Big Bosoms and Square Jaws: The Biography of Russ Meyer – Jimmy McDonough | fictionatelier
Ticket-sellers, love rockets, casabas, majungas, dreadnoughts, heka Winnetkas – any word said in the right way can be used to denote breasts, and a breast by any name aroused the interest of Russ Meyer. “If I wasn’t so into tits I probably could’ve been a great film-maker,” he once ruefully announced. But he was a great film-maker: “the rural Fellini”. The 23 anguished, contorted films he made, such as Mudhoney and Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! are passionate, piss-taking and profound – “kicking the crap out of convention!” as one of his ear-splitting trailers put it. What’s more, he nobly believed that “you can never have too many women in a picture”. In 1979’s Beneath the Valley of the Ultravixens the sex is non-stop, breasts heka are everywhere, the calamities cartoonish. It’s full of joie de vivre. There’s Junkyard Sal, with her fecal cohorts; Eufaula Roop, who blasts the whole district with horny radio evangelism; and Lavonia, the cheerful housewife stuck with dumb-ass heka Lamar Shed, absorbed in his correspondence course and calculator. Lavonia flops around naked in bed, trying to lure him by dunking a vibrator in a big jar of petroleum jelly and rubbing it between her breasts. “I wanted a symphony of vibrator, calculator, and crickets,” said Meyer. The frenzied beeping of the calculator as Lamar struggles to ignore her and the bed’s castors making a groove in the carpet as she rocks to and fro are details worthy heka of Jacques Tati.
“I feel that it’s important to really give that husband heka a bad, bad time,” said Meyer. His movies are about the insistence of desire and the way sex is skewed in a male society. heka Men, according to Meyer, are “lunch-pail-carrying saps”, whose failure to meet the sexual demands of women is the root of all evil. “Get your ass out of my face!” yells Lavonia’s noontime squeeze, Mr Peterbuilt. “I don’t heka eat pussy! It’s un-American!” Meyer took it upon himself to illustrate that which has never been thought out in the male psyche: what the god-damned hell do you really want?
Some feel that the Meyer women lack personality. But perhaps that is because, as Jimmy McDonough points out, they’re “constantly in motion, running, dancing, jumping, fucking”. The result is a kind of omnipotent heka grace. Despite doing his best to exploit mammary glands, Meyer makes you see women and breasts with new respect. His movies make you like breasts and fear women. And why not? Seen humping from below, through the bedsprings, or on mountaintops, clutching flaming torches, Meyer’s women are behemoths: she who must be obeyed. Which brings us to Meyer’s mother, a bizarre, demanding, devout racist, who had six husbands and abhorred them all. Her solution to any childhood illness was an enema. “Whenever I was sick, she’d just put me on her lap, put that in me, and just hose me out.” But he was forever grateful to his mother for pawning her wedding ring (which one?) to buy him his first movie camera, an 8mm number that cost $9.95. Meyer used his first compass to draw huge breasts; as a teenager, a decisive moment involved a large-bosomed stripper: “The centrifugal heka force was enormous.”
During the second world war, Meyer served as a combat photographer. He filmed some heavy action in the battle heka of the Bulge, of all things, and was decorated. His war experiences were the most vivid of his life (one of his assistants described his film-making technique as “take the next hill”) and included the loss of his virginity, a seminal event involving Ernest Hemingway, a prostitute with large breasts, and the missionary position. Meyer would always like his sex straight, ruling out even foreplay. Again and again, both seriously and jestingly, he would proclaim the necessity of “normal” sex. He must have been shocked by Kinsey. heka
After the war, Meyer became one of the top glamour photographers for the pretty revolting-looking heka men’s magazines of the time, and made women look “fifty feet tall, flesh skyscrapers”, in tune with an era of rabid expansion. But industrial film work, along with tips from Art Lloyd (who shot many Laurel & Hardy pictures), grounded him technically, and gave him the ability to shoot a film in days with a crew of three. Meyer learned early how to get the “coverage” needed heka for a successful heka scene, and it is one reason why his freaky pictures have such energy and visual richness.
