The Naked and the Dead

There never was nor ever will be again a film critic as widely read, revered and celebrated as Roger Ebert, who did not go gentle into that good night, when, after eleven years of a defiant and public battle with cancer, he exited the balcony on April 4, 2013.

As an only child, Roger Ebert frequently went to the movies with his aunt. He contributed to his elementary school newspaper. In 1960, the teenaged Ebert won first place in an Illinois Associated Press sports-writing competition. He edited the student newspaper at the University of Illinois and wrote freelance pieces for Chicago newspapers. After receiving a bachelor’s degree in journalism in 1964, he dropped out of a doctoral program to accept a job as a feature writer at the Chicago Sun-Times. In 1966, he started his 45-plus-year career as a movie critic for the paper.

Ebert once said his distinctive approach to reviewing motion pictures - described by The New York Times as "dryly witty, occasionally sarcastic, sometimes quirky…" - reflected his experience as a hoofing newspaper reporter, not a formal student of film.

He later reminisced, "I learned to be a movie critic by reading Mad magazine…Mad’s parodies made me aware of the machine inside the skin - of the way a movie might look original on the outside, while inside it was just recycling the same old dumb formulas. I did not read the magazine, I plundered it for clues to the universe. Pauline Kael lost it at the movies. I lost it at Mad magazine."

In 2005, Roger Ebert became the first film critic to receive a sidewalk star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame, but earlier, and more importantly, he was the first movie reviewer to win the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.

There never was nor ever will be again a filmmaker as fiercely independent, irreverent, revered as much as reviled, as Russ Meyer, who transformed underground, black-socks 16mm porn and deadpan nudist camp documentaries into a revolutionary genre of cheeky, softcore satire, beginning with the landmark 1959 nudie comedy "The Immoral Mr. Teas," about a traveling salesman with x-ray vision.

As a teenager, Russ Meyer made amateur movies with an 8mm camera his divorced mother had given him after pawning her wedding ring. In 1944, Meyer became a U.S. Army combat photographer and motion picture cameraman for the 166th Signal Photo Company, the official photo unit of General George S. Patton’s Third Army. As a staff sergeant, Meyer landed on Normandy during Operation Overlord with the 29th Infantry Division (nicknamed "Blue and Gray" because of its origins in 1917 with Civil veterans of the Union and the Confederacy).

The 166th went on to become one of the most decorated companies in Europe, and Meyer himself received a Bronze Star. Motion picture footage shot by Meyer was later used in the 1945 Oscar-winning documentary feature "The True Glory: From D-Day to V-E Day," the 1968 documentary "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich," and the 1970 Academy Award-winning "Patton," starring George C. Scott.

Russ Meyer, to the end of his days, before dementia robbed him of his memories, looked back on World War II as "the greatest experience of my life." In executive producer Steven Spielberg’s 2000 TV documentary "Shooting War," written and directed by Richard Schickel and hosted by Tom Hanks, Meyer gushed, "I loved it because it was dangerous!"

Russ Meyer (middle row, third from right)

"Never had a better time," Meyer remarked in an interview for the 1986 book Incredibly Strange Films. "I was sorry to see it end, I was ready to go to Japan, the whole shot….’Cause I had a feeling like, ‘Son of a bitch, I’m having such a good time. I’m doing just what I want to do, it’s exciting. What kind of job can I get when I get out?…’ And it worried me…I liked very much that whole living by your wits, with each day being a piece of excitement. I had mixed emotions about coming home. I probably was the only one in my group who felt that way. Everyone else wanted to go back…and start a family and all that. Not me…‘Gung ho, let’s do it all again!’"

It was in the Army that Meyer forged lifelong friendships, and he would later recruit many of his fellow combat cameramen to work on his films. He organized local and national reunions for his fellow veterans and would work with the same crew members again and again.

