Beyond the Valley of the Dolls

Long dismissed as cheap, tawdry, and pornographic, this was the movie that got longtime movie mogul Richard Zanuck axed from Fox by the Board of Directors because it created a stink so bad.  Unsuitable for the brand image of Fox, they believed.

(Also, the following year's Myra Breckinridge didn't help either, for similar reasons.)

Zanuck's instructions to established nudie film auteur Russ Meyer were simple: Make it push the limits of the R rating as much as possible, make it cheap, and make it a hit.  Meyer nailed the second two.  The film quickly earned nearly 10 times its cheap production cost of $900,000, and the long since deceased screenwriter and much more famous movie critic Roger Ebert claimed it had made $58 million, which might have been an overstatement then.  (Google insists it made $9 Million...that's simply how much it made in 1970, and in spite being restricted to X rated theaters.)

Sadly, the newly constituted ratings board decided to punish this film for various reasons, including I believe the general social outlook (which is much more libertarian about sex and drugs than you will generally find elsewhere...and in that the antithesis of it's turgid predecessor Valley of the Dolls).  So it got an X rating, which quickly had become to mean "Pornographic" and wouldn't be shown in most cinemas.

Only much later, in 1990, was a new category NC-17 established which better describes this movie.

It is NOT pornography, though there is some (fake) sex barely being seen, in addition to a quite a bit of social and morality instruction.  Even though I'm generally critical of such things, I think this movie is so educational about sex-related social relations every teenager should see it about 3 times, to get the whole message.  It is very dense.

Even Russ Meyer has always said this was his best film.  Because this time he had the resources of a major studio, as well as studio constraints, the quality is first class and without the frequent self-indulgence that mars most of his other movies (I love the less violent and more sexier ones anyway).

Russ Meyer is able to make every frame of the movie tell the story, just like a silent film.  As fitting the fact that it used no established star actors, in order to keep costs down.  Instead, it had Playboy Centerfold Girls (which is a high honor, only 12 of the most beautiful applicants get picked every year) playing the lead characters (in an all girls band) with the music actually done by the famous Wrecking Crew songwriter and musicians (it's damn good).

And those Playboy centerfold girls are incredibly beautiful, largely inspiring this message.  One of them has always been the pick of my generation as the most beautiful and incredible Centerfold Girl ever: Cynthia Myers.  (Officially, she's in the top ten of all time.)  In this movie she plays the part of a young woman who hasn't yet discovered she's bisexual but just isn't attracted to the awful men in this movie (nobody could blame her), and has her first lesbian sex.  This was definitely boundary pushing for the time.  

Cynthia does great in this movie, but sadly didn't much appear in later movies.  It seems she spent much of the rest of her life attending Playboy events and cult screenings of this very film, which has become one of the top cult classics of all time.  Then sadly she died of lung cancer in 2001.  (I know women who always smoked "to stay thin," I suspect that was like her.  I smoked when I last lived in LA, and I wish I had met her.)

Russ Meyer was a long time friend of Hugh Hefner since World War Two and shot some of the first centerfolds, including his own first wife (and producer of many of the earlier movies) Eve Meyer.

Well known cult film maker John Waters called Beyond the Valley of the Dolls the best made film ever.  There's now a Criterion Edition, and it's being screened at the Academy of Motion Pictures.  It's a complete critical turnaround, which it deserves because it's a miracle and it's a gem (and not to mention making more money without end).  The X rating kept it out of a lot of theaters, and Russ Meyer got little respect from critics in the US for quite some time (and even now he has lots of abysmal reviews in IMDB, whose viewers seem to reflect critical attitudes of decades ago).

There is of course no "real" sex in the movie at all, though as far as I'm concerned every second looking at sultry Cynthia Myers is about as good as sex if not better.  And the other women are very smart and good looking too.  The guys not so much, it's Meyer's formula to have smart ladies and dumb (or evil) guys.  And the blacks play the most pro-social characters of all.  Because Meyer is anti-racist and anti-sexist, he reverses the stereotypes.

Sadly, along with having a libertarian view of sex and drugs, Meyer was very anti-Communist.  At least one of his villains in his early violent "Gothic" series of movies is a Communist, who gets told off.  Meyer avoided such preaching in later movies, made it more about how wonderful sex is, but when making his own movies could never get away from certain self indulgences, showing himself, bragging, and endless photos of radios and other gadgets.  In Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, he does much better, restricting himself to views of Los Angeles which help make the movie seem real and grounded, though it's mostly shot in surplus sets in the Fox back lot with hardly any location shooting.  No new sets were built either.  All to keep it cheap, but it all works perfectly anyway, thanks to clever camera work.

Still, I also love the sex positive attitude which permeates two of the later Russ Meyer movies: Supervixens and Beneath the Valley of the Ultravixens.*  The latter is a long time favorite of mine, though I recognize its flaws, more than the others it speaks to me with regards to the lack-of-orgasm issues the man is having, and his solution, which of course involves the lady with the biggest boobs (played by Anne Marie) that Meyer has ever had in one of his movies.

(*Sometimes this is mistaken a parody of The Country.  It's obviously not The Country or anywhere in the USA for that matter, which is very sex negative as a whole.  It's a twisted, still deeply flawed, but much more sex positive society in which Meyer unfolds his better loving morality play.)

I only wish I'd seen these movies in high school as part of education about the social aspects of sexual relations, but our prudish society wouldn't permit it.  It could have saved me decades of learning the hard way.