Beyond the Valley of the Dolls

Yesterday, I noticed that Beyond the Valley of the Dolls was playing on IFC — and since I knew that Roger Ebert wrote the screenplay, I had to finally watch it. Ebert's own quasi-review, "written for Film Comment magazine on the occasion of the movie's 10th anniversary in 1980" expresses my feelings fairly well:

Remembered after 10 years, 'Beyond the Valley of the Dolls' seems more and more like a movie that got made by accident when the lunatics took over the asylum.

If you've ever watched it — or tried to watch it — you've probably asked, how did this get made? Ebert explains:

At the time Russ Meyer and I 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 studio executives really wanted to think about, so that there was a minimum of supervision (or even cognizance) from the Front Office.

We wrote the screenplay in six weeks flat, laughing maniacally from time to time, and then the movie was made.

In some sense, Meyer's vision comes through:

Meyer wanted everything in the screenplay except the kitchen sink. The movie, he theorized, should 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."

Ebert did seem unusually prescient in one respect:

The character of teenage rock tycoon Ronnie "Z-Man" Barzell, for example, was supposed to be "inspired" by Phil Spector — but neither Meyer nor I had ever met Spector.

Z-Man goes on a murderous killing spree at the end of the movie — a few decades before the real Phil Spector.

Before that spree, the movie's almost unwatchable. In fact, I stopped watching it and came back later, when things more than picked up:

But the last hour has a real kinetic energy, and the scenes beginning with Z-Man's psychedelic orgy and ending with his death are, I must say on Meyer's behalf, as exciting, terrifying and dynamic as any such sequence I can remember. That stretch of BVD is pure cinema, combining shameless melodrama, highly charged images of violence, sledgehammer editing and musical overkill. It works.

Ebert hardly mentions the awful, awful epilogue, with it's not-quite-funny moral message, shared with us via voice-over.