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Russ Meyer: The Times obituary






Russ Meyer was undoubtedly one of the most influential writers and directors in Hollywood in the second half of the 20th century and was hailed by the screenwriting guru William Goldman as American cinema's only true "auteur".

Like many great visionaries and artists through the ages, Meyer was vilified by contemporary critics and his work banned and prosecuted by the authorities. Now it is studied in film schools and celebrated at high-brow festivals. But its value remains the subject of considerable debate.

No other film-maker continues to split critics like Meyer, with one expert hailing Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965) as the best film ever made, while another dismisses it as the worst. Modern western society will readily acknowledge the political, religious and social integrity of maverick film-makers, it will even accept sexual preferences once prohibited by law or convention, when placed in thought-provoking social context, but many still find it difficult to applaud a man whose work was driven by an obsession with large breasts.

Meyer celebrated the female breast in fast-paced, comic book-style films with names such as Wild Gals of the Naked West (1962), Mudhoney (1965) and Mondo Topless (1966). Nicknamed "King of the Nudies", Meyer pioneered the genre of sexploitation, beginning with The Immoral Mr Teas (1959), in which the title character can see through women's clothing. It was shot in five days, with Bill Teas, an old Army buddy of Meyer, as its star. It cost $24,000 and made $1 million, sparking a host of imitations.

The success of Meyer's films encouraged the ailing Hollywood studios to include nudity in their movies and even to hire Meyer himself. Twentieth Century Fox let him loose with $1 million on Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970). The film grossed about ten times its budget on initial American release.

Meyer, born in Oakland California, in 1922, was the son of a policeman and a nurse, who pawned her engagement ring to buy his first movie camera when he was about 14. During the Second World War, Meyer served as a combat photographer and reputedly shot of some of the Normandy footage used in the 1970 feature film Patton: Lust for Glory. During this time he developed the frenetic camera style that would characterise his feature films.

After the war he worked on industrial films and as a stills photographer on movie sets, including Guys and Dolls and Giant. He also began taking pin-up pictures for Playboy and was approached to make a "nudie film". At the time film-makers routinely "dressed up" such projects as documentaries, often set in nudist colonies, though the average nudist hardly corresponded with male fantasies of naked women.

The Immoral Mr Teas made no such pretence at documentary and women were chosen primarily for their looks and the size of their breasts. There was little dialogue and no sex and the film now seems naive and dated, but it was banned in Britain until 1987. Prosecution attempts in America only served as free publicity. Eve and the Handyman (1961), gave audiences more of the same and starred Eve Turner, a Playboy pin-up who had become Meyer's first wife.

Meyer realised nudity in itself had only limited appeal. "There was required, in addition to the exposure of flesh, some sort of simple story," he said. "So from Lorna on, I have concentrated on action melodramas, violence and sex." The story he conceived for Lorna (1964), about a woman who is raped by an escaped convict and likes it, was to ensure the antipathy of the feminist movement and British censors for decades. Yet it was not easy to dismiss Meyer as misogynist, for the central characters in Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! were a trio of women bikers who kill men for fun. Significantly, Faster, Pussycat! was not a hit on initial release.

Meyer rediscovered his Midas touch with subsequent films. Vixen! (1968) cost $76,000 and earned $6 million in America, though there were 23 separate prosecutions against it. The central character has a succession of sexual relationships, including one with her brother, drawing the line only at the suggestion of sex with his black friend. The British censor passed it, but only after 23 minutes were cut from the original running time of 70 minutes.

Fox had a big hit with Valley of the Dolls (1967), an adaptation of a Jacqueline Susann melodrama about young women in showbiz, and studio boss Richard Zanuck hired Meyer to make a sequel, though his film, co-written with Roger Ebert, an esteemed critic, had different characters. The story of an all-girl rock group and their sexual antics, it was outrageously camp, with Meyer using the Fox fanfare to accompany a decapitation scene. The cast included Edy Williams, Meyer's second wife. They divorced in 1975.

