The Other Hollywood (2 page)

I said, “Wally at
Playboy
gave it to me.”

And she said, “Oh? Well, I guess you’re okay then. See, I get all these creeps that come down here and say they’re going to make a nudist camp movie just to meet girls, and I can’t stand them!”

CHUCK TRAYNOR:
I was sixteen or seventeen years old when I first got in the movies—a nudist camp movie. On my first shoot they wasted a whole roll of film because when I squatted down with my back to the camera, my balls were showing.

DAVE FRIEDMAN:
You had to hire some good-looking models to play nudists. We learned that the hard way.

See, one time Herschell and I went to make a movie at Miss Zelda’s Nudist Camp. Miss Zelda was like this Creature from the Black Lagoon. She said, “You boys will have to take off your clothes if you want to come in here…”

Now neither of us are exhibitionists—but we needed a place to shoot. So Herschell and I stripped down. We go have lunch with all these nudists, and they’re eating Franco-American spaghetti—and Miss Zelda’s breasts are
in
the spaghetti.

I said, “Herschell, enough of this.” That’s why we called Bunny Yeager.

When we met her, I said, “We need some girls.”

She asked, “How many?”

BUNNY YEAGER:
I learned how to make movies by watching people like Doris Wishman, who would hire me to take stills on sets. Then Russ Meyer came along with
The Immoral Mr. Teas.
Like I said, Russ and I were always competing with each other. So when Russ branched out into movies, my husband and I thought, “Maybe we could do that, too.”

DAVE FRIEDMAN:
Russ Meyer and I were both in the signal corps during World War II. I was just an instructor; I never got overseas. But Russ was a real hero—he filmed Patton’s march across Europe.

So I didn’t meet Russ until after the war, when Pete DeSinzy, his original partner, introduced us. One day I got a letter from Pete that said, “My friend Russ Meyer and I have made a picture, and we’d like you to play it in a couple of your houses.”

So I went up to San Francisco. Pete had a little theater down on Church Street and a burlesque house—the El Rey Theater in Oakland. The first thing he and Russ had ever done was a picture with Tempest Storm called
The French Peep Show
.

ROGER EBERT:
After the war, Russ Meyer failed, like most service cinematographers, to find a job inside the Hollywood union system. So he moved to San Francisco, shot some industrial films, gained a reputation during the 1950s as a leading pinup photographer, did about a half dozen of
Playboy
’s earlier Playmates and shot an obscure mid-1950s burlesque film, which starred Tempest Storm.

DAVE FRIEDMAN:
The Tempest Storm film wasn’t a short, it was a feature because you know, with girls like Tempest Storm, they knew how to sell themselves so beautifully.

And some of those burlesque stars weren’t the greatest looking women, but they just
exuded
sex, and they knew how to present it. They could get these guys so excited it wasn’t even funny. They had more body movements than a Swiss watch.

TEMPEST STORM:
See, I met Elvis Presley in Las Vegas in 1956, when I was working the Dunes, and Elvis was the headliner at the Riviera. The first time he played Vegas he was a big flop. Anyway, he came over to the Dunes to see my show, and I just thought he was adorable. Oh, I fell in love with him—are you kidding? So, I picked up a few of Elvis’s movements ha, ha, ha. We did talk about dancing and compared notes. He gave me a few pointers, and I gave him some.

Was Elvis a good lover? Yeah! He was the King. Yes. Definitely. No complaints. It was a wonderful night. But the next night, when I went into the show, the big boss said, “Did you have a good time last night?”

I said, “Yes. I went to sleep.”

He said, “But did you go alone?”

Here I was, trying to be very discreet—be a lady about the situation—and the whole hotel knew about it.

RUSS MEYER (FILMMAKER):
When I first met Tempest Storm I was so in awe of her great big cans that thoughts like performing badly or ejaculating prematurely ran through my mind—all connected to the dick bone. So when I made my move to hump the buxotic after the last show in her Figueroa Street scatter, I felt inadequate, plain and simple. Fuck, what can I say?

