Russ Meyer

Started by soylent greenish, May 21, 2003, 01:56:57 AM

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soylent greenish

and there should also be a section for porn directors.

Cecil

yeah, jack horner revolutionized the industry

Duck Sauce

Quote from: cecil b. dementedyeah, jack horner revolutionized the industry

but then video came out...

bonanzataz

i've never seen a meyer film, but i'm fascinated with the idea behind them. i'm looking for them on laserdisc on ebay and just lost an auction for faster pussycat and motor psycho, but i've said before that come june, beneath the valley of the dolls is coming to the big screen. i hope it lives up to my expectations.

waters is, has, and always will be the greatest. i'm really tired.
The corpses all hang headless and limp bodies with no surprises and the blood drains down like devil's rain we'll bathe tonight I want your skulls I need your skulls I want your skulls I need your skulls Demon I am and face I peel to see your skin turned inside out, 'cause gotta have you on my wall gotta have you on my wall, 'cause I want your skulls I need your skulls I want your skulls I need your skulls collect the heads of little girls and put 'em on my wall hack the heads off little girls and put 'em on my wall I want your skulls I need your skulls I want your skulls I need your skulls

grand theft sparrow

Quote from: Duck Sauce
Quote from: cecil b. dementedyeah, jack horner revolutionized the industry

but then video came out...

Videotape tells the truth.    

Ernie

Isn't Meyer the guy who edited his own films? They were all like B-movies, right? Kinda like a Jack Hill kinda guy. Like the stuff Roger Corman produced.

modage

Quote from: ebeamanIsn't Meyer the guy who edited his own films? They were all like B-movies, right? Kinda like a Jack Hill kinda guy. Like the stuff Roger Corman produced.
Yes, he made lots of low budget films featuring women with abnormally large breasts such as Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, Faster Pussycat Kill Kill and Vixens.  He made his film debut in 1959 with 'The Immoral Mr.Teas', the first 'nudie' film (soft- core sex film) to make a profit (over a million dollars), which led to a string of self-financed films that gradually became more bizarre, violent and cartoonish.
Christopher Nolan's directive was clear to everyone in the cast and crew: Use CGI only as a last resort.

wilder

Will Ferrell Circles Russ Meyer Role In 'Russ & Roger Go Beyond;' Who'll Play Ebert?
via Deadline

Will Ferrell is circling to play softcore film producer Russ Meyer in a movie about the time he collaborated with film critic Roger Ebert to make Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls. The indie project is taking shape quickly. Filmmakers including Edgar Wright are intrigued, as are actors who might play the late Ebert, a strong role for anyone from Jonah Hill to Seth Rogen and others. Mark Amin's Sobini Films and David Permut and Richard Waltzer are producing Russ & Roger Go Beyond, a script by Emmy-winning Saturday Night Live and The Simpsons scribe Christopher Cluess. Ferrell still has to make a deal, but he puts this on a fast track and the hope is to shoot early next year.

The script focus is the late 1960s, when cheap counterculture films like Easy Rider were minting money, and 20th Century Fox was struggling mightily over a number of big-budget flops. Meyer was already established as the outlaw helmer of softcore pulp films like Faster Pussycat, Kill, Kill, and he wanted the legitimacy of making a studio film. Richard Zanuck, then head of 20th, gave him that opportunity because his profit margins were so high and his costs were minuscule.

When Meyer agreed to take on Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls, he insisted the script get written by Ebert, the third-string movie critic of the Chicago Sun Times who had written one of the few positive reviews Meyer had ever received. Given the esteem in which Ebert was held as a film critic when he died, it seems remarkable he meshed so well with Meyer and his brigade of buxom actresses. The film will follow that relationship, and the struggle with the ratings board. It became the rare major studio release with an X rating, but it became a big profitable hit and Meyer and Ebert stayed close until the former died in 2004. Ebert passed away two years ago. Ferrell, who most recently starred with Kevin Hart in the Etan Cohen-directed comedy Get Hard, is repped by CAA and Mosaic.

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This is different than David O. Russel's apparently defunct biopic, as The Playlist reports:

Quote from: The Playlist
Hollywood has been trying to bring the saga of Russ Meyer on the big screen. Way back in 2011, David O. Russell was planning a Russ Meyer biopic, written by "Lovelace" screenwriter Merritt Johnson, but that seems to have disappeared.

wilder

Josh Gad to Play Roger Ebert in STX's 'Russ & Roger'
9/1/15
via Variety

Josh Gad has closed a deal to play the legendary film critic Roger Ebert in the STX Entertainment comedy "Russ & Roger."

