The Immoral Mr. Meyer

an appreciation of an erotic auteur who remains abreast of his time

The recent revival of Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! has put Russ Meyer in the spotlight once again, with legions of moviegoers--including some feminist critics--reevaluating his work. One writer opined, "He's an editing genius with a gift for surrealistic narrative." And that doesn't even touch his uncanny ability to cast provocatively named women who have large breasts. The filmmaker's oeuvre has never been for from the public eye, with film festivals and even scholarly treatises devoted to his work. Here he poses with Pandora Peaks (also seen below and at right), star of Meyer's forthcoming Her Life and Times.

Every year at Christmas, Russ Meyer visits his mother's grave. On trips around the country, he often visits the gravesides of old Army buddies, and those who are still living can count on tickets from him if they can't afford the fare to the Signal Corps reunion he hosts every year. Meyer, whose popular image as king of the skin flicks suggests a leering bra-chaser, is in private intensely loyal to friends and family, and he would as soon have dinner with his ancient ex-sergeant as with a buxom starlet.

Search through the credits of his 23 films, from 1959's The Immoral Mr. Teas through 1979's Beneath the Valley of the Ultravixens, and you will find the same crew names over and over: Ryan, Owens and the rest. He met some of them when they were in the Signal Corps, carrying 16mm newsreel cameras into battle. While some X-rated filmmakers might consider their productions to be invitations to an orgy, a Meyer shoot is conducted more like an Army long march, and the last activity you will find on his locations is sex.

Haji, an exotic dancer who has worked on many Meyer films both in front of and behind the cameras, remembers the director's invariable warning to cast members on the first day of shooting: No sex! "He didn't want us looking tired and depleted in the morning," she says. When Meyer was making Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, he heard that Tura Satana might have slipped out of her motel for a midnight rendezvous, so he nailed her room windows shut. He told me: "The picture would be destroyed if the star went out into the desert one night and got bitten on the ass by a rattlesnake."

Meyer uses his productions, I believe, to recapture the joy he felt during the formative and most enjoyable period of his life--the war. It was then that he formed lifelong friendships, discovered his skill as a cameraman and experienced, in a French bordello, his sexual awakening with a buxom partner who became the archetype of the R.M. woman.

Meyer is, of course, the most famous breast man of his generation, maybe of any generation. When I met him, in 1968, he was casting for Cherry, Harry & Raquel, and his ad in Daily Variety mentioned only one prerequisite for female applicants: built Asked once where he finds the amazingly contoured women in his movies, he replied, "After they get above a certain cup size, they find me."

In an unexpected way, Meyer's love of breasts has been his fortune. His films have never expressed much interest in what goes on below the belt, and when hard-core porno came along, he included himself out. Like all artists who idealize the human body, he is more interested in form than in function.

Although Meyer was for many years the target of feminists, in recent times revisionist critics have argued that his films are, in fact, pro-woman. Even such a committed feminist as B. Ruby Rich, writing recently in the Village Voice, devoted a full page to a reevaluation of Pussycat, a film she once despised but now values because of its images of strong women who exercise their wills.

If there are mindless sex objects in an R.M. film, they are invariably his male leads, who are tantalized, tempted, dominated, thrown around, tortured, used, abused, cast aside or simply smothered by powerful women. Consider the insecure rockgroup manager in Beyond the Valley of the Dolls and the husbands in Lorna and Ultravixens who fail to respond to the hungry invitations of their oversexed wives. The hero of Ultravixens is so witless he doesn't even recognize his own wife when he encounters her working as a nightclub stripper.

So consistent is this pattern of powerful--if half-naked--women that in Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, the male villain, before he goes on a killing rampage, reveals himself to have been a woman all along. Meyer is almost unique in the world of popular eroticism in seeing women not as passive victims but as aggressive sexual beings who demand that their needs be met.

One of the reasons Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! is having such a surprising box office revival around the world is that it argues for those images in such a dramatic way. Audiences cheer as the heroine attempts to crush the hapless hero against a wall with her Porsche, her stiletto heel jamming down on the accelerator as the hero's muscles bulge in an attempt to save himself. Meyer builds the climax with quick cuts between the gas pedal, the muscles, the car wheels spinning, the hero's desperate face and Satana's fierce, dark eyes.

Meyer holds all rights to his films, and they have made him very rich. He does not offer discounts to video stores, nor does he (text concluded on page 150)Russ Meyer(continued from page 93) deal with wholesalers: If you want a Meyer film, you buy it from him. For the past ten years, while directing an MTV video and short movies starring such discoveries as the Hungarian beauty Tundi and the American strippers Melissa Mounds, Pandora Peaks and Staci Keith, he has been trying to get another feature off the ground. His current project is The Bra of God, with a title (I modestly admit) by me.

Most of his time in the past decade has been devoted, however, to his massive autobiography, A Clean Breast. Meyer's life is as thoroughly documented as Winston Churchill's. Walk inside his home in the Hollywood Hills, and you'll be bombarded with images from his films: Framed posters in many languages cover the walls and ceilings, and there are souvenirs from each of his films: ice tongs, a steel-cup jockstrap, a room key, an old Rolleiflex and Tura Satana's black leather gloves. Shelves groan under the weight of dozens of scrapbooks documenting every chapter of Meyer's life. His autobiography is generously illustrated with thousands of drawings and photographs--many of old Army buddies, but more, readers will be relieved to learn, of his buxom stars, wives and girlfriends.

The book is finished, but its publication date has been pushed back repeatedly, primarily because Meyer wants it to stand through the ages as a classic example of the printer's art. It will be two or three slipcased leather-bound volumes, printed on expensive acid-free paper with a shelf life of a millennium. It will be produced in Hong Kong by one of the world's finest art book publishers. It will cost around $350. And it will not be sold in bookstores.

"But, Russ, how will people be able to order it?" I asked.

"They can call me up."

"But your number is unlisted."

"That's their problem."

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One of the remarkable things about Russ Meyer's films is that they continue to live and play long after the other work of the soft-core era has been forgotten. That is partly because of their craftsmanship, partly because of Meyer's unique leading ladies and partly because of a spirit of paramilitary commitment that can be sensed as the cast and crew struggle through rugged terrain to enact their passionate rural melodramas. But the central reason, I believe, is that Meyer is an auteur whose every frame of film reflects his own obsessions. Like all serious artists, he doesn't allow any space between his work and his dreams.