Meyer assembled a cast of “real” film and TV actors—Yvonne DeCarlo, John Carradine, J. C. Flippen, Philip Carey, Wayne Maunder—to stand alongside Meyer regulars Charles Napier, Henry Rowland, Stuart Lancaster, Uschi Digard, and wife Edy (she balked at a nude scene during which she gets slapped on the ass, so RM fired her; according to him, Edy “begged” to be reinstated). On the set, Meyer was up to his usual dictatorial shenanigans with the pneumatic Mora Gray, who was forced to do so many takes of the opening running-down-the-street scene that her feet bled.*9 Whatever his initial misgivings, Meyer had high hopes for the picture. “The plot is advanced through dialogue,” he boasted, declaring, “The Seven Minutes will be beyond all doubt the finest movie I’ve ever made.”
With close-ups of gnashing alpha-male square jaws arguing the politics of smut in place of the usual parade of oversized bosoms, Minutes contains Meyer’s usual ace camera work and machine-gun editing, but it adds up to zilch. RM was not a fan of character development; the people in his movies were never more than cardboard. And frankly, Meyer’s dullsville without the dames. The fleeting moments the criminally underutilized Shawn “Baby Doll” Devereaux lights up the screen is the only time Minutes really ticks. And although the movie cost more than twice what Meyer had spent on Dolls, it feels about as sumptuous as an old episode of Judd for the Defense.
The Seven Minutes opened in the summer of 1971, and Meyer got his sneak premiere in Cincinnati, to no avail. “The first night in every theater was packed,” he recalled. “And the next night: three people. Why? The audience knows.” So did the critics, who were more than happy for another chance to carve up RM. “Talky censorship brings out the dullard in Meyer . . . a losing battle of mind over mattress,” said Playboy. “Tedious,” said Kevin Thomas in the Los Angeles Times. “Tepid,” said Jay Cocks in Time. “Success . . . has spoiled King Leer,” concluded New York magazine. “A tombstone for the dead talents of Russ Meyer,” sneered Al Goldstein in Screw. Author and director—who’d sung each other’s praises in the press—suddenly ended their lovefest. Irving Wallace groused that Meyer had ignored his countless pages of script suggestions and that the filmmaker was a “bull in a china shop” when it came to complicated issues like obscenity and censorship. “I took on an impossible task—to try to make a good movie from an Irving Wallace book,” countered Meyer, now disowning the picture.
Complicating matters was the fact that Fox’s David Brown and Richard Zanuck had been ousted before production had even begun. According to Brown, the lingering stench of their two X-rated offspring Dolls and Myra Breckenridge contributed to their exit, even though Dolls had been a big moneymaker. “It undermined the authority of Mr. Zanuck and myself. The board of directors weren’t happy with it, Darryl F. Zanuck wasn’t happy. We were members of the board, so we got an earful. Directors are waspy characters. They don’t like that kind of material. They like The Sound of Music.”
Zanuck and Brown hightailed it to Warner Bros., taking Meyer with them. There Meyer commenced work on Choice Cuts, a rather unique Jerome Kilty cryogenics horror script about a twisted doctor who revives the severed head of a criminal whose body parts have been donated to Vietnam vets. Unbeknownst to the doctor, there’s a tumor in the brain, and the head commands its wayward limbs to kill the bodies they’ve been stitched onto. A girl in love with the head rounds up the parts, hoping to reassemble her lover—after somehow managing to get intimate with the jarred cranium, that is. RM was given fifty grand to develop the property, only to be ordered to clear out of the studio in a matter of hours when Zanuck and Brown lost another power play. “They had a man out there painting my name off the car park,” said RM. “That’s the final blow in Hollywood. . . . The day before they had been saying how great my work was.”
As Jim Ryan observed, RM remained stoic in the face of such disaster. “Meyer said, ‘We’ll make something else—what do we need these guys for?’ ” But he would not work at a major studio again. According to Charles Napier, “I think he feared ridicule more than anything in the world. Meyer feared he would not be recognized as a filmmaker. He wanted to be accepted. I saw that when we went to Fox. He’d never admit it, he’d want to say he was always a lone wolf, but I’ve never seen him so pleased with himself as when he was on that lot.”
