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

by Jimmy McDonough

  Despite such impossible eyefuls as June Mack, Beneath clearly belongs to Kitten. Meyer—who at the time said of Natividad’s body, “I know every nook and cranny, every depression and elevation”—photographs her flesh like a cartographer charting heretofore unmapped wilderness. Shots of Natividad’s eyes, lips, breasts, and ass function as the dominoes in the Beneath game. RM is visibly obsessed with Kitten, lost in her painted smile, and it’s a beautiful thing to experience. Here Meyer takes his industrial-sex-film approach straight to the moon, cramming in many crazy and masterfully cut montages, using what editor Richard Brummer called “musical repetitions” of radio towers, street signs, old trucks, and people fucking on steering wheels to create a magnificent blue-collar sex farm that is equal parts Roy Lichtenstein and Hee Haw. When Beneath’s motor is hummin’, there’s nothing quite like it. “Meyer had carried everything that we had developed to an extreme,” said Brummer (amazingly, most of the film had been shot silent and then dubbed in postproduction, a painstaking editorial tour de force by Brummer).

  There are sequences that absolutely dazzle, such as the opening where Ann Marie screws Martin Bormann in a coffin, bringing to life the tale that Lilly La Mont had related to Meyer years before. Shots of Ann Marie in a white mesh jumpsuit, chewing gum as she twiddles with Pong, her face lit only by harsh, video-game light, evoke a grotesque beauty. The scene where Lavonia, sexually frustrated one hot summer night, taunts her husband with the sound of a sex aid as he tries to study in the next room is a sublime assault only Meyer could engineer. “I wanted a symphony of vibrator, calculator, and crickets,” said RM, who zeroes in the sort of details nobody else would ever bother with, such as a bed frame caster leaving dirty grooves in the carpet as it jerks to and fro from Kitten’s gyrations.

  But when Beneath is bad, it’s dire, with infantile doo-doo humor and cringe-making homophobia again exposing RM as the primate he is. And while expertly cut, the film goes on forever. And ever. Released in 1979, Beneath is at once the best and the worst of Russ Meyer, but critics were consistently unkind. “Russ Meyer’s films were funny ten years ago; today they’re juvenile,” said Gene Siskel. English critic Tony Rayns felt that the director had turned into a machine stuck on repeat. “It may be that Meyer, certainly one of the American cinema’s true mavericks, in his total independence, will never recapture the freedom of invention that he discovered during his brief soujourn at 20th Century Fox but will condemn himself to endless varations on the formula he pioneered with Vixen.”

  Dave Kehr, who’d championed Meyer as recently as Supervixens, saw Beneath as a “strangely unsatisfying” case of style obliterating content. In Kitten Natividad, “with her big round eyes and polished cheeks,” he detected “an eerie resemblance to Howdy Doody,” and it’s clear that Kehr was disturbed by the director manning the puppet strings. “It’s one thing to stylize a landscape, something else to stylize a person,” he wrote. “There’s a lot more to lose.”

  Meyer’s more-more-more aesthetic was becoming a headache-inducing less. Many critics simply felt exhausted, beat up by the Meyer oeuvre. Myron Meisel noted that RM’s “last few films frantically seek to top themselves,” while Kehr opined that “after a certain point the audience can’t take it anymore.” Meyer had become the cinematic equivalent of a carny operating a ferris wheel, determined to run the ride faster and faster, unaware or perhaps unconcerned that some of his customers were being thrown screaming into the night air.

  The emptiness at work can’t be denied. Meyer, at the top of his game in terms of photography and editing, has nothing new to add other than his visual vivisection of Kitten. One can deflect criticism by declaring that It’s Only a Cartoon, but if that were true I don’t think a viewing of Beneath could leave you feeling so utterly spent in such an unsavory way. Due to RM’s potent, almost childlike obsession with Kitten, I happen to love this movie, but it’s awfully hard to defend in its entirety.

  He-man Meyer once more flaunts his lack of introspection, his disinterest in women as anything more than animatronic pinups or receptacles for his sperm, and his contempt for just about everything under the sun with this film. “I’m not a sensitive person,” he sneered. He had no patience in life, let alone for a script. Where could it all lead, other than down a cold, narrow, sporadically bedazzling dead end? Of course, the very idea of a kinder, gentler Meyer makes one puke. One great thing about him is that he just didn’t give a fuck. “If I wasn’t so into tits I probably could’ve been a great filmmaker,” says Our Hero in summation.

