Mudhoney Streets Paved With Gold

An idiot, alcoholic rapist with a sadistic sex drive, a voluptuous abused wife, a twisted hellfire preacher, a mute prostitute and her dwarf sister are just some of the lurid and grotesque characters in STREETS PAVED WITH GOLD, a violent blast of pulp southern gothic. First published in 1958, STREETS PAVED WITH GOLD was filmed under the title MUDHONEY by Russ Meyer in 1965, resulting in an early classic of the “roughie” genre.

Credited with having "opened the floodgates of screen permissiveness" in 1959 with the landmark "nudie" The Immoral Mr. Teas, legendary independent softcore filmmaker Russ Meyer has continued throughout his 30-year career and 23+ films to expand the limits of screen freedom with such genre classics as Lorna (1964), Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1966), and Vixen (1969). Long recognized as an American auteur and honored by numerous international retrospectives of his work, Meyer's story provides valuable insights into independent filmmaking, the history of the modern sexploitation genre, and cinema censorship. Researched from underground, popular and film literature, this book also incorporates much of the material contained in Meyer's own vast archive, to give an in-depth study of the director dubbed "King Leer."

Deals with an analysis of 13 of Russ Meyer's major films produced between 1959 (The Immoral Mr Teas) and 1979 (Beneath The Valley of the Ultra Vixens). This work proceeds to a discussion on film as a form of narration, and then to describing the three basic voices controlling the stories.

Russ Meyer, cult hero, creator of the sexploitation film, and the man the Wall Street Journal called the King Leer of Hollywood, made movies that filled the big screen with “big bosoms and square jaws.” In the first candid and fiendishly researched account of the late cinematic instigator’s life, Jimmy McDonough shows us how Russ Meyer used that formula to turn his own crazed fantasies into movies that made him a millionaire and changed the face of American film forever. This former WWII combat photographer immortalized his personal sexual obsession upon the silver screen, creating box-office gold with The Immoral Mr. Teas in 1959. The modest little film pushed all preexisting limits of on-screen nudity, and with its success, the floodgates of what was permitted to be shown on film were thrust open, never to be closed again. Russ Meyer ignited a true revolution in filmmaking, breaking all sex, nudity, and violence taboos. In a career that spanned more than forty years, Meyer created a body of work that has influenced a legion of filmmakers, fashionistas, comic book artists, rock bands, and even the occasional feminist. Bringing his anecdote- and action-packed biographical style to another renegade of popular culture, New York Times bestselling author of Shakey Jimmy McDonough offers a wild, warts-and-all portrait of Russ Meyer, the director, writer, producer, and commando moviemaking force behind the sexploitation classics Vixen, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! and many others. Big Bosoms and Square Jaws blows the lid off the story of Russ Meyer, from the beginning to his recent tragic demise, creating in the process a vivid portrait of a past America.

Swingers and swappers, strippers and streetwalkers, sadists, masochists, and sexual mavericks of every persuasion; all are documented in The Velvet Underground, a legendary exposé of the diseased underbelly of ’60s American society. The book that lent its name to the seminal New York rock’n’roll group, whose songs were to mirror its themes of depravity and social malaise. Welcome to the sexual twilight zone...