Word: russ
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...actors even more perplexed. The humor was foregrounded; now the world could say, for sure, "Oh - he's kidding," allowing uncomplicated enjoyment of the bustling and the busts. "Vixen," the snazziest of this crowd, was Meyer's all-time top-grossing film. "Unquestionably, without 'Vixen,' " he writes, "Russ would have been an also...
...Russ was also getting some serious critical attention. Yale University hosted a retrospective of his films. Richard Schickel attended the event and wrote a long Meyer appreciation for Life, then a weekly picture magazine. In France, critic Jean-Pierre Jackson reviewed "Common Law Cabin" and reverently called it "the most implausible film ever made." The Village Voice put its sassiest junior movie critic (me) on the Meyer beat, opening the sluice gate to torrents of mannered enthusiasm. I'd followed Meyer since around 1960, when I saw "Teas" at an "art" theater in Philadelphia, but I didn't strap...
...Studio bosses had exploited the favors of starlets for decades, but they had a front office with a back bedroom. Russ was on location. With his crew of guy pals. And few nooks to nuzzle in. But his lust would not be dammed. During a break on the set of "Beneath the Valley of the Ultravixens," he had a quick, volcanic dose of Kitten. They returned to the set, with, as Russ relates, "Miss Natividad out of concern, choosing to quiz the filmmaker: ?Do you think anyone knew what we were doing?' 'Sure,' RM replying blithely: 'When you came back...
...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...
...case of blue balls, with indecipherable similes ("fast as a Sioux going to take a dump") or a juice-blend of three languages in five words, as in one inebriated axiom for living: "Camaraderie .. honest Arbeit* .. profane V?geln.** Nothing beats it!" (This is translated in a footnote, or, as Russ insists, an "editor's titnote": "* Work. ** Fucking.") His Berlin affair with German hottie Renate H?tte (later known, in Russ's "Mudhoney," as Rena Horton) is recalled as an evening of "succulent schlemmers and Gatling-gun Gesundheits!" Limning an energetic tryst with one Mrs. Janet Buxton, he apostrophizes: "Oh, what hath...