Breast Man: A Conversation with Russ Meyer

By Anne Billson

In 1959, Russ Meyer revolutionized the American sex film industry with The Immoral Mr. Teas, which introduced humor and storytelling into a genre that had hitherto been lacking in them. This and the films that followed earned him the nickname "King of the Nudies", and established the recurring motif of enormous bosoms which would henceforth characterize his work. He went on to revolutionize the industry again with a series of black and white gothic melodramas inspired by Italian neo-realism, and then made a further breakthrough in 1968 with Vixen!, one of the first sex films to cross over to mainstream audiences and appeal to dating couples.

Vixen!'s astonishing profitability brought Meyer to the attention of 20th Century Fox, who hired him to direct his first Hollywood studio film, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, from a screenplay written by film critic Roger Ebert. Reviewers were baffled by the delirious mixture of sex, satire and exploitation, but the movie quickly became a cult success on the midnight movie circuit, and, along with Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, secured its director's reputation as an independent film-maker with a unique personal vision.

Meyer's films can be read as parodies of cinema archetypes and melodramatic conventions, as assaults on good taste, pin-ups come to life, an assemblage of Pop Art imagery and an ofttimes glorious celebration of American manhood's onanistic fantasies. In 1992, the British writer and film critic Anne Billson spent a day in his company; this, the transcript of their conversation, offers a glimpse into the mind of an extraordinary film-maker and true American auteur.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anne Billson
• Release date: May 23, 2016
• ISBN: 9781311666048

Anne Billson

Anne Billson is a film critic, novelist, photographer, screenwriter, film festival programmer, style icon, wicked spinster, evil feminist, and international cat-sitter. She has lived in London, Cambridge, Tokyo, Paris and Croydon, and now lives in Antwerp. She likes frites, beer and chocolate.Her books include horror novels Suckers, Stiff Lips, The Ex, The Coming Thing and The Half Man; Blood Pearl, Volume 1 of The Camillography; monographs on the films The Thing and Let the Right One In; Breast Man: A Conversation with Russ Meyer; Billson Film Database, a collection of more than 4000 film reviews; and Cats on Film, the definitive work of feline film scholarship.In 1993 she was named by Granta as one of their Best Young British Novelists. In 2012 she wrote a segment for the portmanteau play The Halloween Sessions, performed in London's West End. In 2015 she was named by the British Film Institute as one of 25 Female Film Critics Worth Celebrating.

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BREAST MAN

A CONVERSATION WITH RUSS MEYER

by Anne Billson

Copyright 2016 Anne Billson

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Nothing is more important than the film: nothing, absolutely nothing. The film is the most important thing. (Russ Meyer, 1992)

INTRODUCTION

Russ Meyer, Palm Desert (1992) © Anne Billson

Russ Meyer revolutionized the sex film industry. With his first feature, The Immoral Mr. Teas (1959) he added humor and a story (albeit of a rudimentary kind) to softcore nudity, earning himself the nickname, King of the Nudies. He later became a fully-fledged cult figure with his black and white go-go girls on the rampage extravaganza, Faster, Pussycat Kill! Kill! (1965) and his delirious Hollywood satire Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970).

Meyer's speciality, his recurring motif and Unique Selling Point, was women with enormous breasts. Voluptuous, he called them. Superabundant.

The first time I met Russ Meyer was when he visited London in 1983 for a retrospective of his work being held at the National Film Theatre, a prestigious venue run by the British Film Institute, which that same year received a Royal Charter. I'd seen some of the films before, but until the N.F.T. retrospective I had never seen them as they were meant to be seen - uncut, in pristine prints that showcased their crisp cinematography, vulgar humor and razor-sharp editing.

By the end of the 1970s, Meyer's work had already crossed over from playing at sex cinemas like the Moulin in Soho, where I'd once seen a version of Supervixens with so much of the sex and violence cut out that large parts of the film seemed mostly to consist of little but trucks moving through a desert landscape. Beyond the Valley of the Dolls was already a bona fide cult favorite on the midnight movie circuit, and played regularly at repertory venues such as the Electric and the Scala.