DAVE FRIEDMAN:
Russ Meyer made the first nudie-cutie in 1959 called
The Immoral Mr. Teas
. It was without a doubt the first nudie-cutie. Absolutely.

ROGER EBERT:
The Immoral Mr. Teas
[was] shot in 1959 at a cost of $24,000 and largely improvised during a four-day shooting schedule.
Teas
was partly bankrolled by a San Francisco burlesque theater owner and was the first authentic American nudie.

The notion of directing the ultimate nude volleyball game did not much appeal to Russ Meyer. He felt that the success of
Playboy
had prepared the American market for an unabashed, high-quality skin flick. The occupation of his lead character and a great many of his interior locations were suggested when his dentist agreed to let his office be used on a weekend.

As Meyer explained, “The chair was well-lighted.”

RUSS MEYER:
I invent the plots myself—usually while I’m alone in the car. I have a clipboard and a felt-tip pen, and I jot down things that turn me on. I assemble these situations in my mind. I imagine how they develop. Then I bring in a writer to put it into script form. But it’s all right here. It’s all right here, and it’s me.

DAVE FRIEDMAN:
I was trying to sell Rose La Rosa—who owned the Esquire Burlesque Theater in Toledo, Ohio—a film Herschell and I had made called
Living Venus
. And while we’re negotiating, Rose said, “Hey, can you guys make some little one-reelers—ten-minute things—with pretty girls in maybe their bras and panties…or maybe
just
their panties…or maybe even without the panties if you just showed their fannies?”

I said, “Yeah, why?”

Rose said, “Well, there’s still fifty or sixty burlesque houses in the country, and they’d pay you a hundred dollars for each.”

I did the math and asked, “Oh,
really
?”

So as soon as I got back to Chicago, I said, “Herschell, how much would it cost for us to do some of these one-reelers?”

Herschell said, “We can make ’em for about six hundred a piece.”

And it was just at that moment that
The Immoral Mr. Teas
opened, and I happened to go see it.

ROGER EBERT:
The premise of the movie is simple: Mr. Teas is a harassed city man, cut off from the solace of nature and burdened by the pressures of modern life. He can find no rest, alas, because he has been cursed by a peculiar ability to undress girls mentally. At the most unsettling times—in a soda fountain or dentist’s office—women suddenly appear nude.

What’s worse, Mr. Teas cannot even control his strange power; it seems to have been invested naturally in him and doesn’t require the magic sunglasses or secret elixirs employed in such
Teas
imitations as
Bachelor Tom Peeping
.

DAVE FRIEDMAN:
So after I saw
The Immoral Mr. Teas,
I said to Herschell, “Instead of us making five or six of these little one-reelers, let’s make five or six one-reelers with some kind of a continuing thread, and we’ll put them together and have a feature film when we’re done.”

And Herschell said, “That’s not a bad idea.”

BUNNY YEAGER:
After
The Immoral Mr. Teas,
my husband and I took every dollar we had—ten thousand dollars—and made a movie.

Room Eleven
had only two locations because my husband said that was the only way to make money. Half the movie took place in the lobby and the other half upstairs in room eleven. There was no dirty language, no complete nudity, and only simulated sex scenes.

And of course you can’t make a low-budget picture and have stars because stars mean money. I don’t know how many couples we had, but the story was about all these different types of people that came to rent room eleven.

DAVE FRIEDMAN:
So Herschell and I wrote five or six vignettes—of course, they always had a dirty story to them—and we called this thing
The Adventures of Lucky Pierre
.

We got a nightclub comic named Billy Fallible from the William Morris Agency who played Lucky Pierre. Then we went up to Minneapolis and found a couple of little blond girls and brought ’em back down. The rest of the girls we picked up were strippers from around Chicago.

Anyway, when I sold the picture to Dan Sonny, he said, “The girls in your picture look like the grandmothers of the girls in my picture.”

I said, “But Dan, you’re out in Hollywood. I mean, they raise ’em out there for these things. But Chicago—it’s a different thing.”

