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Russ Meyer
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Russell Albion Meyer (March 21, 1922 – September 18, 2004), was an American motion picture director and photographer.
Meyer is known primarily for writing and directing a series of successful low-budget sexploitation films that featured campy humor, sly satire and large-breasted actresses.
Meyer was born in San Leandro, California to William Arthur Meyer, a German-American police officer, and his wife Lydia Lucinda Hauck Howe.
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Russell Albion Meyer (March 21, 1922 – September 18, 2004), was an American motion picture director and photographer.
Meyer is known primarily for writing and directing a series of successful low-budget sexploitation films that featured campy humor, sly satire and large-breasted actresses.
Early years
Russ Meyer was born in San Leandro, California to William Arthur Meyer, a German-American police officer, and his wife Lydia Lucinda Hauck Howe. His parents divorced shortly after he was born, and Meyer was to have virtually no contact with his father during his life. When he was 14, his mother pawned her wedding ring in order to buy him an 8mm film camera. He made a number of amateur films at the age of 15, and served during World War II as a U.S. Army combat cameraman for the 166th Signal Photo Company. It was in the Army that 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 (1971). On his return to civilian life, he made industrial films, was a still photographer for mainstream films (he did the still photography for the film Giant), and became a well known glamour photographer whose work included shoots for Hugh Hefner's newly launched Playboy magazine. Meyer would shoot three Playboy centerfolds during the magazine's early years, one of his wife Eve Meyer in 1955. He would do a pictorial of then-wife Edy Williams in March 1973.
Film career
His first feature, the nudist comedy The Immoral Mr. Teas (1959), cost $24,000 to produce and eventually grossed more than $1,000,000 on the independent/exploitation circuit, ensconcing Meyer as "King of the Nudies." Over the next decade, he made nearly twenty movies with a trademark blend of warped humor, huge-breasted starlets and All-American sleaze, including such notable films as Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965) and Vixen! (1968). Russ Meyer was a true 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. And unlike many independent directors of his era he chose to cast actresses like Shari Eubank or Cynthia Myers who were considered extremely beautiful and wholesome.
Meyer's output can be divided into several eras. Earlier works like The Immoral Mr. Teas, Eve and the Handyman, and the Western-themed Wild Gals of the Naked West were stylistically similar to the nudie cutie fare of the era, though separated from the pack by their superior color cinematography. 1964's Lorna saw the ever economical director revert to black-and-white; with this change came a greater emphasis on storyline, almost theatrical violence, domineeringly psychosexual women, and their insipid male counterparts. The "Gothic" period (as it was termed by Meyer) reached its apex with the commercially underwhelming Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, which would eventually be reclaimed as a cult classic. It has a following all over the world and has inspired countless imitations, music videos and tributes.
After producing the popular mockumentary Mondo Topless (1966) with the remnants of his production company's assets and two mildly successful color melodramas, Meyer made headlines once again in 1968 with the controversial Vixen!. Although its lesbian overtones are extremely tame by today's standards, the film — designed by Meyer and longtime cohort 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 up with Cherry, Harry & Raquel! (1970), which depended upon montages of the California landscape (replete with anti-marijuana voiceovers) and Uschi Digard dancing in the desert as the film's "lost soul." This plot device was necessitated after the lead actress, Linda Ashton, left the shoot early and there was 20 minutes of footage needed to complete the film.
Reeling from the success of Easy Rider and impressed by his thrifty attitude, 20th Century Fox signed Meyer to produce and direct a long-simmering proposed sequel to Valley of the Dolls. What eventually manifested was Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970), scripted by film critic (and Meyer devotee) Roger Ebert and bearing no relation to the novel or film's continuity (necessitated by a lawsuit involving Jacqueline Susann). Many critics perceive the film as perhaps the greatest expression of his intentionally vapid surrealism — Meyer went so far as to refer to it as his definitive work in several interviews. Others, such as Variety, saw "BVD" "as funny as a burning orphanage and a treat for the emotionally retarded." Contractually stipulated to produce an R-rated film, the brutally violent climax (depicting a decapitation) ensured an X rating. Though disowned by the studio for years to come and amid gripes from the director after he attempted to recut the film to include more titillating scenes after the ratings debacle, it still earned over $6 million domestically in the United States on a budget of less than $1 million.
After making his most subdued film, an adaptation of the popular Irving Wallace novel The Seven Minutes (1971), Meyer returned to grindhouse-style cinema in 1973 with the Blaxploitation period piece Black Snake, which was dismissed by critics and audiences as incoherent. In 1975, he released Supervixens, a return to the world of big bosoms, square jaws, and the Mojave desert that earned $17 million (American) on a shoestring budget. Meyer's theatrical career ended with the release of the surreal Up! (1976) and 1979's Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens, his most sexually graphic films. Film historians and fans have called these last three films "Bustoons" because Russ Meyer's usage of color and mise en scène recalled larger than life pop art settings and cartoonish characters.
Despite the fact that hardcore pornographic films would overtake Meyer's softcore market share, he retired in the late 1970s a very wealthy man.