One of my friends interviewed Meyer for Men Only magazine, and I went along to take photographs. We presented him with a pair of melons - my colleague apologized profusely because he hadn't been able to find bigger ones - and Meyer obligingly mugged with the fruit for the camera.

The second time I met Russ Meyer was in 1992, when I was commissioned to interview him for the color magazine of a Sunday newspaper. Meyer was excited by the prospect of what, to him, seemed like validation from an upmarket British broadsheet, and I didn't have the heart to break it to him that they were probably more interested in running photographs of women with big bazoomas than in celebrating his auteurist credentials.

The interview was scheduled for Saturday noon, in his house on Arrowhead Drive in the Hollywood Hills. As others have noted, the place was more like a production office than a home, decorated with memorabilia and framed posters of his films, but not really very comfortable. Indeed he had initially bought the house for use as a location for what would be be his last completed feature, Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens (1979). Once the interview had taken place and the photographs (not by me) were in the bag, he asked if I wanted to return the following day. Since it was obvious he was more interested in talking to me person-to-person than in my 32A bust measurement, I jumped at the chance.

So on Sunday morning I rolled up at Arrowhead Drive at 8 o'clock in the morning. Meyer then drove me in his Cadillac to his second house, in Palm Desert in the Coachella Valley - a distance of about 135 miles. The journey took us just over two hours, and he talked all the way. The house in Palm Desert was even less comfortable-looking than the one in Hollywood: a sparsely furnished bungalow, wedged in among many others just like it, with hardly any terrain - just a tiny yard that was almost completely filled by a pool, of a size more suited to wallowing than to serious swimming. There was muzak playing when we arrived; Meyer explained that he kept the sound system on at all times for security reasons.

Palm Desert seemed to me like a rich person's ghetto, with a high street full of overpriced designer shops. It was also blisteringly hot (I guess the word Desert is a clue), though of course there was air-conditioning everywhere. Meyer continued to talk as we ate lunch in a fancy brasserie. Back at the house, he took a break from talking and posed for some photographs in the pool. Then he drove me back to Hollywood, still talking all the way. We stopped at a diner, and then when we got back to Los Angeles we ate spare ribs in a Chinese restaurant, which served chocolate fortune cookies at the end of the meal. By now I had filled half a dozen cassette tapes with his life story. Throughout the day Meyer was unfailingly courteous and generous, and refused to let me chip in when I offered to help pay for the meals.

This, then, is the partial transcript of our marathon conversation. I don't claim there is anything here that Meyer fans won't have read or heard before. He clearly loved to talk, and he almost certainly talked to a great many other journalists at this point in his career. At the start of our day together, when he was describing his war years and early years in the film business, he sounded well-rehearsed - which he probably was; I'm sure he had already recounted these stories to other people, many times. As the day wore on, and as both of us grew tired, his anecdotes became less coherent and more disjointed, probably not helped by me interrupting his flow with random questions. But he was a man bursting to tell his life-story, and for a day, I was his Boswell.

Meyer still had big plans for film projects, but though neither of us were aware of it at the time, he had already come to the end of his film-making career; his last completed feature was Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens (1979). The aborted Sex Pistols movie Who Killed Bambi?, which had collapsed in acrimonious circumstances, was still a sore point with him. But in any case, when he talked to me, he seemed more concerned with taking stock of his career, consolidating his public image, and with establishing his own myth than with creating something new. His long-awaited autobiographical film, The Breast of Russ Meyer, had ended up seventeen hours long and would never see the light of day in theatrical form. In the meantime, he had put other film-making plans on hold in order to concentrate on his autobiography, A Clean Breast.

He was directing all his energies towards this book, to which he refers frequently in the following text as the book or the volume. It sounded as though it had taken over his life, and he seemed fixated on inessential details. I was slightly nonplussed when he described his working methods - he was aiming for perfectly justified and symmetrical blocks of text, with no widows or orphans. If the length of a word spoiled the look he was aiming for, he would simply consult his thesaurus and swap it for another. In other words, he was letting form dictate content, which seemed to me a rum state of affairs.

