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

by Jimmy McDonough

  RM was going for broke. Count Meyer out, did they? The infidels were sadly mistaken.

  Fed up with acting, Charles Napier was working as a correspondent for Overdrive, a magazine for the independent trucker. RM sweet-talked him into leaving his job to take the lead in Supervixens, so the pair went location hunting, roaring off in Napier’s International Scout. “We headed toward the Colorado River, toward Laughlin, Nevada—the middle of nowhere, all desert country—and we get about halfway there and he goes, ‘Let’s go north.’ I go, ‘There’s no fucking road.’ Meyer says, ‘We don’t need a road, this is four-wheel drive. We’ll either make it or we’ll die. You’re either with me or you’re not.’

  “So we’re driving this endless wasteland and now Meyer’s really excited—‘We may not make it, we could die here, we don’t have any water.’ We immediately get lost, of course. We had to sleep out the night under the stars. It was getting kinda hairy.

  “The next day we keep heading north, and there’s a strange-looking hill. And he screams, ‘Stop here!’ And he jumps out, he bolts. He starts climbin’ this mountain, straight up. It was a mound that looked like a woman’s breast.” Napier charged after him, reaching the top after twenty minutes, and found Meyer in a frenzy. “He stood there cursing at the gods, saying, ‘Here I will make history!’

  “I said, ‘What’s gonna take place here?’ An excited RM replied, ‘We’re gonna chain a chick down to the top of this mountain, and we’re gonna abuse womanhood like it’s never been abused. And I’m gonna take out my hatred on every cunt that ever fucked me over in my life.’

  “It became a hate trip against Edy, and Meyer made a movie out of it. And I was his alter ego.”*1

  We see a tow truck tearing through the desert, pulling the hulk of a dead VW Bug. A scratchy record of Nazi marches is our soundtrack. Behind the wheel of the pickup is infamous Nazi fugitive Martin Bormann (Henry Rowland), proud owner of Martin Bormann’s Super Station, where Clint Ramsey works as a gas pump jockey. One of the blanker slates in Meyer’s cavalcade of manhood, Clint is terrorized by jealous, insatiable SuperAngel, whose sole mission in life is provoking him into an angry screw.

  The wild Supervixens opening sets the stage for the utter havoc to follow. Clint is pumping gas for SuperLorna (the demonically sexy Christy Hartburg) when SuperAngel calls the station to check up on her old man. SuperLorna slips into the rest room, donning a devastating outfit—red halter top, boots, white hot pants, pigtails. Slinking out of the ladies’ room, SuperLorna starts go-going, pulling Clint’s attention away from the phone. Angel detects a woman in the background, suspects the worst, and gives Clint the third degree, but he manages to calm her momentarily. “You make her look like a boy,” Clint lies. Gleeful over the putdown to her competition, Angel purrs, “Come on home to our big bed. SuperAngel’s got a big need.” Martin Bormann yells at his employee to get back to work and Clint hangs up on SuperAngel. Enraged, she calls back, only to have SuperLorna answer. “Get off the line, bitch,” hisses SuperAngel. “Can’t wait to strap on your groovy old man,” says SuperLorna with an evil smile, dropping the phone into her cleavage, the canyon between her massive breasts causing SuperAngel’s telephonic curses to actually echo.

  A nasty spat between Angel and Clint summons psychopathic cop Harry Sledge to the scene. Sledge later returns for an illicit liaison with SuperAngel, but when he is unable to close the deal, SuperAngel’s taunts drive him to brutally murder her. Bormann worries that Clint will be blamed for the crime and slips him money to hit the highway, where our innocent hero is beset by sex-crazed sirens who beckon from haylofts and even a dune buggy’s bucket seat. Eventually Clint runs into SuperVixen, the reincarnation of his dear departed, although he’s too dumb to recognize it. Harry Sledge returns, the trio entering into a weird déjà vu that brings the movie full circle. The climax of the film has a lingerie-clad SuperVixen spread-eagled and bound to a mountaintop, Harry Sledge lighting a stick of dynamite parked between her legs. Clint comes to the rescue and love saves the day as Sledge accidentally blows himself up.

  Supervixens hits 80 mph right out of the gate and never slows to a legal speed. This film returns Meyer to that same hyperkinetic universe of Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, although RM has exchanged the glitz of Hollywood for middle America’s dusty byways, where Meyer’s blue-collar surrealism explodes. Faded gas stations, last-chance motels, and gleaming brass beds that overwhelm otherwise threadbare bedrooms supply the backdrops for a mythic, mini-mart soap opera of hate. Meyer maintained that his films were live-action cartoons, and Supervixens is self-consciously so—right before Harry Sledge meets his end from the stick of dynamite is his hand, a hapless What, Me Worry? close-up of his face is set against a car horn imitating Roadrunner’s familiar beep beep to let us know he’s a goner.

