Big Bosoms and Square Jaws: Russ Meyer, King of the Sex Film

by Jimmy McDonough

  Back in the depths of the repository, someone scuttling about in the shadows has heard me enter. Within seconds I am face-to-face with The Handyman himself, Anthony James Ryan. He is instantly recognizable from his many Meyer cameos, most frequently as the omnipresent, glassy-eyed strip joint patron. Al “Li’l Abner” Capp could’ve invented Ryan—thin, slightly hunched, a wide slash of a mouth, exclamation-point eyes behind black frames. He’s The Man with One Expression, the walking, talking definition of “poker face.” At times Ryan looks older than an unwrapped mummy—he refused to state his age when asked—but there’s a youthful fire present, accompanied by a sly sense of humor. The guy’s just a gas to be around, and, outside of combat buddy Charlie Sumners, no man has gotten closer to RM.

  A sharp cookie, Jim Ryan speaks numerous languages and knows a bit about everything. “Ryan has all kinds of adventures in his background, some he won’t talk about,” said Meyer film editor Richard Brummer. “Secret government work here and there.” Despite his seemingly placid nature, one wouldn’t want to cross him, even if he is way past qualification for an AARP card. Fellow Meyer actor Jean Duran recounted how Ryan was once forced to pull a blade on some street trash wreaking havoc throughout the neighborhood. “Jimmy took the knife and—clickclickclick!—cut all the buttons on his shirt,” said Duran. “Don’t go fucking with my old man, he’ll take you out!”

  Jim Ryan first met Russ Meyer at an August 1943 training session for combat photographers over at RKO. Another member of the 166th, Ryan didn’t get to know RM well until after the war, when Meyer was just getting started in Hollywood and Ryan was running a commercial photography studio in Highland Park. In 1960, Meyer offered him a month’s work at four hundred bucks a week to costar in his Eve and the Handyman film. Outfitted in striped overalls and cap, Ryan played a sort of new-model Mr. Teas. Meyer would be so fond of the character that he’d periodically coax Ryan into donning the old overalls for brief Handyman cameos, even in that grim final outpost of 2000, Pandora Peaks.

  The Handyman was an apt part for Anthony James Ryan to play in a Meyer film, because that’s the role he’s essayed in RM’s life. “Russ used to go to Ryan for everything,” said former secretary Paula Parker. For decades Meyer relied on Jim to take care of business, whether co-producing, shooting second-unit footage, photographing stills, or cleaning up the many personal messes Russ left behind. “Ryan is a perfect Meyer crony—he’s an old army buddy, he’s soft-spoken, he’s incredibly dependable, and he’s always there for the emergency,” said Meyer scriptwriter John McCormick. “Ryan is completely steadfast.”

  Not that one could expect Russ to show his gratitude. “I’m sure Ryan did more for Ryan than Meyer did for Ryan,” said RM associate George Costello. Meyer became a millionaire, while Jim Ryan barely scrapes by. So why did Ryan stick with RM until the bitter end? “Meyer’s problems were interesting,” said Ryan. “His whole life was controversy. Meyer loved all that hullabaloo—women fighting, people screaming, cops and red lights flashing, neighbors complaining. He provoked people into something occurring.”

  “I think Jim lived quite vicariously off Meyer’s hijinks,” said John McCormick. Film distributor Jean-Pierre Jackson recalled Meyer forever chuckling over Ryan’s checkered career with the opposite sex. His relationship with his late wife Jacqueline (whom he met on the set of Eve and the Handyman—she appears as a nude model in an art class) was rather tempestuous, as Jacqueline was a bit of a character herself, given to wearing SS uniforms as part of her obsession with the Third Reich. “Her whole room was covered in swastikas,” said Jim. “It looked like a German Bund meeting.”

  Outside of Jacqueline (who, somewhat fittingly, wasn’t exactly “built” in the way RM required), Ryan knew better than to get involved with any of the Meyer women. But he liked being around them, liked getting an occasional whiff of their perfume as they cried on his shoulder after big bad Russ had bawled them out. “For some reason they’d come talk to me rather than Meyer. I listened to them—and he didn’t!”

