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

by Jimmy McDonough

  There was plenty of life to be squeezed out of the past, though. One day Meyer ran into Dave Friedman (“at, of all places, Frederick’s of Hollywood,” Friedman recalled), and Dave said he wanted to show RM something. Friedman took him a few blocks away to the videocassette operation he was a partner in. This was in the earliest days of video, and Meyer, amazed, saw dollar signs. It was just like what Friedman’s old exploitation crony Dan Sonney used to say: a movie’s like a bag of flour. Every time you tap it a little more money comes out.

  Meyer had shrewdly held on to the rights of all of his films, save for French Peep Show, Fanny Hill, and the two Fox-backed pictures. He owned twenty movies outright and began putting them out on video himself, right from his home. The price tag was outrageously steep—$79.50 a tape, $50 wholesale—and RM didn’t waiver. He did no advertising, took no credit cards, and when you called in your order, odds were good that Meyer himself would answer the phone. The market had opened a whole new audience for his films. In 1984, he’d tell a reporter he was shipping ten thousand cassettes a year. Video, said a jolly RM, was “going to swell my ego even more.”

  RM bridled at the term cult, but he certainly qualified for one. His pictures were perfect for the home video market. Strange pictures featuring strange characters, not to mention sex, and nothing that graphic meant they were somewhat suitable for parties. The built-in mystique of having to be in the know enough to buy them direct only increased their hip appeal. Plus, as Meyer has pointed out, you can start watching in the middle, stay only ten minutes, and still have a good time.

  Meyer started receiving all sorts of accolades. The British Film Institute put on a major retrospective in 1983; the Chicago Film Festival honored him in 1985; a flood of revival circuit bookings included a seventeen-and-a-half-hour marathon at the Boston Film Festival. RM did a walk-on as an adult video store clerk in the John Landis segment of the 1987 anthology film Amazon Women on the Moon. In 1990, Roger Ebert would review Wild at Heart and boldly declare, “Russ Meyer invented the cinema of David Lynch twenty-five years ago.” Tim Burton attended one of RM’s birthday parties and paid tribute by casting Meyer stock player Stuart Lancaster in bit parts for Edward Scissorhands and Batman Returns. A Meyer biopic was under discussion, and inexplicably RM wanted Robin Williams to play him on the silver screen.

  One massive film project obsessed Meyer throughout the eighties—The Breast of Russ Meyer. Meyer had talked about doing an anthology film forever. One titled Hotsa, Hotsa was announced as early as 1972, but by the next decade the idea had morphed into something truly epic. RM began condensing his films down into trailer-length capsules, with documentary footage he’d shot of the people and places in his life in between. He went back to Cincinnati to relive his battles with Charles Keating and returned to Europe several times to retrace his every footstep during the war. “The film is unrelenting . . . the scenes are cut by three feet, four frames each, so you get a rhythm,” RM told writer Paul Sherman. “It will either lull you to sleep or give you nightmares.”

  The more one heard about Breast, the more extravagant it became. By 1985 Meyer was telling Variety it had already cost nearly $2 million and, depending on who he was talking to, he claimed it was anywhere from twelve to seventeen hours in length. “You’ve heard of Berlin Alexanderplatz? Well, this is Meyerplatz.” The first seventy minutes would cover his childhood “in a very abstract sense. A naked woman in a tree, watching. The gazebo. ‘Rosebud.’ Ferries turned on their side in the mud. A railroad track. What does it all mean? If you don’t understand, tough shit.” Six new buxom Meyer discoveries would be featured in Breast, and, using a self-timer, he’d even shot Kitten and himself doing the horizontal mambo. “It’s a tone poem,” said RM of the massive project. “It will be my song.”

  In the meantime, Meyer’s mammary obsession had only intensified with age, if that’s possible. As Kitten Natividad observed, “He was going a little bit crazy, because he started using girls that were bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger . . .” Advances in augmentation made the ridiculous possible, and RM was now immortalizing women who seemed more suited to the pages of medical textbooks. The bosom had become so all-encompassing in Meyer’s mind that the body was now a mere appendage, a tit transport mechanism that otherwise served only to annoy and distract. “Mount Baldy wasn’t big enough for him,” said friend Rob Schaffner.