  Maybe critic David Ansen had RM’s number after all. “This is precisely Meyer’s limitation as a filmmaker—behind his bracing mockery is the compulsive guffaw of a high school student too scared to step out of the self-protected shade of parody. It’s all finally just a goof.”

  In Kitten, Meyer had found a Marlene for his Von Sternberg. “He’s a genius, a real genius,” Natividad crowed. “When he wanted me to cry he’d say, ‘Pretend they’re beating your dog.’ When he wanted me to look sexy, he’d say, ‘C’mon, baby, jerk off the whole world.’ I gave all the stagehands hard-ons, which Russ says is the biggest compliment in this business.” RM’s personal life bled further than ever into the cinematic, and the no-sex-while-filming rule was completely abandoned. When the crew would break for lunch, RM would disappear with Kitten, who’d then return with half her body makeup eaten off.

  “It was very, very sexual,” Natividad said of making Beneath, with RM continually egging her on. “I was screwing so hard I broke the bed a few times. The walls fell and everything.” Kitten would look at Meyer “and I could see that his penis was . . . erect, and it was oozing. I didn’t want to say anything, because then everybody would look. But the guy had a hard-on. And it was oozing.”*5

  When Kitten wasn’t getting down in front of the camera, she was getting it on with Meyer, who expected her to deliver the same sort of pile-driving passion she’d put on-screen. “We were really going at it every night. And it was very, very hard, because they’d pick me up at 5:30 a.m., I’d work until about six or seven at night, then I had to wait for Russ to do his cocktail hour and calm down. We’d go have dinner, we’d come back, screw. It would be twelve midnight, he’d drop me off at home—to my husband.” George DeMoss, the man who’d pushed Kitten into Meyer’s arms, was by now seething with jealousy. He challenged RM to put up his dukes, then, after seeing Kitten tooling around in it, smashed up Meyer’s Mercedes.

  The drama was “wearing me out,” Kitten confessed. “I was breaking out in hives.” Finally I said, ‘Look at me—I look worn out! I’d go, ‘Russ, ya gotta let me go home and sleep.’ He’d go, ‘Makeup concealer!’ ” One of the girls would slather on the pancake to hide the bags under Natividad’s eyes, then it was on with the show. But Russ Meyer would take a bizarre and frustrating detour before putting Beneath to bed.

  Russ Meyer and the Sex Pistols. It had more potential than Godzilla versus Megalon. Were there any two forces more arrogant, provocative, and obnoxious? In 1977, the Pistols were the essence of thumbing your nose, and Meyer had made a career out of it. The mastermind pimping this idea was of course Malcolm McLaren, the oft-reviled Svengali behind the band. The Sex Pistols were causing a big ruckus in England, and Warners was intent on breaking them in the States.

  McLaren thought a feature film would be just the ticket for the Pistols, and he’d already considered Peter Cook, Stephen Frears, and Ken Loach for the director’s chair. Now he set his sights on Meyer, admiringly declaring him to be “the epitome of American fascism.” So McLaren flew to Los Angeles to meet King Leer. Wisely, Meyer brought along a young friend who could decode and deflect the hip Englishman: Rene Daalder, a young Dutch filmmaker and screenwriter active in the Los Angeles punk scene. Daalder and McLaren hit it off immediately.

  “Malcolm McLaren was this very intellectual art school product—serious Marxist leanings, informed by the Situationists,” said Daalder. And then there was Russ—unpretentious, commie-hating, frequen
tly farting Russ. RM would begrudgingly admit that “McLaren was sincere. He really was a zealot, he had fire in his eyes,” but the two clashed immediately, with Meyer soon fobbing McLaren off on Daalder, who put the agent provocateur up for a month in Los Angeles. “I don’t know if either of them understood how far apart they were,” said Daalder, adding that although RM’s house was mere minutes away, the vibes between them were such that “it was almost impossible to have Malcolm go there on his own.”

