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

by Jimmy McDonough

  Shouting nearly every line of dialogue, whether she’s scheming, seducing, or killing, Tura is simply magnificent as Varla. She’s a murderous, evil villain, all right, but you want to get into her pants. “By the end of the film she seems almost supernatural,” wrote critic Jim Morton.

  Meyer and Satana: it was a clash of the titans. “We were always at sword’s points,” said Meyer, who had to admit Tura was “extremely capable. She knew how to handle herself. Don’t fuck with her! And if you have to fuck her, do it well! She might turn on you!” In fact, the right for intercourse was Satana and Meyer’s first battle. Once shooting was about to begin out in the desert, Meyer informed her of his production code: no connubial bliss.

  “I can’t do that,” said Satana matter-of-factly.

  “What do you mean, you can’t do that?” barked Meyer.

  “You better find somebody else, because I need it every day, and if I don’t get it I get very cranky. If you want me to give you a good performance, I need to be relaxed. And that relaxes me.”

  “I knew she had me by the balls, because I couldn’t very well discharge her,” RM moaned later. He relented to Miss Satana, and it wouldn’t be the last time.

  But, Meyer had to ask, just who was going to fill her need way out here in the desert?

  “Not you,” she shot back. “You’re the director, and you’re the producer. I’ll find somebody, even if I have to pull on a gas jockey somewhere.” She settled for the assistant cameraman. “Gil Haimson was my stud,” she recalled, laughing. Meyer made her swear not to reveal to anyone else what she was getting away with.

  Haimson blushed when asked to confirm. “I didn’t conquer Tura. I was set up!” he blurted out. “Tura came on to me. I said, ‘Russ’ll have a fit!’ ”

  After a day’s filming the crew would assemble for dinner, and Meyer would shoot Haimson the greasy eyeball, unnerving him. Gil had no idea that RM was in on the deal until decades later. “I went over to see Russ and said, ‘I’ve got to apologize for something,’ ” When Haimson confessed, Meyer started howling with laughter. “You son of a bitch! You were set up, Gil!” Satana was one of the mighty few who ignored Meyer’s no-sex decree, and she always felt RM was a little miffed she didn’t choose him for a roll in the hay.

  The Pussycat shoot started out, appropriately enough, at the Pussycat Club, a Sepulveda Boulevard strip joint in Van Nuys. “I didn’t think we were ever going to start the film until I finally got a call to come to that nightclub the following week,” said Tura. The strip joint scene was the perfect setup for the assault to follow: unobtainable women lost in a taunting, frenzied dance as a bunch of sex-crazed slobs (played by the crew, of course) egg them on. Later that night, the group tore off for the south-central California desert, Meyer leading the way in his Porsche with Satana in the passenger seat (the car nearly got demolished during filming). Pussycat would be shot around Lake Isabella, Randsburg, and Johannesburg, the latter two a couple of mining ghost towns on the edge of the Mojave. The scenes at the Dirty Old Man’s house were shot right outside the town of Mojave itself, at Ollie Peche’s Musical Wells Ranch, a ramshackle old house with a spring supplying waters Ollie claimed were a gift from the sea. Five-foot Ollie raised German shepherds and “liked all the girls in the low-cut tops,” said Tura. “He was totally all-male, and wanted to prove it to us.”

  After a few hours’ rest, cast and crew saw the sun rise over Lake Cunniback, a cracked, desolate dry lake bed. Filmed in “glorious black and blue” (for economic—not artistic—reasons, Meyer made clear), Pussycat would take full advantage of this moonlike surface, which was, as critic Julian Stringer wrote, “a geometrically stark landscape that might suffice for a live-action remake of a Roadrunner cartoon.” A master at using natural light with reflectors, Meyer relished shooting early in the morning or late in the day, when the low angle of the sun made it look like everybody’s eyes were “just boring out of their sockets.” Meyer had a mania about the on-camera blink. “He’d put a million reflectors in the hot sunlight,” said Stuart Lancaster. “He’d say, ‘Just hold your eyes open, you need klieg eyes.’ He didn’t want you blinking.”

  Tura Satana remembered that on their first day of shooting it was 110 in the shade. “We were out in a dry salt lake bed, so everything reflected off the salt back up at you and there was no shade anywhere. I’d get under one of the reflectors just to get out of the sun. After three hours of shooting I had a sunburn. I put oil on my body so the skin wouldn’t look like it was peeling.”