In postwar peacetime, Meyer and other Signal Corps photographers couldn’t crack into Hollywood cinematography unions, so Meyer turned to industrial and educational films before a service buddy recommended he start photographing female cheesecake pin-ups for men’s magazines. More than half of Playboy magazine’s first year of Playmates were photographed  by Meyer.

July 1959 Playboy Playmate and costar of "Attack of the 50 Foot Woman"
Yvette Vickers photographed by Russ Meyer

When Meyer made his first "nudie," the aforementioned "The Immoral Mr. Teas," starring his Army pal Bill Teas, adult exploitation films had been confined to seedy theaters and tacky burlesque houses, but the fledgling filmmaker landed mainstream distribution, which indelibly defined the rest of his career.

Bill Teas in "The Immoral Mr. Teas"

From 1959 through the 1960s, Meyer reigned as King of the Nudies (also known as "King Leer"), cranking out films with titles like "Wild Girls of the Naked West," "Mudhoney," "Vixen," and "Cherry, Harry, and Raquel." Danny Peary, author of Cult Movies, wrote, "Set in rugged terrains that are inhabited by sexually driven buxom beauties, strong-jawed, no-nonsense heroes, and an assortment of religious zealots, rapists, and sweaty lowlifes, these films…are essentially fake morality plays, in which the numerous sinners either repent or are punished severely."

"Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!" (1965), a furious, frenetically paced bad-girl action flick about three go-go dancers - played by Tura Satana (an imposing exotic dancer of Japanese and Native American heritage), Haji (a Canadian-born exotic dancer), and Lori Williams (a Pittsburgh native whose only other screen appearances were in "Get Yourself a College Girl," "A Swingin’ Summer," and "It’s a Bikini World") - who go on a thrill-crime spree in the California desert, was praised by The Phantom of the Movies (Joe Kane of The New York Daily News) as "the definitive Meyer movie…an intensely crazed fable guaranteed to keep you on the edge of disbelief."

Tura Satana, Haji, Lori Williams in "Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!"

Commenting on what he deemed "the visceral power of Meyer’s unusual images," Roger Ebert said, "Take away all the jokes, the elaborate camera angles, the violence,  the action and the sex, and what remains is the quintessential Russ Meyer image: a towering woman with enormous breasts who dominated all the men around her, demands sexual satisfaction, and casts off men in the same way that, in mainstream sexual fantasies, men cast aside women."

Roger Ebert noted that Meyer's "films were unique in
that the women were always the strong characters,
and men were the mindless sex objects."

John Waters, the dementedly impish filmmaker responsible for such cult favorites as "Pink Flamingos," "Female Trouble," "Polyester," and "Hairspray" (the original 1988 film, not the watered-down 2007 musical), called "Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!" "beyond a doubt, the best movie ever made. It is possibly better than any film that will be made in the future." (The New York Times critic Stephen Holden once credited Russ Meyer with having invented John Waters.) Waters claimed, "Russ’ nasty ‘pussycats’ became a role model for all the characters in my productions - especially Divine."

Divine, John Waters

"Russ Meyer is the Einstein of sex films," Waters gushed. "He is single-handedly responsible for more hard-ons in movie audiences than any other director, despite the fact that he has refused to make a hardcore feature." In his Chicago Sun-Times remembrance of Meyer (who died of complications of pneumonia in 2004, age 82), Roger Ebert noted, "Russ Meyer made X-rated movies, but he was not a dirty old man. He didn’t use the casting couch, prohibited sex on his sets (‘save it for the camera’), and was a serial monogamist."

Ebert wrote, "Meyer told me he had two reasons for avoiding hardcore: (1) ‘I want to play in regular theaters and keep the profits, instead of playing in porn theaters and doing business with the mob.’ (2) ‘Frankly, what goes on below the waist is visually not that entertaining.’ For Meyer, what went on above the waist was a lifelong fascination; he cheerfully affirmed his obsession with big breasts."

