A lot more to Hef than Playboy
http://www.montrealgazette.com/entertainment/more+than+Playboy/3392822/story.html
By JOHN GRIFFIN
August 13, 2010
He's a sinner. He's a saint. He's Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist and Rebel.
In Toronto-based Brigitte Berman's sympathetic but exhaustively
researched new documentary, the legendary Chicago publisher of
Playboy magazine is portrayed as a complex individual whose outsized
reputation as a ladies' man blurs his countless achievements as an
advocate for civil and human rights, and the First Amendment of the
U.S. Constitution.
It begins at the beginning, with Hefner as a busy guy in high school,
writing his own graphic novels and engaging in campus politics. After
college at Northwestern, he toiled on a children's magazine by day,
and imagined a men's magazine by night. Hard work has never been an
issue for the man called "Hef."
Playboy launched in 1953 with Marilyn Monroe on the cover, and never
looked back. Hefner seized the moment to position his cheesecake
monthly as a pioneer of the upcoming sexual revolution, and his
timing was right. He further buffered criticism he was offering an
impossible ideal of the American girl next door as vapid, stacked and
sexually rapacious, by offering the best writers in the country space
in his magazine.
He was blind to race and the prevailing anti-commie hysteria of the
McCarthy era, and subsequent Nixon and Reagan years. He hired
blacklisted authors, initiated the provocative Playboy Interview with
people like Miles Davis, Grace Kelly and Bob Dylan, and inflamed the
religious right and feminists alike.
As the empire grew, with Playboy key clubs, a jazz festival and
television variety shows, he welcomed racially mixed groups like
Lambert, Hendricks and Ross, and provided forums for giants like
Dizzy Gillespie, while giving stage time to up-and-coming artists.
For his pains, Hefner was arrested for obscenity, labelled a bold
pornographer by Ronald Reagan's Meese Commission, suffered a boycott
of the magazine, was put under surveillance by the FBI, and set up on
a phoney drug charge. He never lost in court.
In his defence, many people from every facet of society offer
Berman's doc face time, for good and ill. They include singers Joan
Baez and Tony Bennett, Christian Pat Boone, feminist Susan
Brownmiller, comic/ activist Dick Gregory, the Reverend Jesse
Jackson, director George Lucas, satirist Bill Maher, former
Playmateof theYearJennyMcCarthy, Kiss's Gene Simmons, sexologist Dr.
Ruth and cartoonist Gahan Wilson, who first drew for the mag in the
mid-'50s and has been contributing ever since.
Oscar-winner Berman (Artie Shaw: Time Is All You've Got) shines most
of her light on his activism, but does not shy away from the
mansions, the bunnies, the multiple simultaneous girlfriends and
shamelessly hedonistic lifestyles. Those who consider Hefner a man
who made fortunes by exploiting women in his magazine should find no
reason to change their minds after watching this fascinating,
illuminating document of America during a time of profound change.
But they should also learn he is so much more than that.
--
jgriffin@thegazette.canwest.com
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Watch 'Hefner' for the stories
By James Verniere
August 13, 2010
It's clear from Brigitte Berman's "Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist and
Rebel" that Playboy magazine founder Hugh Hefner would like to be
remembered as much for his pioneering social reform as for being the
guy who made America safe for T & A.
That would be a lot easier if he hadn't already made the current
generation know him only as that old guy in silk pajamas in a big
mansion with bleached blond, often surgically altered "girlfriends"
and his pot of Viagra.
I know Hef, 84, has a reputation to uphold among his movie-star,
musician and sports superstar friends as the superman of masculinity,
the original American "playboy" and all that.
But he also did genuinely important work challenging segregation laws
in the 1950s, integrating his Playboy nightclubs and TV shows, which
got them banned in the South, striving to bring down outmoded
"sodomy" and marijuana laws, promoting birth control and criticizing
the war in Vietnam.
Stylistically, the documentary is generic: existing footage and
talking head interviews with the addition of centerfolds and shots of
classic Playboy short stories and Forum debates.
But the list of Hef lovers is impressive: George Lucas himself
appears to say that he and Hef both made themselves famous by
dabbling in people's "fantasies."
Among the others who came - not to bury Hef, but to praise him - are
Tony Bennett, who recalls how Hef gave preeminent jazz musicians
their break, and comedian Dick Gregory, who recalls performing before
an audience of white Southern men for three hours in the days when a
black man could not speak from a nightclub stage (he could sing or
play an instrument, but not speak). Hefner, a Northwestern psychology
major turned publisher, also befriended Sammy Davis Jr. and Bill Cosby.
While the film could do with a little less of pompous airbag Gene
Simmons and more Susan Brownmiller, Hef's bete noire, who comically
keeps repeating how "clever" Hef has been (which explains why he is
still famous and she is forgotten). Also among his detractors given a
forum here are a lost-looking Pat Boone and, in archival footage,
ex-convict Charles Keating.
The film's funniest and most resonant line, however, comes from Ray
Bradbury, whose landmark novel "Fahrenheit 451" was first published
in Playboy. According to Bradbury, Hef's happiest benefactors are
"14-year-old boys everywhere."
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