American film director and photographer (1922–2004)
Russell Albion Meyer (March 21, 1922 – September 18, 2004) was an American film director, producer, screenwriter, cinematographer, and editor. He is known primarily for writing and directing a series of successful sexploitation films that featured campy humor, sly satire and large-breasted women, such as "Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!" and "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls" (1970), the latter of which he considered his definitive work.
Early years.
Russ Meyer was born in San Leandro, California, the son of Lydia Lucinda (Hauck) and William Arthur Meyer, an Oakland police officer. His parents were both of German descent. Meyer's parents divorced soon after he was born, and Meyer was to have virtually no contact with his father during his life. When he was 14 years old, his mother pawned her wedding ring in order to buy him an 8 mm film camera. He made a number of amateur films at the age of 15, and served during World War II as a U.S. Army combat cameraman for the 166th Signal Photo Company, ultimately attaining the rank of technician third grade (equivalent to staff sergeant).
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 newsreels and in the film "Patton" (1970).
On his return to civilian life, he was unable to secure cinematography work in Hollywood due to a lack of industry connections. He made industrial films, 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" centerfolds 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.
Film career.
Early films.
Meyer was the cinematographer for the 1950 Pete DeCenzie film "French Peep Show", and the 1954 Samuel Newman production, "The Desperate Women", among the few Hollywood films to depict a woman dying from an illegal abortion in pre–"Roe v. Wade" America, the original version of which is believed lost.
"The Immoral Mr. Teas" and "nudie cuties".
His first feature, the naughty comedy "The Immoral Mr. Teas" (1959), cost $24,000 to produce and eventually grossed more than $1 million on the independent/exploitation circuit, enthroning Meyer as "King of the Nudies." It is considered one of the first nudie-cuties.
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.
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.
"Lorna" and the "Gothic" period.
"Lorna" (1964) marked the end of Meyer's "nudies" and his first foray into serious film making.
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, music videos and tributes.
Color melodramas.
Meyer made the popular mockumentary "Mondo Topless" (1966) with the remnants of his production company's assets and made two mildly successful color melodramas: "Common Law Cabin" (1967) and "Good Morning... and Goodbye!" (1967).
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 &amp; 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.
20th Century Fox: "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls" and "The Seven Minutes".
After the unexpected success of Columbia Pictures' low-budget "Easy Rider", and impressed by Meyer's frugality and profitability, Richard D. Zanuck and David Brown of 20th Century Fox signed Meyer to produce and direct a proposed sequel to "Valley of the Dolls" in 1969, fulfilling Meyer's longstanding ambition to direct for a major Hollywood studio. What eventually appeared was "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls" (1970), scripted by "Chicago Sun-Times" film critic and longtime Meyer devotee Roger Ebert. Ebert, who became the first film critic to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 1975, would remain a close friend and key artistic collaborator for the remainder of Meyer's life.
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." 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.
Return to independent film making.
Richard Zanuck, who brought Meyer to Fox, had moved to Warner Bros and there was some talk Meyer would make a film at that studio. However, Meyer would never make a studio film again. He returned to exploitation-style independent cinema in 1973 with the blaxploitation period piece "Black Snake", which was dismissed by critics and audiences as incoherent.
"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.
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".
Later years.
Despite hardcore pornographic films overtaking Meyer's softcore market share, he retired from filmmaking in the late 1970s a very wealthy man. 
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 and longtime collaborator 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 collaborator Jim Ryan oversaw the 2001 direct-to-video release of "Russ Meyer's Pandora Peaks", featuring the nude glamour model of the same name. (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 longtime 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.
Use of satire.
Russ Meyer was also adept at mocking moral stereotypes and flagrantly lampooning conservative American values. Many of his films feature a narrator who attempts to give the audience a "moral roadmap" of what they are watching. Like his contemporary Terry Southern, Meyer realized that sex—as one of the few common interests among most humans—was a natural vehicle for satirizing values and conventions held by the Greatest Generation. According to Roger Ebert in a commentary recorded in 2003 for the DVD release of "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls", Meyer continually reiterated that this irreverence was the true secret to his artistic success.
Meyer was also known