Mcdonough - Big bosoms and square jaws: the biography of russ meyer, king of the sex film

Contents

For Tempest

Eve

Lorna

Haji

Babette

Alaina

Erica

Uschi

Edy

Shari

Raven

Kitten

But especially for Tura

Maybe from the start [Russ Meyer] has just been cashing in on the new freedom which provides new ways of exploiting the mindless audience. I would like to believe that this is not so, that he knew all along not merely how funny but how sad Mr. Teas really was.

LESLIE FIEDLER,
Reviewing the 1959 sex film that started it all: Meyers The Immoral Mr. Teas

You have to understand, my job is to get people through the night.

RUSS MEYER

Introduction: Bigger than Life

The memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment.

MARCEL PROUST, Swanns Way

It was one of those colorless, nothing-happening days in downtown Stockton. Russell Albion Meyer, the dutiful son, stood at his mothers grave, ready to detonate. Hed paid that damn florist good money to deliver a Christmas tree to Lydias grave every year, but this time theyd blown it. No tree. The next morning hed make a beeline straight for their office. Of course theyd be closed for Christmas day, so Meyer would scribble an angry note and shove it through the mail slot in the door.

But on this 1991 Christmas Eve, all he could do was stand there apologizing. Hi, Mom, sorry about the Christmas tree. Ill get on those people. Merry Christmas, Mom. Ill see you tomorrow. Screenwriter John McCormick, RMs companion on the drive up from HollywoodMeyer rarely did anything alonehung in the background, transfixed. Id never witnessed anyone speak to a grave before except in John Form films, he later reported. But then, Meyer didnt do anything by the book. He was no ordinary high-class pornographer, as he liked to refer to himself. This was Russ Meyer.

The song is ended, but the beautiful melody lingers onMother, we love youRussell and Lucinda, read the white marble tombstone before him. Lucindaor The Poor Dear, as RM called herwas his half-sister, and she would never see the tribute bearing her name. Lucinda had been institutionalized since her late teens, her brother picking up the tab for her existence. Shed routinely go into paranoid fugues, calling RMs office endlessly and in a tremulous voice, whispering of dark plots and dirty deeds. Get ma out of here, Russ. Save me. But there was no saving The Poor Dear. Perhaps not surprisingly, Russ Meyer grew up minus a strong male role model. His father had split before he was born; his stepfather was a sickly, passive man whom his mother regarded with open contempt. Lydia Meyer was a tough cookie, but she believed in Russ, even hocking her wedding ring to buy her son his first camera. She was crazy about him, and more than a little crazy in general. Lydia and Lucindathe templates for how Meyer would view the female race.

The picture is midnight black, save for the visible blips of an optical soundtrack that begin replicating across the screen in a rather ominous, twilight-zone way. An imperious, testosterone-heavy voice intones: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the world of violence... while violence cloaks itself in a plethora of disguises, its favorite mantle still remains sex... lets examine closely then, this dangerously evil creation, this new breed, encased and contained within the supple skin of womanthe softness is there, the unmistakable smell of female... but a word of caution: handle with care and dont drop your guard. This rapacious new breed prowls both alone and in packs... who are they? One might be your secretary, your doctors receptionist... or a dancer in a go-go bar!

Cut to an eye-popping triad of outrageous, impossibly built women shimmying with frenzied abandon. A swaggering, bargain-basement Tom Jones chest-beater belts out a number on the soundtrackShe will tease and taunt you and shell take just what she wants / You belong to pussycat... Cut! Close-ups of gyrating, disembodied breasts and hips. Cut! A shiny, alluring jukebox. Cut! Leering, predatory faces of cigar-chomping manimals impotently cheering the women on: Go, baby, go!!! Wail! Cut! Cut! Cut! Each new shot seems to add another crazy angle, another fabulous detail. The montage makes your head spin.

Cut to raven-haired, black-gloved Varlaone of the dancershead thrown back and cackling maniacally as she hammers the gas pedal of a gleaming Porsche. Vrrrrooom! Varlas an evil bitch. Half Cherokee, half Japanese, and all woman, this heavy-lidded, sneering, ultra-beautiful creature looks more alien than human. The Porsche screams down a Mojave Desert highway, the head of a menacing trio of bisexual go-go superwomen itching to annihilate any man who gets in their way. Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! screams the title. And this is just the first two minutes of the picture. Yikes!

The delirium this little snatch of drive-in opera induces in this author is hard to describe. Its a visceral, emotional thing, analogous perhaps to experiencing Busby Berkeley at his most berserk or the opening charge of some Roxy Music opus like The Thrill of It All. Pussycat knocks you off your feet, the undertow ripping you right out to sea. But beneath all the sneering and leering, there lurksdare I say it, Russ?an oddly passionate vision of the world.

Russ Meyer at his best: as instantly recognizable, as exhilaratingly American as a ride on a rickety state-fair roller-coaster, Chuck Berrys duck walk, or those addictive little onion slivers on a McDonalds burger. Meyers got a two-fisted, twin-missile attack, approaching filmmaking the way Buick once did cars: fatter curves, crazier fins, bigger headlights, more, more, more. Emerging from the shadows of both Alfred Kinsey and Hugh Hefner, Russ Meyer, particularly in his sixties/seventies heyday, exerted a huge influence on the common mans sexual psyche. Meyer, a pioneer who represents whats most seductive and most repulsive about the USA. Think Henry Ford, Howard Hughes, Elvis Presley. Meyer: a man who made an empire out of female flesh.

From 1959 to 1979 Russ Meyer made twenty-three theatrical features, all but two of them independently made and largely self-financed. Nearly all were profitable, and a few made him millions. At one point RM had four films in Varietys 100 all-time top grossersnot bad for movies in which, as Meyer liked to point out, the only name that mattered was his own. His first smash-eroo was 1959s The Immoral Mr. Teas, an unapologetic ode to voyeurism that gave birth to an adult film industry that Meyer ultimately scorned. Then came his black-and-white backwoods melodramas, depraved-go-go-dancer documentaries, oversexed-housewife exposs, and apocalyptic girl-group soap operas. These are strange movies that radiate, as one critic put it, a directness, an energy, a certain guileless honesty that was not always seen in Hollywood films.

The late, great photographer Helmut Newton, who, like RM, championed big, bad women in his work, once said, I love vulgarity. I am very attracted to bad taste. Well, HN, theres a truckload of it to be found in Meyers work. Expect nothing subtle here: half a dozen or so of RMs titles end in exclamation points.*1 Meyer presents a garish vision of an oversexed America and demands you wallow in it. I dont pretend to be some kind of sensitive artist. Give me a movie where a car crashes into a building, and the driver gets stabbed by a bosomy blond, who gets carried away by a dwarf musician. Films should run like express trains! For those in the audience, this unrestrained bombast is intoxicating, inspiring. It can also sicken, one french fry too many. It is certainly unrelenting. There is something to thrill, amuse, and offend one and all in RMs oeuvre. Wrote Alan Brien, Meyer is both for and against almost everythingliberated women and macho men, faith healing by radio and gay dentists, petroleum jelly and black socks, race prejudice and free enterprise. Tastelessness on this scale eventually amounts to a kind of style.