Feminism, but not as we know it … 50 years of Valley of the Dolls

Meyer wanted to use his own writer, the critic Roger Ebert.

Valley of the Dolls doesn’t have to stay relevant to be a camp classic

Meyer says he and Ebert wrote a page treatment in 10 days and the script in three weeks. Three young girls come to Hollywood, find fame and fortune, are threatened by sex, violence, and drugs, and either do or do not win redemption," according to Ebert. The script was not only a spoof of the original film, but also, in Ebert's words, "a satire of Hollywood conventions, genres, situations, dialogue, characters, and success formulas, heavily overlaid with such shocking violence that some critics didn't know whether the movie 'knew' it was a comedy".

Ebert said the plot was derived in collaboration "by creating characters and then working out situations to cover the range of exploitable content we wanted in the film. Meyer wanted the film to appeal, in some way, to almost anyone who was under thirty and went to the movies. There had to be music, mod clothes, black characters, violence, romantic love, soap opera situations, behind-the-scenes in trigue, fantastic sets, lesbians, orgies, drugs and eventually an ending that tied everything together. Meyer's intention was for the film to "simultaneously be a satire, a serious melodrama, a rock musical, a comedy, a violent exploitation picture, a skin flick, and a moralistic expose so soon after the Sharon Tate murders of what the opening crawl called 'the oft-times nightmarish world of Show Business'".

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.

Meyer said when Fox offered him the film "I felt like I had pulled off the biggest caper in the world. He described the film as "a soap opera for young people, a cornocopia of wild, way-out now entertainment. Roger Ebert revealed that many of the film's themes and characters were based upon real people and events, but because neither Ebert nor Russ Meyer actually met these people, their characterizations were based on pure speculation. The cast was composed almost entirely of unknowns.

Meyer said even if Parkins had wanted to do the film they would not have used her. Cynthia Meyers was a playboy playmate hired to play one of the girls who realises she's a lesbian.


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Edy Williams was under contract to Fox at the time. Pam Grier made her film debut as an extra in a party scene.

Silicon Valley's gender problem extends beyond pay gap

Meyer and Ebert kept the costs down by writing "97 percent of the film" for existing sets on the Fox backlot. Ebert said that Beyond the Valley of the Dolls seemed "like a movie that got made by accident when the lunatics took over the asylum". Ebert says Meyer "directed his actors with a poker face, solemnly discussing the motivations behind each scene.

Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls is still my favourite bonkbuster

Some of the actors asked me whether their dialogue wasn't supposed to be humorous, but Meyer discussed it so seriously with them that they hesitated to risk offending him by voicing such a suggestion. The result is that BVD has a curious tone all of its own Because the film was put together so quickly, some plot decisions, such as the character Z-Man being revealed as a "woman in drag ", [29] were made on the spot, without the chance to bring previous already-shot scenes into alignment with the new development. Because Meyer always discussed their roles and the film so seriously, they did not want to unintentionally insult him by asking, so they broached the question to Ebert, instead.

Meyer's intention was to have the actors perform the material in a straightforward manner, saying "If the actors perform as if they know they have funny lines, it won't work. I think of it as an essay on our generic expectations. Meyer's response to the original X rating was to attempt to re-edit the film to insert more nudity and sex, but Fox wanted to get the movie released quickly and would not give him the time. Most of the film's music was written by Stu Phillips. Members of the fictitious Carrie Nations neither sing nor play their own instruments in the film.

Vocals for the lip-synced songs were performed by Lynn Carey , a blue-eyed soul singer based in Los Angeles. Strawberry Alarm Clock performed their hit " Incense and Peppermints ", the mid-tempo rocker "Girl from the City" written by Paul Marshall , [1] and the power pop anthem "I'm Comin' Home" also by Marshall [1] during the first party scene at Z-Man's house.

Different versions of the soundtrack album exist because of disputes over royalties. However, the CD edition of the soundtrack contains 25 songs compared to the 12 songs on the vinyl version. Upon release, Ebert's future TV co-host Gene Siskel gave the film zero stars out of four, writing in the Chicago Tribune that the film "unfolds with all of the humor and excitement of a padded bra Boredom aplenty is provided by a screenplay which for some reason has been turned over to a screenwriting neophyte.

Vincent Canby of The New York Times wrote that the film "comes off with a slightly higher rating" than the original Valley of the Dolls book and movie, but thought that by "quite consciously attempting to parody his earlier movies" Meyer had "become patronizing. Variety wrote that it was "not much of a film. Producer-director Russ Meyer, who once made low-budget sex pix which had a crude and innocuous charm but not much of a story, this time around spent between 20 and 30 times the money he used to have, and got less for it. Charles Champlin of the Los Angeles Times panned the film as a "a treat for the emotionally retarded, sexually inadequate and dimwitted.

It is a grievously sick melange of hypermammalian girls, obvious double-entendres and sadistic violence. Gary Arnold of The Washington Post declared it "a mess, a disaster, a stinkeroo, the most wretched of wretched movies," adding, "Disregard anything you hear in the so-bad-it's-good or it's-all-a-put-on veins.

Silicon Valley's gender problem extends beyond pay gap | Money | The Guardian

It's a depressing picture — witless, hysterical, gratuitous, technically inept, needlessly brutal. It is also perversely enjoyable if one is prepared to laugh at it as well as with it.


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Since its release in , the film has acquired a cult following and has even been included in various "best of" lists by movie critics. As a result, the studio placed a disclaimer at the beginning of the film informing the audience that the two films were not intended to be connected. Posters for the movie read, "This is not a sequel—there has never been anything like it".

The suit did not go to trial until after Susann's death in September The production of the film, along with Myra Breckinridge , helped lead to the ousting of Richard Zanuck from Fox. Beyond the Valley of the Dolls was released as a two-disc, special-edition DVD set on June 13, , which is now out of print. However, 20th Century Fox re-released it on the second disc of the four-disc variety feature pack, Studio Classics: From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Beyond the Valley of the Dolls theatrical release poster. Retrieved May 26, The Shifting Definitions of Genre: Violence in s American Cinema.

Retrieved March 9, Chicago Tribune 20 Nov Los Angeles Times 20 Aug Director for 'Dolls' Sequel Martin, Betty. Los Angeles Times 26 Aug Los Angeles Times 30 Nov Film Comment; New York Vol. By the end of the novel spoiler warning , two of the central characters are miserable and the other is dead. Its melodramatic storyline and hammy characters, who overflow with emotion but never demand our empathy, have always been essential to its allure.

Sexism Valley: 60% of women in Silicon Valley experience harassment

Audiences laughed openly at preview screenings of the film. In , Nora Ephron proclaimed: And when Jacqueline Susann sits down at her typewriter on Central Park South, what spills out is first-rate kitsch. It, too, will get the Criterion treatment this fall. Order by newest oldest recommendations.

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