The CAMA Mystery Backstory

It starts in the mid-sixties at a Hollywood insider’s party at Bohemian Grove. Four Great Men—Gerry Anderson, Irwin Allen, Russ Meyer, and Roger Corman—get into a heated argument with Gloria Steinem about exploitation films featuring female leads.

Were they empowering or objectifying?

The four men say empowering. Steinem says objectifying. Finally, frustrated by their refusal to grasp feminism, she storms off with Jane Fonda and Warren Beatty. The Great Men stay behind and talk all night. (They may or may not have dropped acid—an experimental LSD isomer, not 25 but 69—courtesy of Timothy Leary.)

In a collective creative frenzy, they brainstorm loglines, show ideas, and pitches. But by morning, they abandon it all. Too risky, too weird, too hard to sell.

Why? Because every show starred women. The leads, the experts, the commanders. Men were assistants, secretaries, love interests. Pretty feminist, right?

But the women? They were all classic Russ Meyer beauties in outrageous sci-fi costumes. Just like Star Trek miniskirts, UFO's Moon Girls purple wigs and silver jumpsuits, and Diana Rigg’s Avenger’s cat suits. CAMA was going to be empowering and objectifying. Maybe one was the Trojan horse for the other. Who can say? It all feels firmly morally gray to me.

Russ’s Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! was arguably the genre’s first film. That’s one reason he’s one of the Four Great Men behind the story.

But… “It just won’t sell,” Corman said, in the cold clear light of day, when everyone was sober.

And that was that.

Enter their assistants: Rusty Mayer, Allan Irwinn, Andy Gerrison, and Rupert Coremen (with an e, not an a). These four had definitely done the weird LSD 69. They’d been sitting in the darkened room, listening to the debate between Steinum, Fonda and the great Men, quietly taking notes all night long.

(Fun fact: Allen Goldman had changed his name to Allan Irwinn just to get close to Irwin Allen… and it worked.)

CAMA was going to be short for Coreman, Allen, Meyer, Anderson—but the assistants adopted it even though it no longer quite fit. Irwinn’s inverted name wrecks the acronym (it should be CIMA).

Using it anyway was, as it turned out, a very CAMA thing to do.

Leary loved the whole idea of thing. Upset the Great Men weren’t going to pursue the female lead projects, he dragged Rusty Mayer through a secret passage, into a hidden room, where a somber looking, long-finger-nailed man sat with Kleenex boxes on his feet.

It was Howard Hughes.

With great difficulty—thanks to those three-inch fingernails—Hughes wrote Mayer a check for $20 million. Memo line: “To make sexy sci-fi movies.”

And so, footloose and fancy free (and incredibly well funded) the Not-So-Fabulous Four were ready to (try to) make history. For seven years, they cranked out weird, brilliant, female-led genre shows and B-movies that played briefly in drive-ins and art house cinemas, (most of which soon pivoted to porn).

The CAMA story ends in the bankruptcy of the four directors for a variety of blunders; all the completed work is lost or destroyed in a series of freak accidents and targeted legal actions.

All that remains are clips here and there, fragments of bootlegs, production notes and recollections.

Still reading?

Okay. That was all made up. I wrote the texts; AI helped me make the images.

These aren't photographs. There are no individual human models involved in the making of these images.

None of these images reproduce copyrighted photographs or illustrations; no image search reveals a match for any of these images, because while I have used AI to assist in their creation, there are no raw AI images in this book.

I begin with a customized Stable Diffusion model, (SDXL2 based) a checkpoint merge of several models and my own artwork. I generate a thousand images at a whack on my own computer using open source Stable Diffusion software.

Then the hard part, which is curation, finding the good ones, the one out of a hundred worth working on longer.

This is half of what you are paying for.

The other half is the laborious Photoshop repainting and recoloring, (repainting oh so many hands!) compositing, correcting anatomy through judicious liquefaction and obsessive noodling, and a lot of adjustments, small and large. Puppet warp. Background replacement. In-painting with Adobe’s image generation to remove stupid AI crap, repair eyes, fingernails, background elements.

I work on their expressions until the images come alive, spending a lot of time on the eyes. The raw AI images never work for me until I tweak them.

No copyrighted franchise characters, or living artist prompts were used in the making of these images.

They represent a collective effort, the prompts, (a tiny part really) the artists work in the models, and the curation design and montage and retouching on top of that.

At this point, I’m deep in the hole on this project. I’ve made almost nothing.

It’s a labor of love, which I hope you share with me.