Yail Bloor Wrote:
Sergei Bubka Wrote:
It was the Seventies. Weird shit happened.
We actually had a presidential candidate - with a serious chance of winning - do a Playboy interview. Said candidate was also an extremely devout Protestant, so we can only imagine he was not so amenable to the magazine's photographic content... But, he knew it was a QUAL periodical, something more than the typical titty mag (i.e. Hustler, or Club), and more akin to Esquire than anything else, anyway. So, yeah...
Imagine that happening today. Will Mitt Romney do a Playboy interview? John Edwards?
Doubt it.
James Earl C. has more balls than the wide-open presidential field of '08 combined. Excepting Hillary...
[/rim.shot]
Agreed. Though, as a high school senior in '92 I remember being surprised/excited to get home from school and find that my new Rolling Stone had come complete with an interview with Slick Willy.
Playboy used to do some heavy interviews. They still do to some extent but the magazine on the whole used to be more literary and intelligent if not altogether classier. Heff's daughter is dancing close to Maxim-ville in her editorial leadership.
Edit: And Steve, no pres. candidate would ever say "I have lust in my heart" again. Ever.
It's definitely gotten lower brow, but I think that it still has life, and could pursue more a literary appeal... To be honest, though - maybe after Hef dies?
I know he still picks the centerfolds, and I doubt that he ceded all editorial control re: written content to others. So I think, due his dotage, that the 'zine is turning too far toward the college crowd... Only dating twenty years old college dropouts probably doesn't help, either.
fake edit: Have you seen that E! reality [sic] show, Girls Next Door, about Hef's three current girlfriends? I caught one episode, and when Hef took the party posse out to eat, he got really ornery - like many eighty years old people - when the food wasn't ready after forty-five minutes. He was banging silverware on the table and smarting off to the girls... It was funny.
When I told my mom of this though, she said she'd read that there are reports that Hef's been "acting weird". She speculated that he's been having mini-strokes - he had a major one twenty years ago - to account for the seeming senility.
real edit: That's the Rolling Stone interview where Clinton spoke of his desire to put one hundred thousand more cops on the street... in the presence of Hunter (who took it as a direct threat, and had to be talked down from the ledge, so to speak, by P.J. O'Rourke and Jann Wenner).