Russ Meyer

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Russ Meyer
Photo by Roger Ebert

Film director Russ Meyer dominated three decades of soft porn - no penetration or cum shots - specializing in beautifully photographed sex, violence and big breasts. The Hugh Hefner of adult movies made pictures that grossed $100 million dollars, four of them ranking among the 1000 top-grossing films of all time - "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls", Vixen, Cherry, Harry & Racquel and "The Supervixens".

"The Immoral Mr. Teas" appeared in 1959, the first "nudie-cutie" and the most notorious erotic film released in the United States until Grove Press put I Am Curious (Yellow) on the market in 1968. (Sinema)

"Mr. Teas" set the standard for a new genre of narrative films that featured female nudity and poked fun at the clumsy participants in the game of love.

Today you can watch the film uncut on cable TV but when it first came out it was censored in city after city.

A former photographer for Playboy, Meyer raised $24,000 to make "Mr. Teas" and it soon made him a millionaire.

A bachelor and deliveryman for a dental supply house, "Mr. Teas" lives in Los Angeles. Neither his voice or that of any other character are ever heard. Instead, we hear sexy accordion music and a voice-over commiserating with Mr. Teas.

"Mr. Teas needs a woman. But he never gets to touch female flesh. His life is filled with daydreams of women undressing. He can't keep his eyes off women - even clothed - and as he watches deep cleavages or their asses in motion, he sees them - and so does the viewer - delectably naked.

"As the picture progresses, his ability to see women naked improves.

"Finally, using this gimmick in the year 1959, Russ Meyer treated male audiences to more female nudity than had ever appeared in any U.S. motion picture. Russ created a new industry that has produced thousands of films that make The Immoral Mr. Teas dated - one step ahead of September Morn. But it's still a collector's item. An interesting sequel could be made using the same format and letting The Son of Mr. Teas go all the way with his fantasies." (Bob Rimmer, X-Rated Videotape Guide p.97)

Literary critic Leslie Fielder reviewed Mr. Teas for Show magazine. "...There was not only no Passion, but no contact, no flesh touching flesh, no consummation shown or suggested. For pornography the woman's angle of vision is necessary, but here were no women outside of Bill Teas' head; and Bill Teas was nobody's dreamed lover, only a dreamer... In the United States we have long been corrupted by the psuedo arts of tease and titillation, conditioned to a version of the flesh more appropriate for peeking than love or lust or admiration or even real disgust... The end result is a kind of imperturbable comedy, with overtones of real pathos."

Pathetic or not, Mr. Teas created a new market for sex films. "There was a vacuum," says Meyer. "The public was waiting for something new...disenchanted with the so-called European sex films, like some of the early Lollobridgida pictures, in which there's a lot of promise but never...fulfillment...they would always cut to the curtain blowing... There were art houses that were floundering and looking for product. We jumped into this field. Once "Mr. Teas" caught on, it was booked all over the country."

About 150 imitators of "Mr. Teas" appeared in the three years following its release.

"...The Nudie Cuties of the early Sixties offered a broad burlesque of sex - purveying asexual nudity and depicting the male as a bumbling buffoon rather than a lover.... The voyeuristic nature of these early nudies is the most striking thing about them. The hero does not crave sex; he just wants to look - and the devices of the filmmakers...remove all suggestion of sexuality from the leading male character." (Playboy)

In the early '60s, Russ directed a couple of movies - Eve and the Handyman and Erotica - which didn't work. Then Meyer made a second breakthrough film. With 1964's "Lorna", he moved sex into realistic drama in a way no one had done before. Sex was the motivating power. Not love, but lust.

""Lorna" established the formula that made Meyer rich and famous, the formula of people filmed at top hate, top lust, top heavy. There are few if any subtleties in a Russ Meyer film, any Russ Meyer film. His canvas is vivid, but it is all red or all purple." (Rotsler)

Russ's first blend of sex and violence would now be rated PG-13. Russ prefered that all his films carried X ratings but by the 1980s the world had caught up with him and he got stuck with several R ratings.

"Lorna" is shot in black-and-white and the heavy-handed melodrama stars the voluptuous Lorna Maitland whose breasts were extra full due to her pregnancy.

""Lorna" was the first dramatic naked-lady movie," says Rotsler. "The films with nudity before then were more vaudeville than drama.

"Russ liked to use a preacher-type character in his films to represent traditional values. The first time he did it was in "Lorna" and he meant the character to be straight. But when everyone laughed at the preacher, Russ decided to make such characters characters.

"Meyer's scripts operated as excuses to create as many

opportunities as possible to show female nudity. He wasn't a story-teller." (Rotsler)

"My stories are morality plays," says Meyer. "I feel strongly about people getting their just deserts, if you do something bad you gotta pay for it."

Meyer's style, originally used to camouflage bad acting, evolved into a fast brazen manner where "I never let the story get in the way of the action."

