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Big Bosoms and Square Jawsby Wheez Von Klaw |
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BIG BOSOMS AND SQUARE JAWS:
The Biography of Russ Meyer,
King of the Sex Film
by Jimmy McDonough
Crown, 2005 $26.95
“In 1969 an ill wind was blowing out of the world’s ass, and its name was hard-core pornography.” Yes that’s right. I’m all agog over the new tome on sexploitation king Russ Meyer, the one true-blue red-blooded genius filmmaker to truly celebrate the female body with a razor-sharp editing style (often copied but never equaled) and a totally bonkers rock n’ roll sensibility. Add a healthy dollop of the ol’ ultra violence with a menagerie of buxotics and hillbilly weirdos and whalla. Folks, good old commie-hatin’ Russ Meyer was the Orson Welles of smut! The book by Jimmy McDonough has all the dirt and soap opera temper tantrums backed up by tons of interviews with all the likely suspects. It also has an almost pathetic, Howard Hughes-like ending that makes you laugh and cry simultaneously at Russ’s horrible death a few years back. (I’d heard he was sick with Alzheimer’s disease, but I didn’t know that his bitch of a handler was leaving the man covered in his own feces on a daily basis.) Real horror show, eh?
But what I really got turned on by was the true tales of the supervixens who populated the desert world of his unhinged vision of Shangri-la excess. I have to admit to being riveted by Tura Satana’s out of control shenanigans on the set of the immortal 1966 classic—Faster Pussycat, Kill! Kill! (which served as a huge influence on the Pope of trash, John Waters—probably as much as The Wizard of Oz). Satana, decked out in black, form-fitting jeans and leather man-grappling gloves stalked the set between scenes with a pet tarantula crawling in her hair and all over her body. Needless to say, both men and women either did what she said or stayed the hell out of her way. I mean, she was a black belt in karate, a former stripper, and a mix of Japanese, Filipino, Scottish-Irish and American Indian blood. Tura is the most charismatic, exotic, deadly villainess to ever hit celluloid (yeah, that’s what I said… even better than Crawford, Davis and the amazing Mercedes McCambridge combined). And when Russ tried to reinstate his “no sex on the set policy” during filmmaking, she said, “Then you better find somebody else, ‘cuz I need it everyday!” and almost walked off the set until one of Russ’s cameramen became her sex-slave for the entire shoot. I love this book!
Another great chapter is the one on the pulsating classic Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. If you haven’t seen John LaZar’s hipster Richard III-like Z-man spouting great lines like, “It’s my happening and it freaks me out!” and “Oh jungle lad! Taste the black sperm of my vengeance,” then maybe you’ve been watching too much Eisenstein in your film class. This was a big favorite of the Sex Pistols (despite what Lyndon says about it now) and would have been interesting if the aborted film, Who Killed Bambi, had been made. You can see why the Pistols dug this flick, though, as it really skewers the whole flower-power philosophy in a completely adrenalized, over-the-top, high-octane way with great songs and non-stop dialogue. (Meyer, unlike many filmmakers, never leaves any extraneous crap talk in.) Russ and co-scripter Roger Ebert created a masterpiece so bad/great that I’ve seen it at least 10 times.
If you are also wondering what other films rank up there in Russ’s legacy, I’d say 1974’s SuperVixens. It is so crazed that, upon viewing it at a private screening, Alfred Hitchcock flipped his lid, gave big-jawed Charles Napier a check for $5,000 and hired him for his next feature. The scene that so impressed Hitchcock was where Napier’s crazed cop stomps SuperAngel to death in a bathtub (mind you he’s already stabbed her with a butcher knife) and then electrocutes her in a blood-filled pool. Meyer had become serial killer as director. Like Russ had been quoted that year, “I really dig violence.” Also, Mudhoney, Lorna and the million-making Vixen are all discussed in detail within and are all fascinating.
What the book also tries to explain, on one level, is Meyer as a walking contradiction. You get the impression that the boob-king just didn’t understsand women. He had very strict WWII values (like the female should be subservient, stay in the kitchen, etc.), but then he depended on them (like his incredible second wife Eve Meyer, who also bankrolled a lot of his early masterpieces and nudie cuties) to make his films successful. I mean, c’mon… without Erica Gavin’s unrestrained performance in Vixen, Hollywood never would have given him the bankroll for Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. He also had a knack for hating Waters’ success with Pink Flamingos and badmouthed him every chance he got, so incensed with the idea that he had been usurped as the king of trash. To this day, Waters has only good things to say about Russ and his work, and his championing of Faster Pussycat (along with The Cramps’ cover of the theme song) made it an arthouse revival film for years.
If you love these films, then you should enjoy this stab at Meyer’s legacy until the next eulogy comes out. While this is probably not the last book to be written about him, it’ll do just fine for now. “Ladies and Gentlemen… welcome to violence!”
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