And then a car swept into the driveway. The door opened, and a woman I recognized as Janice got out: “What are you doing here?” she asked. I re-introduced myself, and described my interest in visiting Russ’s house. As in our previous meeting, Janice was friendly though cagey. I started by asking about the hotel sign on the outside. Was the house being used in a commercial way now? On the way to Russ’ house, I passed a familiar building, a medical and dental center I recognized as having featured in ‘Ultra-Vixens.’ Over 40 years had passed since Russ shot scenes there, but the place was unchanged, and still a medical and dental center. Jiggling Ann Marie and Uschi Digard are along for the roller coaster ride through Meyer’s lusty Small Town USA landscape (the film is set in the desert community of Rio Dio, Texas).

Natividad and Meyer never married, but they lived together for some 15 years. While the remainder of her career was largely devoted to burlesque appearances, nude modeling and starring in porno films, she continued to appear on TV and in mainstream movies. Meyer's two movies prior to this one - 'Supervixens' and 'Up!' - are two of his best ever, and don't receive the attention they deserve. 'Beneath..' follows a similar format to those two classics but does so with more coarseness and less fun. Meyer takes advantage of the more liberal censorship laws of the late 70s and makes his most explicit movie yet, but loses much of his sense of smutty joyfulness. This article may contain an excessive amount of intricate detail that may interest only a particular audience. Please help by spinning off or relocating any relevant information, and removing excessive detail that may be against Wikipedia's inclusion policy. ( June 2023) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message) She adored her friends, cats, family and fans,” her sister Eva wrote in a statement on Facebook posted by Perry.If I’m remembering correctly, someone in the Meyer biography said that Janice Cowart thinks Meyer’s films are sleazy and sees no value in them. She won’t grant access to Meyer’s archives for film historians or writers unless she deems them important. She’ll sue – or at least threaten to – anyone who screens even clips of Meyer’s films or uses Russ’ name without her permission. For a while, she was going after the actors who were trying to make extra money by doing conventions and stuff. She initially claimed Meyer told her to do that, but he wasn’t of sound mind then and almost certainly had no idea what was going on. In reality, she just thinks the Meyer women are whores. Knowing nothing about how a moviola that used to belong to a west coast sexploitation legend works, I needed an east coast sexploitation legend over to give me a crash course. Francesca “Kitten” Natividad, the go-go dancer who became a cult pop culture figure when she was cast by sexploitation film director Russ Meyer in “Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens,” died Saturday of kidney failure after suffering from cancer at Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles, according to her friend Siouxzan Perry. She was 74. Chris Penn, who had starred in “The Wild Life,” hired her to perform as an erotic dancer the night before his brother Sean Penn married Madonna, and she appeared in a music video for Peaches. Burning Bed, The (1984) This made-for-television movie from NBC was based on the true story of timid housewife Francine Hughes of Danville, Michigan, who was…

Of course, I zeroed in on the moviola editing bay. My heart burned for the moviola. That is where the films I grew up with took shape, where the kinetic and frenetic cutting was assembled. This was the very equipment where nearly every one of his films had come to life. I’d heard stories of how Russ would wheel it outside to the swimming pool to work on his latest movie, or disappear for weeks at a time while cutting together his footage. The narrator heads off to his own home, where the teen-aged Rhett, his son, has sex with the narrator's huge-breasted younger Austrian wife, SuperSoul ( Uschi Digard), during an earthquake. In the latest in our series revisiting locations of golden age adult films, Ashley West describes a recent road trip to visit the home of Russ Meyer in Los Angeles – where the Sultan of Sleaze filmed his last feature, Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens (1979). Almost 20 years after his passing, I heard that the Arrowhead Drive house was still owned by Russ’ estate, though it had sat empty and neglected since his death. I wanted to see the home that had been used prominently in ‘Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens’. So on a trip to Los Angeles, I drove across town to visit it. Attached to the front of the house was a sign indicating that the building was a hotel. I peered through the windows but the inside looked dark and empty. At the side of the building sat Russ’ weights bench, just a few yards from a still pristinely-maintained pool.Natividad guested on “The Dating Game” and “The Gong Show,” and had small parts in films including “My Tutor,”“Airplane II,”“The Wild Life,”“Another 48 Hours,”“The Double-D Avenger,” in which she appeared alongside two other former Meyer stars; and Adam Rifkin’s “A Night at the Golden Eagle.” As I said above, the films are available. They’re just shoddy releases that are wildly overpriced. So I guess the estate is making some money, but certainly not as much as it could if it were run by someone who cared even a bit. I don’t think Cowart’s end game was to ever make gobs of money. I think she simply wanted to seize control of something important and then wield power over people. Bullseye! (1990) Bullseye! saw Roger Moore and Michael Caine work together onscreen for the first time. Great friends in real life, it… Russ continued to live in the same house until he passed in 2004. By then his life had changed, his brain addled with dementia, his films neglected, and his business affairs sewn up by a housekeeper-turned-assistant-turned administrator-turned-conservator-over-his-physical-being, named Janice Cowart. While Lamar heads off to his junkyard work, Lavonia spots a young man skinny dipping in a lake. She sneaks off and undresses, then jumps the boy from behind and proceeds to mount and rape him. The young man soon escapes, but she dives down, catches him underwater by fellating him and then overpowers him. After he succumbs to her, she learns his name is Rhett and that he is fourteen. Later on, the aforementioned salesman comes to her home and she ends up having sex with him too.

As usual, another amazing and insightful post. Love the photos. I became an unlikely Meyer fan years ago after catching Beyond the Valley of the Dolls on TV late one night. That film left me discombobulated to say the least, but I had to seek out everything that madman made and I did! I found his biography a few years later for a whopping 50 cents. It’s flawed but I highly recommend it as it’s about the most definitive account of Meyer and his films. Stuart Lancaster in front of 3121 Arrowhead Drive, in ‘Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens’ (1979) The girls sport equally interesting names, such as Eufaula Roop (a DJ at a religious radio station) and a nurse called Flovilla Thatch (Sharon Hill).Janice giggled. “No. That’s a joke. Russ attached it years ago. He put it there to throw people off the scent. It’s never been a hotel.” This quintessential sex comedy – written by famed movie critic Roger Ebert under the pseudonym “R Hyde”– was Russ Meyer’s last movie as director, and it’s all here: insatiable mega-busty women, religion, necrophilia, comic violence, impotent bumbling men, chainsaws and Nazi Martin Bormann (Henry Rowland) in a coffin. The house will be sold soon. It’ll probably be bulldozered and replaced with a new construction – no one is interested in this type of home anymore.” she said.

At this point 'Beneath..' appears to be Russ Meyer's last movie, which is a pity. A pity because we could do with his invention and energy and ideas to liven up our dull movie going lives, and also a pity because it isn't one of his best efforts. By the time he bought the handsome A-frame house at 3121 Arrowhead Drive in the mid 1970s, Russell Albion Meyer had made thirty or so feature films. Or magnificent mammary melodramas, as he might term them. They had several distinguishing features: for one, Russ was an independent auteur, directing, producing, writing, and shooting almost every one of his movies. Somehow it seems fitting that Russ Meyer’s final home was situated right under the Hollywood sign, in a barely noticed area in the shadows of the iconic emblem of glamorous moviedom.

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It was clear that Janice was ready for me to leave. I thanked her for her time, before she offered one more clue.