The production was one of the strangest experiments of late-era studio filmmaking. In 1969, 20th Century Fox abandoned the earlier plan involving Susann's husband and agent, Irving Mansfield, and instead turned the project over to Russ Meyer, whose independent X-rated hit Vixen! had made him a commercial force outside the traditional studio system. Richard Zanuck, then head of Fox, reportedly gave Meyer only a weekend to explain how the film could be made cheaply. Meyer and Roger Ebert, who had never previously written a feature screenplay, produced a 127-page treatment in ten days and completed the script in roughly three weeks. Ebert later described the circumstances as almost miraculous: an independent sex-film director and an inexperienced critic were brought into a major studio and given extraordinary freedom to satirize one of Fox's own hits while the studio was in financial trouble and senior executives were barely supervising the project. To keep costs down, the pair wrote approximately 97 percent of the movie for existing Fox backlot sets. The rushed, hands-off process produced a film that shifted between rock musical, soap opera, sex comedy, exploitation thriller, and savage parody. Even the revelation that flamboyant producer Z-Man was a woman in drag was introduced during production, after earlier scenes had already been shot, leaving the cast to perform material whose intended comic tone they often did not understand. The studio initially received an X rating from the MPAA; Meyer tried to respond by adding more nudity and sex, but Fox refused to delay the release, prioritizing a fast theatrical launch.
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AI concept artworkArchive Record · New Hollywood
The Fox Gamble That Let an X-Rated Outsider Hijack a Major Studio Production
Russ Meyer and Beyond the Valley of the Dolls / New Hollywood
The production was one of the strangest experiments of late-era studio filmmaking. In 1969, 20th Century Fox abandoned the earlier plan involving Susann's husband and agent, Irving Mansfield, and instead turned the project over to Russ Meyer, whose independent X-rated hit Vixen! had made him a commercial force outside the traditional studio system. Richard Zanuck, then head of Fox, reportedly gave Meyer only a weekend to explain how the film could be made cheaply. Meyer and Roger Ebert, who had never previously written a feature screenplay, produced a 127-page treatment in ten days and completed the script in roughly three weeks. Ebert later described the circumstances as almost miraculous: an independent sex-film director and an inexperienced critic were brought into a major studio and given extraordinary freedom to satirize one of Fox's own hits while the studio was in financial trouble and senior executives were barely supervising the project. To keep costs down, the pair wrote approximately 97 percent of the movie for existing Fox backlot sets. The rushed, hands-off process produced a film that shifted between rock musical, soap opera, sex comedy, exploitation thriller, and savage parody. Even the revelation that flamboyant producer Z-Man was a woman in drag was introduced during production, after earlier scenes had already been shot, leaving the cast to perform material whose intended comic tone they often did not understand. The studio initially received an X rating from the MPAA; Meyer tried to respond by adding more nudity and sex, but Fox refused to delay the release, prioritizing a fast theatrical launch.
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