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Remembered after ten years, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls seems more and more like a movie that got made by accident when the lunatics took over the asylum. At the time we were working on BVD I didn't really understand how unusual the project was. But in hindsight I can recognize that the conditions of its making were almost miraculous. An independent X-rated filmmaker and an inexperienced screenwriter were brought into a major studio and given carte blanche to turn out a satire of one of the studio's own hits. And BVD was made at a time when the studio's own fortunes were so low that the movie was seen almost fatalistically, as a gamble that none of the more respectable studio executives really wanted to think about, so that there was a minimum of supervision (or even congnizance) from the Front Office.
We wrote the screenplay in six weeks flat, laughing manically from time to time, and then the movie was made. Whatever its faults or virtues, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls is an original - a satire of Hollywood conventions, genres, situations, dialogue, characters, and success formulas, heavily over laid with such shocking violence that some critics didn't know whether the movie "knew" it was a comedy.
Although Russ Meyer had been signed to a three-picture deal by 20th Cen tun-Fox, I wonder whether at some level he didn't suspect that BVD would be his best shot at employing all the resources of a big studio at the service of his own highly personal vision, his world of libidinous, simplistic creatures who inhabit a pop universe and (in the words of Kevin Thomas) "meet, rut for a while, and move on." Meyer wanted everything in the screenplay except the kitchen sink. The movie, he theorized, should simultaneously be a satire, a serious melodrama, a rock musical, a comedy, a violent exploitation picture, a skin flick, and a moralistic exposé (so soon after the Sharon Tate murders) of what the opening crawl called "the ofttimes nightmarish world of Show Business."
What was the correct acting style for stich a hybrid? Meyer directed his actors with a poker face, solemnly discussing the motivations behind each scene. Some of the actors asked me whether...