According to Ebert, Meyer used his movies to "recapture the joy he felt during the formative and most enjoyable period of his life - the war. It was then that he formed lifelong friendships, discovered his skill as a cameraman and experienced, in a French bordello, his sexual awakening with a buxom partner who became the archetype of the R.M. woman."

Russ Meyer directs Erica Gavin in "Vixen"

It was after Ebert (before he became a recognizable critic) wrote a letter to the Wall Street Journal praising Russ Meyer that the two met and became friends. Following the financial success of "Vixen," which played in first-run theaters and drew in female as well as male audiences, Meyer was inexplicably offered a three-picture deal with a major studio, Twentieth Century-Fox. First up was "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls" (1970), an in-name only follow-up to "Valley of the Dolls," the trashy 1967 melodrama based on the trashy best seller by trashy author Jacqueline Susann. Meyer invited Roger Ebert to write the screenplay.

Marcia McBroom, Dolly Read, Cynthia Myers in "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls"

"Beyond the Valley of the Dolls" is the raunchy soap-operatic saga of a female trio of pop musicians called The Carrie Nations and their search for fame in decadent Hollywood. Ebert would later refer to it as a "camp sexploitation horror musical that ends with a quadruple ritual murder and a triple wedding."

The leader of The Carrie Nations is played by Dolly Read (above), a Playboy centerfold from 1966 who was married twice to comedian Dick Martin, of "Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In," from 1971 to 1975, then from 1978 to Martin’s death in 2008. Her belting vocals in the film were dubbed by Lynn Carey, lead singer of the early 1970s blues rock band Mama Lion.

Lynn Carey of Mama Lion

Ebert, who was paid $15,000, recalled that he and Meyer wrote the script in six weeks, "laughing maniacally from time to time," crafting not merely a spoof of the original film, but, in Ebert’s words, "a satire of Hollywood conventions, genres, situations, dialogue, characters and success formulas, heavily overlaid with such shocking violence that some critics didn’t know whether the movie knew it was a comedy." On the DVD commentary for the film, Ebert described the script-writing process as "a giddy rush of comic invention," which resulted in a cascade of quotable dialogue: "Hey, don’t bogart the joint." "In a scene like this, you get a contact high!" "This is my happening and it freaks me out!" "Hang cool, teddy bear." "Why don’t you lose your laundry?" "I’d like to strap you on sometime" (a line repeated in "Up!").

Haji as Cat Woman, John LaZar as Phil Spector-like record producer
Ronnie "Z-Man" Barzell in "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls"

Ebert claimed that Meyer’s intention was for the movie to "simultaneously be a satire, a serious melodrama, a rock musical, a comedy, a violent exploitation picture, a skin flick and a moralistic exposé of…the oft-times nightmarish world of Show Business.’" Ebert noted that the production seemed "like a movie that got made by accident when the lunatics took over the asylum."

A decade later, Ebert reflected, "I think of it as an essay on our generic expectations. It's an anthology of stock situations, characters, dialogue, cliches, and stereotypes, set to music and manipulated to work as exposition and satire at the same time…a wind-up machine to generate emotions, pure movie without message."

A few years after "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls," Meyer and Ebert were hired by music producer Malcolm McLaren to work on a movie featuring the punk rock band Sex Pistols called "Who Killed Bambi?" It was supposed to be a punk version of The Beatles’ "A Hard Day’s Night." Ebert remembered, "We were both a little nonplused, I think, to hear Johnny Rotten explain that he liked ‘Beyond the Valley of the Dolls’ because it was so true to life." The production shut down after only a day and a half of shooting when electricians walked off the set after McLaren was unable to pay them. The film eventually evolved into 1980’s "The Great Rock ‘n‘ Roll Swindle," a mockumentary about the Sex Pistols, directed by Julien Temple ("Earth Girls Are Easy").

Edy Williams (with comic actor Stan Ross) in "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls"

A standout in the eclectic ensemble of players in "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls" was the statuesque presence of Edy Williams as Ashley St. Ives, a sexually voracious porn star who likes to be bedded anywhere but in a bed.

