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Russell Albion Meyer (March 21, 1922 – September 18, 2004) was an American filmmaker. He was primarily known for writing and directing a successful series of sexploitation films featuring campy humor, sly satire and large-breasted women, which have attracted a considerable cult following. His best-known works include Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965), Vixen! (1968), Supervixens (1975), Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens (1979), and the film he considered to be his definitive work, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970).
In the Army 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 and in the film Patton (1970).McDonough 2004, p. 44.
On his return to civilian life, he was unable to secure cinematography work in Hollywood due to a lack of industry connections. He made sponsored film, freelanced as a still photographer for mainstream films (including Giant), and became a well-known glamour photographer whose work included some of the initial shoots for Hugh Hefner's Playboy magazine. Meyer would go on to shoot three Playboy during the magazine's early years, including one of his then-wife Eve Meyer in 1955. He also shot a pictorial of then-wife Edy Williams in March 1973 and remained on the periphery of Hefner's Playboy Mansion West "gang list" milieu long into the 1990s, likely in part due to their shared interest in monitoring First Amendment litigation.McDonough 2004, chapters 1–3.
Russ Meyer was an 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.McDonough 2004, Chapter 5.
Meyer followed Teas with some shorts, This Is My Body (1960) and The Naked Camera, then made a second nudie cutie, Eve and the Handyman (1960). This starred Meyer's wife Eve and Anthony-James Ryan, both of whom would be crucial to the production of Meyer's films.
His next features were Erotica (1961) and Wild Gals of the Naked West (1962). Audience reception of Wild Gals was lukewarm, and Meyer decided to change genres.
He did a documentary, Europe in the Raw (1963), and tried a comedy, Heavenly Bodies! (1963).
He then directed a version of Fanny Hill (1964) in Europe.
He followed this with three other similar films, and would call this his "Gothic" period: Mudhoney (1965), Motorpsycho (1965) and Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965).
Lorna was very successful commercially, making almost a million dollars. Mudhoney was more ambitious, based on a novel, and did not perform as well. Motorpsycho, about three men terrorising the countryside, was a big hit—so much so Meyer decided to make a film about three bad girls, Faster Pussycat. Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! was commercially underwhelming but would eventually be acclaimed as a cult classic. It has a following all over the world and has inspired countless imitations, and tributes.
Meyer made headlines once again in 1968 with the controversial Vixen!. Although its lesbian overtones are tame by today's standards, the film—envisaged by Meyer and longtime producer 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 with Finders Keepers, Lovers Weepers! (1969), and Cherry, Harry & Raquel! (1970), which utilized long montages of the California landscape (replete with anti-marijuana voiceovers) and Uschi Digard dancing in the desert as the film's "lost soul." These plot devices were necessitated after lead actress Linda Ashton left the shoot early, forcing Meyer to compensate for 20 minutes of unshot footage.McDonough 2004, p. 246.
The film bears no relation to the novel or film adaptation's continuity, a development necessitated when Jacqueline Susann sued the studio after several drafts of her script were rejected. Many critics perceive the film as perhaps the greatest expression of his intentionally vapid surrealism, with Meyer going so far as to refer to it as his definitive work in several interviews. Others, such as Variety, saw it "as funny as a burning orphanage and a treat for the emotionally retarded."McDonough 2004, p. 272. Contractually stipulated to produce an R-rated film, the brutally violent climax (depicting a decapitation) ensured an X rating (eventually reclassified to NC-17 in 1990). Despite gripes from the director after he attempted to recut the film to include more titillating scenes after the ratings debacle, it still earned $9 million domestically in the United States on a budget of $2.09 million.
The executives at Fox were delighted with the box office success of Dolls and signed a contract with Meyer to make three more films: The Seven Minutes, from a bestseller by Irving Wallace; Everything in the Garden, from a play by Edward Albee; and The Final Steal, from a 1966 novel by Peter George. "We've discovered that he's very talented and cost conscious", said Zanuck. "He can put his finger on the commercial ingredients of a film and do it exceedingly well. We feel he can do more than undress people."