  Meyer went through all sorts of overseas espionage to shoot the truly freakish Tundi, a nineteen-year-old Hungarian who spoke no English and resembled a giant triangle made flesh. Her measurements, threatened RM, would render “all the others obsolete.” Entering his sixties, Meyer was no longer averse to the casting couch. The gentlemanly filmmaker was now an official dirty old man, and sex became a requisite of the shoot. RM boasted to a reporter of laying down the law to an English lass who was his latest discovery: “We are going to be intimate. That’s part of the deal.”

  Rock and roll had begun namechecking Meyer. First and foremost came the Cramps, followed later in the decade by groups named after RM’s films, such as Seattle grunge outfit Mudhoney. Germany gave birth to the Charles Napiers, and an alt-metal outfit called Manhole elected to face the future simply under the name of a favorite Meyer superstar: Tura Satana. And still the infection spread. The Bangles played gigs as the Carrie Nations, White Zombie paid tribute with its 1992 track “Thunder Kiss ’65,” and Janet Jackson’s black-and-white video for “You Want This” plundered Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! for inspiration.

  In 1987 came the inevitable. Meyer, now sixty-five, was asked to direct his first music video. The L.A. hair metal band Faster, Pussycat needed MTV fodder for their debut single, “Don’t Change That Song.” Could anyone be more qualified to direct it than the man responsible for their name? Initially, RM balked at the request. By the time he relented, there was a list of demands to be met, primary among them: three girls with big breasts, no silicone, and no porno stars. Keisha, a hard-core “name,” actually slipped into the cast and was immediately recognized by the crew, but Meyer remained oblivious. Even Kitten Natividad tried to get in on the fun, marching into the production office with her own weighing machine to prove her moneymakers’ worth. “Eight and a half pounds,” she announced, hefting a boob out, but the scales did not tip in Kitten’s favor.

  At this time music videos were exhausting a plethora of technological advances with a can-you-top-this fury. Meyer treated the music video world with disdain, “always pretending to have one foot out the door,” as producer Dave Ewing observed. He immediately laid down ground rules: no dollies, no zooms, and no extra stuff, just a list of shots longer than the Bible. Assistant director Brent Bowman saw RM as “stuck in a certain way of filmmaking. He operated his motion picture camera like a still camera.”

  Meyer wanted to shoot the video outside Modesto in an area he dubbed “the tit hills,” which, he claimed, looked just like a field of firm bosoms in the right light. Ewing actually traveled to the location with Meyer but found the landscape to be rather flat-chested. They wound up shooting on a soundstage, the video’s “plot” consisting of a bunch of top-heavy girls worshiping a vintage jukebox as the band mimed in front of a screen showing clips of Tura Satana and her girl gang in action. Whoopee.

  Five hairspray addicts sporting more makeup than Babette Bardot, the band Faster, Pussycat was a touch on the fey side for our former combat photographer. “He kept calling them ‘the orchestra,’ ” said Ewing. Meyer was particularly rough on lead singer Taime Downe, begging him not to wear a dress. “With all his makeup, it made him look like Renee Taylor doing a bad number in the Catskills,” complained RM. “Russ didn’t give the band their due as stars—Russ Meyer was the star,” said Ewing. “They started out idolizing him; by the end they didn’t want anything to do with each other.”

  On the set, Meyer was “demanding, demanding, demanding,” said Brent Bowman. RM hated the cameraman and ran the girls ragged. “It had the feeling of a big game,” said Ewing, who liked Meyer
but found him exhausting: “You felt like the weight of the world was on you when you were around him.”

  The end result was, according to Ewing, “a terrible video.” For Bowman, the most memorable moment came one night as the crew chowed down on pizza. An inquisitive Meyer asked the producer, “You’re a pretty healthy guy, but you eat all this junk. What’s your stool like?” “No one had ever asked me what my stool was like, except for my doctor,” recalled a nonplussed Bowman.