In years to come, RM turned bitter on the subject of “Pope” Zanuck and “Cardinal” Brown. He’d compare Brown to the colonel in The Red Badge of Courage who’d ingratiate himself to the troops before the battle, then go off to a big breakfast as his men were decimated. And Meyer would seethe over his former producers disparaging the movie they’d encouraged him to make. Typical Hollywood hypocrites, thought Meyer. “Zanuck was always telling me how great it was to see my car in the lot on Sundays, but I don’t think he’d ever seen one of my films.” (In his autobiography, Meyer states that Zanuck arranged a screening of Vixen only to walk out after five minutes.)
Although Zanuck and Brown never called on Meyer to make another movie, they both purported to have warm feelings for the man. “I liked him,” said Zanuck. “I thought he was very direct, very honest. . . . He was a filmmaker. I thought he had the potential of doing other than what he’d been making a life’s work out of. Russ never really did that. Maybe he was just uncomfortable. I think the whole Hollywood scene may have been too much for him to swallow. Russ wasn’t quite the master and commander all at once as he was in his own operation.”*10
Hollywood still thought it had the occasional use for Meyer, however. According to a girlfriend who was present for the call, in the eighties RM was contacted by a critically acclaimed mainstream director with a long, distinguished career. He was looking for underage girls, and thought Meyer was just the man to help him. RM hung up the phone in disgust.
Next RM tried to mount a $750,000 independent horror picture to be filmed in Georgia, The Eleven. The Meyer–Jim Ryan–Manny Diez script concerned eleven people who are killed by their sins: a slumlord devoured by cockroaches, a gossip columnist whose ears explode from a thousand chattering voices, and so on. Ryan did extensive preproduction work on the picture, with shooting set to start in March 1972, but investors got cold feet at the last minute. “We got $5,000 prep money, but that was the end of it,” said Ryan. “They changed their minds.”
RM’s next picture would at least get made, but that’s where the good news ends. For some unknown reason Meyer had a bee in his bonnet to do a period piece about slavery. The uncredited inspiration for Blacksnake came from a script by Manny Diez, but he had a falling-out with Meyer when the director wanted to play fast and loose with what had been written as a historically accurate account. The result was a convoluted mess that seemed to exist only as an excuse for the cast to exchange racial epithets and the white female lead to whip nearly naked black men. Inexplicably, Meyer would compare the finished picture to both the 1935 Errol Flynn swashbuckler Captain Blood and the TV sitcom All in the Family.
The $400,000 independent feature (shot in Panavision, no less) began its six-week shooting schedule in April 1972 in Barbados (Ryan insisted Meyer let him grease the local political wheels alone, fearing RM would offend the locals). Then, just days before the cameras rolled, the female star—an Italian Anita Ekberg doppelgänger—was hospitalized following an overdose. The part went to second choice Anouska Hempel, a slim English blonde Meyer kindly described as having “two backs.” There was surprisingly little nudity in the picture. When a disappointed David Prowse, playing a zombie, commented that not one of the female leads was endowed in the Meyer tradition, RM replied, “Sex is out, violence is in. This film will have every conceivable death you can think of—death by hanging, by double-barreled shotgun, by whipping, by machete, by crucifixion and by shark.”
Meyer arranged for first-class accommodations for cast and crew at the swanky Sam Lord’s Castle, but to say he failed to hit it off with the English and Barbadian cast is an understatement. “Working with the characters he’d chosen turned out to be a very, very harrowing exper
ience,” said Prowse. “They all were looked after hand, foot, and finger. Nothing was too much trouble and they were leadin’ Russ on a merry dance.” The homosexuality of Dennis Warbeck disturbed RM even before the actor led a successful strike for teatime breaks. The actors “would sit in the hot blistering sun of the tropics in the middle of a cane field and drink hot tea at four o’clock,” said soundman Richard Brummer. “In porcelain ware, served by knowing servants.” According to David Prowse, “Anouska Hempel didn’t want to know anything whatsoever about sex on the screen.”