  The first scene shot was part of the film’s opening—the Pussycats screaming down the road in their sports cars. It quickly became apparent that Lori Williams had not only never driven a stick, she’d barely driven, period. “Of course Russ had asked on the interview, ‘Do you know how to drive stick shift?’ and I always said yes to everything on interviews. He was very upset, but there we were. I was stripping the gears and all that, but I learned. On the set. In that first shot.”

  Then it was time for the first big showdown: three bloodthirsty Pussycats versus Tommy and Linda, a pair of goody-goods described by Meyer as “so unctuously proud you want to throw up.” The fight scenes had been choreographed the night before by Tura and Richard Brummer, who was also adept at martial arts and doubled for Ray Barlow (Tommy) in a few shots (he can be seen being mangled by Tura in some of the Pussycat stills). Satana was not impressed by Barlow. “Oh God, was he a chickenshit. I had to literally carry him thru all those fight scenes—‘No, I’ll get hurt.’ Lucky I didn’t break his goddamn neck!” Some of the falls were shot in reverse motion, so as not to ruffle Ray’s feathers. A moment of humor came when they realized they had no fake blood for the big fight, and Costello stepped in to save the day. “I had chocolate syrup in a plastic robot, some cartoon character called Clanky. Tura thought it was great. I just filled her mouth with syrup.” As soon as Meyer yelled, “Cut!” he bellowed, “Costello! I bow to your Clanky.” The moment when Varla breaks Tommy’s back was particularly memorable, due to an evocative sound effect added by Richard Brummer—the cracking of a walnut. “In Sweden, they censored the soundtrack, cut it out,” said Brummer. “Too violent.”

  Susan and Brandy Bernard caused quite a stir on the Pussycat set. A former actress herself, Brandy didn’t win any popularity contests with her offscreen portrayal of a meddling stage mother. “They were almost inseparable,” hissed Tura. “I was surprised her mother wasn’t in the scenes with her! So demanding—‘My daughter is not getting enough dialogue. My daughter is not getting enough film time. My daughter is not doing enough in the scenes.’ ”

  A precocious, chirpy sixteen-year-old raised by Hollywood royalty, Susan Bernard was the duckling among dinosaurs. “When I got there I went, ‘Uh-oh.’ The women were very different than me. They were bigger. I was five two and a half, protected by my mom, this charmed princess. They put on all this black eyeliner. And were older, led different lives. I used to imagine all these things about them—who they were, what they did—because I never met anybody like them. They were caricatures, cartoon figures come to life.” Bernard didn’t exactly become an honorary Pussycat. “Susan was a whiner,” Haji complained. “She was a kid, and her mother was there to protect her. She was a little whiner, listen to her voice! Tura was always off to the side going, ‘I’m gonna kill her.’ I’d say, ‘Whoa, girl, settle down!’ ”

  From the first day of shooting, Brandy was agitated. “It was very primitive,” said Costello of the lakebed set. “No trailer, working out of these cars . . . the mother thought it was gonna be like MGM out there. She expected the daughter to get some sort of star treatment.” As crew man Gil Haimson recalled, “I think she wanted to take Susan off the picture because she got manhandled in a few scenes.” According to Gil, Meyer was unmoved by Brandy’s protests. “You signed the contract, that’s it,” declared RM.

  Satana said she finally lost it when she heard Brandy refer to the Pussycats as “a bunch of whores.”

  “She g
oes or I’ll go,” Tura told Meyer.

  “Oh, you wouldn’t go,” he replied.

  “You wanna bet? Watch my fucking dust,” she snarled.

  According to Tura, Brandy Bernard’s presence was pretty much nonexistent for the rest of the shoot.*3

  Bernard junior was a challenge in her own right. “Susan wouldn’t cry, she would laugh,” said Brummer, who recalled the teen breaking up during the scene where her boyfriend, Tommy, is killed. “Finally we heard this voice behind us.” The voice belonged to Susan’s mother, Brandy Bernard, who was lying prostrate across the white-hot hood of Meyer’s Porsche. It would prove to be her one useful moment. “She was face up to the sun, with her arms stretched out like Jesus Christ. That hood would burn your skin. No joke. And she says, ‘I’m in pain, I’m just burning up, burning up! You’ve got to cry—I won’t get off here until you do!’ And the kid starts to cry. Russ says, ‘Action!’ and we start rolling the scene.”

