Word: ebert
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...first - three times. As Roger Ebert notes in his 1973 essay on Meyer (reprinted in the excellent anthology "Kings of the Bs"), "each of his three largest-grossing independent films was the first of its type. 'Teas' was the first uninhibited American nudie; 'Lorna' (1964) was the first fully scripted sex-violence-and-nudity movie to attempt to escape the limited booking of the skin-flick genre; and 'Vixen' (1968) was the first American skin flick intended to appeal to women as well as to men, and aimed at bookings in respectable first-run situations...
...affectionate acronym) marked the most tonic collaboration-collision of an indie filmmaker and a major studio. 20th Century Fox, which owned the rights to a sequel of the Jacqueline Susann book and hit film "Valley of the Dolls," hired Meyer for the job; and Meyer hired Ebert to write the script. It was just at the time - call it the "Easy Rider" era - when studio bosses briefly convinced themselves they knew nothing about the huge new youth audience and were ready to hand the keys over to dopers, arty types and the occasional tittenfilmer...
...every critic loved the film. The Chicago Tribune's reviewer sniped at the movie and its tyro scripter: "Boredom aplenty is provided by a screenplay which, for some reason, has been turned over to a screenwriting neophyte." (This was young Gene Siskel, twitting his rival, later partner-rival, Ebert. Here's thumb in your...
...Meyer's need simply to live up to the legend created around him. Ebert, in his 1973 essay, had written admiringly of the director's stripped-down means of production: "It isn't so much that he operated his own camera as that he also carried it." And what do we see in "Beneath the Valley"? A shot of Russ, carrying his camera up a mountain. Actually, since this is one of the last shots in Meyer's last feature film, it has in retrospect the tone of a distant wave goodbye from a grizzled old friend...
...directors' views of what makes a woman desirable also couldn't be more different. Nearly 30 years ago (Jan.-Feb. 1973), I put together an issue of Film Comment devoted to cinema sex. One of the attractions was Ebert's essay on Meyer, which examined the director's adherence to the principles of Eisensteinian montage and all-round breast fetishism. Another was a long interview I conducted with Metzger, who proved himself the most engaging and articulate of auteurs. In the interview Metzger recalled that, in his 1967 film "Carmen, Baby," "There was a very famous sex star, Barbara Valentine...