A famed film auetuer and master of celluloid erotica, Russ Meyer held a unique place in Hollywood mythology. Part showman, part filmmaker, the uninhibited Meyer helped usher in the sexual revolution past Hollywood’s repressed gates in the 1960’s, thereby establishing sex as a crucial cinema ingredient for decades to come.

Born Russell Albion Meyer on March 21, 1922 in San Leandro, CA, Meyer was the son of a small-town police officer and a registered nurse. Fascinated with photography since childhood, legend has it that Meyer’s mother pawned her wedding ring to buy her son his very first camera. Showing a natural aptitude as a shutterbug, Meyer began making amateur films in his early teens. It was during World War II, though, that Meyer first established his professional credentials while serving in Europe as an army combat cameraman. A good deal of Meyer lore came about during this period. In later years, Meyer recalled that while stationed overseas, he visited a French brothel, where he met the great American novelist, Ernest Hemingway. Upon learning that Meyer was a virgin, Hemingway supposedly offered him his choice of prostitutes. In response, Meyer chose the one with the biggest breasts – a fateful event which Meyer claimed later ignited his lifelong fascination with buxom women.

After the war, Meyer’s impressive portfolio led to his first professional assignment as a photographer for Hugh Hefner’s Playboy magazine in the early 1950’s. There, Meyer cut his teeth for several years shooting some of the magazine’s earliest centerfolds. Among his subjects were such pioneer pin-up queens as Dolly Read and the late Eve Turner (whom Meyer would later marry). Despite his success as a photographer, however, as the 1960’s rolled around, Meyer found himself increasingly drawn to filmmaking. In late 1959, Meyer made his film directorial debut with “The Immoral Mr. Teas,” a ribald, but innocuous sex comedy filmed in Europe. When the film went on to become the first "nudie" (softcore) sex film to make over a million dollars at the box office, Meyer knew he’d found his calling and never looked back.

The success of Meyer’s nudie flicks led to a string of self-financed films that gradually became more bizarre and over-the-top. Starting in 1964, Meyer entered his "gothic period" with a quartet of black-and-white films that titillated and entertained as no other films had before. Starting with 1964’s “Lorna,” Meyer continued with “Mudhoney” (1965), “Motor Psycho” (1965) and the cult-classic masterpiece “Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!” (1965).

In the summer of 1969, Meyer was riding high on the heels of his latest financial success, the sex romp “Vixen!” when he finally received the call he’d been waiting for. Hired by 20th Century Fox to direct his first mainstream studio picture, Meyer made his debut with “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls” (1970), a satirical quasi-sequel to 1967’s high camp drama, “Valley of the Dolls (1969). Penned by a novice screenwriter named Roger Ebert, the film received a critical drubbing; nevertheless, “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls” became a major hit and a cult mainstay.

Unfortunately, Meyer received yet another lukewarm reception with the release of his next film, the uncharacteristically somber drama, “The Seven Minutes” (1971). Stung by the criticism, Meyer eventually returned to the sex-and-violence films that made his name. Over the next decade, Meyer cranked out a string of soft-core films which culminated with 1979’s deliriously bawdy “Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens” (1979). Having abandoned all pretenses of becoming an “important filmmaker,” by the early 1980’s, Meyer focused his remaining attention on various autobiographies, both in film – “The Breast of Russ Meyer” – and print A Clean Breast.

While dismissed by many of his critics as being little more than a primitive pornographer, a new generation of film enthusiasts began to re-evaluate Russ Meyer’s works as a whole. Many modern film scholars and proponents pointed out that Meyer was a competent filmmaker who was adept at mocking moral stereotypes. Many of his films featured a narrator who attempted to give the audience a "moral roadmap" of what they are watching, while simultaneously lampooning the conservative midset. In 2003, just before his death, Meyer's art was compared by the USC Film Department as being a “polished example of the venerable Menippean satire. A difficult genre to define – roughly, [Meyer’s films] combine disparate forms such as prose and verse, theatre and film, sacred and profane, [while simultaneously] maintaining a healthy disregard for all forms of authority: religious/moral, legal, political, and last but not least, the authority of the established aesthetic tradition.”

Russ Meyer’s legacy as a filmmaker remained yet to be written. On Sept. 18, 2004, Meyer died of complications from pneumonia and dementia.