  Supervixens is a technical tour de force for Meyer. The editing is magnificent—RM boasted that the film contained over three thousand setups and that no single shot was over three feet long. The beyond-busy soundtrack gooses the rhythm as well. Way before Scorsese concocted hyperactive, wall-to-wall soundtracks for the likes of GoodFellas and Casino, Russ Meyer was there, using layers of music, dialogue, and effects to achieve a headache-inducing white noise, not unlike three TV stations murdering a radio. And just when you’re ready to scream, he brings the soundtrack down to a mere tap-tap of high heels on gritty asphalt and the squeak of a swinging screen door. The music here functions as a constant barrage of exclamation points, with silent-movie themes, sitcom pap, and Dixieland jazz running against snippets of ditties so familiar they barely register—“Here Comes the Bride,” “Dixie,” “Glory, Glory, Hallelujah,” “When Johnny Comes Marching Home.”

  Wild imagery is what one remembers most from Supervixens. Deaf and dumb SuperEula (Deborah McGuire, who later married Richard Pryor), her ebony body struggling to break free of a white bikini festooned with red hearts, signing away frantically as she zooms off in a dune buggy railjob; Lute the farmer (Stuart Lancaster) maniacally screwing his very vocal Austrian milkmaid wife SuperSoul (Uschi Digard) as Clint works the soil and “Turkey in the Straw” blasts on the track. And on and on and on. It really is a comic book come to life, spilling over with loud, vivid colors, particularly Meyer’s bold reds, which seem to pop up everywhere.

  Supervixens has an amazing, hostile energy. Men and women spar in a manner that would make a boxer wince. Martin Bor-mann asks himself in German—subtitled for the audience’s convenience—“Is the fucking you get worth the fucking you get?” Although it’s somewhat hard to hear the dialogue amid all the chaos, the bedroom banter between Clint and SuperAngel is far from lovey-dovey. “Gotta play the man-eater,” Clint sneers. “Angel number one, screw everybody else . . . money, a shitpile of it, just lay it on Angel . . . buy, spend, give it away, rip off any jerk that says no to her.” As the battle escalates he shrieks, “Say one more thing about my mother and I’ll bust you in the jaw!” The parallels between Clint/SuperAngel and Russ/Edy were purely intentional. “I wrote the dialogue,” said Jim Ryan. “I just copied what Edy would’ve said. Supervixens was almost all Edy Williams.”

  If there was ever a Meyer movie that truly approximated war, it is Supervixens. Shooting in and around Palo Verde Valley, California, and Quartzsite, Arizona, in March and April 1974, Meyer had cast and crew ensconced in shabby little cabins “that these migrant workers had abandoned in the Arizona desert,” according to actor Charles Pitt. Roger Ebert, who roomed briefly with Meyer to contribute to the script, added that the closet was just “a broomstick hanging from the ceiling. The shower water ran down a sloping floor and right outside into the desert. There was no drain.”

  Ebert chuckled while recalling crew member Stan Berkowitz, “some kid who I think was a film student at UCLA.” It was Ber-kowitz’s job to dig holes for the pay phone Meyer carried around for scenes—and redig it when RM decided it wasn’t the right height. Said Ebert, “The guy is complaining to me, ‘I’m studying Bergman and Antonioni and h
ere I am diggin’ a hole!’ Russ repeated that for years.” Perhaps the spirit of Supervixens is best exemplified by the powderman in charge of the picture’s many explosions, Harry Wohlman. “He had a Toonerville Trolley kind of truck, full of explosives,” said editor/soundman Richard Brummer. “That guy would sit outside those explosives, smoking a cigarette. He had several fingers missing.”

  Meyer charged around the desert like a pirate, a cigar in his mouth and a .45 on his hip. “We worked our way up from Yuma through the Copa Game Range. No permits, nothing,” said Charles Napier. “I don’t know why the rangers didn’t catch us. Meyer’s answer to that was, ‘We’ll give them a blow job. Forget about a permit. Anybody can be bought.’ ”

  At the end of the physically grueling shoot Napier found himself attempting to recover at the Little Lake Motel in Long Pine, California, RM laid out next to him. “We’re sittin’ up there in the room, Meyer’s in one bed, I’m in the other. We’d been filming for three weeks. I’m beat, he’s beat. And I said, ‘Have you had enough?’ And Meyer goes, ‘Yup. I’ve had enough now. I’ve beaten myself down to my knees. I can barely walk, but I did it.’ I said, ‘Ya gotta really kill yourself, don’t you?’ ‘Yup. Physically, mentally and every other way, or else it won’t succeed.’ That was Meyer, man.”