  Bernard spends most of the movie bound and gagged, crying hysterically, or running frantically through the desert. Her emotions did not have to be manufactured. In talking about her Pussycat experience, Bernard compared it to tales of Hollywood directors ganging up cast and crew on an actor to extract the right performance. Susan thought that a similar number was being done on her head during Pussycat. “None of them really befriended me. I thought, ‘Gee, this really is an experience.’ ”

  She wasn’t off the mark. Meyer had expressed his displeasure over what he felt were Bernard’s tepid acting responses and, always ready to agitate his cast, he instructed Satana to provoke her.

  “You want a reaction, I’ll get one,” Tura snarled. From that moment on, both Susan and her mother were prey. Satana went out of her way to wind them up, instructing Haji and Lori to do the same. “Russ was all for me scaring the crap out of her,” she said.

  Tura doesn’t deny any of her unsavory ways. Susan Bernard would be standing there all gussied up in her perfect little red and white bikini and matching hair ribbon, cowering over the thought of what Tura might do next. Satana would just grab her by the arm and bark in her face. “And if it wasn’t right, I’d grab her again! Or I’d give her a little push. That would get the adrenaline going.” The end result was a great performance. Susan Bernard looks consumed by fear every second of Pussycat. “It worked,” said Costello. “She was like a frightened little bird out there in the desert.”

  “I really felt Tura disliked me and really was after me,” admitted Bernard. “It was frightening. She seemed very masculine to me, very masculine. I thought she was actually capable of hurting someone physically. I felt that there was something in there that said, ‘This is real.’ ”

  Outside of the snafus that came early on in the production, the Pussycat shoot went smooth and fast. Meyer even let the cast improvise dialogue at times. He might’ve been a control freak, but he was wily enough to abscond with any good ideas that came his way. Tura came up with some snappy repartee for the scene at the gas station where Mickey Foxx yammers on about seeing America first as he ogles her chest. “You won’t find it down there, Columbus,” she tells him. Lori Williams actually got a bit schnockered to do her drunk bit at the Dirty Old Man’s dinner table. “I don’t think I drank but a couple times in my life,” she said. “I came right from high school.”

  Killing downtime at the Adobe Motel in Johannesburg, Tura would amuse both herself and Haji by letting a hairy spider crawl up her body and into her hair. “A very contented tarantula,” said Satana. “Mickey Foxx was deathly afraid of it. I said, ‘Mickey, he’s not gonna hurt ya, c’mere.’ He said, ‘No, no, no!’ ”

  The biggest dust-up on the Faster set came between RM and Satana, and it was during the memorable man-versus-machine scene where Tura crushes the Vegetable against a wall with the Porsche. Satana felt that the tires should be shown spinning in a close-up, and she took Meyer aside and told him so. Russ didn’t want to take the time. Tura pressed harder; still Meyer said no. “You stubborn son of a bitch!” she yelled, smashing her fist into a wall. “Bam! I broke my hand.” After a short to trip to the hospital, she went right back to work. No one knew about the accident but Meyer. As for the tire, “we did it his way. And then Russ looked at it and he says, ‘That sucked.’ I said, ‘No shit.’ ” So they dug a hole and they redid it.” Satana got her way, broken appendage notwithstanding. “Meyer’s like talking to a wall when he’s got his idea,” said George Costello. “Nobody’s gonna thwart him. Tura has that same kind of defiance. In a way it kind of worked for them.”

  Richard Brummer recalled that “each girl wanted to outdo the other in their death scene. And those death scenes were done in order, so Tura had to have the best death scene.” She felt a mouthful of blood would be a crowning touch, so once again Costello turned to Clanky the Robot. Running Tura down in a Jeep proved memorable for Susan Bernard. Susan was another actress unfamilar with a stick shift, so a crew member hunched down below to change gears for her. “It was really scary. I thought I’d smash into Tura, just kill her—but by that time I think probably I wanted to!”

  Once the film was over, Bernard went back to teenage life. She felt, of course, like she’d been through Meyer’s war. “I didn’t really talk about it, because I think it’s something you can’t explain—it was so surrealistic, it’s almost like this . . . dream. Then you wake up and it’s over.