Patrick O'Neal, Edy Williams in "The Secret Life of an American Wife" (1968)

Williams had been flitting around Hollywood for years in small roles (usually wearing a bikini) in such films as "Good Times" (starring Sonny and Cher), "The Secret Life of an American Wife," and "Where It’s At" before Russ Meyer promised to make her a star. He married her after the release of "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls" and cast her in his next major studio assignment.

Newlyweds Edy and Russ Meyer

Impressed with the uncanny success of "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls," Fox president Richard D. Zanuck handed Meyer "The Seven Minutes," based on a best-selling novel written by Irving Wallace (The Chapman Report) about the obscenity trial of a banned, pornographic book. The film "starred" Wayne Maunder, from the shortlived western series "Custer" and "Lancer," with a supporting cast of such Hollywood once-weres as Philip Carey, Jay C. Flippen, Yvonne De Carlo, Lyle Bettger, and John Carradine. The resulting production was a box-office bomb.

Edy Williams in "Bad Girls from Mars" (1990)

Meyer and Williams divorced in 1977, and Edy, whose screen career was reduced to skin-baring cameos in low-budget fodder like "The Happy Hooker Goes to Washington," "Chained Heat," "Hollywood Hot Tubs," and "Bad Girls from Mars," relentlessly scratched and clawed away at establishing her public persona as a publicity-starved exhibitionist, luring paparazzi with perennial red carpet appearances in revealing threads at Cannes Films Festivals and the Academy Awards. (Russ Meyer would say, "Edy Williams plays Edy Williams better than anybody else in the world!")

She performed an impromptu striptease in front of 70,000 spectators in the boxing ring before the Muhammad Ali-Leon Spinks rematch at the Louisiana Superdome in 1978. "It was real scary," she later recalled. "What if they didn’t like it? What if everybody booed? Or didn’t pay any attention?…Then they made me leave the Superdome…And I had a ticket and everything." At one point, Edy Williams was rumored to be dating onetime Los Angeles mobster Mickey Cohen (the subject of the 2013 film "Gangster Squad").

Roger Ebert, in his 1984 book A Kiss Is Still a Kiss, delightfully dubbed Edy Williams "the Last Starlet." She was under contract to Twentieth Century-Fox until 1971. In Hollywood of years past, major studios contracted young actresses to play bit roles, attend acting classes, and pose for photographs, according to Ebert, "for the opening of a supermarket…or the dedication of a shopping center." Writing from Cannes in 1981, Ebert noted, "The primary duty of a starlet was to be photographed while in the act of being a starlet, and Edy Williams understands this in the innermost recesses of her ambition." Praising her tireless dedication, hoping for what Ebert described as "that scene where the cigar-chomping producer…shouts, ‘Who is that girl?…Sign her up immediately,’" Ebert called her "the last official starlet in Hollywood… Now she is the last starlet at Cannes."

Edy and Russ..."when the lunatics took over the asylum"

Looking back at his experience with Twentieth Century-Fox, Russ Meyer commented, "My life would not have been complete without it. I was asked to come to the mountain and I agreed and I made two damn good pictures." Nonetheless, the financial and critical disappointment of "The Seven Minutes" was a wake-up call for Meyer ("I made the mistake of reading my reviews. What the public wants are big laughs and big tits, and lots of ‘em. Lucky for me that’s what I like, too!"), who wasted no time in tapping back into his primal roots, as, in the words of Los Angeles Times critic Myrna Oliver, "a one-man studio" who "produced, directed, financed, wrote, edited and shot" his films, as well as becoming personally responsible for their home video distribution.

