor his co-writer, the film critic Roger Ebert, had read the novel, but both were keen to produce a parody of the screen version. Alexander Walker described the result as "a film whose total, idiotic, monstrous badness raises it to the pitch of near-irresistible entertainment".

Meyer made more than a million dollars from the film and admitted that after 1970 he lost interest in filming. He did make several more films, including The Supervixens (1973); Up (1976); and Beyond the Valley of the Ultravixens (1979), but none of them enjoyed the same success as his earlier films. He then began work on an autobiographical film, The Breast of Russ Meyer. In 1985 Variety magazine reported that this was "shaping up as a 12-hour mammary extravaganza" that would need to be screened with meal breaks.

The film eventually clocked in at 17 hours, at which point he decided to commit his life story to paper. A Clean Breast - The Life and Loves of Russ Meyer was published (by himself, in 1992) in 5,000 boxed sets of three volumes, costing $350 each.

Russ Meyer was married three times. His longest marriage was his second, to Eve, Playboy's first playmate, who later became his business partner. It lasted from 1952 until the mid 1960s when, as he recalled, "I ran off and found another pair of boobs". He was later briefly married to the actress Edy Williams. He had no children.


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