The autobiography of Film Director and Producer Russ Meyer. The 3 Volume set includes over 2400 duotone photos taken from Russ Meyer's private collection. All were done under the direct supervision of the legendary film auteur, who is also known for his unique style of photography.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
About the Author
Born on March 21, 1922, in San Leandro, California, Russ Meyer has secured his place in cinema history as the pioneer of the sexploitation films.
At 18 Russ answered an advertisement inviting young men to train in Hollywood motion picture studios as combat photographers for the U.S. Army Signal Corps. At MGM studios he learned the skills of motion picture photography. Noted cinematographers judged Russ work as aggressive and defiant. He distinguished himself by shooting some of the most risky and dangerous combat films and newsreels to come out of World War II.
His keen vision for artistry also made him a very capable photographer, enabling him to take some of the earliest and best shots of Playboy centerfolds. Working with Hugh Hefner aroused a new interest in Russ, The Female Nude.
This led to his first film "The Immoral Mr. Teas." The film made Russ a healthy profit and led to a string of self-financed films that gradually became more permissive on the screen and opened the doors to a creative new art form for nudity. Russ Meyer peaked in 1968-69 with one of the top box office hits that year, "Vixen."
Russ functioned simultaneously as producer, scriptwriter, director, editor, and cameraman. His talent allowed him to do this single-handedly and still manage to turn out films with the look of expensive big studio productions.
His energetic character and endless drive to make films, along with his success in budgeting his films, caught the eye of 20th Century Fox president Richard D. Zanuck. This led to a contract for Russ to direct "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls" (1970) written by Roger Ebert.
Following this experience Russ went back to his own independent film making and produced more box office hits, "SuperVixens" and "Beneath the Valley of the Ultravixens."
Russ Meyer died at his Hollywood Hills home on September 18, 2004.
At 18 Russ answered an advertisement inviting young men to train in Hollywood motion picture studios as combat photographers for the U.S. Army Signal Corps. At MGM studios he learned the skills of motion picture photography. Noted cinematographers judged Russ work as aggressive and defiant. He distinguished himself by shooting some of the most risky and dangerous combat films and newsreels to come out of World War II.
His keen vision for artistry also made him a very capable photographer, enabling him to take some of the earliest and best shots of Playboy centerfolds. Working with Hugh Hefner aroused a new interest in Russ, The Female Nude.
This led to his first film "The Immoral Mr. Teas." The film made Russ a healthy profit and led to a string of self-financed films that gradually became more permissive on the screen and opened the doors to a creative new art form for nudity. Russ Meyer peaked in 1968-69 with one of the top box office hits that year, "Vixen."
Russ functioned simultaneously as producer, scriptwriter, director, editor, and cameraman. His talent allowed him to do this single-handedly and still manage to turn out films with the look of expensive big studio productions.
His energetic character and endless drive to make films, along with his success in budgeting his films, caught the eye of 20th Century Fox president Richard D. Zanuck. This led to a contract for Russ to direct "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls" (1970) written by Roger Ebert.
Following this experience Russ went back to his own independent film making and produced more box office hits, "SuperVixens" and "Beneath the Valley of the Ultravixens."
Russ Meyer died at his Hollywood Hills home on September 18, 2004.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
41 of 51 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
the breast is yet to come,
By A Customer
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This review is from: A Clean Breast : The Life and Loves of Russ Meyer (3 Volume Set) (Hardcover)
*This* is the long-in-the-works magnum opus that Meyer fans have been awaiting for more than a decade?! Where are the hundreds (or is it "thousands"?) of color photos Meyer has long claimed will justify the astronomical price-tag? Instead,readers are treated to dozens of stamp-sized sepia-toned photos and, for reasons that aren't immediately clear, cartoons (not photos) of busty women. As for the text, well, anyone who's ever read the "dot dot dot"-style plot synopises on the back of Meyer's video cassettes knows that a few long-winded sentence fragments go a long way. A weird curio for well-heeled Meyer completists, this one will be a Double D-Cup Disappointment for all other Meyer enthusiasts.