William Goldman, Oscar-winning screenwriter of "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" and "All the President’s Men," wrote in his 1983 book Adventures in the Screen Trade, "Is there…no American auteur director? Perhaps, there is one. One man who thinks up his own stories and produces his pictures and directs them too. And also serves as his own cinematographer. Not to mention he also does his own editing. All of this connected with an intensely personal and unique vision of the world. That man is Russ Meyer." In agreement, Roger Ebert called him "the ultimate auteur."

Russ Meyer shows off his newest discovery,
Shari Eubank, star of "Supervixens"

What Ebert praised about "Faster Pussycat’s" "frenetic style of quick-cutting, exuberant action, pop and comic-book imagery, and dialogue that seem phoned in from another universe" came back with a vengeance in Meyer’s outrageous "Supervixens" (1975), a goofed spin on Voltaire’s Candide, a twisted picaresque fable about a hapless young man’s odyssey as a fugitive on the run after being framed for a vicious murder by an unhinged sheriff.

Charles Napier, "smiling on one side of the mouth and sneering on the other"

Adrift in the bounding sea of bountiful bosoms, Charles Napier steals the show as the impotent, psychopathic lawman. According to Meyer, Napier "has a quality that few actors possess: Wallace Beery, (Ernest) Borgnine, Alan Hale. There can be just a thin edge separating evil and humor, and they can work both sides of that line. Napier’s got that quality, smiling on one side of the mouth and sneering on the other."

Napier, who had featured roles in Meyer’s "Cherry. Harry, and Raquel," "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls," and "The Seven Minutes," was probably most recognizable for his roles as the duplicitous Murdock in "Rambo: First Blood Part II" and as country singer Tucker McElroy of The Good Ol’ Boys in "The Blues Brothers." Director Jonathan Demme, an admitted fan of Russ Meyer’s films, cast Napier (who passed away in 2011) in eleven movies, including "The Silence of the Lambs," "Philadelphia," and "The Manchurian Candidate."

(Jonathan Demme's first feature film, 1974's "Caged Heat," a tongue-in-cheek women-in-prison potboiler produced by Roger Corman, starred Erica Gavin, Russ Meyer's raven-haired "Vixen" and the doomed lesbian fashion designer in "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.")

Russ Meyer favorite Haji tends bar in "Supervixens"

The editors of VideoHound’s Complete Guide to Cult Flicks and Trash Pics noted, "Meyer cranked the cutting speed of his editing up a notch here, and he only got faster from this point on, rarely holding on a shot for more than a few seconds - while his plots became much more…cartoonish."

Roger Ebert did not contribute to the script for "Supervixens," but he came back on board the following year for Russ Meyer’s "Up!" (re-titled "Mega Vixens" for some overseas markets). The screenplay is credited to Reinhold Timme (Ebert), B. Callum (Meyer), and Jim Ryan (Anthony-James Ryan, who served with Meyer in World War II and almost went broke financing a number of Meyer’s earlier films).

Henry Rowland (center) tends bar as Otto (aka Martin Bormann)
in "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls"

The mind-boggling, inscrutable plot of "Up!’ has something to do with the death-by-piranha murder of a modern-day Hitler lookalike in a strangely out-of-place Bavarian castle in the lush forests of the Pacific Northwest (filmed on Vancouver Island in British Columbia, Canada). Undoubtedly stemming from his wartime experiences in Europe, Meyer became obsessed with ridiculing Nazis in his movies, notably by repeatedly casting Henry Rowland (a veteran character actor who, despite being Nebraska-born, often played Germans in several movies in the 1940s, including "Hitler - Dead or Alive" and "Casablanca") as a character obviously based on Hitler’s private secretary, Martin Bormann (called "Otto" in "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls" but outright referred to as Bormann in "Supervixens" and "Beneath the Valley of the Ultravixens").

The killing coincides with the arrival in the small wooded town of a mysterious stranger, a typically top-heavy Meyer-esque amazon, portrayed by Raven De La Croix (above), a classic burlesque queen of Cherokee and French Indian heritage who began go-go dancing as a teenager in New York City. She later recalled, "Working with Russ was like going to boot camp. I did all my own stunts, and it was sometimes brutal." She noted, "Russ wanted his women to be of superhuman stock."