Use of satire
Russ Meyer was also adept at mocking moral stereotypes and actively lampooning conservative American values. Many of his films feature a narrator who attempts to give the audience a "moral roadmap" of what they are watching. Like contemporary Terry Southern, Meyer realized that sex — as one of the few common interests among most humans — was a natural vehicle for satirizing values and conventions held by the Greatest Generation. According to Roger Ebert in a commentary recorded for the DVD release of Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, Meyer continually reiterated that this irreverence was the true secret to his artistic success.
Meyer's art is an example of the venerable Menippean satire, a difficult genre to define — roughly, it combines disparate forms such as prose and verse, theatre and film (think Lavonia and Semper Fidelis making love in heroic couplets or Kitten Natividad as the Greek Chorus in Up!), all of the time maintaining a healthy disregard for all forms of authority: religious/moral, legal, political, and last but not least, the authority of the established aesthetic tradition.
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."
Big breast fixation, or the Meyer physical archetype
Russ Meyer's lifelong unabashed fixation on large breasts would feature prominently in all his films and is his most well known character trait as both an artist and a person. His discoveries include Kitten Natividad, Erica Gavin, Lorna Maitland, Tura Satana and Uschi Digard among many others. The majority of his discoveries were naturally large breasted and he occasionally cast women in their first trimesters of pregnancy as it enhanced their breast size even further.
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" 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.
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 hip-to-waist ratio or "wasp waist" as he was about very large breasts. The six-pack abdominal muscles and built-up squarish appearance of modern Hollywood figures do not mesh with his pin-up aesthetic. Secondly, he also required that even his most busty actress have the ability to look good braless; "gravity-defying" and "cantilevered" became two of his favorite expressions.
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 with very clever camera angles and well constructed bras. Reportedly, Gavin was cast as the lead in Vixen! because her "smaller" bust would make the character "more relatable to women"."
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 the British actress Sabrina."
Dolly Parton was the only modern Hollywood actress Meyer ever expressed interest in working with.
It should also be noted that while he often referred to his actresses as "Junoesque" and "Amazonian" this was probably more in their spirit than their actual physiques" as Meyer rarely ever 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." 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. Thus Meyer's complete 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."
The tallest actress Meyer ever cast in a lead was the 5'9, slim hipped, huge breasted Lorna Maitland (who he admitted he found intimidating to work with). Nearly all the other women he featured were no taller than 5'7. 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.
Female empowerment
Film historian Jimmy McDonough posits that Russ Meyer's usage of physically and sexually overwhelming female characters places him in his own separate genre. He argues that despite portraying women as sex objects, Meyer nonetheless depicts them as more powerful than men and is therefore an inadvertent feminist filmmaker. Similarly, Hugh Hefner has observed: "In retrospect it seems to be empowering rather than exploitive. How much of that was conscious and how much was unconscious? I think it was relatively uncalculated...most of what Russ did came from the gut."
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 Shed (Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens). And even in the 1950s and '60s his films were sometimes centered entirely around a woman's need and struggle for sexual satisfaction (Lorna, Good Morning and... Goodbye! and Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens). Additionally, Russ Meyer's female characters were often allowed to express anger and violence towards men (Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! and Supervixens).
Yet in his research, McDonough also notes that Meyer's female characters were limited in how powerful they could appear; 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. He also ensured that women's breasts were at least semi-exposed during these ordeals for comic or erotic effect. 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.
Personal and family life
It was in World War II, that, according to Meyer, he found himself at 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.
Despite his reputation as a Rabelaisian man, Russ Meyer never employed the casting couch and rarely slept with any of his actresses. 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".
Meyer was very upfront throughout his life about being too selfish to be a father or even a caring partner and husband, yet he is also said to have been very generous with all he knew and never isolated friends from each other. Biographers have attributed most of his brutish and eccentric nature to the fact that he was abandoned by his father, an Oakland police officer and overly coddled by his mother, Lydia, who was married six times. Russ Meyer also had a half sister, Lucinda, who was diagnosed in her twenties with paranoid schizophrenia and was committed to California State mental institutions until her death in 1999. Mental illness ran in his family and it was something he secretly feared. During his entire life Russ Meyer would speak with only the highest reverence for his mother and sister.
Meyer was married to:
- Betty Valdovinos (ca.1949 - ?)
- Eve Meyer (April 2, 1952 - 1969, divorced)
- Edy Williams (June 27, 1970 - November 7, 1977, divorced)
Contrary to some accounts, Meyer was never married to his Kitten Natividad, 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 the very same Los Angeles, California home he lived in and usually answered the phone to take orders himself. A major retrospective of his work was given at The British Film Institute (1983), the Chicago Film Festival honored him in 1985, 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 entitled 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. Most of Russ Meyer's estate was left to the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in honor of his mother.
Meyer died at his home in the Hollywood Hills, of complications of pneumonia, on September 18, 2004, according to Janice Cowart. He was 82 years old. Meyer's grave is located at Stockton Rural Cemetery in San Joaquin County, California. Stockton, His headstone reads:
RUSS MEYER
"King of The Nudies"
"I Was Glad to Do It"
FILM PRODUCER AND DIRECTOR
MARCH 21, 1922
SEPT. 18, 2004
Filmography
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