Russ Meyer, American Pioneer of Porn, and “The Immoral Mister Tees”
Oh my, what the heck are we watching?!?
This one is kind of an experiment, let me know what you think in the comments or by direct communication. Next week I plan to return to the history of the history of ninja, and afte that I hope to return to the San Francisco Tong Wars. Housekeeping and Subscription information is at the bottom.
In a couple weeks, around the first weekend in May, there will be a slight change in schedule as I set aside my “Asian History Scholar Hat” for a few days and put on my “EMT Hat” to attend an FDNY Search and Rescue Conference in New York City. I hope to share some photos from the conference as well.
When I started this project, S.T.A.F.I., I promised not just “Asian (mostly) history,” but also real smutty, sexual content from time to time. Of course, there is an overlap between the two. For instance, I thought it might be interesting to write a piece on Ming Dynasty gay erotic paintings (yes, believe it or not, they did actually exist) but to reproduce them in this forum would violate the Substack image policies and shock some people too. Perhaps someday I will write about them, particularly if I find that someone somewhere has reproduced them online and can provide a link. (My understanding is that sharing a link does not violate substack policy.)
In the meantime, we offer a brief report on a groundbreaking event in the history of American pornographic film. In other words, the history of some truly historic smut. Remember, here at STAFI, it’s only MOSTLY Asian history and historical methodology. Other times, it could be anything else.
“ Modern day porn was born in 1959,” or so wrote Joe-Bob Briggs, film critic, author, and world renowned expert of trash and exploitation films, who also writes under his real name, John Bloom. Bloom/ Briggs was referring to the release of a low budget, quickly produced 62 minute film entitled “The Immoral Mister Tees.” Created on a budget of $24,000 and filmed in a period of four days, Russ Meyer's little film created a new industry, expanded freedom of expression (not necessarily a good thing), and ultimately changed society. (Briggs, p. 146.)
“The Immoral Mister Tees” is a very strange film by today’s standards. The plot focuses on a man, the titular immoral Mister Tees. Tees is a voyeur who sneaks around peeping at women, either imagining them naked or else having the apparent good fortune to stumble across actual naked women. When this happens, he watches them as they engage in things like sunbathing or canoeing in the nude. He hides and stares unseen as the camera shows us what he sees. All these women are large breasted and, by today’s standards, plump. They seem to be enjoying themselves, while remaining completely unaware of his presence. They have no idea that they are being ogled and the subject of someone’s lurid fantasies. The film was filmed without sound, there having been no budget for sound, and therefore throughout the film there ‘s a voice over, as well as background music. This voice, a very authoritative and masculine voice, offers the audience not just insight into the thoughts of Mister Tees and explanations of what is happening but also educational factoids, about such things as water density, observations about the nature scenes, and commentary on the pressure of modern living, at least modern living circa 1959. Why these factoids? More on that later.
For the moment let’s focus on the man behind this, Russ Meyer. Having voluntarilly enlisted to serve in World War Two at the age of 19, Meyer jumped at the chance to be trained as a US Army Combat Cameraman. According to all reports, Meyer enjoyed his time in the service and in Europe. Throughout the war, he developed a reputation for going off on his own and taking great risks to get combat footage and images of the American troops in action. He stayed in touch with many of the friends he made in the war, and, while they did not appear in The Immortal Mister Teas, Nazis had a strange way of cropping up in his films in unexpected places. (The only openly gay scene in a Meyer’ film appeared in 1976, 17 years later, and involves a geriatric Hitler receiving anal sex, but more on that in a future issue, and not for a while.)
After the war, unable to find employment in Hollywood due to tight union control over the film industry’s hiring of cameramen and the flood of post-war applicants for such positions, Meyer made his living and honed his skills as a still photographer as well as making promotional films for American factories and businesses. As a still photographer, he shot about half of the centerfolds for Playboy magazine in its first year of publication. As a maker of promotional films for American industry, he became skilled at making ordinary things look exciting and finding ways to work with untrained film subjects who lacked acting talent. Much of this was accomplished through rapid scene cuts and unusual choice of angles, something Meyer’s many films are known for. Meyer soon took his camera and production skills, as well as his many connections with large breasted women who could be talked into posing nude, and pushed them to the limit, at least the limit circa 1959, and made “The Immoral Mister Tees.” His use of voice over instead of dialogue also clearly shows technique carried over from the business promotion films that he had made.
To properly understand “The Immoral Mister Tees,” its success, and the impact it had, as well as the way it has been long forgotten by the bulk of humankind a little over 60 years later, it is important to put the film in historical context. (REMEMBER, historical events need to be understood in context. Constant theme of this publication.)
While the first amendment of the Constitution guarantees a great deal of free speech, it has never been viewed as an absolute guarantee of freedom for any and every kind of expression. The exact limits of the first amendment have shifted and changed over time. One area where things changed notably in the twentieth century was allowable representation of nudity and sexuality in film.
