Adult Film Legend Dead
Russ Meyer, skin-flick auteur, dies aged 82

Xan Brooks
Wednesday September 22, 2004

Russ Meyer in 1969: 'Please don't put me in some museum'. Photo: AP
 
Russ Meyer, the self-styled "king of the nudies", has died at his home in the Hollywood hills. He was 82 and had been suffering from dementia and complications following pneumonia.
A one-man film industry, Meyer wrote, directed, produced and edited some 23 features, starting with his censor-baiting debut The Immoral Mr Teas in 1959 and continuing through to 1979's Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens. Fans fondly remember such cult 1960s offerings as Mudhoney, Vixen and Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!

No one could ever mistake a Meyer film as the work of anyone else. Initially shot for the drive-in market, his movies featured cartoonish plots containing rambunctious dollops of sex and violence, and showcasing imposing, full-breasted women. Defending his work against accusations of sexism, Meyer described these heroines as "take-charge women, the type of women I like".

In 1970 Meyer made a rare foray into the Hollywood mainstream when he directed Beyond the Valley of the Dolls for 20th-Century Fox. In later years he would remember this as his career high point. "That's the best film I ever made," he said. "Don't talk to me about art and all that crap. That movie made me a ton of money."

Dismissed for years as a disreputable peddler of pornography, Meyer was belatedly embraced by the artistic establishment and hailed as an American auteur. His films were purchased by the Museum of Modern Art, and he was the subject of retrospectives at the American Cinematheque and the National Film Theatre in London. But, cussedly to the last, Meyer appeared uncomfortable with his role as a revered older statesman. "Don't ever call me a cult film-maker, and don't put me in some museum" he pleaded. "My films are ever-living. They'll go on and on. They aren't ever going to die."



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Mammaries are made of this ... action in Meyer's Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!

Russ Meyer, a master of sexploitation filmmaking who was called "king of the nudies" or "King Leer" for such soft-core pornography classics as Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! and Vixen has died. He was 82.

Meyer, who also directed the big studio release Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, died at his home in Hollywood Hills. His company, R. M Films International, said he had suffered from dementia and died of complications of pneumonia.

Something of a one-man studio, Meyer produced, directed, financed, wrote, edited and shot 23 tantalising but teasing films that pioneered a genre of skinflicks with much violence and large-busted women but little sex.

The titles of the X-rated fare that made him millions are descriptive - The Immoral Mr Teas, Erotica, Wild Gals of the Naked West, Heavenly Bodies, Mudhoney, Mondo Topless, Common Law Cabin, Supervixens and Europe in the Raw.

"I love big-breasted women with wasp waists," he told the London newspaper The Times in 1999, 20 years after making his final film.

"I love them with big cleavages." Little wonder that a Time magazine critic, Richard Corliss, called Meyer's films "bosomacious melodramas" or that Meyer came to be viewed as an auteur.

But with age came grace - and admiration - as Meyer's work was honoured at film festivals around the world, including at the American Cinematheque in Hollywood and the National Film Theatre in London. His movies were discussed in classes at Yale and Harvard, and purchased by such respectable institutions as the New York Museum of Modern Art.

In 2002, an exhibit of his striking pin-up and studio still photos from the 1950s and 1960s was staged at the prestigious Feigen Gallery in New York, which also handles the work of the late caricaturist Al Hirschfeld.

Born in Oakland in 1922, Meyer was the son of a police officer and a nurse. With money borrowed from his mother, he bought an eight-millimetre Univex "picture-taking machine" when he was 12 and began making amateur films.

After World War II, Meyer began photographing models for nude magazines and parlayed that expertise into photographing some of the first centrefold layouts for Playboy. He married one of the playmates, Eve Turner, for whom he named his first company, Eve Productions.

In 1992, he published his autobiography, A Clean Breast: The Life and Loves of Russ Meyer.

That Sucks.

He and I had remarkably similar tastes

RIP Russ.

Bless that man and all the joy he brought me.

I like bewbies! Thanks, Russ.

He's exploiting angels now.

Kind of like the treatment Hitler was getting in "Little Nicky" eh ETH?

Quoted: I would think that demons are stuffing it in his pooper at present, and, well, not posting pics! Eric The(Tormented)Hun

Quoted: I really, really doubt that !

Well, me too. I paraphased that line from a Futurama episode that was on this week. A 31st-century Pharaoh died after being crushed by a huge stone nose, which fell off of a giant monument to himself. Bender, who admired the cruelty with which the slaves were driven to work on the Pharaoh's monument lamented, "He's whipping angels now." [

I like bewbies.

I like cartoons, too!

ETA: Hmm ... Pharaoh smilie no workie!

I will miss him… they were the only soft porn films my wife would let me watch!… even she liked his films…



This film is one of the finest Cinematic productions of all time…

Andy