He is known primarily for writing and directing a series of successful sexploitation films that featured campy humor, sly satire and large-breasted women, such as Faster, Pussycat!

He made a number of amateur films at the age of 15, and served during World War II as a U.S. Army combat cameraman for the 166th Signal Photo Company, ultimately attaining the rank of technician third grade (equivalent to staff sergeant).

[8] His first feature, the naughty comedy The Immoral Mr. Teas (1959), cost $24,000 to produce and eventually grossed more than $1 million on the independent/exploitation circuit, enthroning Meyer as "King of the Nudies."

Motorpsycho, about three men terrorising the countryside, was a big hit—so much so Meyer decided to make a film about three bad girls, Faster Pussycat.

Although its lesbian overtones are tame by today's standards, the film—envisaged by Meyer and longtime producer Jim Ryan as a reaction to provocative European art films—grossed millions on a five-figure budget and captured the zeitgeist just as The Immoral Mr. Teas had a decade earlier.

(1970), which utilized long montages of the California landscape (replete with anti-marijuana voiceovers) and Uschi Digard dancing in the desert as the film's "lost soul."

These plot devices were necessitated after lead actress Linda Ashton left the shoot early, forcing Meyer to compensate for 20 minutes of unshot footage.

What eventually appeared was Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970), scripted by Chicago Sun-Times film critic and longtime Meyer devotee Roger Ebert.

"[12] Contractually stipulated to produce an R-rated film, the brutally violent climax (depicting a decapitation) ensured an X rating (eventually reclassified to NC-17 in 1990).

The executives at Fox were delighted with the box office success of Dolls and signed a contract with Meyer to make three more films: The Seven Minutes, from a bestseller by Irving Wallace; Everything in the Garden, from a play by Edward Albee; and The Final Steal, from a 1966 novel by Peter George.

Featuring loquacious courtroom scenes alongside little nudity, the comparatively subdued film was commercially unsuccessful, and his oeuvre would be disowned by the studio for decades after Zanuck and Brown departed to form an independent production company in 1972.

"[16] In 1975, he released Supervixens, a return to the world of big bosoms, square jaws, and the Sonoran Desert that earned $8.2 million during its initial theatrical run in the United States on a shoestring budget.

Despite hardcore pornographic films overtaking Meyer's softcore market share, he retired from filmmaking in the late 1970s a very wealthy man.

[17] Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Meyer announced several projects (including the Dirty Harry parody Blitzen, Vixen and Harry, ultimately thwarted by Meyer reneging on a profit-sharing agreement with envisaged lead actor and longtime collaborator Charles Napier; a sequel to Mondo Topless provisionally entitled Mondo Topless, Too; and a color remake of Faster, Pussycat!

Pandora Peaks interpolated footage originally intended for The Breast of Russ Meyer (1979-c. 2001), an unfinished "gargantuan, umpteen-hour anthology film" that would have encompassed précises of Meyer's earlier films; memoiristic documentary footage (including voluminous accounts of his Army service in which Kitten Natividad functioned as a metonymic representation of Meyer's sexual desires, culminating in a timer-shot assignation between the filmmaker and his longtime muse); and Mondo Topless-style profiles of such performers as "Tundi" Horvath, Shawn "Baby Doll" Devereaux, Tami Roche and Kristine Mills.

Like his contemporary Terry Southern, Meyer realized that sex—as one of the few common interests among most humans—was a natural vehicle for satirizing values and conventions held by the Greatest Generation.

According to Roger Ebert in a commentary recorded in 2003 for the DVD release of Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, Meyer continually reiterated that this irreverence was the true secret to his artistic success.

"[22] Russ Meyer's lifelong unabashed fixation on large breasts featured prominently in all his films and is his best-known character trait both as an artist and as a person.

However, by the early 1980s, when surgical advancements had made the gargantuan breasts of Meyer's fantasies a reality, many felt he had started viewing the female body as simply a "tit transportation device"[24] and that his aesthetic vision was no longer attractive or vibrant.

and Cherry, Harry & Raquel!, some of the actresses do not have large (by Russ Meyer standards) breasts yet their chests are always accentuated by use of camera angles and well-constructed bras.

"[26] He went on record numerous times to say that Anita Ekberg was the most beautiful woman he ever photographed and that her 39DD breasts were the biggest in A-list Hollywood history, dwarfing both Jayne Mansfield and Sabrina.

"[31] And indeed, Meyer said many times that it was Gina Lollobrigida's smaller-breasted figure that he preferred visually over her larger-breasted, taller and bigger-hipped rival, Sophia Loren.

[22][32] The tallest actress Meyer ever cast in a lead was the 1.75 m (5 ft 9 in), slim-hipped, huge-breasted Lorna Maitland[33] (working with whom he admitted he found intimidating).

In many of Meyer's films, women eventually defeat men, winning sexual fulfillment as their reward, e.g., Super Vixen (Supervixens), Margo Winchester (Up!)

While Russ Meyer may have championed powerful woman characters, he also forced them into violent and terrifying situations, making them prove their physical and mental strength against tremendous odds.

[39] Furthermore, according to frequent collaborator and longtime companion Kitten Natividad, Meyer's love of dominant women extended to his personal life, and he was almost always in a tumultuous relationship.

[23] Despite his reputation, Meyer never employed the casting couch during his career's peak years (though that shifted during his post-1980 unfinished projects) and rarely had sex with any of his actresses.

There is a longstanding rumor among his closest friends and at least one biographer that he had a son in 1964 with a secret lover who he would refer to only as "Miss Mattress" or "Janet Buxton"; this relationship commenced in 1963 (as Meyer's first extramarital liaison during his relationship with Eve Meyer) at the Hollywood Players Motel on Vine Street and continued "periodically over the years" (with their "strictly carnal" meet-ups "never extending beyond three hours at any one time") "until he could no longer function," according to Jimmy McDonough.

Biographers have attributed most of his brutish and eccentric nature to the fact that he was abandoned by his father, an Oakland police officer, and coddled by his mother, Lydia, who was married six times.

That same year, with no wife or children to claim his wealth, Meyer willed that the majority of his money and estate would be sent to the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in honor of his late mother.