In 1979 Russ Meyer was traveling around with Beneath The Valley of the UltraVixen trying to drum up publicity. At a lunch where other critics were talking to him about breasts -large breasts and larger breasts – Ed Lowry and I were asking question about his brilliant independent, remarkable editing and narrative ambitions – before […]

 Summer 1998: I first met Jonathan Demme in 1976 at a drive-in movie theater in South Austin, Texas sitting in a car watching Caged Heat, his directorial debut. A women-in-prison exploitation film, I was really unfamiliar with that genre, but the experience was revelatory and profoundly life changing. Four decades later, I found myself again […]