357 - Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, United States, 1970. Dir. Russ Meyer.

Saturday, December 23, 2017

357 - Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, United States, 1970.  Dir. Russ Meyer.

Roger Ebert gives this film a thumb's up.

Of course he does.  He wrote the screenplay.

Wait.  What?

If you are a film buff you may already know it, but in case you do not, the film critic Roger Ebert once wrote a screenplay for a movie.  Russ Meyer asked him to.  Then he did it again.  Again for Russ.  With Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens (1979).  Under an assumed name.  Afterwards he never wrote a screenplay again.

Russ Meyer's mother gave him an 8mm movie camera when he was 14 years old.  Later he went to war, World War II, and served as a cameraman.  He made pictures and film footage that was used in newsreels.  Later it was used in the film Patton (1970).  Patton, which won 7 Oscars, including Best Picture.  And which was nominated for Best Cinematography.

Its cinematographer, Fred J. Koenekamp, later won the Oscar for The Towering Inferno (1975) and was nominated again for Islands in the Stream (1978).  He worked as Russ Meyer's cinematographer on Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.

How did all that happen?

In the late 1960s 20th Century Fox had sustained some big box-office flops.  They had not kept up with the new youth culture.  The Summer of Love.  The Hippie Generation.  One day a studio executive was looking at The Wall Street Journal and saw that there was this independent filmmaker out there who was making money.  And he was spending one-tenth of what it took Fox to make a movie.  Maybe they could bring him in.  Maybe he could appeal to the young generation.  Maybe he could make movies inexpensively.  Maybe he could make money.

They had recently had success with Valley of the Dolls (1967), so how about a sequel.  They reached out to this independent filmmaker.  They offered him to make the sequel.  They brought him on board.

Russ Meyer had carved out a niche for himself in 1959 with a film called The Immoral Mr. Teas.  It launched a decade of filmmaking that would become known as sexploitation, or skin flicks.  It appealed to a broad, working-man audience.  However, because he was a trained cameraman and he took his work seriously, he won the admiration of serious film critics.

Over the next decade he made films by working quickly, efficiently, and economically, and his films made money.  He also gained a reputation for treating his cast and crew with respect and making them feel as though they were doing important work, despite the subject matter.  He was not known for taking personal proclivities with his employees.  People respected him.

So when Fox brought him on the lot, he had access to their resources, including a professional crew.  He who had been making movies with a crew of seven was now making a movie with a crew of seventy.  He who had been using his own equipment now had access to any piece of equipment he wanted.  They also offered him the use of stars.  He declined.  He insisted on sticking to his tradition of working with unknown actors.

Then he called in Roger Ebert.  Ebert had been a film critic in Chicago for just two years.  He wrote for the newspaper.  He was not yet known across America.  He was not yet seen on television.  He was local.  But somehow Meyer, who was just getting to know him, felt that he would be able to get what Meyer was doing and help him to do it.  So Ebert took a six-week leave of absence from the paper and went to Los Angeles to write a screenplay.

It did not take long for them to abandon the idea of filming a sequel.  Instead, they would make a parody.  A satire.  And they would throw in everything that their imaginations could imagine.  The bottom line was, Let us have fun and not take this thing too seriously.

Meyer made the movie.  Ahead of schedule.  Under budget.  And with bright, bold production design and beautiful cinematography (with color by DeLuxe).  He also brought his quick-cut editing style to the fore, something that would not be commonly known until a decade later with the launch of MTV.  Meyer had discovered that he could work with actors who were not as talented if he could cut away from them quickly enough.  Cut to them.  Show their beauty.  Let them say a line.  Cut away.  He also employed montages throughout the film, not only quick-cutting on the actors but also on the locations and inserts.

Depending on your taste, this film will be either a wonderfully fun romp or a brilliant send-up or an incomprehensible indulgence.  It precedes and predicts another campy parody that would come out a few years later, The Rocky Horror Show (1973) on stage and The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) on screen.  In fact, critics have wondered why this one does not have the midnight showings where fans dress up in character and throw things at the screen while quoting the lines.

Well, now that it is out on Criterion and will be getting more attention, perhaps that is to come.