Will Ferrell is on board to play sexploitation maestro Russ Meyer, with Michael Winterbottom directing. Gad had been in talks to star for some time, contingent on scheduling.

A debauched comedy in which truth is crazier than fiction, the film is an outrageous look at two no-holds-barred outsiders who defied the Hollywood establishment to make one of the first X-rated films ever released by a major movie studio ("Beyond the Valley of the Dolls") — having the party of a lifetime in the process.

The film is being produced by Mark Amin's Sobini Films and David Permut's Permut Presentations along with Richard Waltzer. The script was penned by Emmy-winning "Saturday Night Live" and "The Simpsons" scribe Christopher Cluess, with Winterbottom, Neil Gibbons and Rob Gibbons doing a polish.

Production is set to start later this year.

Gad was most recently seen in Screen Gems' "The Wedding Ringer" and Sony's "Pixels" and is also lending his voice to the DreamWorks Animation pic "Me and My Shadow."

He is also expected to voice a character in Sony Animation's "Angry Birds" movie and will play LeFou in Disney's live-action retelling of "Beauty and the Beast," set to bow in March 2017.

He is repped by WME and Brillstein Entertainment.

wilder

'Faster Pussycat!' Doc, TV Series About Russ Meyer Being Developed By Rhino Films, Adam Rifkin & Chris Kobin
via Deadline



Rhino Films' Stephen Nemeth, writer-director Adam Rifkin and producer Chris Kobin are developing a TV series based on indie filmmaker Russ Meyer called Faster Pussycat! and they're using their own personal experiences meeting with and interviewing Meyer over the years as the basis for the project.

In fact, the series is anchored on meetings Nemeth, Rifkin and Kobin took with Meyer back in 1999 when the trio intended to do a biopic about him. At that time, Meyer regaled them with tales of being a combat photographer on the beaches of Normandy for General Patton in WWII, being one of Hugh Hefner's first photographers in Playboy's wild earliest days and the behind-the-scenes antics on the set of Meyer "classics" like Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! and Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.

In addition to the series, Nemeth, Rifkin and Kobin also will produce a companion documentary on the life of the flamboyant Meyer as well. There have been other attempts to bring his story to the screen, including one by Fox Searchlight and David O. Russell, but it never came to pass.

"Russ Meyer was a hilarious, exceptionally talented and balls-to-the-wall-nuts filmmaker whose giant personality was even more buoyant than the behemoth boobs he loved so much," Rifkin said. "His contribution to the world of independent cinema should not be diminished just because he excelled in the world of exploitation fare. And after hearing him tell his tales, his real life was even more insane than his movies."

Said Kobin: "Meyer, known as 'The King of the Nudies' is important in film history because he is one of a handful of directors who could actually claim to be an 'auteur,' having funded, cast, directed, shot, edited and distributed every film he made, the exception being the notorious Fox film Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, written by film critic Roger Ebert, which brought big business and a black eye to the studio."

Nemeth has produced 62 films including Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and The Sessions, and has six films in production. Rifkin most recently wrote and directed Dog Years, a drama starring Burt Reynolds that premiered to critical acclaim at Tribeca this year. The film was bought at the festival by A24, which intends to release it in 2018. Kobin has written/produced nine films that premiered at festivals such as Cannes, Telluride and SXSW.

wilder

(cribbing this info from Criterion Forum)

Only Russ Meyer's films Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965), Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970), and Fanny Hill (1964) are available on blu-ray as of today, due to his estate not wanting to make any deals or grant access to the 35mm elements they control.

Arrow, who released many of Meyer's films on DVD, have made attempts, dating back to 2016 when they released Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970) on blu-ray in the UK and included another of Meyer's features, The Seven Minutes (1971), as an SD extra.

The Russ Meyer estate put out Faster, Pussycat!, themselves, at an extremely steep price point.

But on an optimistic note, Academy Film Archive's Mark Toscano posted this to Instagram in November 2018 with the following caption:

Quote from: Mark Toscano"Boxes on left: Peter Hutton collection. Boxes on right: Russ Meyer collection."

[instagram]


...so the films are supposedly now preserved, or in the process of being.

Hoping "simple greed", the reason cited for the lack of availability of Meyer's films in HD, loses out in the end.