  Daalder and McLaren banged out a treatment for the Pistols movie with the working title Anarchy in the U.K. Meyer perused the work, which, according to Daalder, centered on the grim, grimy “actual story of the Sex Pistols,” and threw it right into the near-est trash can. Reality? That was for dummies! Meyer hated the treatment “because it was depressing,” according to Daalder. “Depressing—that’s the last thing that a Russ Meyer can ever be. But a Sex Pistols movie has to be depressing.”

  RM immediately set out to undermine McLaren’s plans. There was no way Meyer could make some downer cinema verité band hagiography. So RM got Ebert on the horn—he’d whip up something fast and remember to put in the tits. McLaren had to get it through his Situationist skull that he’d hired Russell Albion Meyer and, as Daalder put it, “Z-Man and Martin Bormann were going to march right through whatever it was gonna be.” In June 1977, Roger Ebert installed himself at the Sunset Marquis Hotel and, with a great deal of input from McLaren—who gave Meyer and Ebert a crash course in punk rock and Pistols, thrashed out a script with the unforgettable title Who Killed Bambi?

  M.J.,*6 a rich, decadent rock star, gets his kicks being chauffered through the countryside, lazily searching for some deer to shoot. He has his driver dump his latest kill in front of some poor family’s home, a little girl opens the door, sees the bloody carcass, and exclaims, “Mummy, they’ve killed Bambi!” M.J. then tries to corrupt the Sex Pistols, as does their head-game manager P. T. Proby, with such distractions as a mad rapist, a sexy Scotland Yard operative named O, and an arcade game that pokes fun at Scientology’s fabled E-Meter along the way. The little girl returns at film’s end, avenging Bambi by way of a .357 magnum blasting a fat hole in M.J.’s celebrity face. Bambi was to be, Ebert later wrote, “a statement of anarchic revolt against the rock millionaires, and the whole British establishment.” Meyer, who was going to appear as an on-camera narrator, described the picture as “a combination of A Hard Day’s Night and Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.”

  With the script somewhat complete, the entourage set out for London. Meyer and McLaren weren’t exactly becoming bosom buddies. On the flight over, “Russ insisted on sitting on the aisle because McLaren had his bondage pants on,” said Ebert. “Russ said, ‘If we get in a crash, you’re gonna get those goddamn straps twisted around the chair and we’ll all die.’ ” The chaos that seemed endemic to McLaren was beginning to chafe RM, and in the absence of a signed contract, he demanded to be put up in style and paid weekly in cash.

  In England came the inevitable summit meeting of Meyer, Ebert, McLaren, and the Sex Pistols. It was a surreal collection of egos. As Ebert later wrote, both he and Meyer were “a little nonplussed, I think, to hear Johnny Rotten explain that he liked Beyond the Valley of the Dolls because it was so true to life.”

  Pistols band members Paul Cook and Steve Jones got on with Meyer. Jones had no clue who RM was before a copy of Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! won him over (“I love the bird in it, she was fuckin’ awesome,” he said of Tura Satana). Jones was also impressed by Meyer’s chutzpah. “He was a Hollywood guy, American, dressed kinda loud. I thought he was great.”

  Not surprisingly, Rotten plus Meyer made for a toxic cocktail. “If I had a tape recording of any one night in my life, it would be the night Johnny Rotten, Russ Meyer, and I went out to dinner,” said Ebert. “We went to Beauchamp Place, behind Harrod’s. And at one point Rotten was being obstreperous. And Russ said, ‘Listen, you little shit—we won the Battle of Britain for you. And we can come over here and beat you, too.’

  “What Russ didn’t take into account was that America didn’t fight in the Battle of Britain and that John Lydon was Irish, not British. But this didn’t register with Johnny Rotten, either, because he was impressed. At this point—when he was supposed to be the bad boy of Britain—here was a guy who called him a little shit and said he would knock his block off. I think Rotten liked that.”

  Not according to JR, who later maintained that he completely lost interest in the project on the spot. “After I met Russ Meyer, this dirty old man, I felt really shabby about the whole thing,” he wrote in his autobiography. “I didn’t want to know from there on. . . . I hated Russ Meyer from the first second I saw him—an overbearing, senile old git.”

  Meyer, happily exhibiting his anti-Irish prejudice, complained that all Rotten did was pick at his scalp, his nose, and the green film on his teeth. Worst of all, little Johnny was vociferously anti-American. “He was proud of his bomb-throwing countrymen, the IRA,” said a disgusted RM, who maintained that if the IRA requested Rotten “to throw a bomb, he’d probably run the other way.”*7 Still, Meyer admitted, “Rotten definitely had charisma.”