A lot of this was due to something called “the Roth Decision.” This 1957 Supreme Court decision ruled that nudity by itself was not grounds for something to be declared obscene, but in order for nudity to be determined obscene, it had to be devoid of any socially redeeming value and be something far outside community standards. (JOE BOB, P 146) (Edison, p 72)
A scene from The Immoral Mister Tees
Prior to this decision, depictions of nudity and sexuality in film were forbidden in the USA and thus few and far between and kept out of view. Immediately after, while they were permitted, they had to be shown with a veneer of self-importance and claims of educational or social value. Therefore in the USA, when people went out seeking the opportunity to see films, if they wanted to see films that contained images of naked people, perhaps even naked or semi-naked people engaged in mating rituals of various kinds, their choices tended to be either allegedly educational documentaries with lots of nudity, foreign films produced in European nations where nudity was more acceptably (and it was incredible what people would sit through just to get a glimpse of some mundane European nudity), or stories set in and filmed within actual nudist camps. (The supreme court having ruled that if one filmed within a nudist camp, then it was, apparently, only natural that one would find nudity, and therefore it should be legal to show nudity if the nudity were filmed inside a nudist camp. — I hope to write a bit more on nudist camp films in upcoming issues of STAFI. Remember, I did promise periodic sexual content.
“The Immoral Mister Tees” offered these audiences what they REALLY wanted. Nudity and sexual content aimed at American tastes without too much pretension and stripped of the flimsy veneer that this was somehow something important and educational. Now, admittedly, it takes about 20 minutes or a third into the film, before the actual nudity began to appear. But then again, this was less time than it took to sit through many of the European films of the time. At the European films, audiences would often sit through almost an entire film just to catch a glimpse of one of the breasts of the actress who played the Italian farmer’s wife. Not just that, but once the nudity began to appear in “The Immoral Mister Tees,” unlike the European films, it never stopped until the film itself stopped. This was ground-breaking in 1959. The film met with a ready audience and even ran for two years straight in Los Angeles’s Monica International Cinema. (Briggs, p. 156) Of course, this was in the days before there was any kind of home media, and if one wished to see a movie, well, you simply had to go to a movie theater to see one.
“The Immoral Mister Tees” opened proverbial floodgates spawning countless imitations and leading to more and more stories that focused on showing nudity and sexuality as well as other kinds of excess. People like Bunny Yeager, the famous model and photographer who is perhaps best known for her work at Playboy magazine and her photos of Bettie Page, as well as David Friedman, and Herschell Gordon Lewis, and a veritable plethora of film makers who at first produced so-called “nudie cuties” but then broke barriers by producing the first splatter films and taking gore to unseen levels, have credited Russ Meyer as a direct influence and inspiration for showing what was possible. ( McNeil, p. 7-9)
As for Russ Meyer, he followed this wave, creating many films that featured busty women in various states of near or complete undress. And many, such as “Faster Pussycat Kill Kill,” “Vixen,” or “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls,” were cult classics and financial successes. Unfortunately, like a lot of cutting-edge film makers, once having pushed the limts and expanded the boundaries of what was permitted, as others followed, the original creator found himself increasingly left behind as other rushed through the gates he created.
Nevertheless, today, Russ Meyer is a legend among the creators of classic exploitation films, with a loyal following.
In upcoming issues of STAFI -Scattered Thoughts And Focused Investigations, we will revisit the films and life of Russ Meyer and similiar subjects. In fact, I’ve got a major piece with my thoughts on what the films of Russ Meyer reveal about his own sexuality. Please share this and other pieces your find here, and help us build our readership.
Bibliography and Pathways to Digging Deeper
First, “The Immoral Mister Tees” is, like most of Russ Meyer’s films, surprisingly difficult to find on physical media ( I bought my DVD of this film in Shanghai. It is part ofwhat I believe is a pirated copy of a Japanese Russ Meyer box set.) Nevertheless, it is easily available on many major streaming or video platforms. At the time I write, this includes YouTube among others. A quick flourish of even minor Google-fu should be enable one to find the film. Meyer, tried to keep and control the rights to his films and publications, and after his death, it seems, confusion over these rights kept them from being easily available. A shame. Alas.
Briggs, Joe Bob. Profoundly Erotic, Sexy Movies that Changed History. New York, NY: Universe Publishing. 2005.
Edison, Mike. Dirty! Dirty! Dirty! On Playboys, Pigs, and Penthouse Paupers, An American Tale of Sex and Wonder. Berkeley, CA: Soft Skull Press. 2011.
McDonough, Jimmy. Big Bosoms and Square Jaws, The Biography of Russ Meyer, King of the Sex Film. New York: Three Rivers Press. 2005.
McNeil, Legs & Osborne, Jennifer. The Other Hollywood, the Uncensored Oral History of the Porn Film Industry. New York: Harper Collins. 2005.
Housekeeping and Subscriptions!
-Housekeeping. First, some people tell me that they have to check their spam filters to find S.T.A.F.I. If you miss an issue, please check your spam filter and label it, not spam. Second, if you don’t wish to receive this publication, please quietly unsubscribe. If you are receiving this by email, then you are already a free subscriber. Third, for the first three months, everything I write here, will be available free of charge. When that changes, if it changes, you will not be charged unless you ask to become a paid subscriber, but you may stop receiving some of these writings if you don’t. Fourth, please help me build up my membership. Share these writings in places where people would find them interesting and tell your friends.
Finally, in the last week of April and the first week of May, there will be a slight shift in the publication schedule to accomodate my attendance at a Search and Rescue Conference in New York City put on by the not-for-proft branch of the New York City Fire Department. I work a part time job as an Emergency Medical Technician with an ambulance service, and look forward to some really unique and exciting training opportunities. Although it falls outside the scope of this publication’s focus, I do hope to send some photos of some of the highlights of the event. You will still receive two articles relating to history or Asian Studies each of those weeks, one long, one short, but they might off by a day or so. If you don’t check your spam filter.