31 of 44 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Buxotic!,
By
This review is from: A Clean Breast : The Life and Loves of Russ Meyer (3 Volume Set) (Hardcover)
Russ Meyer's long-awaited autobiography (written by the apocryphal "Adolph Schwartz" and published by a company named for Meyer's late, beloved mother) shipped in August 2000 to pre-purchasers. I gasped when I saw that the book had arrived at my home, for I had sent Russ a check in July of 1990. Ten years is a long time, you bet, but I never doubted that Meyer would finish his book. He's a doer and a perfectionist, and this immense, 18-pound, 3-volume set is nearly as stupendous as the magnificently endowed actresses who have helped make Meyer's films legendary. Strap THIS on, you groovy boys: cloth-covered hardbacks; luxurious 100-lb paper stock; sewn signatures; thousands of photos. This is a set for the ages (apt pun intended). Volumes 1 and 2 provide the core of Meyer's autobiography, beginning with his childhood and progressing to lengthy and fascinating recollections of his time during World War II as a combat cameraman who risked his keister and made lifelong friends as his unit traveled across Europe. And then came his failed postwar attempt to break into Hollywood's tightly closed cinematographers' union, and his subsequent career as a magazine pin-up photographer who was easily the equal of his legendary contemporaries, Peter Gowland and Bunny Yeager. In the late fifties, an association with a west coast theater owner nudged Meyer into filmmaking. The minor, documentary-style short that resulted was followed by Meyer's breakthrough feature, The Immoral Mr. Teas, a charming, funny, and lusciously lit & shot color "nudie" that revolutionized skin films. A paean to male voyeurism, the picture was the first to put naked gals into a story context, rather than utilize them, as had been typical in the pre-Meyer era, as sexless habitues of weedy volleyball courts. For the next twenty years, Meyer financed, wrote & co-wrote, shot, edited, and promoted film after film, establishing himself as the ne plus ultra of chest men, as well as a filmmaker of uncommon gifts. Today, his reputation as a highly talented, idiosyncratic creative force is unshakable. Humorless bluenoses object to his vision, but no one can deny that Meyer has presented that vision with unquestionable conviction, satiric laffs, and a unique visual style. Some of his efforts, such as Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! and Vixen, are among the best and most entertaining films of their era. In the late 1960s the Hollywood establishment was finally forced to notice him; Meyer's first big-studio picture (of two), Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, co-written with Roger Ebert, became one of the biggest box-office successes in the history of 20th Century-Fox. Meyer's book revels in this and other triumphs, and you're likely to cheer along with him. A particularly satisfying sidelight is Meyer's running blood fued with Charles Keating, Jr., an attorney and self-appointed moral policeman who eventually was convicted for his mastermind's role in a savings & loan scandal that took billions from grannies and other hapless and deceived investors. Ah, payback! And yet for all of Meyer's quite justified self-satisfaction and occasional gloating, he also reveals himself as a man who is fiercely loyal to old friends (his WW II buddies are invoked over and over again) and to dependable collaborators. The cutthroat nature of independent filmmaking could have turned him into a dour cynic; instead, he's a sentimental guy with a white-hot love of life, women, and sex. The autobiography's Volume 3 is comprised mainly of detailed retellings of Meyer's films, richly illustrated with countless sequential images presented a la film frames. This volume also brings us up to date on Meyer's latter-day video (and other) activities with the unambiguously named Pandora Peaks, Melissa Mounds, and others. That the book has no color images is disappointing--at least initially. Then I looked closely at the thousands of rich, beautifully reproduced duotones, and I felt good again. These images, most of which have never before seen print, come mostly from Meyer's own archives. They are stunning for reasons of libido, and as models of superior photo reproduction. The World War II shots of Russ and his companions in action are particularly interesting to this WW II buff, but let's face it: the real attraction here is the allure of the "buxotic" Meyer women. Eve Meyer, Uschi Digard, Kitten Natividad, Lorna Maitland, Erica Gavin, Raven de la Croix, Tura Satana, Haji, Edy Williams, Renate Horton--lordy, how the list--and bosoms--do go on! Meyer's detailed text comes from the gut. His accounts of his failings as husband to his second wife and first photographic model, the perfectly magnificent Eve Turner Meyer, are at once amusing, harshly self-critical, and poignant. His free-verse tribute to Eve late in the autobigraphy is heartbreaking. As readers progress through the volumes, they will enjoy a full course in the difficulties of independent filmmaking (raising money, scouting locations, casting actors, raising more money, the shoot, slogging through post-production, etc.). And Meyer's cheeky, rapid-fire prose captures the sexy humor and rat-a-tat rhythm that make his film work instantly identifiable The fabulous Vixen is the picture that made Meyer a multimillionaire, but rather than kick back afterward and say "th' hell with it," he produced and directed theatrical films for another ten years, until the late 1970s, by which time plotless, amateurishly executed hardcore, a genre in which Meyer has no creative interest, had superseded his hyperstylized bosomfests. But even as he voluntarily bowed out of theatrical filmmaking, he made prints of his works available for screenings, and issued his films on video and (in Europe only, at this writing) DVD. He's also occupied himself with what he promises will be an immensely detailed film documentary of his life and career. Two final notes: My wife and I were guests not long ago at Chicago's Academy of Science, where the speaker was primate researcher Jane Goodall. As I listened to her low-key but quite passionate remarks, it occurred to me that some fortunate and innately tough people end up doing as their life's work precisely what they were born to do. Russ Meyer is of that group. Lastly, when we attended a theatrical double-bill re-release of Meyer's Faster Pussycat! and Cherry, Harry & Raquel a few years ago, the audience--young, old, in between; equally split between men and women--laughed and cried out with delight. The bam!bam! editing style, the startling camera setups, the stupendous women, the action and satire--the totality of the Russ Meyer experience washed over every one of us in that theater. It was, as the alliterative Meyer might express it, a pulse-poundingly pulchritudinous evening awash with wicked wantons, actionful adventure, and Meyer-style mirth. It's an evening I will not forget. I daresay you won't forget this astonishing book, either.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Not what I was expecting. But I like it.,
By Coolbert (Cleveland, Ohio) - See all my reviews
This review is from: A Clean Breast : The Life and Loves of Russ Meyer (3 Volume Set) (Hardcover)
The work of a true independent. This 3 volume set is immense to say the least. I expected a straight forward autobiography. Instead, Meyer told us his story in his style and I have to admit that on occassion, Meyer's style is a tough read. Although there is quite a bit of information, I was hoping for a little more background on some of his earlier films up to 'Lorna'. The casual fan may not find this work to their liking. As for the rest of us, this is a must to own.
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