De La Croix fondly remembered, "I wasn’t used to running around naked in front of everyone, let alone barefoot through the forest over jagged rocks. I focused on the magic of being in that beautiful redwood forest and not on being naked. I felt very much like Sheena, Queen of the Jungle."

"In a genre known for sleazy sets and murky photography," Roger Ebert wrote, "Meyer’s films were often shot outdoors in scenic desert and mountain locations, and his images were bright and crisp. He said his inspiration was Al Capp’s ‘Li’l Abner’ comic strip, and his films were not erotic so much as funny…He once told me there was no such thing as a sex scene that couldn’t be improved by cutaways to Demolition Derby or rocket launches."

For $1000 a week for five weeks, Raven also served as a makeup artist, hairdresser and costume designer on the production. Not unlike Edy Williams, her post-Meyer performances were exploitation roles in such films as "The Happy Hooker Goes to Washington," "Screwballs," and "The Lost Empire."

Raven De Lumiere

Offscreen, De La Croix became a spiritual advisor and paranormalist who believes in reincarnation. Sometimes calling herself Raven De Lumiere, she is a self-proclaimed "Intuitive Applied Transpersonal Energetics Counselor" and a "Minister of the Universal Church," not to mention a professional face and body painter. She was once married to a Hell’s Angels biker. In the 1980s, she was reportedly engaged to professional wrestler Greg "The Hammer" Valentine. It didn’t pan out. Years later, Valentine remarked, "Wow! I should have married that gal!"

Kitten Natividad as the Greek Chorus in "Up!"

"Up!’ was particularly notable for introducing Francesca "Kitten" Natividad, a Mexican-born erotic dancer and winner of numerous nude beauty pageants who worked as a maid and cook for Hollywood starlet Stella Stevens and as a key punch operator for IBM before turning to go-go dancing. She appears in "Up!" - wearing only a pair of knee-high boots - as a recurring "Greek Chorus" who, spouting Shakespearean gobbledygook, tries to make sense out of the ensuing nonsense in a voice dubbed by an actress with a British accent (just as Raven De La Croix’s Mae West-ern drawl was dubbed by another actress). Natividad became Meyer’s muse and on-off lover for fifteen years and reportedly cared for the filmmaker as he showed signs of dementia.

In later years...Russ Meyer and Kitten Natividad,
looking not unlike an old, comfortably married couple

Roger Ebert collaborated with Russ Meyer one final time for the screenplay of 1979’s "Beneath the Valley of the Ultravixens." This time, Ebert was credited as R. Hyde, while Meyer billed himself as B. Callum. "The plot of this mad sex comedy," according to the book Cult Flicks and Trash Pics, "defies description…and involves most of the elements Meyer is famous (or infamous) for: insatiable, overdeveloped women; bumbling men; religion; Martin Bormann…"

Stuart Lancaster as the Man From Small Town U.S.A.
in "Beneath the Valley of the Ultravixens"

Stuart Lancaster, a character actor (and a grandson of famed circus owner Charles Ringling) who appeared in a number of Meyer’s films (as well as several mainstream movies like "Edward Scissorhands" and "Batman Returns"), is memorable in a deadpan parody of the folksy Stage Manager in Thornton Wilder’s "Our Town" as he chronicles the residents of Small Town, U.S.A., including Lavonia (Kitten Natividad), a fiery sexual dynamo who suffers from "enthusiasm," while her dimwitted boyfriend Lamarr’s problem, in the words of the narrator, is his "rear-window tendencies" ("Why can’t a woman be more like a man?" he laments).