  Sid Vicious had his own problems with Meyer. At McLaren’s behest, Ebert had written a scene in which the doomed bass player has sex with his mother (Meyer had already cast Marianne Faithfull for the role) and then shares heroin with her. At this, Vicious drew the line: “Well, I don’t mind balling her, but shooting up—forget it!” Meyer later made the preposterous claim that had the movie happened, Vicious would “still be alive.” Roger Ebert reported that at the time of Bambi, McLaren had Sid on a weekly retainer that translated into about $14 in U.S. funds. “He had nothing to eat,” said Ebert, who recalled that Meyer, driving Vicious (in some tellings it’s Rotten) home one night, bought him a much-needed dinner: “two six-packs of beer and a big can of pork and beans.”

  Rene Daalder saw the Pistols and RM as a case of two angry worlds colliding. Meyer was Mr. Can-Do, always ready to go-go-go. “Every morning the phone would ring at 5:30 a.m., a military wake-up call. If Russ heard in your voice that you were still somewhat sleepy, he would find it disgusting.” The Pistols, on the other hand, “were not at all about energy. Sick every morning, incapable of moving a limb, totally lethargic British guys.”

  By this point in the game Rotten and Vicious totally despised McLaren, and Who Killed Bambi? became emblematic of his scheming megalomania. Now the Pistols had been relegated to performing monkeys in a Russ Meyer film. Rotten, particularly annoyed he’d been consigned to play a sex fiend, was determined to wear a garish hippie outfit for the role to thwart what he surely regarded as a Hollywood version of punk. According to director Julien Temple, who picked up the pieces after Meyer left (and decades later put together the one great Pistols visual document, The Filth and the Fury), it was during the Bambi debacle that McLaren really lost control of the band. “The group broke up largely because of that film,” he said.

  Still, the project staggered along. McLaren drove Meyer around London, amused by the director’s determination to avoid showing a single red double-decker bus in the film, and his fascination with arcane British street signs, “names like Wopping, Battersea, Bayswater, names that conjured up sexual connotations.” Ebert polished off another round on the script and flew home. Sets were built near Heathrow, and Meyer summoned Fred Owens and Jim Ryan to join him in London.

  In mid-October 1977, Meyer shot the opening scene, where M.J. kills the deer that’s dumped on the little girl’s doorstep. With Blacksnake’s David Prowse as the chauffeur, all went well. “They’d already seen the dailies of the stuff they’d shot and had put a work print together of the first scene,” said Jim Ryan. When Steve Jones saw the footage, “I didn’t really know what to make of it, ’cause I didn’t even bother reading the script.” He admits he was still looking forward to “the birds with big tits.”

  Three days into the shoot it became apparent that they were already out of money.
McLaren had never finalized a deal. “Reams of contracts were prepared, document upon document for producing and financing of the film,” Sandy Lieberson, then of 20th Century Fox, told Craig Bromberg. “And Malcolm was continually changing his mind.” With increasing chaos surrounding the proj-ect, Fox’s stockholders were getting cold feet—particularly one of its more famous board members. “We just happened to meet the Fox guys who axed us in an elevator in Portugal,” recalled Jim Ryan. “They said, ‘Well, this is off the record—[stockholder] Princess Grace said, ‘We don’t want another X picture from Meyer.’ ” Yes, none other than Grace Kelly hammered the final nail in Bambi’s coffin.

  Would Who Killed Bambi? have made a great film? Who knows. “What a tragedy! It could’ve been a screamer!” insisted RM, who found Ebert’s script to be cinematic gold. Steve Jones thought Meyer was clueless when it came to the band’s music, complaining that as far as RM was concerned, “we were the Monkees.” “It was totally doomed,” said Rene Daalder. “It could never have happened, really.” Meyer’s best pictures may approximate the energy of rock, but he had little interest in the actual stuff, and one of the world’s most exciting bands might’ve been squandered in the process. “Almost without exception, motion pictures are a very unfortunate match with rock and roll,” maintained Daalder. “Ultimately you’re going to pervert or corrupt the spirit. It just can’t be done.”