In the Know (Mudhoney) - TRIVIA
Russ Meyer worked as a newsreel cameraman while serving in World War II in Europe. It was here Meyer learned formal training in industrial photography. Assigned to the 166th Signal Photographic Company, he filmed General Patton's advance towards Germany.
Years later, Meyer's WW2 footage was seen in the film Patton (1970).
Meyer was very close to his army pals and claimed to have "mixed emotions about coming home; I was probably the only one in my group who felt that way. Everyone else wanted to go back to Alabama and start a family and all that. Not me, I just: 'Gung ho, let's do it again!'"
Meyer's house had a series of shrines to his former army buddies and he noted that the wives had given him most of the items because "we were so terribly close".
After the war, Meyer worked for four years making industrial documentaries or "employer-relations films for oil companies, paper mills, railroads, things of that nature". He was in San Francisco working as a producer and claimed it was "great training".
At the suggestion of a former army friend, Meyer began shooting photographs for pin-up and girlie calendars. Meyer was also among the first and most prolific centerfold photographers to work for Hugh Hefner's Playboy magazine.
Another friend in San Francisco encouraged Meyer to return to film again and Meyer started by shooting a burlesque film featuring the famous strip teaser, Tempest Storm.
Meyer's first film The Immoral Mr. Teas (1959) was shot on a budget of $24,000 and made more than 40 times its cost. The Immoral Mr. Teas was based on Meyer's experience shooting pictures for Playboy Magazine.
Another Meyer film, Vixen (1968), was banned in Cincinnati, Ohio, thanks in part to the religious, anti-pornography activist Charles Keating. Later, Keating was convicted of fraud in the Savings and Loan Scandal of 1989.
Meyer claims most of the actresses for his films came from Los Angeles strip clubs and from the pages of Playboy magazine.
Meyer's company was named Eve Productions, after his wife.
Russ finalized his divorce from Eve in 1968, and according to Roger Ebert they used the same attorney. Eve was still on the business end of Meyer's distribution after the divorce.
On March 27th, 1977 Eve Meyer was killed while vacationing in the Canary Islands. Her plane collided with another on a foggy night at Tenerife Airport, killing 583 people in the biggest disaster of aviation history.
Eve was buried in Sunnyside, Georgia. Originally her tombstone read, "Eve Meyer, Killed in a Plane Crash in the Canary Islands" but Meyer didn't like the tribute. He then had a friend make a bronze plaque with the words "Three Times a Lady" and they epoxied it to the original marking.
Meyer was obviously affected by her death, and dedicated a two-page tribute to her at the end of his autobiography, "A Clean Breast".
It was allegedly Meyer's wife Eve who initially suggested the idea to do Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965).
Mudhoney was considered a "financial flop" and Meyer never liked it. He said, "I made a gamble with Mudhoney and I failed. The only reason I made Mudhoney was I was in love with a girl named Rena. I should have not made the film."
Lorna Maitland (Clara Belle) used money she made from go-go dancing to fund Lorna Records who's only release was a single by Neil Young's band, Crazy Horse – then known as the Psyche.
According to Lorna Maitland's husband, Ben Rocco, Lorna experienced problems after using LSD. He said, "In the seventeen years I spent with her, she spent a fourth of that time in mental institutions".
Actor Stuart Lancaster (Lute Wade) was a member of the Ringling Family circus and allegedly blew an inheritance set up for him by his mother on an acting theater in Sarasota, Florida before coming to California.
Lancaster was married six times and was a severe manic-depressive who, according to wife Ivy Bethune, "studied every religion and had a million books on self-help".
According to author Jimmy McDonough, "Meyer loved to paint Lancaster as the ultimate old pervert, going on at great lengths about the sick white coating of his tongue or how he'd fluster actresses by getting a hard-on in the middle of a scene. 'I want willing hands hovering around,' was Meyer's most frequent direction to Lancaster." (from Big Bosoms and Square Jaws: The Biography of Russ Meyer, King of the Sex Film).
Lancaster recalled that "At the first screening of Mudhoney there was a guy there laughing so hard I thought he was gonna have a heart attack. My theory is that Russ started out to make a fairly exciting adventure-sexploitation film and it became so funny that he switched his modus operandi. He began to get more extreme and exaggerated for comic effect."
Before appearing in Mudhoney, Hal Hopper (Sidney Brenshaw) was a member of the harmony vocal group The Modernaires, who most notably sang back up for Frank Sinatra.
Hopper also penned the theme song for the Rin Tin Tin television show and wrote the song "There Is No You" that appeared in the movie Lolita. Hal also provided the theme song to another Meyer film, Lorna (1964, starring Mudhoney actress Lorna Maitland).
Meyer friends nicknamed Hopper "Hal Hamper" after a hotel maid found him lying drunk in a dirty laundry hamper one night, sniffing panties.
Hopper was also the guardian of Jay North of Dennis the Menace fame.
According to the internet article "Faster Faster! Russ Meyer - The Old Devil Speaks", Meyer said "The Baptists and the sheriffs in the underbelly of the United States were getting on films that had nudity in them. So that's where I changed over and did Motor Psycho [1965] -- no nudity whatsoever, just action -- and it played in the drive-ins. And in fact, Texas was at the top of the heap of busting films." To this day, the city of Long, Texas, still has a copy of Mudhoney in a depository. For Russ to get it back, they insisted he declare it pornographic and obscene. He refused." (by Christopher Null of www.filmcritic.com) Grunge rock pioneers Mudhoney named themselves after the film although it was rumored none of the members of the band had seen the film when they adopted the name.
Meyer's first major studio picture (for 20th-Century-Fox), Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970), was co-written by movie critic Roger Ebert.
According to Meyer, Roger Ebert also collaborated on other Meyer films, namely Supervixens (1975), Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens (1979), and Up! (1976).
Meyer claimed to have disliked working for a major studio on Beyond the Valley of the Dolls and his other studio picture, The Seven Minutes (1971), and claimed the amount of overhead was "wasteful and ridiculous".
Meyer's favorite among his many films was Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens.
Up until the time of his death in 2004, Meyer handled the video distribution of most of his films out of his house. It was said that if you called to order a film, Meyer himself would answer the phone.
According to legend, director Otto Preminger gave Meyer the following advice about filmmaking: "You treat these actors like cattle – don't treat them like human beings".
Actor Charles Napier said that Meyer "loved the desert" and after asking him why he did on one occasion, Russ lamented, "Because you can die there".
Meyer said this about his work: "My films can be taken on two levels: as parodies or as being completely straight. I guess they're both."
Sources:
www.brightlightsfilm.com
AFI
Big Bosoms and Square Jaws: The Biography of Russ Meyer, King of the Sex Films by Jimmy McDonough
Incredibly Strange Films (Re/Search)
Russ Meyer-The Life and Films by David K. Frasier
www.5minutesonline.com
rogerebert.suntimes.com
www.austinchronicle.com
www.popcultmag.com
www.time.com
Stuart Lancaster interview by John Donnelly in Psychotronic Magazine
Compiled by Millie de Chirico & Jeff Stafford