  The men in RM’s movies are mere wisps of beings that are about as vague as Meyer’s father: if the women are cartoons, the men are stick figures. In life, Meyer surrounded himself with some of the brightest, most talented guys around, but they weren’t the most aggressive bunch. RM’s was a world ruled by a king with no challengers. There was room for only one big shot: Russ Meyer. “I think Russ tended to romanticize the depth of his friendships with his male associates,” said Meyer biographer David K. Frasier. “It would not surprise me if many of the people with whom he was close now express misgivings about the relationship.” The fact that RM surrounded himself with such nonthreatening males suggests he wasn’t as secure in his own skin as he appeared to be. It also meant that for guys like Ryan there would be no way to stand outside Meyer’s shadow. “What a drag to work for a man who’s a one-man show,” said former RM crew member Stan Berkowitz. “You’re nobody.”

  Before we jump back into Russ Meyer’s post-Teas oeuvre and the making of it, let’s take a look at RM’s competition, the rogues who operated outside mainstream Hollywood in the underground world of the now-booming sexploitation business—and at just how separate Russ Meyer kept himself from them.

  “I have no gods,” said Russell Albion Meyer. “I’m impressed with a few films—Sahara with Humphrey Bogart. Casablanca. Charley Varrick. Red Badge of Courage. A Bridge Too Far. The Bank Dick. Foreign Correspondent.”

  Meyer liked to present himself as a filmmaking primate who’d invented himself. He simply had no influences, and if pressed, made up fictitious ones with grand names, such as Chester Floodbank.*1 The truth was Meyer knew his motion pictures. He liked Sam Peckinpah, Don Siegel, Martin Ritt, David Lean, and a lot of film noir. He loved W. C. Fields, Mae West, and the Marx Brothers. He’d tell distributor and friend Jean-Pierre Jackson that the inspiration for the way some of his male characters are put upon came out of the 1947 Henry Hathaway espionage picture 13 Rue Madeleine. David Prowse, who appeared in Meyer’s 1974 picture Blacksnake, had worked with Stanley Kubrick on A Clockwork Orange, and Meyer grilled him on the director. “He loved me talking about Stanley Kubrick, because that was one of his big idols,” said Prowse, who said RM wanted to know “everything I could possibly tell him about Kubrick.”

  “If you turned on the television he would always know what movie was on,” said Roger Ebert. “I think that he must’ve gone to the movies a lot as a kid. You felt the knowledge was there, but you didn’t often talk about it because you usually talked about the project at hand.”

  Russ Meyer’s work can be divided up (minus three one-off anomalies: Fanny Hill, Mondo Topless, and Blacksnake) into six periods, beginning with The Immoral Mr. Teas and its five “imitations,” 1959–63; his four black-and-white “roughies,” 1964–66 (culminating in Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, which introduced screenwriter John Moran); three color “soap operas,” 1967–68 (two of them written by Moran); a pair of harder sex films, 1968–69; the two-picture 20th Century Fox studio output that signaled the arrival of Roger Ebert, 1970–1971; and the three self-conscious sex comedies of 1974–1979, all with varying degrees of Ebert input. Lastly comes 2000’s Pandora Peaks, a fumbling, sad tombstone to his career that didn’t even see a theatrical release.

  “After Teas a lot of embarrassing bummers were made by people just jumping on the bandwagon,” said Meyer. “I imitated myself six times.” (Actually only five, Russ.) The Immoral Mr. Teas immediately jump-started an entirely new wave of sex pictures that came to be known as “sexploitation.” Sexploitation ushered in a genre of (mostly) ultra-low-budget, American-made pictures that actually told a story (however marginal), had ample opportunity for sex within, and, unlike the exploitation films that preceded them, had no condemning moral tacked on at the end. Mr. Teas may have been immoral, but he was unapologetic about it—a new attitude indeed. And it sold tickets. Alabama-born producer/director/distributor David F. Friedman estimates that during the sixties heyday of sexploi
tation there were approximately 750 theaters in America hungry for the stuff. “Talk about business—back then, you got a new picture, and all the exhibitors were saying, ‘When can I have it?’ Selling? There was no selling.”

  Russ Meyer regarded nearly all of his competition with disdain. They churned out technically inferior product, crap with sprocket holes. And while Meyer would bring some imagination to the table with Teas, what followed in its wake certainly didn’t up any artistic ante. Talent generally wasn’t required to make a sexploitation film, only a loaded camera and a naked broad or two. These were pictures “as rigid in their construction as a medieval morality play,” Friedman maintained. You stuck in something for everybody: a straight sex scene, a spanking scene, a lesbian scene, a rape scene, all simulated by a motley bunch of seminaked thespians who rarely if ever looked like they were even having fun, let alone actual sex. There were no sexploitation stars per se, just the latest available piece of flesh. “Our theory—Russ Meyer’s, [sexploitation director] Bob Cresse’s, and mine—was that every week the suckers want to see a new face, and a new set of tits,” said Friedman.