BUNNY YEAGER:
We shot
Room Eleven
in two days. We knew we could pay these “actors” to do something and then they might not show up the second day, and we’d have no movie. But everybody that wants to act in a movie wants to have lines. They want to be seen with their clothes on. They don’t mind taking them off, but wow, if they have lines! So we made them do the nude scenes first, and that’s why they all showed up the next day—to do their lines.

DAVE FRIEDMAN:
I took the finished
Lucky Pierre
back to Rose La Rosa and said, “Rose, now I took your advice, but we made ’em features.”

She said, “That’s pretty good.”

And I said, “I want you to play it, and I want forty percent.”

She said, “Are you outta your mind?”

I said, “Rose, I wanna tell you a little secret. There’s a new game in town. It’s called film. Every week, I’m gonna send you a couple of cans of film. And the only thing you’re gonna have to pay on that is the express charge from Chicago. And you can run those two cans of film fifteen times a day, and nobody’s gonna argue back with you. Your girls aren’t gonna demand more money. You don’t have to worry about any stagehands. Those drunken musicians you got down there, you can tell ’em all to get lost.”

I could see Rose’s eyes lighting up. And I said, “And you won’t have any catfights backstage between the girls, and you won’t have to put up with them beefing about doing an extra show on Saturday night because this can of film
doesn’t talk back
.”

She said, “Dave Friedman, we’re in business.”

So that’s basically how I took a lot of burlesque theaters in this country and turned them into adult theaters overnight.

BUNNY YEAGER:
Room Eleven
played mainly at drive-in theaters.

The sex was all simulated. In other words, you could not show a man’s penis. And the “actors” usually kept everything covered up by being real close together. So basically they’d just be rolling around on the bed.

Just fun nudity, you know? And, yeah, a lot of kissing.

DAVE FRIEDMAN:
Nudie-cuties were very rigid in their construction—you had the boy/girl scene, the girl/girl scene, the orgy scene, and then the kiss-off. They worked just as long as you had those elements in it.

And in the beginning, of course, you didn’t dare show pubic hair. An L.A. vice squad cop told me, “If we see pubic hair, then it’s pornographic—and that gives us an excuse to pick up the print.”

It wasn’t until probably 1968 that we began to show pubic hair. And the first nudist camp picture to show “pickles and beaver” was
Raw Ones
.

BUNNY YEAGER:
As nudity became more acceptable, nobody wanted to buy my beautiful bikini shots anymore. The men’s magazines wouldn’t buy from me anymore. They said I was old-fashioned. They wanted explicit nudity, and I didn’t want to shoot it.

DAVE FRIEDMAN:
The heyday of the nudie-cutie was 1967, 1968, 1969, and 1970. Those were the years I was turning out
Brand of Shame, The Head Mistress, Lustful Turk, Trader Horny, Thar She Blows, Starlet,
and
The Erotic Adventures of Zorro
—some of the greatest films of the genre. Classics that still live today, ha, ha, ha.

BUNNY YEAGER:
We stopped making our movies because all the distributors were calling and saying, “Make it more sexy!” Pornography was becoming legal.

We liked making our movies—and I didn’t see anything wrong with nudity. But I guess there was a certain morality that we didn’t want to cross. Pornography is a whole different bag. There’s a reason for it, and there’s probably a place for it, and I mean, everybody’s got a right to do what they want to do. But I had no reason to get into that world. I didn’t need it. I didn’t want to be making it: in stills or movies.

So I laid down my camera for about ten years, till the time came again when I could sell sexy glamour photos without being crude. By the time the 1980s were over, my work was well-accepted again.

DAVE FRIEDMAN:
Even though they killed off burlesque—and killed off girlie shows at carnivals—the nudie-cutie films were the answer to the showman’s prayer. Because he no longer had to worry about live talent, which was always a problem.

Now, of course, instead of the voyeurs staring at some tired old burlesque broad up there, live, onstage—they were suddenly looking at gorgeous, young, blond, tan California girls, in all their pristine glory, with their beautiful little breasts, and their pert little nipples, and their dimpled little behinds—in Technicolor—on screens forty feet wide and twenty-five feet high.