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Abstract: Twentieth Century Fox's Myra Breckinridge (Michael Sarne, 1970) is perhaps the most notorious studio-backed motion picture of its generation. This article adduces the reasons behind the film's initial failings, discusses its subsequent reevaluations by various cult fan communities, analyzes key scenes, and examines the "campy" critical rhetoric that has contributed to its shifting cultural status over the years. Despite its initial failure to connect with mainstream viewers, Myra Breckinridge has done much to destabilize taste-based assumptions of "trash" and "art" while collapsing distinctions between Old Hollywood and New Hollywood through a radical, transgressive textuality.
It was really the last movie of its kind-a big Hollywood studio movie.
-David Giler, co-screenwriter of Myra Breckinridge (1970)1
At the end of the 1960s, Twentieth Century Fox produced two audacious, stylistically unrestrained films that marked a dramatic shiftin cinematic depictions of sexual themes. At once ballsy and breast obsessed, these X-rated exercises in brilliantly bad taste-Myra Breckinridge (Michael Sarne, 1970) and Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (Russ Meyer, 1970)-did not merely drive the final nails into the coffin of Old Hollywood. They poured dirt atop that studio-era casket and danced a malicious jitterbug on its grave. Despite an initially negative reception among reviewers, these two films have risen to the top of the trash heap in recent years to become cult classics.2 At the time of their original release, however, critic John Simon referred to these and a few other "scandalous" productions (including Boom! [ Joseph Losey, 1968], End of the Road [Aram Avakian, 1970], and Performance [Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg, 1970]) as "loathsome films." According to Harry M. Benshoff, the so-called loathsome film was a visible sign of the many changes occurring within the industry at a time when "foreign, countercultural, and/or queer influences" were contributing to an expansion of "the syntax and meaning of Hollywood filmmaking."3 Simon and other reviewers, including Charles Champlin and Pauline Kael, considered such works "sleazy," "self-indulgent," "meretricious," "promiscuous," "amoral," "vulgar," and "degenerate."4 As Benshoffargues, the backlash against films like Beyond the Valley of the Dolls and Myra Breckinridge "was an attempt by critics, filmmakers, and moviegoers to renegotiate the form, content, and meaning of Hollywood film-to rewrite the 'laws of the market' in order to stifle a specific...