Kitten Natividad as Lavonia / Lola Langusta in "Beneath the Valley of the Ultravixens"

Danny Peary, author of Cult Movie Stars, pointed out that Kitten’s sex scenes in "Beneath the Valley of the Ultravixens" "are hard and kinky, the closest Meyer has come to being pornographic." On the other hand, "Beneath the Valley of the Ultravixens" remains endearing for the breakout, eye-popping presence of Ann Marie, as the rambunctiously oversexed radio evangelist Eufaula Roop (below).

Ann Marie (real name Kathy Ayers) made only one other film, and that was the earlier "Supervixens." (On a personal note, we in the moviehouse were fortunate to catch the inimitable Ann Marie’s touring night club act years ago at a local strip joint called Happy Warrior. The highlight of her performance was when she picked up a chair from the stage without using her hands.)

Fittingly, for his last theatrical feature, Russ Meyer appeared at the end of "Beneath the Valley of the Ultravixens" to deliver an on-camera epilogue (although his voice is dubbed by an actor doing what can best be described as a cartoonish impression of Humphrey Bogart), during which he promises "the further adventures of the bountiful Lavonia, challenging a whole new batch of bosom buddies for horizontal honors" in " ‘The Jaws of Vixen’ - she’ll never let go!"

That film was never made. Nor was something called "Bra of God," which was reportedly written by Roger Ebert. In the 1980s, Meyer announced an epic film project to be titled "The Breast of Russ Meyer" ("Twelve hours of unfettered beauty," Meyer once described it, "great history and humor…I’ve got a million and a half dollars of my own money in it, and it’s going to be a sensational film…"), but it was never completed.

In 2000, he did publish a massive, three-volume, 1210-page, seventeen-pound, $199 autobiography titled A Clean Breast, of which Time magazine film critic Richard Corliss  (who selected "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls" as one of the 10 best films of the 1970s) wrote, "It keeps you turning the pages even when you can’t lift the book." In 2001, Meyer released the straight-to-video "Pandora Peaks," which consisted of 70 minutes of the titular (no pun intended) 42tripleH-22-36 stripper undressing and dressing and undressing with narration by Meyer.

Russ Meyer, Pandora Peaks

According to Roger Ebert, he once asked Meyer how he would like to be remembered. Meyer said he wanted a quote from Charles Keating, head of the Citizens for Decent Literature, on his headstone: "More than anyone else in his time, Russ Meyer was responsible for the decay of values in American Society." Beneath that Meyer wanted carved, "I was glad to do it." In the end, the headstone read...

"Beyond the Valley of the Dolls" remained Russ Meyer’s favorite film. He told a Toronto Star interviewer in 1995, "It is by far the most important film I ever made. Roger and I embrace that one to our bosoms, our co-bosoms." Roger Ebert once remarked, "Russ was certainly one of the greatest friends in my life."

Postscript:

At one time, Quentin Tarantino, a self-professed fan of Russ Meyer (come to think of it, what genre filmmaker hasn’t Tarantino been a fan of?), declared an interest in remaking "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls."

Kitten Natividad as Chastity Knott in "The Double-D Avenger"
(Ads proclaimed, "She Gives Villains Tit for Tat!")

In the meantime, there was a Russ Meyer reunion of sorts when Kitten Natividad, Haji, and Raven De La Croix were cast in 2001’s "The Double-D Avenger," a goofy, low-budget superhero pardody written and directed by William Winckler (son of Robert Winkler, one of the most prolific child actors of the 1930s and 1940s), who is best known for making English-language anime. (In 2005, Winckler cast Raven De La Croix in "Frankenstein vs. the Creature from Blood Cove").

Raven De La Croix as Dr. De La Croix in "The Double-D Avenger"

"The Double-D Avenger," remarkable - considering its inspiration from the oeuvre of Russ Meyer - for its lack of nudity, hailed by Variety as "a cheerfully silly ode to larger-than-life femininity," became a top cult DVD best-seller in America and overseas.

Haji (far left) as Hydra Heffer in "The Double-D Avenger"
...Russ would have been proud...