Anthony James Ryan

Russ Meyer's right-hand man

In Russ Meyer's 1961 nudie-cutie Eve and the Handyman, Anthony James Ryan played the bespectacled, cap-wearing, poker-faced handyman spied on and eventually cornered by the statuesque Eve Meyer, the second wife of the cult director, who opens her trench-coat supposedly to flash the target of her attentions. While the leading lady's voice-over narration was straight out of the Mae West school of double entendres, Ryan didn't utter a single line, even when playing a nonsensical game of tennis in a scene reminiscent of Jacques Tati's Monsieur Hulot's Holiday.

Ryan met Russ Meyer in August 1943 at a training session for combat photographers which took place at RKO film studios in Los Angeles. Subsequently, they both joined the 166th Signal Photographic Company which documented the advances of General Omar Bradley's First Army and General George S. Patton's Third Army across northern France and into Germany in 1945. After demob, several members of the company like Ken Parker and Fred Owens remained associates of the director, with William Ellis "Bill" Teas going on to play the lead in The Immoral Mr Teas which started off Meyer's career as a sexploiter extraordinaire in 1959.

As well as playing the male lead in Eve and the Handyman, Ryan also appeared in the self-explanatory Wild Gals of the Naked West (1962) and Finders Keepers, Lovers Weepers! (1968), a film set in a topless go-go bar. He became Meyer's de facto right-hand man, helping the breast-obsessed director write and produce Vixen! (1968), Cherry, Harry & Raquel (1970), Black Snake (1973), Supervixens (1975) and Up! (1976), which have become cult classics and are now available on DVD.

Anthony James Ryan (variously billed also as Anthony-James Ryan, A. James Ryan and Jim Ryan) refused to state his age when asked by interviewers but was born in 1921. He spoke several languages, had done secret service work for the US government and could certainly handle himself in any tricky situation. In the 1950s, he ran a commercial photographic studio in Los Angeles and gladly accepted the $400 a week his old army buddy Meyer offered him to co-star in Eve and the Handyman.

Shot in and around San Francisco over a month in 1960, Eve and the Handyman is the only picture to feature Eve Meyer. Interviewed by Jimmy McDonough for Big Bosoms and Square Jaws, the exhaustive 2005 biography of Meyer, Ryan recalled:

Eve typed the script, it wasn't even a script, just a list of ideas. That's all we had to work with. I improvised some of the stuff.

As Russ Meyer's lieutenant, the soft-spoken, dependable Ryan wrote, produced, shot second-unit footage and smoothed things over when the director fell out with his well-endowed starlets - or crossed the authorities when shooting on location, yet again, without a permit. "Meyer's problems were interesting," said Ryan:

His whole life was controversy. Meyer loved all that hullabaloo: women fighting, people screaming, cops and red lights flashing, neighbours complaining. He provoked people into something occurring.

For his part, Ryan, who met his future wife, Jacqueline Stevens, while shooting Eve and the Handyman (she played a nude model), seemed content to have everyone's confidence but didn't take any liberties with the female talent. "For some reason they'd come talk to me rather than Meyer. I listened to them - and he didn't!" he admitted.

Ryan foolishly invested his own money in Meyer projects such as Black Snake, a violent film about slavery shot in Barbados in 1972 and starring the English starlet Anoushka Hempel and a pre-Darth Vader Dave Prowse. "I thought we had a winner. I put a lot of money into it. Lost it. It hurt me. It hurt Meyer, but he had the funding to withstand it. I didn't," said Ryan, who nearly lost his house in the process as the film bombed.

Still, he hung in there and contributed to Supervixens. "I wrote the dialogue. I just copied what Edy would have said. Supervixens was almost all Edy Williams," explained Ryan about the plot, which mirrored the marriage difficulties Russ Meyer and his third wife were experiencing. "The divorce was very unfriendly. Edy had two or three high-powered attorneys there, Meyer had two. It was an expensive thing. I think he had a $100,000 bill," remembered Ryan, who testified in court that Edy Williams had threatened to shoot the director during a phone call to him.

In the autumn of 1977, Ryan also came to London to assist Meyer on the Sex Pistols film Who Killed Bambi? but the project foundered after a few days, with the manager Malcolm McLaren blaming 20th Century-Fox. (The young British director Julien Temple took over the film and turned it into The Great Rock'n'Roll Swindle while Meyer and Ryan returned to the United States.)

Ryan kept in with his old friend, helping him through the tumultuous relationships he had with Kitten Natividad and Melissa Mounds and various attempts to edit the sprawling anthology film The Breast of Russ Meyer. When the director's health and mental state deteriorated at the end of the Nineties, Jim Ryan was one of the trustees appointed to oversee his affairs. He also had a sick wife to look after and just managed to keep his photographic business, simply called Modern Photo, going.

"The day after I die, Ryan will go out and buy a Cadillac," said Russ Meyer. Meyer died in 2004, but there were few signs of a large inheritance.

Pierre Perrone