Russ & Roger Go Beyond, a biopic of Russ Meyer and Roger Ebert, will explore how the pair created the X-rated Beyond the Valley of the Dolls

Fresh from telling the story of one icon of softcore pornography in Paul Raymond, Michael Winterbottom could be about to take on another: Russ Meyer, the pulpy sexploitation director whose violent, big-breasted protagonists made him an enduring cult hero.

According to Variety, Winterbottom is being lined up to direct Russ & Roger Go Beyond, a film about how Meyer hired film critic Roger Ebert to write 1970 movie Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. Will Ferrell is to play Meyer, with Josh Gad mooted for the Ebert role.

Written by Simpsons writer Christopher Cluess, the film looks at how Meyer, trying to haul himself into major studio legitimacy, hired Ebert after he’d written a rare positive review of one of Meyer’s films. A raunchy satire on the melodramatic Valley of the Dolls, it was given an X rating – prompting Meyer to try and insert even more sex and nudity into it ahead of release.

Writing 10 years later, Ebert described it as “a movie that got made by accident when the lunatics took over the asylum … 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, it 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.”

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Meyer also didn’t let on to his cast that it was meant to be comic, drawing out amusingly straight performances by directing them as if it were a drama. The pair went on to make further cult films like Beyond the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens and Up!, while Ebert went on to become America’s best-known film critic, prompting 2014’s well-received posthumous documentary Life Itself.

The ever-prolific Winterbottom meanwhile has two new films currently on release: polemical Russell Brand documentary The Emperor’s New Clothes, and Face of an Angel, a drama based on the Amanda Knox case. Ferrell can be seen in broad prison comedy Get Hard, and, following the hit 2010 comedy The Other Guys, will again co-star with Mark Wahlberg in Daddy’s Home later this year.