  Russ Meyer’s newest superstar was SuperAngel Shari Eubank, a very funny brunette who remains the most corn-fed and all-American of Meyer’s many cuties. A former cheerleader, homecoming queen, and sorority girl from Farmer City, Illinois, Eubank was, according to Haji, “very forgiving, very naive, and a little too sensitive for this business.” “We never discussed sex,” Shari informed a reporter in reference to her family. “One night my father called us all out to a barn to see a calf being born.”

  Meyer had nothing but praise for Eubank and “the way she was dragged over that damn mountain in the movie—she never complained. And every rock just reached out and bit you.” By the end of the film she’d be perched naked upon the mountain’s very pinnacle, a crew member hiding behind her (and out of camera range) with his palm extended in a catcher’s mitt, allowing Eubank to perch there safely without gouging her ass on volcanic rock.

  Haji, playing Supervixens’ nude bartendress SuperHaji (whom Napier found “a little distracting—she used to do makeup with only sneakers on”), found Eubank for Meyer. “Shari was working at the Classic Cat as a dancer. She was a damn good actress and didn’t even know it. But Russ brings these things out in you.” Although there was certainly no Meyer-Eubank romance, Haji felt that she was “another one Russ kinda had a thing for. I know he liked her.”

  Eubank actually had two roles in Supervixens, a somewhat confusing gambit Meyer would later repeat with Kitten Natividad in 1979’s Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens. It came about by accident. According to Ebert, Meyer was short one Supervixen during the time when there were still a few dying embers left in RM’s marriage. “The final character was supposed to be played by Edy, and she said she wouldn’t do it because her career had reached the point where she didn’t want to take off her clothes.” Meyer, whose shot of his wife nude on her back in their pool for Playboy had gone on to become a popular poster, was dumbfounded, telling her, “We can’t have six naked vixens and for the climax have you with your clothes on.” Ebert says he told Edy she was out of the movie, sinking any hope of staying out of divorce court.

  Instead of a new actress, it was decided that Shari Eubank would be brought back at the end of the film after SuperAngel’s death to play another character—SuperVixen—and RM brought Ebert in to figure out how. “He told me we had to explain how come she was still alive, so I told him that we would put a bathtub on a mountaintop—that’s where she was last seen, dead in a bathtub—and have the sun rising behind it and play ‘Thus Spake Zarathustra’ as she stood up in a white gown, backlit by the sun. This would be her resurrection.”

  Next they had to get that bathtub up the mountain. According to Ebert, “Napier went into a truck stop and said, ‘Any of you guys wanna be in a Russ Meyer movie?’ Six truckers came out, and they all got paid with beer. Their job was to carry the bathtub up to the top of the mountain.” Meyer shot the scene, but when Ebert saw the finished product, it wasn’t in the movie.

  “I said, ‘What happened to that scene?’ And Russ said, ‘I tried it, but y’know, it was just too implausible.” The idea of Meyer finding anything implausible is a rich one. “What was hilarious was at one point in his next film, in a montage involving sex, there was a cut to six guys carrying a bathtub up a mountaintop.” Meyer saved the footage, and “used it as his ‘symbolism.’ ”*2

  Pretty boy Charlie Pitt, whom Edy Williams had met in an acting class, was to play Clint Ramsey. “Edy and I got on extremely well—I underline extremely—and she had me come up to her mansion on Mulholland Drive. I had just got into Hollywood, a kid from Fort Pierce, Florida. She just thought I was so hot.”

  Edy suggested Pitt for a role in Supervixens, escorting him down to Meyer’s Ivar Street office, where RM growled, “You got good bones, kid, but can you act?” Meyer shot a screen test of Pitt scrubbing vehicles in a Pasadena car wash. “I like the way the kid moves,” declared Meyer. Adds Pitt, “I knew how to juggle, so I was throwing the Windex around. He got a kick out of that. I sing pretty good, so I sang for him in Italian. Russ said, ‘Well, it sounds a little fag.’ ” Pitt was miffed when Meyer later allowed Charles Napier to warble a little ditty in Supervixens.

  Meyer and Pitt clashed from the get-go. RM bitched that the actor was too frisky with his leading ladies, to which Pitt happily pleads guilty. “What are they for? Quote me: ‘What are they for?’ It’s like putting a chocolate cake in front of you—you’re supposed to try and not eat that?” But Meyer also offered his own brand of encouragement to the rookie, informing him early in the shoot, “I need more from you. Ryan looked at the dailies. You’re dull as shit, dull as shit.”

