Russ Meyer, who died Saturday of pneumonia at his Hollywood home, was a self-described “lust-crazed filmman” who pioneered the cinematic genre that came to be called “sexploitation.”

He is remembered for such camp classics as “Vixen!” “Supervixens!” and “Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!” Director John Waters called the latter “beyond doubt, the best movie ever made… possibly better than any film that will ever be made in the future.”

Fixated on the pneumatic female form, Meyer was “the most famous breast man of his generation, maybe of any generation,” according to the film critic Roger Ebert, who co-wrote “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.”

“All my girls have a couple of things in common,” Meyer told the Wall Street Journal, and he once told Mr. Ebert that “there was no such thing as a sex scene that couldn’t be improved by cutaways to Demolition Derby or rocket launches.”

Although his films began as trashy attempts to make a quick buck off what he called “the pant-and-drool crowd,” they were eventually embraced by the art-film establishment, collected by museums, and continue to be revived on college campuses throughout the nation. In truth, they were skillfully filmed. Most of them play at least as well, if not better, with the sound turned off, squelching their inane dialog and plotlines.

Meyer was born in Oakland, Calif., the son of a nurse and a policeman, and by his early teens was making amateur films. While attending junior college, he saw an ad offering the chance to be come an Army Signal Corps newsreel photographer, and ended up being stationed in Europe during World War II. He claimed the action he witnessed on the front had a formative effect on his personality, not least the awakening of the senses he received when Ernest Hemingway sponsored him for a night in a French bordello.

After the war, Meyer shot short industrial films and adopted the lean, do-it-yourself approach to filmmaking that he would use throughout his career.

He also worked as a photographer, and an early association with Hugh Hefner led to Meyer photographing half the centerfolds for the first year of “Playboy.” He later married one of the centerfold models, Eve Taylor, Miss June of 1955.

In 1959, Meyer shot what is generally conceded to be the first “nudie” film with a plot, as opposed to the documentary-style footage of nudists that was then common. “The Immoral Mr. Teas” concerned a man who awakes from a botched dental procedure with X-ray vision. The film was wildly popular, earning more than $1 million on its $24,000 production cost, and played for more than a year at some of its first engagements.

Meyer’s second film, “Eve and the Handyman” (1961), starred his wife as a trench coat-wearing detective shadowing a plumber through various titillating adventures. She would be listed as a producer on most of the rest of Meyer’s films, although the two were amicably divorced in 1970.

Meyer worked in a Spartan style that minimized a film’s costs. His crews were tiny and actors often pitched in with production work. He never used established stars, and scripts were minimal. The typical Meyer film of the 1960s was shot in a couple of weeks for less than $100,000. Meyer oversaw every aspect of the film, from the writing and the cinematography (probably his greatest legacy in terms of film artistry), through editing and even distribution. If a theater owner wanted to book a Meyer film, he called Meyer. Perhaps predictably for a fetishistic auteur, he forbade sex during filming.

He told the Wall Street Journal that his goal was to “get the audience whipped up, so they’ll walk out of that theater saying, ‘Good God, did you see that?'” In another interview he said, “My films are like a reptile you beat with a club. You think you’ve killed it, but then you turn around and it gets you in the ankle.”

Following “Eve and the Handyman,” Meyer directed an erotic anthology called “Eroticon,” and followed this with “Heavenly Bodies” (1963) and “Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!”(1965). Although it did poorly in theaters at the time, “Faster, Pussycat!” has been Meyer’s most-revived film.

When his 1969 film “Vixen!” earned $6 million on a $76,000 investment, studios finally began paying attention, and Meyer was signed by 20th Century Fox. His first film for the studio, “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls,” was “by far the most important film I ever made,” he told the Toronto Star in 1995. “Roger [Ebert] and I embrace that one to our bosoms, or co-bosoms.” It was a smashing commercial success, but when the follow-up for Fox, “The Seven Minutes” (1971), failed to score, the studio dropped Meyer. He never worked for a studio again.

Meyer continued to make “softcore” self-parodying sex romps for drive-ins through the 1970s – “The Jesus Trip,” “Blacksnake,” “Supervixens!” and “Up!” The latter had a plot so complicated that it featured a one-woman nude Greek chorus who popped up from time to time to explain what was going on. Meyer’s final film, also co written with Mr. Ebert, was “Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens” (1979), and it did poorly at the box office. Drive-ins were closing, and videos provided the “slack-jawed trade” with far more graphic entertainment than Meyer as willing to make. “As soon as the porno people came in,” he told Entertainment Weekly in 1996, “I couldn’t find a place to play.”

Meyer continued to run his RM Films International out of his home, and enthusiastically attended the frequent film festival and museum showings of his work. He attended reunions of his casts and crews, and also reunions of his Signal Corps buddies. He wrote a lavishly illustrated three-volume autobiography titled “A Clean Breast” that he sold over the Internet for $350. In advertising materials he wrote, “Thrill to the lust-crazed film man’s erotic meanderings as he recounts for you his monumental couplings with the most oversized and desirable women ever.”

And where did Meyer find them? “After they reach a certain bra size, they find me,” he told Mr. Ebert. But he disapproved of implants: “They miss the whole point.”

He was satisfied that his work had played a part in loosening America’s morals. “The public is conditioned to permissiveness,” he said in 1969. “It won’t stand for going back to Cary Grant and sneaky sex.”