She played a prominent role in one of the classic exploitation films of the 1970s. Then she basically disappeared from the movie business . . .

played Junkyard Sal in Russ Meyer’s Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens. Meyer was known for campy exploitation films in the 1960s and ’70s, like Up! and Supervixens, which featured lots of big-breasted women. Most are rated X and are considered to be adult films. 1979’s Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens features a young man named Lamar Shedd, who is desirable to the ladies but there’s a problem: he only really wants anal sex. June Mack’s character is the proprietor of the junkyard where Lamar works. Full-figured and half-dressed, her dark skin contrasts sharply with her striped overalls or her pink nightie. The assertive Junkyard Sal is more interested in having Lamar in her little shack of an office than she is in having him work among the scrap metal. The scene in which she gets Lamar into her bed is a mix of silly overacting and soft-core porn, with Sal manhandling Lamar as he tries to survive the experience.

June Mack led a short, unconventional life. She was born in 1955 in Louisiana and was murdered in Los Angeles in 1984. She would have been in her mid-20s when Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens was released and just shy of age 30 when she was killed. One internet source provides a lengthy accounting of the incident when she was shot to death, with facts about her life sprinkled in. It explains that she primarily made her living as a prostitute or madam and from phone sex, though she had appeared in some pornographic movies.

Other posthumous sources, two episodes of The Rialto Report podcast from December 2021 and January 2022, also give insight into her life and her death. The podcast is devoted to stories from the film industry, so that is the main focus. After some noir-ish introductory material in one of the two episodes, we get this:

June Mack was June Cassandra Mincher. Born in Louisiana in January 1955. Eighth child in a family of dirt-poor, hardscrabble, ex-sharecroppers. Food was always in short supply. Love and affection were non-existent. June grew up ignored and forgotten. She retreated to a fantasy world. Took refuge in TV re-runs of old movies. Harlow. Lombard. Monroe. Vampy, trampy blondes. Women with smooth skin and pointed noses. A southern black girl didn’t have the luxury of idols that looked like her.

Then June hit puberty. She got curves, got noticed, and got options. Suddenly life happened. No more hopping tables at the local Hi-D-Ho. She got attention and exploited it. She parlayed it into cash the most old-fashioned way. She took control on the vinyl tuck and roll, pleasing the light-skinned boys she barely even knowed. Her new found power bought a one-way greyhound ticket out of the south.

However, it wasn’t as simple as her being just a Southern girl come to the big city. In a 1980 article in Film Comment magazine about working with Russ Meyer, film critic Roger Ebert – who actually wrote Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens – had this to say: “The black girl we used, June Mack, spoke without any trace of an accent, so we hired a girl who had formerly come from Mississippi to dub her voice.” She had left everything, even her accent, behind. In LA, June Mincher became June Mack, a sex worker who drove a lavender-colored Rolls Royce and carried around thousands of dollars hidden in her wig.

The narrator of The Rialto Report calls June Mack a “footnote,” which is probably a fair assessment of her place in film history. But her story is a complicated one: born in the Deep South the same year as Emmett Till’s murder and Rosa Parks’s arrest, grew up poor in a big family, used the little that she had to her advantage, left the post-Civil Rights South for the West Coast, and played one memorable character in one cult-classic film. Then she was killed, possibly by a bullet that was meant for someone else, in a situation that is still not clear to this day.

June Mack would have turned 70 earlier this year.