Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist, Rebel (Tuesday, August 3, 2010) (91)

The most insightful moment in the bio-doc Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist, Rebel is near the end when Dr. Ruth Westheimer says that Hef has hurt his reputation as an activist and rebel by dating multiple women at the same time. He has become a caricature of what he once advocated and is now much more known for being a target of parparazzi flashes than any sort of force for social change. This disconnect between what he apparently once was and what he is today is the unexamined subtext of this film - a subtext that is really more interesting than the surface of the film.


Director Brigitte Berman shows us how Hefner got where he is now, with the history of the Playboy magazine and all the social causes it (Hef) championed over the years. From civil rights to anti-Vietnam, to obscenity and freedom of speech, to gay rights and women's rights, Hefner was on the forefront of the most of the major social issues of the second half of the 20th century. At least that's what his supporters and he says about him.


Most of the film is interviews with people who are friends or past collaborators with Hef. Some are former models or girlfriends, some are business people and some are old friends from his long-ago Chicago days. They all agree that Hef is a pretty fantastic guy all around.


Berman does have a few detractors on screen, but they are all people with "agendas", so they're easy to ignore. She has arch-Christian singer Pat Boone on talking about how the magazine traffics in sleaze and also how it has become not as interesting or cutting-edge as it once was (this second point is true - so why does the dismissible freak get this line and not someone more trustworthy?). Berman also has on Susan Brownmiller, a feminist writer, talking about the objectification of women as a counter point to Hef's claim that he is a feminist who has done more to help women gain control of their sexuality than anyone else on earth (an interesting, if unconvincing opinion). The big problem is that Brownmiller is a long-time foe of Hef and they once had a big on-air fight on the Dick Cavett show in the 1970s.


Basically other than these two, the whole film is totally laudatory. Nobody asks what to me is the most important question, which is what the hell happened to the magazine in the 1980s to turn it from an interesting magazine with top-notch writers and a sharp social compass (that also featured naked women) to the current trashy porno mag that has very little in the reading department. Yes, Alex Haley, Norman Mailer, Ray Bradbury and Kurt Vonnegut once wrote for Playboy, but nobody close to them has anything to do with the magazine anymore. At one point Hef suggests that obscenity cases and Jerry Falwell in the 1980s hurt the perception of the magazine, but this is ultimately unconvincing as it's been a long time since then and the magazine is still dull.


My biggest objection is that the film is way too long, running more than two hours. At most this should be a 90-minute movie, spending just a few minutes on each era and coming off as more than just a laundry list of achievements and anecdotes. There is no question that Hef is an important guy who was on the right side and out in front of all of these important issues, but most of the stories in the film I knew from other sources.


I know well that Hef drove to the West Side of Chicago to buy the Marilyn Monroe picture that was on the cover of the first issue; I know that he helped Lenny Bruce out of jail when he was arrested during a stand-up act in Chicago; I know that the Los Angeles Playboy Mansion is a fuckfest and a destination for celebrities. None of this is interesting. I would rather have had more cutting analysis of Hef, like what Dr. Ruth gave 110 minutes into the film.


Stars: 1 of 4