"Come on, man. I doubt if you'd recognize a hippie. I'm a capitalist, baby. I work for my living, not suck off somebody else."

One of my favorite late night television watching is Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. Sometimes, the Fox Movie Channel will play it over and over again and I can watch the last half-hour, then the whole thing, and fall asleep some time during the third viewing. Ahhhh. Heaven.



You can see why it would be so addicting, yes?

Roger Ebert, who wrote the screenplay, has this to say about the film:

Remembered after 10 years, "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls" seemsmore and more like a movie that got made by accident when the lunatics tookover the asylum. At the time Russ Meyer and I were working on "BVD" I didn't really understand how unusual the project was. But in hindsight I can recognize that the conditions of its making were almost miraculous. 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 (or even cognizance) from the Front Office.

We wrote the screenplay in six weeks flat, laughing maniacally from time to time, and then the movie was made. Whatever its faults or virtues, "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls" is an original -- 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.

A cult favorite, yes. It combines sex, drugs, 'rock music,' humor, violence, sex and also explores some pretty nifty social issues. Like should you trust the lesbian who wants you to give you advice on keeping or aborting your baby?



Did I mention it has sex?



Since I'm a huge fan of the flick, you know I'm diggin' these tarot cards by Howard Hallis.




I just wish they were larger and made into PDFs or something I could print. Better yet, sell me a nice glossy set in a box (with your signature, of course!).






How am I supposed to live my life -- understand it -- without these cards?!

To paraphrase the movie dialog, "Howard, you've made me a whore -- and I dig it, you little freak!"