Hefner doc goes behind the myth
http://www.torontosun.com/entertainment/movies/2010/08/05/14935901.html
By LIZ BRAUN
August 6, 2010
Long before he began appearing in public with a crowd of bimbos like
some sort of geriatric filling in a pneumatic blond sandwich, Hugh
Hefner was doing his best to change American life for the better.
The founder of Playboy magazine goes under the microscope in Hugh
Hefner: Playboy, Activist and Rebel, a marvelous documentary about
the guy all other men are said to envy. (Well, all other men except
'50s cultural icon Pat Boone, who calls Hefner a pornographer in the film.)
During the 1960s, Hefner was almost as well known for his efforts on
behalf of racial equality, peace and even women's rights as he was
for naughty pictures; he was busy hiring black comics and blacklisted
writers when few others would.
Meticulously researched, beautifully edited and dense with historical
detail, Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist and Rebel is both a biopic and
a history lesson that's bound to surprise many viewers.
As luck would have it, Hefner himself is an obsessive record-keeper
and scrapbook organizer, and Oscar-winning filmmaker Brigitte Berman
had total access to the man's archives. Berman includes dozens of
interviews with Hefner's friends and colleagues, and that's a crowd
that includes James Caan, Gene Simmons, Dick Cavett, Dick Gregory,
Tony Bennett, feminist Susan Brownmiller, Jenny McCarthy, Shannon
Tweed, Ray Bradbury, Gahan Wilson, Mike Wallace, Tony Curtis, Jim
Brown, Jesse Jackson, Joan Baez and various members of Hefner's
family. And that's just for starters.
Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist and Rebel, starts with Hefner's
childhood influences, zooms through high school and his first
marriage, and lets Hefner explain his thinking about moving out of a
repressive era in America and into healthier attitudes toward sex
with Playboy's help.
The film does a good job of explaining the enormous social changes in
the 1960s; as a student at Northwestern, Hefner wrote a paper about
the sex laws in 48 states which, if enforced, would put most
Americans behind bars. His interest in changing America's unhealthy
puritanical outlook and his work in publishing came together when he
founded Playboy magazine, a publication that combined the famed
centrefold with work by such writers as Bradbury, John Updike, Ian
Fleming, Irwin Shaw and dozens of others.
The Playboy brand was born there were the nightclubs, the TV show,
the Playboy Jazz Festival in Chicago and, of course, the famed
mansion. Along the way, Hefner thumbed his nose at racist America by
having black musicians and comics on his TV show (Dick Gregory
suggests that Hefner opened the door for all black stand-up artists)
and he ignored the political right by working with people like Dalton
Trumbo and Larry Adler.
Hefner, a bit of a workaholic, fought for reproductive rights for
women, supported the anti-war movement and was generally a pioneer of
social freedoms at least, that's how Bill Maher describes him.
It's too bad, as one interview subject states in the film, that
Hefner's blond-saturated private life got mixed up with his public
life, because a lot of Hefner's positive work for social change has
thereby been forgotten. The film goes a long way in helping correct that.
Berman's film does not overlook the tragedies and the tough legal
fights that were also part of Hefner's working life. This is a
complex film about a complex man, and if Berman is making any larger
statements about the American psyche, she found the ideal subject
through which to do so in Hugh Hefner.
(This film is rated 14A)
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