The son of a policeman and a nurse, Russ Meyer made amateur films in his early teens, winning prizes at 15. He spent World War II in Europe as a combat cameraman, then after the war became a professional photographer, shooting some of the earliest "Playboy" centerfolds. He made his film directorial debut with The Immoral Mr. Teas, the first "nudie" (softcore sex) film to make a profit (over a million dollars), which led to a string of self-financed films that gradually became more bizarre, violent and cartoonish. In 1964 and 1965 he established his style with his "Gothic period", a quartet of black-and-white films Lorna, Mudhoney, Motor Psycho and Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!) that many consider to be his best work. After the blockbusting Vixen!, he was hired by 20th-Century Fox to make studio pictures. The first of these, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, was an enormous hit, but after the lukewarm reception of the uncharacteristically serious The Seven Minutes, Meyer returned to the sex-and-violence films that made his name, culminating in the delirious Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens. He spent the 1980s working on various autobiographies, both in film (The Breast of Russ Meyer) and print ("A Clean Breast").


In 1977, Malcolm McLaren hired Meyer to direct a film starring The Sex Pistols. Meyer handed the scriptwriting duties over to Roger Ebert, who, in collaboration with McLaren, produced a screenplay entitled "Who Killed Bambi?" According to Ebert, filming ended after a day and a half when the electricians walked off the set after McLaren was unable to pay them (McLaren has claimed that the project actually died at the behest of main financier 20th Century-Fox, under the pretext that "We are in the business of making family entertainment"). Told NY Times that the first time he visited a whorehouse, as a soldier in France during WWII, he was taken there by Ernest Hemingway. His films have influenced both John Waters and John Landis. John Waters has often cited him as inspiration for his female characters. His films are often studied in film schools and shown on the cult film festival circuit. During WW2, he served with the US Army Signal Corps' 166th Photographic Unit. He landed in Normandy with the 29th Infantry Division. Some of the footage he shot can be seen in Patton (1970). A first-rate cameraman, Meyer fine-tuned his craft in the Army Signal Corps during World War II. After the War, he moved to Hollywood to try to catch on as a studio cameraman, but despite his expertise and the excellent footage he had shot during the war, he was refused a job due to the guild system. The Hollywood guilds typically were closed to outsiders unless they had gone through the apprentice system by starting at the very bottom. Told John Lydon (Johnny Rotten of the punk rock band, The Sex Pistols) during the pre-production of the ultimately aborted Sex Pistols film "Who Killed Bambi?" that the U.S. had saved Britain during World War II after Rotten had expressed his distaste for Americans. Meyer had been stationed in Britian during the War; Rotten was unimpressed.