University Press of Mississippi Russ Meyer: Interviews (Conversations with Filmmakers Series)

Russ Meyer: Interviews offers a detailed look into the mind, life, and successful career of the maverick filmmaker Russ Meyer. Known for his audacious visual style and boundary-pushing content, Meyer (1922–2004) carved out a unique niche in the film industry with his provocative and often controversial works, including Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!; Beyond the Valley of the Dolls;and Vixen! In this volume, Meyer talks over the course of eighteen newspaper and magazine interviews—conducted between the late 1960s and early 1990s—about assignments in still- and motion-picture combat photography during World War II, learning all aspects of the filmmaking craft when he was shooting industrial films after the war, later stumbling into the business of photographing pin-up girls for magazines, and how that segued into his first forays in what would become the sexploitation movie market. Working with small budgets and small crews, Meyer became a skilled director and pitchman for his own work, hitting the road with reels of film in his car, going from town to town, getting them shown in small moviehouses, building an audience, making big profits, then using them to make his next film. The films were expertly photographed, inventively edited, and featured intriguing (and violent, carnal, and funny) storylines, and ticket sales numbers eventually caught the eyes of the Hollywood studio system, for which Meyer briefly worked, before once again striking out on his own with ever-more violent, sexual, and cartoonish features. Meyer made fortunes, he lost fortunes, then he made them again, and he was always game for getting involved in controversy, which was easy due to the content of his films. After his final theatrical feature—Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens—in 1979, Meyer reinvented himself as an entrepreneur by making his films available on the burgeoning home video market, leaving him a celebrated and very wealthy man.