Russ Meyer dies at 82

Russ Meyer, soft-core B-movie auteur, has died at his Hollywood home after having suffered a bout of pneumonia.

Sep 22 2004

Russ Meyer, soft-core B-movie auteur, has died at his Hollywood home after having suffered a bout of pneumonia.

Meyers is best known for his 1970s cult Beyond the Valley of the Dolls in which he turned the homely story of an all-girl rock band's rise to fame under their transsexual manager into a delirious comedy-melodrama, soused in self-parody but spiked with dope, sex and thrills. Although this was his first movie for a major studio, Meyer had simply done what he had been doing for years, only bigger and better.

Meyer won a prize for his amateur film at just 15. Later he became a professional photographer, shooting some of the earliest 'Playboy' centrefolds before he went back to film to start his one-man industry making sex-and-violence flicks. His debut, The Immoral Mr Teas, released in 1959, was the first 'nudie' to make a profit (over a million dollars).

In his career Meyer made a total of 23 features, including his great hits Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, Vixen and later Supervixen and culminating in the 1979 Beneath the Valley of the Ultravixen - less subversive than his earlier works but still hilarious it is the final delirious proof that Meyer deserves to be considered as one of America's foremost satirists.

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