Russ describes Lorna as a "primitive work of art in which black is black and white is white, and there is no shading or distortion."

An evangelist enters the action several times and predicts the terrible ending.

"Faster Pussycat Kill! Kill!", 1966, is another black-and-white Meyer pic overflowing with violence and nudity.

With the exceptions of Haji and Uschi Digard, Russ wasn't faithful to his heroines. He picked a new big breasted female to lead each film. In "Faster Pussycat" it's Tura Satana.

The second Meyer color feature is 1968's "Finders Keepers, Losers Weepers". The women are still busty and only the men get hurt.

Russ reached his peak in 1968's "Vixen", the best known and highest grossing of his films. Russ produced it for $72,000 and it grossed over ten million dollars.

Erica Gavin is Vixen and a black man is the hero. The film contains no sex in the last 20 minutes as the hero rejects communism for America. Next to "Deep Throat", "Vixen" is probably the most profitable movie ever made.

Russ made for 20th Century Fox the least titillating of his major films - "The Seven Minutes", based on the Irving Wallace novel about censorship.

"It was my biggest disappointment," says Russ. "No matter how hard I try it would appear that the only thing I can make is comedy. It's as if my reputation proceeded me and my fans were let down because I didn't give them what they wanted.

"I decided to take a great slap at Charles Keating, of the "Citizens for Decent Literature", and that was stupid. I said, 'I'll make the common man understand the problem of free speech.' But it didn't go over. Who cares? Who wants to be lectured to? The common man is not concerned about censorship until they say, 'Sorry, you can't see any more R-rated movies'."

Russ pioneered sex flicks but eventually he felt squeezed by the competition. "The idea of Brando, the Academy Award winner, putting butter up some broad's ass and jumping her and you see his ass twittering as he's on top of her, it's hard to compete with that "Last Tango in Paris"."

Known as the King of Nudies and the Barnum of Boobs, Meyer could've retired young and in comfort. But Russ - the Hugh Hefner of Pornographic films - kept working because of the "hard-on" he got when shooting a good scene with one of his big-breasted female stars.

"I'm obsessed with female breasts... They do a lot for me. They "titillate" me, turn me on, excite me, rejuvenate me."

But Russ was not the type of guy who reduced women to their tits.

"I've had more than my share of ass," says Meyer. "And they were all great looking broads."

Russ believes that his best film is 1970's "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls", written by frustrated movie maker turned film critic Roger Ebert. The story details the rise of a female rock group against the sleazy background of Hollywood.

"Beyond the Valley of the Dolls" is an "atrocious film with all the faults of a Russ Meyer picture and little of his usual virtues," says William Rotsler, summing up critical reaction to the movie.

"Mudhoney", 1976, gave Meyer his basic direction for later films - lots of sex and violence before virtue finally triumphs.

"Up!" appeared the same year, offering another example of sexploitation combined with Nazism.

Bob Rimmer: "This story is so complicated that for the first half-hour you may think the plot will never unravel. On top of that it has Frances Natividad acting as a Greek Chrous, and a couple of other big-breasted women commenting on what fools we mortals be... Their breasts and words will leave your tongue hanging out.

"Margo Winchester (Raven La Croix) is the big chested heroine. She's jogging along a country road when Sheriff Homer Johnson (Monte Bane), driving a Mercedes Cruiser, tries to pick her up. She refuses him but a few minutes later a guy Leonard Box (Larry Dean) corners her and she gets into his pick-up truck. Box immediately goes ape over her. But never try to rape a Russ Meyer heroine! This one is a karate expert, and though Box knocks her out and manages to rape her, she comes to and lifts him up. In the middle of a mountain stream she tosses him down so hard that she breaks his back.

"In a counter point plot, Paul is whipping and buggering an Adolf Hitler lookalike who pays to have it done...

"A woodchopper Rafe (Bob Scott), who weighs about 250 pounds and is six feet tall, spies Margo doing her act at Alice's. He picks her off the bar and while she's struggling and screaming, tears off her clothes and rapes her across one of the tables while the male crowd cheers him on. Paul tries to save her, but Rafe clouts him silly. Homer arrives and sees his woman being molested. He plunges one of Rafe's axes into Rafe's back. Rafe pulls the ax out of his back and whops it into Horner's chest. Blood spurts out of Rafe like a geyser, but Rafe picks up both Margo and Alice and trudges off into the night with them. He's followed by Homer, who is erupting with blood but now has a chainsaw. When he catches Rafe, he damn near saws him in half.

"Alice is determined to kill Margo for seducing her husband and almost does before she admits that her real name is Eva Braun, and she was Hitler's mistress." (X-Rated Videotape Guide, p.148)

"Beneath the Valley of the Ultravixens" (1980) stars Frances "Kitten" Natividad, Anne Marie, Candy Samples, June Mack, Lola Langusta, Sharon Hill and Uschi Digard.

