In appropriate CinemaScope exaggeration, Russ Meyer baits, borrows and reworks sixties popular culture. Part Playboy centerfold, part headline news (the Manson murders), part potboiler (Jaqueline Susann's novel), all are collaged into a quest for the ultimate in popular culture, a pop art Hollywood of larger-than-life proportions. Screenwriter Roger Ebert noted, "We were not much concerned with Miss Susann's original novel or film. Neither of us (Ebert or Meyer) ever read the novel, although I attempted to at one time. We did screen Mark Robson's film version of Valley of the Dolls before starting work, and this gave us the notion of making BVD as a parody. We would take the basic situation (three young and talented girls come to Hollywood, find love and success, and then are brought low by booze, drugs and pride), and attempt to exaggerate it wildly. We would include some of the sensational elements of the original story-homosexuality, crippling diseases, characters based on 'real' people, events out of recent headlines-but, again, with flat-out exaggeration. I originally saw the movie as total parody. Meyer, with his characteristic unwillingness to stop at the merely total, saw it as a total parody, and a total sex-and-violence trip..."