WWW- Forget Hugh Hefner. Or even Dr. Kinsey.

Ask any male boomer who helped him survive the sexually repressed 1950s and early ’60s and that would be Russ Meyer, also known fondly as King Leer.

A Second World War combat photographer — he followed Gen. Patton’s Third Army — Meyer returned stateside after the war and launched his career as a cheesecake photographer.

Over the ensuing years, he shot alluring pin-ups of some of the most famous strippers, actresses and models, including Lili St. Cyr, Mamie Van Doren, Jill St. John, Sabrina, Joi Lansing, Jayne Mansfield, Anita Ekberg, Kitten Natividad and June Wilkinson.

But one of his favourites was his own wife. Eve Meyer was a blond, Marilyn Monroe-lookalike who later became a partner in his company Eve Productions.

A strangely, gruff man with his buzz cut and brush-like moustache, Meyer had an outright passion for large bosoms… the bigger the better.

He soon developed a reputation as a true artist but one who was very difficult to work with.

While his talent for sexy photography was unparalleled, it was when he turned to motion pictures that he really made his name and fortune with now-legendary ’60s flicks as The Immoral Mr. Teas, Cherry, Harry and Raquel, Vixen and the unforgettable Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (Most of his movie titles carried exclamation marks.)

Despite an undeniable talent for camera work and editing, his naughty pictures were cheesy and their appeal stemmed from a strange combination of big-busted beauties, rock-jawed men and a perverse sense of morality.

As his biographer put it, RM approached filmmaking the way Buick once did cars: “fatter curves, crazier fins, bigger headlights, more, more, more.”

Ironically, Meyer — a Communist-hating right-winger — loathed hard-core porn when it arrived on the scene in the 1970s. He preferred to sell the sizzle, not the whole filet mignon.

In his own way, though, Russ Meyer was a pioneer who left a legacy that goes far beyond a dozen or so sexploitation flicks and an ambiguous moral code.

It was Meyer, along with Hustler creator Larry Flynt and a few others, who were on the front lines fighting for a liberated cinema, something the big Hollywood studios take for granted today.

Author McDonough paints a fascinating portrait of an all-American male who nevertheless was saddled with some eccentric emotional issues and whose mental decline in his later years was accompanied by tragic exploitation Howard Hughes-style by those who surrounded him and claimed to be protecting him.