Beyond the Valley of the Dolls

Russ Meyer and Roger Ebert’s manic, hysterical assault on American celebrity culture has risen to the status of a modern classic, but in its time it was a true oddity: an X-rated, tonally berserk black comedy commissioned when a major studio decided to fund a parody of one of its own films. In this sequel to Mark Robson’s much saner Valley of the Dolls, three young women form a rock band, travel cross country, and—as their star rises—descend into a frenzy of drug use, violence, and love affairs of every kind under the influence of a gender-ambiguous Svengali. With its deadpan, taboo-bending humor and its interest in bodily breakdown, BVD (as it’s known to its many fans) is a clear antecedent to Haynes’s three films about the perils and ecstasies of fame.