* Certainly, I know what everyone knows about the director, that he loved to make live-action cartoons about large-breasted women committing acts of sex and violence I have heard it said that he considered BtVotD to be the greatest work of his career. I would like very much to open by considering its place in the career of Russ Meyer, one of the key figures in the history of exploitation cinema, but I'm very ashamed to admit that this is the first and only film I've seen by Russ Meyer. It's hard to know where to begin discussing Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. Future Pulitzer Prize-winning film critic Roger Ebert This is my happening and it freaks me out! It's such a fine line between stupid and clever. Camp introduces a new standard: artifice as an ideal, theatricality.
In John Waters' autobiography Shock Value: A Tasteful Book About Bad Taste, he called this "the funniest film ever made." (He called Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! "the greatest movie ever made.The traditional means for going beyond straight seriousness - irony, satire - seem feeble today, inadequate to the culturally oversaturated medium in which contemporary sensibility is schooled.This film is listed among The 100 Most Enjoyably Bad Movies Ever Made in Golden Raspberry Award founder John Wilson's book THE OFFICIAL RAZZIE® MOVIE GUIDE.As part of their settlement with Susann, Fox was forced to clarify "this is not a sequel to VALLEY OF THE DOLLS" in all advertising. When she saw this film, author Jacqueline Susann was reportedly so offended that anyone might think she had written it that she threatened to sue 20th Century-Fox.During a bedroom scene, Kelly wears the same flimsy red nightgown worn by heroines of at least two earlier Russ Meyer pictures ( Vixen (1968) and Finders Keepers, Lovers Weepers! (1968)).While frequently touted as Pam Grier's film debut (she received an on-screen credit and a photo of her in a party scene was prominently featured in a 1970 Playboy layout on the film), her role in the film is non-existent and she can't even be spotted as an extra.
Budgeted at a modest $900,000 (approximately $4.5 million in 2005 dollars), the film grossed ten times the amount in the US market, qualifying it as a hit for the beleaguered 20th Century-Fox.Furter/Rocky relationship that we would see 5 years later in The Rocky Horror Picture Show. There's a sequence at the end of the film between Z-Man and Lance Rocke that may have inspired the Dr.Two women wear costumes in the film inspired by another hit production of 20th-Century-Fox, "Batman" (1966).Jacqueline Susann submitted a screenplay for a sequel to Valley of the Dolls (1967), but when Fox found it unsatisfactory, Susann's contract gave them the right to concoct a follow-up of their own.Considering what happens in the climax, and what later happened with Spector and Lana Clarkson, they captured him far more accurately than they could have imagined.
While neither Russ Meyer nor Roger Ebert had ever met Spector, they were told by acquaintances of his that they'd caught his essence very well.