By Peter Landau
Boobs look smaller, duller, and don't kabobble like they used to now that Russ Meyer has died. The legendary breast man and independent director of the most boobalicious exploitation films ever produced died Saturday September 18, 2004, in his Hollywood Hills home. He was eighty-two; the immediate cause of death was pneumonia, though he reportedly had been suffering from other ailments associated with old age in previous years.
Imagine the images that must have filled Meyer's head in his twilight season: Uschi Digard (Picture: ), Erica Gavin (Picture: ), Haji (Picture: ), Kitten Natividad, and Tura Satana (Picture: ), just to name a few of the top-heavy honeys who sweetened such classics as Supervixens (1975), Vixen! (1969), Motorpsycho (1965), Up! (1976), and Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1966), respectively.
Exclamation marks appropriately screamed out the titles to many of Meyer's moan-inducing features, where it was always midnight at the oasis for breast fetishists, but before he exposed his cinematic lust for luscious hourglass figures, he received his first 8mm movie camera from, appropriately enough, his mother. When Meyer turned eighteen, he enlisted in the U.S. Army Signal Corps, where he learned motion-picture photography in an army school at MGM. But he had yet to rally his troops in the service of titillation.
After his military service, Meyer's true calling emerged in the pin-up photos he took of his then wife, the appropriately bombastically bazoomba'd Eve Meyer, which he sold to Playboy . Even as he first aimed his provocative lens at the skin that would make his name, the Meyer lexicon of lust was firmly focused on breasts, big and fat and plump puppies that make tongues wag and dogs howl. The Bunny liked, and Meyer served as Hef's house photog, shooting the majority of Playmate pictorials during its first year in publication.
But the star-maker of super-sized sacks wasn't born until the release of The Immoral Mr. Teas (1959). Not only does this film mark the beginning of his great legacy, it has the distinction of being the first skin flick. Surprisingly, it even garnered attention from highbrow critics such as Leslie Fielder, who christened it the funniest comedy of the year. What followed was a genre all its own, more than sexploitation, this was Meyer Mania: The Naked Camera (1961), Fanny Hill (1964), and Mudhoney (1965), from which the famous Seattle grunge band took their name in tribute. But it was with Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965), a raging tale of blood-lusty go-go dancers on a rampage, that Meyer's artistry and power of arousal combined to make his first masterpiece. Director John Waters said of Pussycat, "It is possibly better than any film that will be made in the future."
The power of Meyer's talent was not lost on extraordinary chronicler of low-life Josh Alan Friedman, author of the definitive book on the dirty heyday of The Deuce, Tales of Times Square, as well as When Sex Was Dirty (Feral House), a memoir of his days as editor of Screw magazine in the decedent 1970s that will be released this November. (Both titles are available at FeralHouse.com.)
"I was shocked at how good his films were, after I first attended a Russ Meyer film festival some twenty-odd years ago," Friedman tells Mr. Skin. "Talk about your swaggering independent American spirit. He seemed to have that great inbred-Californian style, common also to John Steinbeck and Tom Waits. Two fists, no apologies, felt pride where others would have felt shame, and our nation's tit laureate nonpareil."
Selwyn Harris, former publisher of the sleaze-zine Happyland and present-day Editorial Director of MrSkin.com, applauds Meyer for his dedication to (s)extremes, particularly in the form of female extremities. Says Harris: "I first became aware of the Russ Meyer canon--and his starlets' cannons--via the Biblically important Cult Movies books by Danny Peary. I could hardly wait to see the movies that Peary wrote about. Unfortunately, I was twelve. But after reading the Meyer interview and profile in John Waters's Shock Value when I was a freshman in high school, I could wait no longer. I somehow worked up the nerve to sneak into a midnight screening of Beyond the Valley of the Dolls at the 8th Street Playhouse in Manhattan. Let us just say that whoever sat in front of me was lucky I hadn't yet completely figured out every last mechanic of masturbation. Damn lucky."
Harris's tale of derring-do in the name of eyeballing a Meyer opus echoes that of his idol, Howard Stern, who has frequently and colorfully recounted his adventures with a fake i.d. when he caught Vixen! at Long Island, New York's sorely missed Mini-Cinema.
As a parting tribute, Selwyn Harris notes: "To this moment, I remain obsessed by women with freakishly unusual chest appendages, be they mammazons such as those Meyer immortalized or barely-able-to-dent-a-training-bra beauties on the order of Jane Birkin and Selma Blair. Meyer proved that life should be led solely at the extreme. And I salute him. And I also want to point out that his movies damn near killed me once I did conquer the technical components of hormone-enflamed self-gratification."
Following the mamm-oth success of Mondo Topless (1966) and other indie smashes, Hollywood came knocking on the door of the man who made the films about the women with the big knockers. "Of all the sexploitation filmmakers, he is the one guy who crossed over," says writer Jimmy McDonough, in an interview with The New York Times.