  In 1991 Meyer shot his second and last video, for “Soultwister” by German rocker Jean Park. Once again, the now-tired reference point was Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! Meyer shot Park lip-syncing in the Mojave as three wenches reenacted scenes from the old workhorse. Leading the pack was RM’s current girlfriend Melissa Mounds, outfitted in cringe-inducing eighties workout spandex (and seen washing Meyer’s car). Music video should’ve been a cinch for the fastest cutter in the West, but the opportunity had come too late to matter. Clips intercut from the original film only pointed out how truly spectacular Meyer’s women had once been—and how little he seemed to care about what he was doing now.

  By now, Meyer “was a caricature of himself,” as “Soultwister” producer Gary Adelman saw it. “He kind of played the role of RM, and he had his routine down.” One scene for “Soultwister” was shot in front of Meyer’s house, the director lying on the ground shooting up as Richard Brummer stood across the street holding a reflector. “He yells to Dick, ‘Move the goddamn reflector to the right spot,’ ” recalled Adelman. “Russ said to me, ‘That’s what filmmaking’s all about—you can yell at people.’ ”

  One way or another, Meyer yelled at a lot of people in the eighties. “Russ started changing,” said Haji. “He starting believing his own press. It was like a drug to him.”

  Even though they no longer had business together, Meyer’s longtime distributor Fred Beiersdorf tried to maintain their friendship. RM, unfortunately, began to have fits if Fred didn’t return his phone calls immediately. “He lost his sense of humor,” said Beiersdorf, who was dismayed by what he saw when he visited Meyer on Arrowhead Drive. “I said, ‘Russ, you got all this money and you’re sittin’ here like a goddamn hermit! Why don’t you enjoy it?’ But his enjoyment was to make other people’s lives misery.” A popular routine involved threatening to take people out of his will. One day Fred would be out, the next day Jim Ryan. “Every day I’d hear somebody off, every day,” said Kitten Natividad, who continued to float in and out of RM’s life. “I’d say, ‘Yes, Russ.’ ”

  With 1974’s Pink Flamingos (starring jumbo drag queen Divine, infamous for scarfing down a dog dropping during the movie), John Waters had become a notorious filmmaking force himself. He continued to befriend and champion Meyer. RM even attended a premiere after-party for one of John’s early films, during which Waters happily noticed a very odd couple. “Russ and Divine were sitting there together,” he recalled. “Divine was scared of him, I think. Russ was uncomfortable. You could just see him thinking, ‘What the fuck am I doing here?’ ”*1

  Not unlike Meyer, the John Waters imprint soon crossed into the mainstream as a touchstone for all things depraved. By the eighties, Waters had an impressive three-film oeuvre of his own and a highly influential book to his name, Shock Value. According to Kitten Natividad, all that success caused Meyer to start taking a dislike to him. If someone became a bigger phenomenon than Meyer, RM “got jealous,” said Natividad. “He’d ignore the person.”

  In 1985, Waters wrote an article for Rolling Stone entitled “John Waters’ Tour of L.A.,” and one of the primary stops was the museum Russ Meyer called home. By now, Waters had gotten friendly not only with Meyer but also with some of his stars. “Every one of the women I met were great. They were all nice, they were all funny, they were all smart. They were like old showgirls basically, and I mean that in a good way.” Waters, of course, intended the article as a sort of tribute. Problem was, he included RM’s address.

  “I remember telling him, ‘Russ, to be in there I have put your address in, because it’s a tour. He said yes.” When fans started showing up at Meyer’s front door, he went berserk. Eventually word got back to Waters, who called RM to clear up the situation. “I said, ‘But Russ, you said it was okay. I have it on tape.’ ” Meyer then blamed the wine they’d shared over dinner. John should have known better. He hadn’t really said yes.

  Waters was clearly pained to talk about the falling-out with Meyer. “He started saying really mean things about me in the press, which shocked and hurt me. I never answered Russ in the press. I never said nasty things about him—and I still am not saying nasty things about him. I don’t know why, but from what I hear, he got nasty to a lot of people, so I guess I just joined the club.” Meyer stopped speaking to the man who’d done so much to bring his films to a new audience, although when Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! was rereleased theatrically in 1995, RM put the infamous “best movie ever made” Waters quote front and center in the ad campaign. “That was really ballsy,” said John. Reporters who visited Meyer’s home would see a Polaroid of Waters—affixed to RM’s toilet.

