Beyond The Valley of The Dolls - Production

Production

Beyond the Valley of the Dolls was originally intended as a straightforward sequel to the 1967 film Valley of the Dolls. Jacqueline Susann, author of the novel Valley of the Dolls, had been asked to write a screenplay but declined. Susann herself had come up with the title while she was writing her second novel The Love Machine. 20th Century Fox rejected two screenplay drafts, and the final version, written by director Russ Meyer and novice screenwriter Roger Ebert in six weeks, was not only a spoof of the original film, but, in Ebert's words "a satire of Hollywood conventions, genres, situations, dialogue, characters and success formulas, heavily overlaid with such shocking violence that some critics didn't know whether the movie 'knew' it was a comedy." Meyer's intention was for the film to "simultaneously be a satire, a serious melodrama, a rock musical, a comedy, a violent exploitation picture, a skin flick and a moralistic expose (so soon after the Sharon Tate murders) of what the opening crawl called 'the oft-times nightmarish world of Show Business.'"

As a result, the studio placed a disclaimer at the beginning of the film informing the audience that the two films were not intended to be connected. Posters for the movie read, "This is not a sequel — there has never been anything like it".

Upon its initial release, the film was given an X rating by the MPAA; in 1990, it was re-classified as NC-17. Meyer's response to the original X rating was to attempt to re-edit the film to insert more nudity and sex, but Fox wanted to get the movie released quickly and wouldn't give him the time.

Beyond the Valley of the Dolls – sometimes referred to as BVD – is the first of two films produced by independent filmmaker Meyer for 20th Century Fox – it was followed by The Seven Minutes, although Meyer's original deal was for three films – and one of three movies that film critic Ebert co-wrote with Meyer. Ebert has said that Beyond the Valley of the Dolls seemed "like a movie that got made by accident when the lunatics took over the asylum."

Because the film was put together so quickly, some plot decisions, such as the character Z-Man being revealed as a transvestite woman, were made on the spot, without the chance to bring previous already-shot scenes into alignment with the new development. As they were shooting, the cast was uncertain whether the dialogue was intended to be comic or not, which would alter their approach to acting it. Because Meyer always discussed their roles and the film so seriously, they did not want to unintentionally insult him by asking, so they broached the question to Ebert instead. Meyer's intention was to have the actors perform the material in a straightforward manner, saying "If the actors perform as if they know they have funny lines, it won't work." Ebert describes the resulting tone as "curious".

In 1980, Ebert looked back on the film and said of it:

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.

Beyond the Valley of the Dolls was made while Fox was being sued by Jacqueline Susann, according to Irving Mansfield's memoir Jackie and Me. The suit did not come to trial until after the death of Jacqueline Susann, and her estate won a $2 million verdict against the studio.