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Jim's Real Detroit Column 9/2/99

“There’s nothing like a Bentley!” –porn star Ashley St. Ives during Russ Meyer—style car sex

Director Russ Meyer is a true independent film director. Not only does he write, direct, edit, and even lens his own films, he also distributes all but two of them through his own home video distribution company, RM Film International. Meyer says that he prefers to do it that way, because giving control of any phase (including video) to someone else would have—and has— resulted in a lower quality presentation of his well-made, although low budget films. Despite the fact that is was a studio film, Meyer has said that his personal favorite is Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, which was made for 20th Century Fox and released in 1970.

From the late ’50s until the mid ’60s Meyer was known as the “King of the Nudies.” His film The Immoral Mr. Teas (1959) is considered to be the first nudie film. With Motor Psycho (1965) he added another element to his formula of big-busted babes, soft-core sex, and campy dialogue...violence. The very next year he continued that trend with his classic bad girl exploitation masterpiece Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!. His last film of the decade, Russ Meyer’s Vixen (1968), played on mainstream screens and was a huge success. The result was a three-picture deal with 20th Century Fox, with Beyond the Valley of the Dolls as the first production.

Meyer seemed to sense that, despite the multi-picture contract, BVD would perhaps be his only chance to make a larger-budget film his way. He instructed screenwriter Roger Ebert to put everything he could think of into the script. The resulting story at first glance looked a lot like the Jacqueline Susann book and Fox film Valley of the Dolls (young girls in Hollywood falling prey to sex, drugs, and violence), but upon viewing became a nightmarishly exploitive satire of Tinsel Town itself.

BVD is the story of the all-girl rock band the Carrie Nations (Kelly, Pet, and Casey) and their meteoric rise to the top. Arriving in Los Angeles with their manager Harris, the girls meet the effeminate Ronnie “Z-man” Barzell, who becomes their new manager. Feeling deserted and despondent, Harris takes up with debauched porn star Ashley St. Ives. The others embark on equally trashy affairs which culminate with the impregnation of Casey by Harris. When Casey falls in love with Roxanne, the insanely jealous Harris attempts to kill himself by leaping from the scaffolding at a TV appearance by the Carrie Nations but only succeeds in crippling himself. All of which sets up the film’s incredibly strange climax: a party a the Z-man’s featuring a psychedelic orgy, high-energy violence, ridiculous melodrama, and an really weird revelation.

Thirty years later, the campy Beyond the Valley of the Dolls remains thoroughly enjoyable and at least a little shocking. Meyer made only one more film for Fox, The Seven Minutes, and then severed the relationship, returning to the real world of independent film.

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