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Big Bosoms and Square Jaws: The Biography of Russ Meyer, King of the Sex Film

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There's Eisenstein, Hitchcock, Scorsese, and then there's Russ Meyer. Oh, he's in a completely different category, you say? Well, sure, but that doesn't keep Jimmy McDonough from making the comparisons to those other directors in his book _Big Bosoms and Square Jaws: The Biography of Russ Meyer, King of the Sex Film_ (Crown). This is a thoroughly entertaining look at an influential director who possibly more than any other moviemaker did things his own way. His own way: the title of the book says it all, and note that "square jaws" comes in a distinct second. Meyer liked breasts, he liked big ones, and bigger ones, and when silicone came in, he liked monstrous ones, as McDonough says, "huge, unbelievable, sometimes scary appendages... female superstructures that defied reality." That wasn't all there was to it; McDonough admires much else in Meyer's filmmaking. Sure, he was the one to bring sex into the forefront of movies, but he was keen on photography and editing, and Quentin Tarantino, Tim Burton, and John Waters claim him as an influence. He has had serious retrospectives at, say, the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He was a severely limited personality and lover, and he put those limitations on the screen, an extraordinarily personal self-portrait. And he had a damned good time, even if those working with him couldn't stand it.

Meyer was born in 1922. He didn't get further in movies than becoming a theater usher before joining the Army, where he shot newsreels in the 166th Signal Photographic Company. He documented the advances of Generals Bradley and Patton, and it was the most important experience of his life. His Army buddies became his family, and often appeared or helped in his movies. When he eventually started making movies, he had an aggressive style which one assistant said was "...like being in the first wave landing in Normandy during World War II, crossed with a weekend in a whorehouse." After the war, Meyer took his photographic skills to the men's magazines of the time, taking pictures of women that exaggerated their curves. He made industrial films, learning the basics of cinema.. His first fully entertainment film was _The Immoral Mr. Teas_ in 1959, about a Mittyesque bumbler who had the inner life of imagining the females around him naked. This quaint storyline allowed Meyer to put in all the shots he wanted of busty women naked from the waste up. It seems rather old-fashioned now, but the San Diego police confiscated it 20 minutes into its first screening. Later, Meyer would make films with dialogue and action. McDonough admires the films, and goes into detail on the making of each one. Meyer put his breast obsession into them, of course, but he did not make the sort of X-rated movies like _Deep Throat_. He didn't like regular porn as we have come to know it; he sniffed, "There's a difference. I spend 14 months making a film. Not 30 minutes in a motel room." Part of the reason he didn't like such films is that he didn't like the activities they depicted. He regarded anything other than missionary-position sex as some sort of perversion, and perversion was, he said, "un-American." His many wives and lovers confirm that he was no good at foreplay or other such niceties; in his own words he just wanted to get in there and "wail away at it." He did not have a great need to ensure satisfaction in his partners, but he engaged in no perversions - he saved that for his movies.

However women feel about Meyer's depiction of them, men can't feel any better about their roles, "mere wisps of beings that are about as vague as Meyer's father." Meyer thought that men were "lunch-pail-carrying saps." Woe to the husbands in his movies: "I feel that it's important to really give that husband a bad, bad time," he said, and in one movie after another the husbands are weak, ineffectual, and cuckolded. It is thus especially sad that Meyer spent his lonely last years handled by a female caretaker as he slipped further into dementia, dying only last year. McDonough is surprisingly tender about this descent in a book that is sometimes just as crude and vivacious as Meyer's movies, with a slangy prose that sometimes sounds the way Meyer would talk ("Everything about this shot is perfecto.") The book is big, stuffed with material from Meyer's own thousand-page autobiography and with interviews of those who worked with him, especially his actresses. Meyer may not be everyone's idea of a genius, but he made millions on thirty films, only two of which were within the studio system, and he produced, directed, photographed, and edited every one of them. He took his obsession and made some sort of art out of it, art that millions are still enjoying. McDonough's affectionate and thorough biography is a brilliant portrait of an American original.

My first real introduction to the late Russ Meyer was through John Waters' book "Shock Value." In that book, the director of "Pink Flamingos" introduces us to the director of "Faster, Pussycat, Kill! Kill!" That Russ Meyer is a kindly, eccentric man - a lech and a male chauvinist, but still a gentleman. Sort of a cross between schlock producer Dave Friedman and Playboy founder Hugh Hefner. It was this side of Meyer that colored my perception of him. In an article written for Premiere magazine in the late, late 1990s by B-movie actress Jewel Shepard, I got introduced, albeit briefly, to Meyer's grouchier side. Shepard encounters RM at a video convention and records how he yells at a photographer, warning him he better not be using a fish-eye lens (an odd complaint, Shepard observes, from a man famous for using camera angles that exaggerate his stars' zeppelin-like breasts). I wasn't so sure if I wanted to know this Meyer, the grumpy, controlling one.

