If anyone can send me a copy of Russ & Roger Go Beyond, Christopher Cluess‘s screenplay about the making of Russ Meyer‘s Beyond The Valley of the Dolls, I’d be grateful. I never saw this 1970 schlocksploitation parody. Perhaps the main thing that dissuaded was that young Roger Ebert wrote the screenplay. I always wondered what Ebert — fat, brilliant, bespectacled, desk-bound — could have possibly known about hot lascivious chicks and the charged sexual atmosphere of the late ’60s. Imagination obviously counts for a lot, but you have to…look, I don’t know what Roger was up to in the ’60s but I don’t believe he was up to very much, okay? No offense.
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One look at that poster tells you that no one goes down on anyone or does anything the last bit “dirty.” You can just tell right away.
The beginning of Vincent Canby‘s 6.27.70 N.Y. Times review is hilarious: “Any movie that Jacqueline Susann thinks would damage her reputation as a writer cannot be all bad. Beyond the Valley of the Dolls isn’t — which is not to say it is any good. It is to say that on the scale that measures the comparative values of incomparable things, for example, termites versus tides, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls comes off with a slightly higher rating than Miss Susann’s novel, ‘Valley of the Dolls,’ and the movie that Mark Robson distilled from it, making tap water out of tap water, as it were.”
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