5 Feet of Fury

‘Try doing that with Steven Spielberg…’

From the comments at my PJM article about the Roger Ebert/Russ Meyer biopic:

True story – Some years ago a friend and I were watching a Russ Meyer flick on VCR. I can’t remember which one and the fact that we were drinking heavily may have had something to do with it.

One of us got the bright idea of actually calling Russ Meyer and telling him what a great guy we thought he was. (Did I mention that I was drunk?)

We called the phone number on the VCR jacket for Meyer’s production company in San Diego. To our amazement Russ himself answered.

Turned out that he was running his operation out of his home at this time.

We described ourselves as fans of his ourve and he was sort of gruff but ultimately couldn’t have been nicer. (I think he had been drinking too.)

He patiently answered questions from two drunken idiots for about fifteen minutes and told us were we could more easily purchase Russ Meyer products.