A Clean Breast was finally published in 2000 as a three-volume set, obtainable only by mail order for $350, plus shipping costs.

What I didn't realize in 1992, though it became obvious when I later read Jimmy McDonough's biography, Big Bosoms and Square Jaws, was that Meyer was perhaps already suffering from the early effects of the dementia which would progressively rob him of his mind and memory over the following decade. When I met him, his recall seemed sharp enough. I ascribed his wearing a grubby vest with a hole in it to millionaire eccentricity, but in retrospect there were several other details during our encounter that I considered a little odd. He made numerous references to his girlfriend, but the bathroom in his Hollywood house was so filthy that I began to wonder if the girlfriend talk was pure bravado, part of the womanizing image he felt he needed to convey to a visiting journalist. No woman, I reasoned, would tolerate a bathroom as filthy as that. Then again, maybe he didn't bring his girlfriends home.

What follows here is neither autobiography nor biography - if you're looking for one of those, I recommend McDonough's book. Nor is it a full account of his unique career - something that would need a lot more time and space to do it justice. It's merely a transcript of those cassette tapes, edited to delete repetitions and hesitations, and with the order occasionally shuffled in an attempt to make it flow more chronologically, but at the same time attempting to preserve Meyer's unique voice.

Although he did much of the talking, it wasn't by any means a one-way monologue. We exchanged a lot of incidental chit-chat about Los Angeles, the traffic, the weather and so forth, most of which I have deleted. I have retained my contributions only where I considered them necessary to an understanding of what he is saying. I have tried to cut out most of the waffle and semi-coherent rambling that forms a natural part of any conversation (and of which I was as guilty as Meyer) and omitted sections where, over twenty years later, I was unable to work out what on earth we were rabbiting on about.

You will nevertheless encounter repetition and non-sequiturs. These were not necessary Meyer's fault - many were caused by my questioning, which was not always strictly chronological. I was particularly keen on getting an idea of the nuts and bolts of being an independent film-maker, of how films were made and distributed outside the Hollywood studio system. If Chapter 15 seems more disjointed than what precedes it, this is largely because towards the end of the day, when we were both all talked out, my questions became more random. My equipment was a primitive cassette recorder, and not everything I recorded was clearly audible. (Here I must tip my hat to the remarkable Liz Dexter, who heroically transcribed hours and hours of talking that was frequently drowned out by background noise.)

Here then is the record of My Day with Russ Meyer - film-maker extraordinaire, self-made millionaire and a true American auteur.

CHAPTER 1: GROWING UP

Russ Meyer, London (1983) © Anne Billson

I was born on March 21st, 1922, and I’ve grown up to be sixty-nine years of age, fighting with all my might to retain my youthful figure. Exercising and so forth. Weight machine and barbells and so on. Swimming? No, I don’t care for that, I like to flounder in the pool. It’s not an outsize pool, but I like a pool to be warm, like a bath. I have solar heating in the roof, the sun heats the pipes and so on.

Anyway, I was born in Oakland, California, which is in the middle part of the state, and my father was a policeman and my mother a registered nurse, although they were separated when I was born. She was a great mother, and I lived with her and my grandparents. But from what I’ve been able to gather, he wasn’t the nicest guy in the world. Sometimes I feel the chip doesn’t fall too far from the block. He had a tendency to say things in court that were unpleasant, and it was for that reason that the judge awarded my mother child support till I was aged twenty-one. Interesting that when I was nineteen, I was in the Army - and he was still paying child support, which must have been extremely irritating to him.

I only saw him once in my life. I wasn't told when he passed on. My mother never really put him down or anything; I just figured that it was something very personal between him and her and that’s how I left it. Although in the baby book, I did find some very frank things on her part about the way he treated her. The baby book is a book mothers have in the States whereby they list any kind of documents of birth: your birth record, the fact that you were christened, the religion, relatives, who was present, things of that nature.

Then when I was fourteen, my mother gifted me with a camera, a cinecamera. We never really had much money, and she was often prone to what we call hock - taking something into a pawn shop to get money to purchase something else, and then retrieve it later. So she bought me this movie camera - it was a Uniflex - and I was able to experiment with it, and it