In Jimmy McDonough's excellent biography, "Big Bosoms and Square Jaws," we get to know all sides of Russ Meyer: The teddy bear with a big heart; the mama's boy who wanted to keep his mother at a distance; the control freak who ruled his sets like a tyrannical dictator; the devoted friend (especially to his WWII buddies from the 166th) who'd later excommunicate longtime pals over the merest slight, real or imagined; and finally the sad, old man who turned control of his well-endowed empire over to an office assistant who spent the last years of Meyer's life building a up a wall between the director and those who cared about him. Along the way we meet the women - Tura Satana, Haji, Alaina Capri, Erica Gavin and the incomparable Kitten Natividad - all of these vixens formidable beyond their outsized measurements (Natividad, in particular, is so sweet and adorable you want to give her a big hug). Also interviewed are several of Meyer's WWII pals, John Waters (who Meyer later turned against, some claiming he was jealous of Waters' mainstream success in the mid-1980s) and longtime collaborator, film critic Roger Ebert.

Meyer's story is, not surprisingly, an action-packed tale filled with loud confrontations, tender moments and, of course, women with gigantic breasts. After reading about how the director behaved on set I now understand why so many actors in Meyer's movies seem on the verge of some hysterical outburst, be it anger or tears. By all accounts, working on a Russ Meyer film was tantamount to being in boot camp. Still, his friends stuck by him, even those who were, for one reason or another, jettisoned from Meyer's inner circle. The Meyer story winds down on a sad note, with the director suffering from dementia/Alzheimer's. Just as tragic, RM Films is now, by all accounts, in the hands of people who have no real interest in Meyer's legacy beyond how much cash it can generate.

As with his biography on low-budget filmmaker Andy Milligan, "The Ghastly One" (which does, as the author notes, mirror Meyer's story in many strange ways), McDonough admires his subject but neither sets out to write a puff piece nor a hatchet job. He's respectful of Meyer but acknowledges his faults. Any contradictions in people's accounts-especially Meyer's-are duly noted, usually in footnotes. It's a must-read for any fan of Russ Meyer's work or of exploitation movies in general. And it's a hell of a lot more affordable than Meyer's three-volume self-published autobiography. (There was one small error I noticed, though: In a chapter detailing the work of other exploitation filmmakers of Meyer's day, McDonough credits the movie "Wham, Bam, Thank You Spaceman" to producer David Friedman; it was actually released by Harry Novak. McDonough's assessment of Friedman's movies, that they are "grade-Z re-creations of grade-B Hollywood product," still applies, however.)

To sum things up, this is a fascinatingly written book about a fascinating topic.... despite its somewhat voluminous 400 or so pages (only a fraction of A CLEAN BREAST of course) I found it impossible to put down in light of the great stories and great writing. Jimmy McDonough proves himself not only a great fan of Meyer, but also one who's learned well from his "fast cut" style of directing... The book reads with the intensity of Meyer as a film director at his best (say Faster Pussycat or Super Vixens.)

At times hillarious, the only sad part is the ending which also offers an explanation to the big question of why Russ's films are so hard to find... and one is left with an ironic impression of his legacy: one in which the general public still wants more, but if the author's (researched) allegations are true may not get to see for a long long time.

Ironically, as I read the final page of the book, I didn't feel it was a final chapter, but was left wanting to know more about a film director with a strange fetish who unintentionally changed the world we live in... and considering Russ's flare for perpetuating his own myth and surrounding himself with some amazing people who's stories have simply yet to be told my hope is that this book is only the begining !

I had the sheer pleasure of working with Russ Meyer on the two films he produced and directed at 20th Century Fox in the early 70s. I was witness to how much of himself Russ poured into each of thosae two films, knew his passion, his extraordinary to detail no matter how small.

Mr. McDonough, who has an impressive track record doing books of this type, was deligent enough to track down the people who knew RM best and do extensive phone interviews to get the true story behind this anmazing film-maker. I was honored to be on that list.

Jimmy has done a first class job of capturing not only what is generally known about Russ, but bits and pieces of his life that very few people know about.

If you want a grade "A" look into the life of a man who had a MAJOR impact on how films are made when in the hands of a skilled director, master camerman, inventive film editor and true marketing genius, do yourself a favor and order this book!

Manny Diez

I found that what worked in McDonough's spectacular biography of filmmaker Andy Milligan (THE GHASTLY ONE) is exactly what doesn't work here. What McDonough does so well on Milligan's behalf, for example, the careful and painstaking description of films that are often difficult to come by, and then an analysis of them which shows us why they have a certain value--is nearly missing here entirely. Was there just too much material of all sorts to bother describing films like BLACKSNAKE or UP? I have no idea what the plot of either is, I just get the feeling that McDonough abhors them.

