But halfway through the movie, a creep factor sets in. Maybe it is the parade of dead talking heads presented as if they were alive -- Alex Haley, Robert Culp, Tony Curtis -- or the fact that Hef wannabe Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione just died.
Maybe it was the ubiquity of Kiss' Gene Simmons -- so sexually and psychiatrically unbalanced that an NPR interview in which he tells interviewer Terry Gross to "open your legs" went viral -- or the appearance of a leering James Caan who was linked to Hollywood prostitute broker Heidi Fleiss. (At the film's end, Simmons who pontificates about male sexual parts being aroused by clothing while women's are hidden away, removes the sunglasses he wears during the film in a gesture of grandiosity and symbolic exhibitionism. Ick.)
But the straw dog enemies of lust director Berman sets up -- Pat Boone, Jerry Falwell, Charles Keating -- are not nearly as creepy as those who are agnostic on, or supporters of, Hef style lust.
What is, for example, the Rev. Malcolm Boyd, author of Are Your Running With Me Jesus, doing at an establishment where half the sky, as Nicholas Kristof puts, is deemed worthy of wearing animal tails? Where have Dick Cavett and David Steinberg been for the last 30 years to not notice that Oprah, Chelsea Handler and the women on the View have retired them? And what is up with Bill Maher's appearance?
In fact Hef's pride in liberating African-American men to enjoy cottontail service at the segregated New Orleans Playboy Club and the movie's discussion of his fight against "oppression" and "sexual McCarthyism" is so Denial it brings to mind a scene in Sacha Baron Cohen Bruno last year. Cohen invites the singer Paula Abdul, who has arrived for an interview, to use a Mexican gardener on his hands and knees as a chair -- and she does!
Everything is fine if you ignore the furniture.
An admitted sex, Dex, Pepsi and work addict, Hefner has the self-centeredness, grandiosity and resentments sometimes called King Baby. He deserved seven girlfriends because he had been monogamous for eight years. The death of playmate Dorothy Stratten gave him his stroke -- it was a "miracle" he got through -- and the suicide of bunny Bobbie Arnstein was caused by drug officials and hurt the brand.
While Hefner is admired as much for his business acumen as lifestyle, he fails to see that laddie magazines on the one hand and cable and cyber porn on the other retired his brand and still blames Former Attorney General under Ronald Reagan Edwin Meese for casting Playboy as obscene and its circulation nosedive. (Hef went hard core in 2001 over the objections of daughter Christie, CEO of Playboy Enterprises, who told the Daily Telegraph as a "feminist" she would not take the magazine hard core.)
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