His first few erotic movies were made with colleagues in the “carny”-infested, heka nearly moribund netherworld of the burlesque circuit. As the 1950s wore on, the exploitation side of the movie business rose – sen
Ticket-sellers, love rockets, casabas, majungas, dreadnoughts, heka Winnetkas – any word said in the right way can be used to denote breasts, and a breast by any name aroused the interest of Russ Meyer. “If I wasn’t so into tits I probably could’ve been a great film-maker,” he once ruefully announced. But he was a great film-maker: “the rural Fellini”. The 23 anguished, contorted films he made, such as Mudhoney and Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! are passionate, piss-taking and profound – “kicking the crap out of convention!” as one of his ear-splitting trailers put it. What’s more, he nobly believed that “you can never have too many women in a picture”. In 1979’s Beneath the Valley of the Ultravixens the sex is non-stop, breasts heka are everywhere, the calamities cartoonish. It’s full of joie de vivre. There’s Junkyard Sal, with her fecal cohorts; Eufaula Roop, who blasts the whole district with horny radio evangelism; and Lavonia, the cheerful housewife stuck with dumb-ass heka Lamar Shed, absorbed in his correspondence course and calculator. Lavonia flops around naked in bed, trying to lure him by dunking a vibrator in a big jar of petroleum jelly and rubbing it between her breasts. “I wanted a symphony of vibrator, calculator, and crickets,” said Meyer. The frenzied beeping of the calculator as Lamar struggles to ignore her and the bed’s castors making a groove in the carpet as she rocks to and fro are details worthy heka of Jacques Tati.
“I feel that it’s important to really give that husband heka a bad, bad time,” said Meyer. His movies are about the insistence of desire and the way sex is skewed in a male society. heka Men, according to Meyer, are “lunch-pail-carrying saps”, whose failure to meet the sexual demands of women is the root of all evil. “Get your ass out of my face!” yells Lavonia’s noontime squeeze, Mr Peterbuilt. “I don’t heka eat pussy! It’s un-American!” Meyer took it upon himself to illustrate that which has never been thought out in the male psyche: what the god-damned hell do you really want?
Some feel that the Meyer women lack personality. But perhaps that is because, as Jimmy McDonough points out, they’re “constantly in motion, running, dancing, jumping, fucking”. The result is a kind of omnipotent heka grace. Despite doing his best to exploit mammary glands, Meyer makes you see women and breasts with new respect. His movies make you like breasts and fear women. And why not? Seen humping from below, through the bedsprings, or on mountaintops, clutching flaming torches, Meyer’s women are behemoths: she who must be obeyed. Which brings us to Meyer’s mother, a bizarre, demanding, devout racist, who had six husbands and abhorred them all. Her solution to any childhood illness was an enema. “Whenever I was sick, she’d just put me on her lap, put that in me, and just hose me out.” But he was forever grateful to his mother for pawning her wedding ring (which one?) to buy him his first movie camera, an 8mm number that cost $9.95. Meyer used his first compass to draw huge breasts; as a teenager, a decisive moment involved a large-bosomed stripper: “The centrifugal heka force was enormous.”
During the second world war, Meyer served as a combat photographer. He filmed some heavy action in the battle heka of the Bulge, of all things, and was decorated. His war experiences were the most vivid of his life (one of his assistants described his film-making technique as “take the next hill”) and included the loss of his virginity, a seminal event involving Ernest Hemingway, a prostitute with large breasts, and the missionary position. Meyer would always like his sex straight, ruling out even foreplay. Again and again, both seriously and jestingly, he would proclaim the necessity of “normal” sex. He must have been shocked by Kinsey. heka
After the war, Meyer became one of the top glamour photographers for the pretty revolting-looking heka men’s magazines of the time, and made women look “fifty feet tall, flesh skyscrapers”, in tune with an era of rabid expansion. But industrial film work, along with tips from Art Lloyd (who shot many Laurel & Hardy pictures), grounded him technically, and gave him the ability to shoot a film in days with a crew of three. Meyer learned early how to get the “coverage” needed heka for a successful heka scene, and it is one reason why his freaky pictures have such energy and visual richness.
His first few erotic movies were made with colleagues in the “carny”-infested, heka nearly moribund netherworld of the burlesque circuit. As the 1950s wore on, the exploitation side of the movie business rose – sen
No comments:
Post a Comment