THE CHAT ROOM

Just over the ridge at Russ Meyer’s Hollywood Hills home lies the largest pornography-region in the wold, locus of director Paul Thomas Anderson’s extravagantly hyped new movie “Boogie Nights,” about life amid the San Fernando Valley porn industry in the late ‘70s. Missing from the film, however, is Meyer himself--L.A.’s grand auteur of ‘70s sexploitation, director of what Time critic Richard Corliss called “bosomacious melodramas” like “Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!” and “Beneath the Valley of the Ultravixens.” Now, with his films taught as art in college classrooms, the industry’s Rubens has written a three-volume, 2,000-page autobiography.

A: I don’t know--soon. I’m selling it by mail order only, $5,000 a copy.

Q: That sounds a little steep.

A: Listen, I’ve got people lining up to buy it right now. I think there’s even potential for a movie.

Q: Are you thinking about a soft-core production?

A: I don’t like the term “soft core”--soft is mushy. I never made soft-core films.

Q: So how do you describe your movies?

A: Big bosoms and square jaws--the jaws were the men, of course.

Q: Speaking of bosoms, can you remember the first you set eyes on?

A: Yes. It was just outside Paris in World War II. I was a 20-year-old cameraman working with a crew, and we ran into Ernest Hemingway one night. He felt so bad for us, he opened up a whole whorehouse for the night. Before that, I was a virgin.

Q: What do you think your influence has been on the porn industry.?

A: I don’t know and I don’t care. I know how to provoke people--all this other stuff, no one wants it. What people want is a Melissa Mounds. Or a Pandora Peaks. Or a Letha Weapons. The way Meyer does it.

Q: Any regrets?

A: I once traveled through Germany, hotel to hotel, filming a Hungarian woman named Tundi. Spectacular breasts. That movie was “Europe in the Raw.” Afterward, Tundi invited me home to Hungary for Christmas, and I should have gone. You pass up something like that, it never comes around again.