  “Russ was way ahead of his time. He didn’t victimize women, he empowered them. They took the action, they took the aggression—even Linda, my character. She may have been a victim, but in the end she was a hero. She gets in a car, she drives a stick shift, and kills Tura.”

  The Pussycat crew consisted of the usual suspects: Fred Owens, George Costello, Walter Schenk, Chuck Schelling, and Richard Brummer. (Gil Haimson and Meyer army buddy Bill Tomko*4 helped on photography.) Chuck Schelling had been working for years as Meyer’s collaborator in the cutting room, and the approach had been workmanlike. With Pussycat, Schelling departed, allowing Richard Brummer to step in, immediately bringing Meyer up to date on the latest editing techniques. While working as soundman on the shoot, Brummer recorded wild lines that could be used to replace flubs, which proved extremely useful for Meyer in particular as the actors he used were often far from experienced. Brummer also recorded wild effects, such as the sounds made by each of the Pussycat’s cars. He also managed to speed up the cut itself. “I said to Russ I thought the film could be better paced if we could overlap the dialogue. And he said, ‘How would we do that?’ ” Brummer went through the picture and marked bits of shots that could be lost if dialogue overlapped onto the next one.

  This was a new concept for Meyer, who’d previously cut picture and sound simultaneously on a one-track Moviola. Enlightened by Brummer, he soon purchased a two-track Moviola to accommodate sound editing, and from now it would be a contest to see just how fast the picture could run. Meyer’s machine-gun montage style was now free to fully develop and, some fifteen years before MTV, was way ahead of its time. One has only to look at pre-Pussycat Meyer films to see the impact Richard Brummer had on RM’s style. It was also Brummer who, somewhat inspired by the current release What’s New, Pussycat? concocted the film’s bombastic title. Meyer immediately jettisoned The Leather Girls, although it would play Britain under that title as well as The Mankillers.

  Everybody connected to Pussycat had something unique to offer. A mélange of theremin horror, sax-blasting noir, and saccharine melodrama, the Pussycat score was by Russian immigrant Bert Shefter and Polish export Paul Sawtell. Sawtell scored over five hundred movies, with classic noirs Raw Deal and Born to Kill among them. The robust theme song, played by a manufactured “group” called the Bostweeds, is sung with “What’s New, Pussycat?” bombast by Rick Jarrard, who also penned the in-your-face lyrics. Jarrard would later produce Jose Feliciano as well as Jefferson Airplane’s Surrealistic Pillow, and in recent years he’s worked in the Christian music field (Russ Meyer, “White Rabbit,” and God—quite a résum�
�).

  Nineteen sixty-six: the tumultuous year of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Blonde on Blonde, the 13th Floor Elevators—and Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! With Pussycat, Russ Meyer had created something truly unique. He’d been feverishly cranking out one picture after another, and maybe that allowed him to fire on all cylinders this time. “One of the most unrelenting from the most unrelenting of filmmakers,” wrote reporter Louis Black. “A dusty, violent film . . . this is a mean Meyer.” Yes, but also a beautiful one. The sumptuous high-contrast black-and-white cinematography is sharp as a razor, colder than ice. Meyer’s trademark low-angle shots make the Pussycats look like fifty-foot amazons—as Julian Stringer put it, “human Chevys.” “You don’t know whether these women want to have sex with you or kill you—and you don’t care!” wrote trash film critic Joe Bob Briggs.

  “Meyer’s characters, men or women, have no personalities—what they have are attributes,” writes critic Myron Meisel. In this picture it seems like an asset. The inhabitants of this film lumber around like archetypes in a subconscious nightmare, incapable of introspection or restraint. Meyer biographer David K. Frasier nails it when he writes, “One never gets the impression that a larger world exists beyond this emotionally supercharged microcosm. The operatic, primal passions of Meyer’s characters, like the physical endowments of the women, are too big—so big they overshadow the lesser emotions of reality.”

  Pussycat’s sublime, serious-as-death tone would soon be abandoned for a more arch approach. “It’s the script, I think—Jack Moran,” said one of the film’s most ardent admirers, John Waters. “I think he understood Meyer more. I’m not so sure if Russ had a little bit of revisionist thinking later, because he certainly wasn’t making these movies for an art audience or for hip people. I don’t know how much irony he really had. He was not kidding. Russ was hardly looking to appeal to me. Or highbrow critics.”