Roger Ebert’s only screenplay was for a 1970 cult classic: “When the lunatics took over the asylum”
Roger Ebert was not an easy man to impress, and if you made a movie he didn’t like, you faced the threat of his verbal wrath. Of course, that’s what makes a good movie critic – someone who is brutally honest about whether a film is actually worth your time or not.
Sure, sometimes Ebert could be a bit crass, but his conversational style – as though you’d sat down at the pub with him after going to the cinema – was what made him so popular. He didn’t take a super high-brow approach to writing; instead, he took a personal strategy, and this made him much more trustworthy.
Thus, it comes as a shock to many to discover that Ebert actually penned a screenplay himself back in 1970, and not just for any movie, but a bizarre, campy standalone sequel to The Valley of the Dolls. The film was directed by exploitation king Russ Meyer, who’d also made movies like Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! and Vixen!, so it seemed an unlikely endeavour for this rising film journalist to take on.
Beyond the Valley of the Dolls seemed like something you’d expect Ebert to slate (it’s quite ridiculous), and he could later admit that it was a strange project. Reflecting on the project a decade on for Film Comment, the writer said, “Remembered after 10 years, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls seems more and more like a movie that got made by accident when the lunatics took over the asylum.”
Made on a bit of a whim, Ebert acknowledged that the fact the movie got made was “miraculous.” He explained, “An independent X-rated filmmaker and an inexperienced screenwriter were brought into a major studio and given carte blanche to turn out a satire of one of the studio’s own hits. And BVC was made at a time when the studio’s own fortunes were so low that the movie was seen almost fatalistically, as a gamble that none of the studio executives really wanted to think about, so that there was a minimum of supervision.”
Given free rein to do whatever they liked, Ebert and Meyer crafted a satirical look at “Hollywood conventions”, and perhaps only someone as knowledgeable of cinema as Ebert was right for the job. He believed the film to be an “original,” even if “heavily overlaid with such shocking violence,” the film left many viewers confused. “Some critics didn’t know whether the movie ‘knew’ it was a comedy.”
Ebert created the fictional band the Carrie Nations for the film, with a mysterious man named Z-Man becoming their manager. There’s a big twist later on involving Z-Man that’s too good for me to spoil here, but Beyond the Valley of the Dolls really is a wild ride, featuring everything from lesbian affairs to domestic violence and, ultimately, lots of murder – all wrapped up in campy humour and the kind of outfits you can only dream of. It might sound like a thematic and tonal mess, but it does work, strangely enough.
Not every critic was convinced when it was released, though, and many slated it. Now, people seem to understand what Meyer and Ebert were going for all along. However, “The movie’s story was made up as we went along, which makes subsequent analysis a little tricky,” Ebert admitted, which makes the big Z-Man reveal even more oddly hilarious.
“I think of it as an essay on our generic expectations. It’s an anthology of stock situations, characters, dialogue, clichés and stereotypes, set to music and manipulated to work as exposition and satire at the same time; it’s cause and effect, a wind-up machine to generate emotions, pure movie without message,” he concluded.