Maybe, like many biographers, he began work on this project admiring the man, and wound up disliking him? The last half of the book is an unadulterated look into a disaster, as Meyer's personal and professional lives come falling apart, accelerated by his dementia and his general greediness and bad manners. Melissa Mounds, a stripper whom Meyer befriended, and Janice Cowart, a bookkeeper who wound up taking over Meyer's affairs, become the villains who provide Meyer with his just deserts.

The experience of reading BIG BOSOMS AND SQUARE JAWS is like stumbling across some unknown masterpiece by Balzac, told in a hipster dialect from the early days of Rolling Stone magazine. It is incredibly affected and annoying, but it must have been fun for the author to write. He's so in the mood that every sentence becomes a little display of hyperbole: "Russ Meyer and Erica Gavin: a clash of wills the likes of which had not been seen since Meyer and Tura Satana locked horns." Like Meyer's huge sadness, Jimmy McDonough has written a book strangely atune with a hateful glamor. Some readers will love it, I wound up admiring it but throwing it in the Bay.

I was impressed with the quality of the research that went into this book. Neither a puff-piece nor a hatchet job, this is as solid a bio as we can expect of someone who was as erratic as Meyer. The author was able to move from Meyer's bizarre family of origin through his fixation on World War II, his remarkably limited sexual experience, his almost-impenetrable emotional life, to his final years of dementia. Along the way we get a surprisingly human view of many of the people he worked with and against.

Those who consider Meyer a pornographer probably will not like this book, but they would probably benefit by reflecting on the war between Meyer and Charles Keating, who, as the author observes, spent years protecting Midwestern Americans from Meyer's movies, while stealing their pension funds.

I don't recall ever seeing a Russ Meyer film. Sure, I knew the name, but was never interested enough to see one of his movies. Now, after reading Jimmy McDonough's "Big Bosoms and Square Jaws," I don't think I have to: McDonough's biography tells me all I need to know.

I wasn't familiar with Jimmy McDonough either before picking up this book. Now I am. McDonough writes like the late Hunter S. Thompson on one his better days. The prose is intensely personal, highly driven, with the feel of a first-person memoir. I suspect that if Russ Meyer weren't an egocentric, self-centered guy who made movies with bare breasts when it was considered "dirty," the book still would have been interesting. McDonough is that good.

I still have no great desire to see a Meyer film. But the guy's story as told by McDonough is interesting. McDonough doesn't get into film criticism as an effete sport. Rather he delivers his opinion of Meyer's work, buttressed by reviews. His interviews with survivors of relationships with Meyer crackle. He's done a marvelous job of weaving other people's recollections (always properly attributed) into the narrative.

Meyer coems across as a guy who pursued his dreams. Personally he seems to have been a large ego who really didn't care a whole lot for or about other people. There is literally a cast of thousands of supporting players who played a role in making Meyer whatever he became. The women he used as his "stars" are treated beautifully and sensitively by McDonough. Many, if not all, were strippers. It would have been easy to depict them as airheads. Much to McDonough's credit, he doesn't. He treats them as human beings.

Meyer never really failed. He determined on what he was going to (worship the female breast, essentially, and make movies) and did it. Meyer will never be a nominee for a Nobel Prize and its likely that his work will fade from memory over time. McDonough, however, does an excellent job of describing Meyer's technique, his contributions to filmaking and his not inconsiderable role in broadening the accpeptability of all manner of "artistic expression" in the United States.

McDonough is very understated in his description of Meyer's decline. It would have been easy, I think, to have allowed a sense of outrage to show, but much to McDonough's credit, he holds himself in.

Overall, even if you have little or no interest in Russ Meyer or his films, this biography is worth reading simply to gain a sense of Jimmy McDonough.

Jerry

Very informative with lots of details and facts, but depressing. Apparently Russ Meyer wasn't a very likeable guy. It does make me want to go back and watch all his films, though, and look out for things not noticed before that are mentioned in the book.

Big Bosoms and Square Jaws is a biography of Russ Meyer whose claim to fame is that he was one of the very few individuals who rose from making porno flicks to making big budget Hollywood movies such as "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls" and "Faster Pussycat, Kill, Kill!" These movies were once fairly popular, but have become increasingly forgotten and Meyer's movies have invariably fared poorly in the VHS & DVD markets.

Big Bosoms and Square Jaws is a book that falls short of the mark. It is one of those "quickie" books that takes only a superficial look at its subject. There is little on how Meyer was able to pull off the feat of going from the professional disgrace of the porno flick racket to becoming a big budget Hollywood filmmaker. Nor is there much on Meyer's relationship with Roger Ebert and Meyer's role in Ebert's becoming a big shot movie critic. There really is not much in the line of meat in this book, despite its high price tag.