Roger Ebert Secretly Co-Wrote Russ Meyer's Most Outrageous Sexploitation Satire

Bizarre & Myths4/5 wildness

Roger Ebert Secretly Co-Wrote Russ Meyer's Most Outrageous Sexploitation Satire

Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens / 1970s

The film's strangest behind-the-scenes twist was the involvement of Roger Ebert, then best known as a serious newspaper film critic rather than as a screenwriter of deliberately extreme sexploitation. Ebert co-wrote Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens with director Russ Meyer, shaping a grotesque, comic variation on Thornton Wilder's Our Town in which the supposedly wholesome American small town becomes a stage for sexual coercion, hypocrisy, religious exploitation, marital violence, and absurd social rituals. Ebert reportedly wanted to use a pseudonym, an understandable impulse given the film's deliberately shocking material and its distance from the respectable critical persona audiences associated with him. The collaboration nevertheless became part of the film's historical identity: a Pulitzer-winning critic had helped construct one of Meyer's most aggressively vulgar satires. Rather than producing a conventional scandal or legal battle, the episode survives as an extraordinary collision between mainstream film criticism and underground exploitation cinema.