  “I still carry a scar from that movie,” revealed Pitt. During the big finale on the mountain top, the dynamite’s magnesium fuse fell on him “and left a hole in my chest the size of a quarter. I jumped up in the middle of the shot—I’m supposed to be unconscious. Meyer said, ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ I screamed, ‘I’m on fuckin’ fire, Russ!’ ‘That’s no excuse to ruin a shot! C’mon, be a man, Pitt!’ It was always ‘Be a man,’ never ‘Let’s see some serious acting, what’s your motivation?’ ” In that same scene, Charles Napier throws a knife that lands in Pitt’s leg. “Meyer was shooting a close-up of my face. I was supposed to react like I’m getting knifed. He kept saying, ‘It’s not enough. C’mon, Pitt, c’mon!’ Finally Russ just clubbed me right in the calf of my leg with his fist. It got the reaction he wanted.”

  But Pitt’s greatest humiliation would come during the rambunctious hayloft sex scene with Uschi Digard (who plays, of course, SuperUschi). Pitt remembered the scene as “a lot of dust, not very romantic at all . . . when I’m supposed to jump up and zip my pants up very fast, I caught my irving in the zipper. It hurt like hell, and I turned around to scream. Meyer said, ‘Now, that’s the kind of reaction we want. That’s what I call acting!’ ”*3

  Crew member Stan Berkowitz felt RM had deliberately set out to instigate friction with Charles Pitt. “Meyer likes strife, and he creates it when there’s no purpose for it,” said Berkowitz. “He’s superstitious. Russ actually told me that when a shoot went well, without problems, the movie was not a hit. But those movies that were ridden with strife, misery, and all sorts of disasters happening, those were the hits.”

  Supervixens is one entertaining, poisonous piece of work. Meyer lays his cards on the table early on with the drawn-out, frenzied killing of SuperAngel, but the twisted, vengeful face of Harry Sledge is really the main attraction here. Napier’s macho cop wears mirrored shades, carries the requisite oversized nightstick, and, strangely enough, is given to wearing saddle shoes in his downtime. “Built like a brick shithouse. Biceps, triceps, lats, pectorals,” boasts Harry, d
onning for the film’s climax a rather fey combat ensemble of fatigues, beret, and wrist bazooka. Sledge is impotent and orally fixated on his stogie, yet when SuperAngel heads south on his suddenly rigid body, he mutters, “Knock that queer stuff off . . . we’re gonna do this my way or no way at all.” SuperAngel gets a kick out of needling Harry, cooing, “I like a good cigar, but I take it out of my mouth on occasion.” Her reincarnated alter ego will repeat the line near the end of the film.

  When Harry meets SuperAngel—who functions, according to one critic, as “the embodiment of evil, malice and all castration anxieties”—for their illicit rendezvous and fails to perform, she takes Harry’s flaccid “prune prick” member as a personal attack. “What the hell’s wrong with you? Not ready, with my beautiful body? You got a lotta nerve . . . all those muscles, except the one that really counts.” SuperAngel throws a drink in Harry’s face and we’re off to the races. For Meyer, beautiful women are cruel, narcissistic figures of torment that can’t be vanquished. “Regardless of who holds the social, economic, or political power, women, because of their bodies, are sexual objects of desire,” writes journalist Louis Black. “Even if men are physically stronger, they’re nothing before women, who have that ultimate power.”

  Harry Sledge is driven berserk by this vaginal mojo. As SuperAngel, who has locked herself in the bathroom to escape his rampage, turns on a radio to nonchalantly go-go what will be the final few minutes of her life away, Harry hacks his way in with a butcher knife. “What’s the matter, Superstud Harry? All your other muscles gone limp, too?” Harry plunges the knife into SuperAngel, then drags her into the bathtub, the water turning crimson as he strangles and repeatedly stomps on her. A blood-drenched Angel feebly tries to pull herself up over the edge of the tub. “Lousy lay, huh? . . . You’re quite a turn-on yourself,” sneers Harry as he drops the radio into the water, electrocuting her. Meyer tried to explain away the numbing brutality of the scene as a “satire” on violence. Napier—who helped create it—disagreed: “There was nuthin’ satirical about it.” Crew member Stan Berkowitz shuddered recalling how spent Shari Eubank looked at the end of the shoot. “The makeup was gone, she was in a tub of blood-red water . . . I almost threw up.”