Per his new contract, Meyer then made a faithful adaptation of The Seven Minutes (1971). Featuring loquacious courtroom scenes alongside little nudity, the comparatively subdued film was commercially unsuccessful, and his oeuvre would be disowned by the studio for decades after Zanuck and Brown departed to form an independent production company in 1972.
Foxy, a proposed vehicle for Edy Williams, was cancelled in the wake of the United States Supreme Court's Miller v. California decision in June 1973, which modified its definition of obscenity from that of "utterly without socially redeeming value" to that which lacks "serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value". His marriage to Williams subsequently disintegrated.
"Those years were very confusing to me", said Meyer. "But instead of rushing off and throwing myself out the window, I was able to psychoanalyze myself and discern what was best for me. I looked myself square in the face and realized I couldn't do everything."
In 1975, he released Supervixens, a return to the world of big bosoms, square jaws, and the Sonoran Desert that earned $8.2 million during its initial theatrical run in the United States 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 his use of color and mise en scène recalled larger-than-life pop art settings and cartoonish characters.Green 2004.
In 1977, Malcolm McLaren hired Meyer to direct a film starring The Sex Pistols. Meyer handed the scriptwriting duties over to Ebert, who, in collaboration with McLaren, produced a screenplay entitled Who Killed Bambi? According to Ebert, filming ended after a day and a half when the electricians walked off the set after McLaren was unable to pay them. (McLaren has claimed that the project was scrapped at the behest of the main financier and Meyer's erstwhile employer, 20th Century Fox, whose board of directors considered the prospect of a Meyer production to be untenable and incompatible with the insurgent family values ethos in popular culture.) The project ultimately evolved into The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle.
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Meyer announced several projects (including the Dirty Harry parody Blitzen, Vixen and Harry, ultimately thwarted by Meyer reneging on a profit-sharing agreement with envisaged lead actor/co-scenarist Charles Napier; a sequel to Mondo Topless provisionally entitled Mondo Topless, Too; and a color remake of Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!) that stalled in development hell. "I don't care about making another movie," he concluded in 1988. "I got all the money I'll ever need. You gotta be hungry to make a movie. I don't have the desire, the urge."
Amid Meyer's cognitive decline, longtime factotum Jim Ryan oversaw the 2001 direct-to-video release of Russ Meyer's Pandora Peaks, featuring the nude glamour model Pandora Peaks. (An analogous film featuring Meyer's then-partner Melissa Mounds was never completed.) Around the same time, he also participated in Voluptuous Vixens II, a made-for-video softcore production by Playboy.
Pandora Peaks interpolated footage originally intended for The Breast of Russ Meyer (1979-c. 2001), an unfinished "gargantuan, umpteen-hour anthology film" that would have encompassed précises of Meyer's earlier films; memoiristic documentary footage (including voluminous accounts of his Army service in which Kitten Natividad functioned as a metonymic representation of Meyer's sexual desires, culminating in a timer-shot assignation between the filmmaker and his last significant muse); and Mondo Topless-style profiles of such performers as "Tundi" Horvath, Shawn "Baby Doll" Devereaux, Tami Roche and Kristine Mills. In late 1985, Variety reported that the film had "rapidly approached $2 million in production costs" and was "nearly 12 hours in length." In December 2024, Russ Meyer Trust officer Janice Cowart confirmed that all project footage for The Breast of Russ Meyer was bequeathed to the Museum of Modern Art. The institution had expressed its intent to acquire the project by the late 1980s (per a contemporaneous 1988 interview with Roger Ebert for Meyer's installment of The Incredibly Strange Film Show, which also previewed brief snippets of a wartime-oriented segment featuring Natividad and Roche) and remains interested in "doing something" with the film.
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 fetishism." His immediate reply: "That's only the half of it."Woods 2004.