  The self-proclaimed Mighty Monarch of the Exploitation World, David F. Friedman did it all: exploitation, sexploitation, gore, hard-core. A jowly, moustached man whom distributors often mistook for RM, Friedman is charismatic, funny, and a great raconteur, but watch out, as he’s got the cool, calculated stare befitting a carny (retired from the movie business, Dave now runs his very own midway attractions). In the flick of a cigar Friedman can ascertain your price tag, and before the stogie’s ground out he’s figured how to get you for a buck fifty less.

  A notorious ham (he even appears in the sex scenes of some of his own pictures), Friedman, another Signal Corps graduate, worked for Paramount as well as exploitation pioneer Kroger Babb before teaming up with Herschell Gordon Lewis for a string of notorious films, most notably the landmark 1963 gore outrage Blood Feast, a picture that substituted the spectacle of bloody (if ridiculous) disemboweling for any sex.

  In 1964, he moved to Los Angeles, founding with Dan Sonney (whose family had already been in the exploitation movie business for three decades under the banner Sonney Amusements) what became Entertainment Ventures, Incorporated, a mini-empire located at 1654 Cordoba Street, in the heart of what had once been Hollywood’s film row. There, among the dusty, partially melted statues once featured in the Sonney family’s traveling waxworks show (not to mention an infamous real-life mummy of Oklahoma petty criminal Elmer McCurdy), was a one-stop movie factory. Friedman even had his own printing company on the premises, which churned out florid one-sheets and pressbooks illustrated by the largely unknown great Rudy Escalera, who’d later turn to painting collectible plates for the Reader’s Digest crowd. (Friedman had to keep a close watch on this one, as Rudy tended to paint women on the lardy side if left to his own imagination.) When not terrorizing their shrill-voiced Orthodox Jewish secretary Bea, Friedman and Sonney hosted a round-the-clock gin rummy game that drew in every sleaze merchant passing through downtown L.A. Even the ever-down-on-his-luck director of Plan 9 from Outer Space, Ed Wood Jr., stumbled into the Entertainment Ventures offices every once in a blue moon, sniffing around for a booze-money handout.

  Friedman didn’t have much contact with RM in the early years, outside of clashing with his uppity wife Eve at distributors’ meetings. In 1973, Meyer—concerned about a Nixon-regime Supreme Court obscenity ruling throwing the decision of what’s obscene back to individual states—was an unlikely attendee at Friedman’s support group, the Adult Filmmakers of America Association, and the pair became friends. In the years to come, Friedman would testify on Meyer’s behalf during his divorce battle with third wife Edy Williams, help RM get his film distribution in Australia, and introduce him to the home video market.

  Meyer’s pictures got wider exposure than most sexploitation, but he also spent much more making them. While Meyer loved moviemaking, David F. Friedman loved the con. Despite such title grabbers as Trader Hornee, Thar She Blows, and Wham, Bam, Thank You, Spaceman, his pictures are insufferably dull, laboriously constructed grade-Z re-creations of grade B Hollywood product that exude a cynicism not dissimilar to that of some huckster selling twenty-five-cent peeks at a real, live two-headed baby in a jar. Friedman’s trailers, however, are another story. Unable to advertise on television or in many newspapers, sexploitation pictures relied on the buzz generated by coming attractions, and Dave’s were particularly irreverent and fast-paced. As Friedman admitted, “Our whole business was the old carny tease: ‘Boy, we didn’t see it this week, but look at the previews—look at what we’re gonna see next week.’ ” The name of the game was get the “D.G.’s” (degenerates) into the theater, and making the actual film came in a distant second place. “I had the one-sheet and pressbook ready before the picture was even started.”

  Meyer admired Friedman’s moxie and con-man charm. The latter may have churned out total crap, but he took it real seriously. RM described a visit to a Friedman production, a picture with “some stiff directing it. Dave would drop in when they’d have a love scene and say, ‘Stand aside.’ ” Friedman “always came in with a coat over his shoulders, no arms in the sleeve. And he’d have some flunky take the coat off, and he’d say, ‘All right, now I’m in charge.’ And then he’d direct things so seriously it would wanna make you laugh. The motivation—‘Your old man is crazy, your child is a homosexual, this is affecting you, milady, despite the fact that you have breasts almost big enough to be in a Meyer movie.’ Then he’d say, ‘Alright cut! Gimme the coat.’ Put it on, walk out. ‘LUNCH!’ That was Dave Friedman. And bless him for it.”