  Meyer even started grousing about the recently married Roger Ebert during interviews. “His wife really doesn’t feel all that keen about me,” said RM. “She’s afraid that he might get something in his shorts. . . . I like the idea of him . . . cheating on his wife.”

  In the mid-eighties, Rolf Thissen, German author of several film books, undertook a biography of Meyer. With RM’s blessing, he came to Hollywood, interviewed the director, then pored over his archives. Everything went swimmingly until he showed the manuscript to Meyer so corrections could be made. RM labeled the book “libelous,” once again blaming the booze enjoyed during the many dinners author and subject had shared. RM took the matter to court. Surely Thiessen knew better than to actually print what Meyer had told him.

  The Thissen book was published in 1987. In the course of interfering with it, Meyer had thought again about his own autobiography, something he’d started years earlier during a trip to Europe. RM was further encouraged by William Kahrl, a Sacramento Bee reporter who’d written a reverent 1982 Meyer piece that so moved RM he later included it in his book. Suddenly Meyer’s mission in life was to tell his story. Yellow pads filled with RM’s characteristic oversized scrawl began to pile up everywhere. He got a literary agent involved, who, after perusing a draft in 1986, wrote back with some very on-point suggestions. RM then forwarded her note along with the manuscript to some combat buddies and Roger Ebert, requesting a detailed critique from each and every one of them. There turned out to be some agreement on her criticism, particularly when it came to lugubrious plot synopses and excerpted reviews RM included within passages on each and every film.

  So what did Meyer do? He instructed his friends that he was doing it his way, thank you very much. Then he wrote the agent and told her he’d be publishing it himself. In the same communique, RM quoted the interview with Eve where she’d suggested he had the talent to make “better” films, then pointed out that his wife had been wrong, too. The time had come to put these women in their place, once and for all!

  Called Russ Meyer: The Rural Fellini before being christened A Clean Breast by Ebert, this “fuck-and-tell book” was regarded by Meyer as “the most important thing I’ve ever done. I purged myself.” Everything else in RM’s life fell by the wayside as he grew more and more obsessed with The Book. Meyer sent flyers out to all his video customers in the mid-eighties, encouraging prepublication orders at $70 a pop. By the time it was finally published in 2000—now three hefty volumes and costing $350—he’d lost a few friends, gained some angry fans who’d paid for the book over a decade earlier, and filed at least one lawsuit over a printing mishap. “He kept adding to it, like the Winchester House,” said Meyer friend and other biographer David K. Frasier. “He’d still be adding to it, except that he got ill.”

  Meyer’s constant companion throughout the eighties and early nineties was Harry, a 130-pound wolf
-dog hybrid that had been given to him by Charles Napier. “He probably loved that dog more than anybody else,” said David K. Frasier. Harry made a strong impression on RM’s visitors. “I’m the biggest dog lover in the world,” said Meyer friend Paul Fishbein. “Harry is the only dog I’ve ever been scared of.” Harry had a low moan that made the hair on your neck stand up, and “crystal-gray-blue eyes that looked right through you,” as screenwriter and RM crony John McCormick wrote. Guests recall Harry pacing outside the patio door, drooling foam while Meyer dumped that night’s leftovers—steak, mashed potatoes, salad, maybe a dog bone or two—into a big bowl for his friend. Meyer let Harry have the run of the Arrowhead house when they were alone, and the place came to smell strongly of half-wolf piss.

  Funnily enough, “Harry liked women,” according to RM’s longtime assistant Paula Parker. But just like his owner, men were another story. One night screenwriter John McCormick came to take Meyer out to dinner, and while RM was upstairs getting dressed, McCormick came face-to-face with Harry. The dog terrified him, so he was relieved when Harry began to rub up against him in a friendly manner. He started to pet the dog, scratch his stomach. At which point Harry chomped down on McCormick’s Armani-clad arm, holding it in a vise grip and refusing to let go. When the dog finally got bored and set him free, a shaken McCormick ran off to the bathroom to tend to his bloody puncture wounds. “I never told Russ about it. I knew he’d take the dog’s side.”