Stuart Lancaster comments on the story in "Smalltown". Lavonia (Frances Natividad) is a nymphomaniac and the wife of Lamar Shedd (Ken Kerr). She gets ticked with him when he takes off on the town with Mr. Peterbilt (Pat Wright). Lamar works for a black woman who teaches him how to make love while Lavonia does Rhett (Steve Tracy) who tells her he's only 14. She also has sex with Semper Fidelis (Michael Finn) who works for Frederico's of Wisconsin who sells sexy underwear and a bust developer you can attach to a water faucet.

Lamar relaxes at a strip joint where Lavonia moonlights. She does a sexy strip...

"All the women get socked on the jaw and the guys knock down doors. Asa Lavender (the dentist/psychologist) uses a chainsaw to burst through one to get at Lamar Shedd enjoying his wife Lavonia, who also is having sex with Uschi Digard. But you know who wins out at last - the ladies with the huge breasts." (Guide, p. 63)

Russ Meyer films are "outrageous," says Russ. "I essentially make a film to entertain myself. I think sex on screen is more palatable if it is made outrageous. In my films, the women are always abundant, the men are their willing tools, and they drive around in beat-up old cars. They do that so the cars won't go out of date, because the film will play a long time.

"I've tried several time to do other things, but I wasn't successful. If I don't deliver the kind of picture - the kind of girls - that are synonymous with my motion pictures, the kind of exposure, the kind of sex, it's not going to do well. If you create the monster, you'd better live with him."

Russ and one of his big-breasted stars, Kitten Natividad, enjoyed playing a game called "Come, Kitty, come." Kitten sucked off Russ until he came. Then she'd spit his sperm into her hand, and call for her cat to lap it up.

It was easy to talk Kitten into a blowjob. You just had to tell her she was the 14th best woman in the world at giving head. "Fourteenth, hah?" she'd challenge before going down on you. "Let's see about that?"

Russ's last feature film was 1979's "Beyond the Valley of the Ultravixens". Since then he's embarked on several ambitious projects but finished none.

"As soon as the porno people came in," Meyer said in 1996, "I couldn't find a place to play."

Camille Paglia says Russ understood that sex was fun. "His women had an exuberance and vitality you rarely see in film anymore."

Meyer's ex-wife Edy Williams

Meyer's big-breasted wife number three, Edy Williams, found the lesbian scene in "Valley of the Dolls" such a turn-on, that a quarter-century later, she did her first such scene with veteran Sharon Mitchell.

In her private life, the boyish looking Mitchell is bi-sexual. She had a famous fling with porn actress and production assistant Tigr.

In her go round with Edy, Sharon took the aggressive role, showing Meyer's ex-wife the pleasures of womanly love, even stroking Edy's vagina through her panties. Later, Edy did another softcore lesbian scene in the promo video Woman on Woman. She fondles and kisses Kimberly Carson in the shower.

It's similar to what Koo Stark did in the soft-porn feature "Angel". Koo has a touchy feely shower scene with Ina Storm, who later dated Princes Charles and introduced Koo to Prince Andrew. The soft porn princess and the real prince almost married but news of her past movies played a crucial role in breaking them apart.

Edy Williams became famous for flashing her big breasts at the Cannes Film Festival and the Oscars. Ron Jeremy persuaded her to go hardcore under his direction in "Snatch Masters 6". Edy performs lesbian sex with someone half her age - Sandi Beach, 20. The scene reveals more of Williams than most people want to see - including her many liver spots.

From the 4/5/96 Entertainment Weekly

"I'M STANDING here stark naked," announces Russ Meyer, over a transatlantic phone line from his suite at a London hotel, "and I'm getting excited just talking about all this." By "all this," the 74-year-old pioneering soft-core auteur means the strippers starring in his upcoming videotapes, Meyer's return to form after a long dormancy: Pandora Peaks in "A Tale of Two Titties" and his ex-fiancee Melissa Mounds in "Melissa Mounds". "She's the hottest woman I've ever worked with," Meyer says of Mounds, who, he adds somewhat breezily, "disappeared" about six months ago. Meyer, in Europe to receive an honor from the Royal Film Archive of Belgium's film festival, hopes to release both 60-minute tapes this year.

Meyer is slightly less enthusiastic about the recent video release of his 'Mandingo-meets-9 1/2 Weeks' potboiler "Blacksnake!" (see review on page 93), not because he didn't like the 1972 movie but because British star Anouska Hempel "wasn't the typical Meyer girl," he says. "She didn't have the usual accouterments." Hempel, he says, replaced the original, busty leading lady, who was incapacitated by a drug overdose three days before filming commenced.

Archived files

• F:\V-Pinup\Evemeyer.Mpg Eve Meyer photographed by Russ Meyer

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