Mega-studio 20th Century Fox saw gold in them thar hills and recruited Meyer to make Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970). Film critic Roger Ebert was asked to write the screenplay after Meyer read an adoring letter about his work Ebert wrote to The Wall Street Journal. The film cost $900,000 and grossed $40 million, and it made Meyer a cult figure. The Sex Pistols hired his services to direct Who Killed Bambi? (1978), which lasted all of one day before the Pistols' production company went bankrupt.
The Sex Pistols may have shot blanks but mostly Meyer's pistol hit its targets, which were jamambo-sized titillations. Ebert asked Meyer how he found such, ah, bountiful talent. "Once they reach a certain bra size," Meyer responded, "they find me." But Meyer was a purist and was uninterested in medically enhanced busts. "They miss the whole point," he said.
Biographer Jimmy McDonough--author of superb tomes on crackpot horror director Andy Milligan (The Ghastly One) and crackpot rock god Neil Young (Shakey)--is presently at work on an epic chronicle of Meyer's life titled Big Bosoms and Square Jaws (Crown), scheduled for publication next year.
But Meyer's mythic story has already been told in his own words. A decade in the works, A Clean Breast is his three-volume autobiography illustrated with over 2,500 pictures from Meyer's personal archives. It is available, as are Meyer's films, on the director's official web site: rmfilms.com.
McDonough isn't the only author who tried to summarize the mammary man. "Several years ago, I was asked to write a biography of Russ Meyer for a series of trading cards celebrating great American eccentrics," remembers New York Press columnist JR Taylor. "My whole take was on Meyer as the world's leading maker of nature films. I thought it was flattering of the Great Man, but the cartoonist who was illustrating Meyer disagreed. The artist was in a position to contact Meyer--which he did--and the filmmaker assured the cartoonist that the bio seemed awfully insightful. I've always been grateful to that cartoonist for passing that story on to me and also grateful to Meyer for being the kind of guy who wouldn't edit another."
Taylor continues, "A few years later, I had the chance to spend several hours with Meyer in casual conversation. I'm as nerdy as anybody else out there and was looking forward to asking lots of questions about his notorious vixens. I spent two hours listening to amazing stories, and I don't think the guy had even gotten to the part of his history where he made his first nudie. Meyer was always quick to acknowledge his obsession with breasts. It's to his credit that something so big was just a small part of an amazing American life."
That American life continued to reel out breastacular films such as Supervixens (1975) and Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens (1979), which was his last theatrically released mamsterpiece. Pandora Peaks (2001), a straight-to-video feature, was Meyer's final work. Meyer and Ebert collaborated again on the screenplay The Bra of God, which was never produced, which without hyperbole is the greatest tragedy of our modern age.
Meyer was laid to rest at Forest Lawn Cemetery in Los Angeles on Friday September 24 at 2:30 in the afternoon. Among those in attendance was Kitten Natividad, who had this to say about her former director, "To tell you the truth, Russ was the most important man in my life, who really changed my life. He made me a star, honey, what can I tell you? He taught me a lot. I'm forever grateful in my heart and my soul for him."
Ebert gave a eulogy, but the reported presence of a fire-and-brimstone preacher officiating was less expected. Rob Schaffner, owner of the Los Angeles-based Mondo Video, told Mr. Skin that Meyer would be less comfortable in the arms of Jesus, drinking wine, which he never touched, than shouting at the go-go dancers that gyrated during the title sequence of Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!
"I went up to the coffin, stood at attention, saluted, and told Meyer, 'At ease,'" says Schaffner, who is referred to as Colonel Rob. He went on to say that despite the fact that Meyer had been systematically separated from old friends, allegedly by his assistant, he and others like Erica Gavin managed to make the funeral, though they were not allowed to speak of the great man. One imagines if they had an opportunity to say a few words it would be to wish Meyer two large and soft milk balloons to lay his tired head upon like pillows for eternal rest.
Similarly iconic and lifelong-dedicated flesh fanatic Mr. Skin credits Meyer with profoundly skinspiring his own pursuit of the prurient.
"For me," Mr. Skin decrees, "the most beautiful women on earth are those with all-natural, overwhelmingly tremendous breasts and wildly unshaven furburgerage. And when it came to capturing that specific female archetype on film, Russ was the king. In fact, he still is the king. And he always will be."
Mr. Skin recalls the momentous occasion of his first encounter with Meyer-mania. "I got a video of Supervixens when I was a teenager, and, to this day, I've never fully recovered from witnessing fully nude Uschi Digard climb up into a hayloft at the forty-nine-minute mark." (Picture: - )
There's no doubt that the combined potency of Meyer and Uschi forever altered the direction of Youngman Skin's life, but another figure also compounded the overall impact.
"Let's just say," Mr. Skin divulges, "that that was the day Mama Skin learned to knock before she came into my bedroom--the hard way!"
And that's just the way Russ Meyer would have wanted it.
Goodnight, Boobie Man.
NEXT WEEK: A one-armed salute to the delectably dirigible-proportioned dairy queens of Russ Meyer's movies.