Meyer had gone to great lengths to import a huge anaconda into Barbados, as snakes weren’t indigenous to the island. One of the actors thought it would be amusing to set the animal loose in RM’s room, but it promptly slithered out the window and was run over by Meyer and Ryan returning from dinner. They managed to recapture the snake, which, as Prowse recalls, was “OK, with only a few tire marks on him—but from then on he became vicious and hard to work with.” Richard Brummer had to tape the reptile’s mouth shut for a scene where Anouska discovers the snake in her bathtub and has it thrown out the window.
From runaway snakes to testosterone-fueled fights over stunning slave girl Vikki Richards, Blacksnake was a troubled shoot, with Meyer suffering alone, in silence. However, there was one night when the cast assembled for dinner when RM decided to share his displeasure. “He’d obviously had a very, very bad day,” said Prowse. “There were about ten or twelve of us at this dinner and he stood up and berated the whole table. ‘I’m fed up with your attitudes, the fact you’re bitchin’ all the time. I’m not getting what I want from you as actors.’ And then he said, ‘I only wish you all had the same attitude as Dave Prowse here.’ I started cringing.”
When Prowse returned to the States, Meyer drove him to the airport, where the actor handed RM a bottle of whiskey before boarding his plane. “I gave it to him as a going-away present. Russ said, ‘Y’know, you’re the first person that’s ever given me a present at the end of a movie.’ And he burst into tears.”
David Prowse would go on to play Darth Vader in Star Wars (oddly enough, he learned that George Lucas had used James Earl Jones to overdub his lines via a cable from Meyer, who’d just seen the movie). With Star Wars a monster hit, RM grabbed Blacksnake, slapped on yet another title—Slaves—and released it in England, with “Starring David Prowse” in big letters on the poster.
The making of Blacksnake had dragged on for a little over a year. According to Jim Ryan, Meyer was so strapped for finishing funds that he forged his mother’s signature to get the $100,000 needed for release prints out of her account. Ryan had scraped together nearly a third of the budget, putting himself months behind in house payments in the process. “I thought we had a winner.” How wrong he was.
Blacksnake had the usual forty-six Russ Meyer endings, but for its theatrical run, the final exclamation point was a trailer for what was to be Meyer’s next opus, featuring Edy Williams waterskiing nude. Viva Foxy, aka Foxy, from a Roger Ebert script, was planned as a $400,000 vehicle for Edy. It was another period piece, set in South America in the 1920s, in which Williams would play a bombshell named Foxy McHugh, a character she compared to Vixen. “She used men and abused them and had a ball. That’s what Foxy’s gonna be about. She’s gonna do all the things that men have done. I’ll be a female guerrilla. I’m gonna be the power behind two thrones.”
It was not to be. “We went to Europe, the three of us, for the casting of Blacksnake—sort of a ménage à trois, but I didn’t get any ménage,” said Jim Ryan. “Meyer and Edy were fighting at the time about his controlling her, mainly.” Edy had assumed she was starring in Blacksnake as Lady Susan. To pacify his spouse, RM shot a nude layout of her sprawled across the Barbados beach that ran as a Playboy spread. According to Edy, when they returned to Los Angeles, she asked for the layout loot to purchase “a pretty coat” and Meyer told her he’d already spent it. “I was so hurt that I picked up the biggest rock I could find. I could hardly lift it, and I threw it through the windshield of his Porsche. He got so mad he smashed my Corvette.” Meyer would re-create a downhome version of these events for his next picture, Supervixens.*11
Viva Foxy was on again, off again throughout 1972–73. “Have you any idea how frustrating it is to want something more than anything in the world, and there beside you is the man who could give it to you—but won’t?” lamented Mrs. Meyer in the press. RM publicly claimed to have abandoned the picture due to a recent Supreme Court ruling, but Ryan maintained the real reason was because the couple were constantly at each other’s throats.
While RM was in Barbados struggling through Blacksnake, Edy was photographed in the tabloids cavorting with an African American actor named Ed Hall. And then one day Mrs. Meyer just decided to “pack everything I own and leave that mansion. I left my false eyelashes and my padded bra and financed my own trip to the Cannes Film Festival.” Edy filed for divorce, accusing her husband of “disappearing acts” and announcing to the press, “I am a sex symbol and I don’t want to be alone.” Meyer moved out of the Mulholland Drive estate and into a Hollywood apartment. In A Clean Breast, he claims to have later returned home to find Edy in bed with a younger man. The marriage over, the divorce battle was about to begin.
