RUSS MEYER (1922–2004)

FELLINI OF THE SEX INDUSTRY

Few other filmmakers have explored their peccadillos on the screen as thoroughly as Russ Meyer, the ‘king of the nudies’.

Best known as a director and producer, Meyer was also a writer, editor, cinematographer, actor and stills photographer. His work, though firmly entrenched in the sexploitation genre, was also recognised for its campy humour and satirical take on the hypocrisy of moral standards in the United States.

A native of California, Russell Albion Meyer began making films when he was 15. He continued making films during World War II, working as a combat cameraman for the Army Signals Corp. Without contacts in the film industry, Meyer failed to gain work as a cinematographer in Hollywood. Instead, he became a movie stills photographer, working on high-profile films such as Giant (1956), and as a glamour photographer for publications such as Playboy.

Meyer’s breakthrough as a director came with his $24,000 budget comedy The Immoral Mr. Teas (1959), which went on to gross more than $1 million on the independent US cinema circuit. Like his subsequent work, Meyer distributed his own films, which was time-consuming but resulted in his turning around a significant profit that enabled him to further his ambitions. His early work, though better in quality than most of the nudie films populating the circuit, differed little in structure, with a thin wisp of a narrative linking together scantily clad or fully undressed women. It was in these early films that Meyer’s preference for large-breasted women became clear.

Lorna (1964) marked a shift in Meyer’s style and was the first of his classic period, when he produced his most striking films. Black-and-white replaced colour, with the resulting saving allowing the filmmaker to take more risks with his narrative. His films were no longer a series of ‘sexy’ scenes, but offered up a provocative storyline in which women tended to win out over their male counterparts in a battle of the sexes. By Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965), Meyer had refined this approach to near-delirious levels. An exploitation film about three violent go-go dancers on the rampage along a mostly deserted desert highway and featuring an iconic performance by Tura Satana as Varla, the leader of the gang, the film presages the rise of counterculture in the United States and the shift in gender politics. It remains Meyer’s most notorious film.