FAQ

"Why did you write a dirty, violent movie?" I finally asked [Roger Ebert].

"It was written as a parody of dirty, violent movies," he said.

"Did the producer and director know that?"

Although I am not a movie critic, I think I have figured out what went wrong, how so talented a writer and so decent a young man could be involved in that dog.

Ebert's problem is that he is not a dirty old man. If a dirty movie is going to be any good, it has to be written by a dirty old man. You wouldn't let an ROTC student write a war movie, or a Republican write a book about Chicago politics. From: his July 10 1970 newspaper column, collected in: Mike Royko, "Like I Was Sayin'," NY, 1984

The short answer is, nothing.

Originally conceived as a sequel with the involvement of Jacqueline Susann, the project eventually became 20th Century Fox's attempt to tap into the growing market for "counterculture" films such as "Easy Rider". Susann left the project after her attempts at a script were rejected, and Fox hired Russ Meyer to write and direct, with Roger Ebert sharing screenplay duties. The characters of "Aunt Susan" and her beau were originally conceived as Anne Welles and Lyon Burke, which would have carried over two characters from the original, but after Susann objected to the film being presented as a sequel to her original work, the connection was dropped entirely, with the film even marketed with the tagline "This is not a sequel, there has never been anything like it."

In fact, the disclaimer that appears on screen just before the opening credits reads as so, as a legality to the situation listed above:

"The film you are about to see is not a sequel to "Valley of the Dolls". It is wholly original and bears no relationship to real persons, living or dead. It does, like "Valley of the Dolls" deal with the oft-times nightmare world of show business but in a different time and context."