Perversely Meyer abandoned his staple ingredients on his second Fox film, The Seven Minutes (1971). The subject was pornography and the title supposedly came from the length of time it took a woman to achieve orgasm, but the film turned out to be a courtroom drama and a meditation on censorship. It flopped at the box office and Meyer returned to independent production and made Supervixens (1975) and Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens (1979).

In his book Censored, Tom Dewe Mathews noted: "Their comic-strip violence won the disapproval of the women examiners." The censors wanted 11 minutes cut from Ultra-Vixens and although they insisted on only three minutes of cuts from Supervixens that did include the climax, in which the villain stakes out the heroine with a stick of dynamite between her legs. "The board attempted to separate the cocktail of sex and violence with a pair of scissors and once more the deliberate absurdity of a film-maker was unintentionally added to by a sanctimonious censor," Dewe Mathews wrote.

Meyer and Ebert worked on a feature film with Malcolm McLaren and the Sex Pistols called Who Killed Bambi?, which was abandoned shortly after shooting began. By the end of the Seventies Meyer's career was virtually over.

Then something strange happened. In Adventures in the Screen Trade (1983) William Goldman hailed Meyer as America's only auteur, pointing out that he conceived, produced, directed, filmed and edited his movies. The director John Waters hailed Faster Pussycat! as "beyond doubt, the best movie ever made". British audiences saw some of Meyer's films for the first time on video in the late Eighties and Nineties. Critics and film-makers began to reassess his work, films were rereleased and enjoyed by a new, perhaps more sophisticated audience, less hidebound by humourless gender politics. His work has been particularly appreciated by young audiences and no fewer than three major rock groups named themselves after his films - Mudhoney, Vixen and Faster Pussycat.

The Vagabond Theatre in Los Angeles hosted a festival devoted to Meyer's work in 1992, when the Los Angeles Times critic Kevin Thomas wrote: "No one projects heterosexual male sex fantasies with greater gusto and resolute dedication than Meyer."

Meyer lived in Hollywood with a succession of strippers, models and actresses, though it is not thought he had any children. His three-volume autobiography was entitled A Clean Breast: The Life and Loves of Russ Meyer and included a chapter called Mammaries Are Made of This.

Russ Meyer, film director, was born on March 21, 1922. He died of pneumonia on September 18, 2004, aged 82.


http://www.timesonline.co.uk/printFr...274724,00.html

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DVTimes

Cult film-maker Russ Meyer dies

Adult film-maker Russ Meyer, one of the pioneers of the porn movie industry, has died in Los Angeles aged 82.
Meyer - nicknamed King Leer - produced, directed, wrote, edited and shot over 20 films, including the 1965 cult hit Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!

His trademarks were violence and busty women, though by modern standards his films featured little graphic sex.

His biggest success was 1970's Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, which Meyer co-wrote with film critic Roger Ebert.

Born in Oakland, California in March 1922, Russell Albion Meyer got his start in film when his mother, a nurse, gave him an 8mm camera.

During World War II he made training films with the Army Signal Corps and shot newsreels in France and Germany.

He then turned his hand to photography, shooting some of the earliest Playboy centrefolds.

He made his film debut in 1959 with The Immoral Mr Teas, one of the first "nudies" - soft-core sex films - to turn a profit.

He sealed his reputation with low-budget, black-and-white titles such as Lorna, Mudhoney and Motor Psycho.

Vengeful

However, his fame now chiefly rests on Faster, Pussycat!, in which three go-go dancers embark upon a vengeful murder spree.

A favourite of Quentin Tarantino and John Waters, the film remains popular on the arthouse circuit.

Meyer refused to apologise for his films, which made him rich and are now discussed in American college courses.

"I've always played well at the Ivy League," he said. "I have never encountered a berating woman."

With the rise of the "skin flick", however, his work fell out of favour, and he spent much of his later years working on his autobiography.

Married three times - his second wife was actress Edy Williams - Meyer had no children.

His spokeswoman said he had suffered from dementia and died on Saturday of complications from pneumonia at his Hollywood home.



http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertain...lm/3680976.stm

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jmk

OH man!
Probably my biggest influence in my teenager years lol