  “We were all independent characters,” said Friedman. “We’re talking about very unique people, people who did things that the average person would shun.” Just like the mainstream film business, the main hubs of activity were New York and Los Angeles, and the usual clichés applied. “Hollywood producers made pictures to look like Hollywood product,” said Friedman. “The New York producers made pictures to look like European product—a grittier, more art-house look.” Friedman’s being kind here, as a good percentage of the New York sexploitation pictures featured a sordid, ring-around-the-collar bunch you’d have gladly paid to keep their clothes on, while Los Angeles product boasted, naturally, the “best-looking dames in the world.”

  But while Hollywood had the slicker product, New York was home to the money mecca of the exploitation biz, 42nd Street and its formidable string of grindhouses, most of them clustered on one gaudy block and for the most part owned by the utterly ruthless Brandt Organization. Their goal was to exploit the exploiters, and the main terror in the family was the bald-headed, pinky-ringed Bingo Brandt; he constantly changed deals, lining his own pockets while shortchanging the filmmaker. Distributors lived in fear of the man because Bingo could make or break you on the Deuce. But not Eve Meyer. Marvin Friedlander, Meyer’s New York distrib, would watch in amazement as Eve stood up to Bingo over a sour deal. There wasn’t a man in the business who didn’t shudder when it came to dealing with Bingo. Eve didn’t flinch.

  Strangely enough, the biggest sleaze pit in the world had to kowtow to one of the toughest censor boards in the country: the New York Board of Regents. Meyer tried and failed to get The Immoral Mr. Teas passed before turning to distributor William Mishkin, who finally got the picture passed by cutting it to forty-seven minutes—and taking 50 percent of the action. As usual, it took a bad deal to get onto the Deuce.

  The New York City sleaze boys were a rough, tough, secretive bunch, characters to do Damon Runyon proud. Another RM, Radley Metzger, was king of the New York sexploitation world, and one of the exceptions to the rule there as Meyer was on the West Coast scene. Generally regarded as the two greatest talents in the field, Meyer and Metzger both made stylish, technically dazzling sex films that benefited from budgets that would cause other exploitationers to faint. Both men were also loners who had intense relationships with their mothers and female dist
ributors, Ava Leighton in Metzger’s case. But that’s where the similarities ended. The West Coast RM serviced Joe Six-Pack, while his East Coast counterpart courted the intelligensia. “The most erotic films ever made,” Meyer once said of Metzger’s work.*2

  A silver-haired Leonard Bernstein look-alike, Metzger possessed a voluminous knowledge of motion picture history and had a predilection for wearing the occasional scarf. Radley made “serious” erotic films for the art-house crowd, delving deep into territory Meyer considered off-limits if not downright perverted. Bisexuality was the thrust of Metzger’s 1972 Score, S/M the subject of his nefarious 1975 masterpiece The Image aka The Punishment of Anne. Under the alias Henry Paris, he directed what Meyer would never even consider: out-and-out hard-core.

  Los Angeles had its own bunch of sexploitation auteurs and distributors, men like David Friedman, Lee Frost, Don Davis, Pete Perry, Harry Novak, and A. C. Stephen, aka Steve Apostolof, an Eastern European who talked of making “smoot pictures.” By far the wildest character of the L.A. group was the notorious Bob Cresse, who partnered with a soft-spoken director named Lee Frost to form Olympic Pictures, an outfit responsible for such assaults on taste as Mondo Freudo and One Million Years A.C./D.C. A bug-eyed, sawed-off runt who looked like a cross between Erich von Stroheim and one of those carnival-prize chalk dogs from days gone by, Cresse was considered a “great little showman” by David F. Friedman, who’d met the young Cresse at—where else?—the carnival. “Bob was a bigmouth, with the balls of a burglar.” A degenerate gambler, Cresse carried a gun, was fond of dressing as a Nazi, and routinely filmed women undressing behind a secret one-way mirror.

  According to Friedman, Cresse was “not homosexual, heterosexual, not bisexual. He was totally asexual, and the greatest voyeur in the world. I think that more than anything else drove him into this racket. He was absolutely insane.” Meyer was fond of recounting an apocryphal Cresse tale concerning the time Bob stuck his pistol in the mouth of a deadbeat exhibitor, who wisely paid up on the spot.