In many of Meyer's films, women eventually defeat men, winning sexual fulfillment as their reward, such as in Super Vixen ( Supervixens), Margo Winchester ( Up!) and Lavonia Shedd ( Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens). Even in the 1950s and 1960s, his films were sometimes centered on 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;McDonough 2004, Chapter 8, p. 305. 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 portrayed them in violent and terrifying situations, in which they demonstrate 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.McDonough 2004, p. 238. Furthermore, according to his frequent collaborator and longtime companion Kitten Natividad, Meyer's love of dominant women extended to his personal life, and he was almost always in a tumultuous relationship.McDonough 2004, chapters 14–16.Sullivan, Steve, "Kitten Natividad: Russ Meyer's Most Bodacious Babe", Glamour Girls Then and Now, number 11, 4-5/86, 8/17/90.
Despite his reputation, Meyer never employed the casting couch during his career's peak years (though that shifted during his post-1980 unfinished projects) and rarely had sex 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 also was found guilty of assaulting him in 1999.
There is a longstanding 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"; this relationship commenced in 1963 (as Meyer's first extramarital liaison during his relationship with Eve Meyer) at the Hollywood Players Motel on Vine Street and continued "periodically over the years" (with their "strictly carnal" meet-ups "never extending beyond three hours at any one time") "until he could no longer function," according to Jimmy McDonough.Meyer 2000, Volume 3, p. 48.
Meyer was very upfront throughout his life about being too selfish to be a father or even a caring partner or husband. Yet he is also said to have been very generous with all his friends and acquaintances, and never isolated friends from one another. 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 coddled by his mother, Lydia, who was married six times. Meyer had a half-sister, Lucinda, who was diagnosed in her 20s with paranoid schizophrenia and was committed to California State mental institutions until her death in 1999. Mental illness ran in his family and was something he secretly feared. During his entire life, Russ Meyer always spoke of his mother and sister with the highest reverence.
Meyer was married to:
Contrary to some accounts, Meyer was never married to Kitten Natividad, his longtime companion and the star of his final two films.
He also worked obsessively for over a decade on a massive three-volume autobiography, titled A Clean Breast. Finally printed in 2000, it features numerous excerpts of reviews, clever details of each of his films and countless photos and Eroticism musings.
Starting in the mid-1990s, Meyer had frequent fits and bouts of Amnesia. 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. That same year, with no wife or children to claim his wealth, Meyer willed that the majority of his money and estate would be sent to the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in honor of his late mother.
Russ Meyer died at his home in the Hollywood Hills (from complications of pneumonia), on September 18, 2004, at the age of 82. Meyer's grave is located at Stockton Rural Cemetery in San Joaquin County, California. Big Bosoms and Square Jaws
Personal and family life
During World War II, according to Meyer, he was in 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.Meyer 2000.
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 his Los Angeles home and usually took telephone orders in person. A major retrospective of his work was given at the British Film Institute which Meyer attended in 1982. The Chicago Film Festival honored his work in 1985, for which he also made a personal appearance, and many revival movie houses booked his films for midnight movie marathons.
Filmography
Notes
(1998). 9780786404728, McFarland & Co. ISBN 9780786404728
(2026). 9781840680959, Creation Books. ISBN 9781840680959
(2026). 9780962179723, Hauck Pub Co. ISBN 9780962179723
(2026). 9780859653091, Plexus Publishing. ISBN 9780859653091
Further reading
External links
Categories: 1922 Births, 2004 Deaths, American Cinematographers, American Male Film Actors, American Film Editors, Film Producers From California, United States Army Personnel Of World War Ii, American People Of German Descent, American Male Screenwriters, Deaths From Pneumonia In California, Writers From Oakland, California, People From San Leandro, California, United States Army Non-commissioned Officers, Film Directors From California, Screenwriters From California, 20th-century American Male Actors, 20th-century American Male Writers, 20th-century American Screenwriters, Counterculture Of The 1960s, Counterculture Of The 1970s
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