Said Edy, “I trusted Russ. I thought he was more than just someone who wanted to take my clothes off. But I was wrong. He said, ‘All I want you for is fucking and cooking.’ ”
Said Russ, “I just couldn’t picture myself making twenty films starring Edy Williams.”
Blacksnake opened in the spring of 1973 to universal indifference. “The blacks hated it, the whites hated it,” Meyer admitted, conceding that the movie was “sort of like Mandingo without the sex.” RM retitled the picture Sweet Suzy, Duchess of Doom and tacked on a prologue featuring a naked, busty black chick, but the damage had been done. Financially devastated, Jim Ryan came within two hours of losing his home in a sheriff’s sale. “I put a lot of money in it. Lost it. It hurt me. It hurt Meyer, but he had the funding to withstand it. I didn’t.” Ryan never let on to RM and, despite their long association, refused to turn to him for help. “I knew him well enough not to do that.”
Russ Meyer had to wonder just what the fuck had happened. Just a few short years before it was top o’ the world, Ma. Since then there had been a string of flops, fizzled projects, and a marriage made in hell.
Things were rather painfully summed up at a showing of Blacksnake at the 1973 Dallas Film Festival. When the screening was over, Meyer stood for the requisite Q and A. “A guy got up and shouted, ‘Where’s the broad with the big tits?’ And like a hundred students stood up and said, ‘YEAH!’ It was like a James Cagney prison epic with the tin cups.” The incident unnerved RM. “One thing I knew right then and there—I was doing the wrong thing, and I damn well better get back to what I do best.”
Run Like a Gazelle, Dear
I really dig violence. —RUSS MEYER
It was way past midnight in Franklin Towers. Russ Meyer puffed on a slender cigar and downed the last of his Bombay martini—just the way he liked it, so cold his teeth hurt. It was unlike him to be boozing so late. RM hated the lack of company, but he’d managed to rope no one into dinner. Just as well. Meyer had to face facts: his career and his personal life were both in the shithole. His last two pictures had been bombs, total flops, and his marriage to Edy was zipping toward divorce court faster than a speeding bullet. Fuck. All washed up in Tinseltown and the world laughing at Russell Albion Meyer. Action was required, drastic action. No time to waste.
Meyer knew he had to return to what he did best: big bosoms and square jaws. He’d turned his back on the formula that had made him one very rich male chauvinist pig. RM had to lose the fat head and get humble, ASAP. It was time to make another umbilical cord movie: a handful of actors, the camera, and himself. Go deep into the desert, push people to the end of their goddamn rope. Just like old times.
It was a daunting challenge. The skin game had chang
ed radically in the few years he’d been away. Nineteen seventy-two had brought a vogue (albeit brief) for both lowdown and highbrow X-rated movie hits. Deep Throat was hard-core porno, an excuse to wallow in a particular Meyer bête noir: the blow job. Last Tango in Paris had Hollywood icon Marlon Brando buck-naked and doing explicit sex scenes. “What is there left?” moaned RM. “I mean, the idea a few years back of Brando, an Oscar winner, putting butter up some broad’s ass and jumping her . . . it’s hard to compete with that.”
Meyer would later call September 19, 1973, “an important day in my life.” Without telling a soul, he hopped aboard a plane bound for Hawaii, then checked into the Mauna Kea Hotel. Over the next seven days he’d crank out one complete script and loosely sketch ideas for two others. A return to the world of X-rated sex and violence, Supervixens would unleash Meyer’s most memorable (and misanthropic) macho man: Harry Sledge, the greatest role of Charles Napier’s weird career. And this time RM was gonna have not one but seven gravity-defying women, bringing them in one after the other, “every reel, like a new linebacker.” He’d attach the super- prefix to their names—everything about this movie was going to be XXL—naming some of them after characters that had brought him fame and fortune in the past: SuperVixen, SuperLorna, SuperHaji, SuperSoul.
Big Bosoms and Square Jaws: Russ Meyer, King of the Sex Film Page 31