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Hollywood Spin
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Madding Crowd
Once upon a time, the Playboy Interview was a cultural milestone. Today, it’s just another pit stop on the ever-widening Hollywood PR circuit.
Wednesday, December 10, 2003
By Richard Horgan
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Back in 1969, media seer Marshall McLuhan was asked whether he foresaw a rosy or dim future for North American media. “There are grounds for both optimism and pessimism,” the Canadian academic replied. “The extensions of man's consciousness induced by the electric media could conceivably usher in the millennium, but it also holds the potential for realizing the Anti-Christ -- Yeats' rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouching toward Bethlehem to be born.”
“Cataclysmic environmental changes such as these are, in and of themselves, morally neutral,” McLuhan continued in a Playboy Interview published four months before Neil Armstrong’s moon landing cemented the concept of event television. “It is how we perceive them and react to them that will determine their ultimate psychic and social consequences. If we refuse to see them at all, we will become their servants.”
Today, the 500,000 channel universe and 24/7 kindling of the Internet have done little to reduce our predicted servitude. In a celebrity culture that has shifted its focus from people who walk on the moon to those who simply moonwalk on a stage, the Michael Jackson sound byte rules.
And so, as Playboy Magazine marks its 50th anniversary this month, it is somewhat emblematic that its celebratory January 2004 issue Interview with Something’s Gotta Give star Jack Nicholson is neither groundbreaking nor unique, although the actor could certainly teach his peers a thing or two about maintaining an aura of mystique in today’s multimedia age. By refusing to do TV interviews, the 66-year-old has kept just enough of his id out of limelight’s unflattering glow. Or, put another way, you can be sure that if and when Jack does The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, the end of the world will be very near.
The author of this month’s Playboy Interview, freelance journalist David Sheff, has been doing Hef’s Q&A work for some time. For example, his January 1981 chat with John Lennon and Yoko Ono was the last major interview given by the couple before the singer’s untimely death on December 8th, 1980.
More recently, Sheff got into hot water with Tobey Maguire for turning what the actor claimed was an off-the-record chat about his battles with alcoholism into the lynchpin of his August 2003 Playboy Interview. "It upsets me,” Maguire said in a July 16th 2003 Hollywood Spin column entitled Star Treatment. “I think it's a well-written piece, but I don't like that part of it. It becomes a revelation, even though it's been out there for years." However, short of making its way around the Internet, the fracas was quickly forgotten, proving that a Playboy Interview no longer commands front page attention.
But it’s not all Playboy’s fault. In a world where a typical week’s TV listings can encompass Julia Roberts on Letterman, Uma Thurman on Howard Stern and Meg Ryan on Conan, there is no longer a center stage. It’s more like a three ring circus.
In recognition of this new reality and the fact that the magazine has not turned an annual profit since 1999, Playboy hired 41-year-old former Maxim editor James Kaminsky in April to help the magazine rise above the din of the madding media crowd. But if Kaminsky duplicates the editorial format of Maxim, it will soon no longer be possible to say you read Playboy for the articles, because there will hardly be any.
In a celebrated February 1962 Playboy interview, singer Frank Sinatra suggested, “If the press reports world news as they report about me, we're in trouble.” Guess what Frank, we’re in trouble, especially since world news is increasingly hard to find in mainstream broadcasts and the local news is backed up by even more of a horn section than old Blue Eyes could have ever foreseen.
At the time, Sinatra was also convinced that his comments in the interview about the hypocrisy of organized religion could spell doom for his career. “Have you thought of the chance I'm taking by speaking out this way?” he asked “Can you imagine the deluge of crank letters, curses, threats and obscenities I'll receive after these remarks gain general circulation? Worse, the boycott of my records, my films, maybe a picket line at my opening at the Sands. Why? Because I've dared to say that love and decency are not necessarily concomitants of religious fervor.”
Forty years later, as actor Matthew McConaughey can attest, crazy comments or a Texas arrest for playing the bongos naked can quickly be drowned out by well-organized press tours for Hollywood leading man fluff such as The Wedding Planner and How To Lose A Guy In Ten Days.
Strangely enough, the diminished ranking of the Playboy Interview in the entertainment journalism pantheon has had something of a reverse effect. Knowing full well that shocking revelations now have a much shorter shelf life, some of the interviewees sound more like they are talking to a therapist than a member of the press corps.
| Take for example Charlie Sheen’s informal June 2001 chat with L.A.-based freelance writer David Rensin, conducted at the actor’s condo and on the set of the ABC sitcom Spin City. Although Sheen denied that he ever got Heidi Fleiss’s girls to dress up as cheerleaders, he did admit to sleeping with five of them at one time.
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“It was the end of the night and everybody had split,” Sheen recalled. “It was me and five girls, and I said, "Well, I'm up for it if you girls are." They're like, "Yeah, right." That was a challenge, so I went for it. I was with one at a time with the other four watching. It was a little uncomfortable, actually. I think I said, "Can you guys just look the other way until it's your turn?" I wouldn't recommend five at once. There's just not enough guy to go around.”
| In comparing Sheen’s June 2001 confessional with Sinatra’s February 1962 interview, a couple of things become clear. First of all, there’s no way interviewer Joe Hyams could have opened his interview with Rensin’s first question to Sheen - “Did you really sleep with 5,000 women?” – and lived to tell about it. Secondly, whereas Sinatra’s views about nuclear testing and “Communist expansion” into areas such as Cuba, Laos and the emerging African nations were valued because celebrity itself was once held in higher esteem, today it is nothing more than a trampoline for salacious details. The scoop has become the poop and scoop. All that’s left really is for a new magazine to drop all manner of pretense and launch under the title Next?.
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Similarly, while the cantankerous give and go of Nat Hentoff’s February 1966 Playboy Interview with Bob Dylan epitomizes the rebellious nature of that decade, it has little place today within the micromanaged interview opportunities of the new millennium.
Asked at one point what his songs are about, Dylan replies, “Oh, some are about four minutes; some are about five, and some, believe it or not, are about eleven or twelve.” Later on, when Hentoff inquires him how the troubadour gets his kicks, he fires back, “I hire people to look into my eyes, and then I have them kick me.” Again, such one-on-one behavior today would generally be considered unsportsmanlike rather than iconoclastic.
| Even though the Playboy Interview most likely escapes the do-not-ask conditional provisions of many of today’s top-level celebrity interviews, the Hollywood stars profiled most likely have a hand in approving the writer assigned to do the piece. But even if the most aggressive reporter were allowed in, there’s really nothing shocking left to tell. Legal secrets are PDF-ed on The Smoking Gun web site; the most egregious celebrity Internet gossip easily outpaces the supermarket tabloids; and fake celebrities on reality TV are bigger in many cases than real celebrities from fake TV shows.
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For the record, the Playboy Interview officially began in the wake of Sinatra’s headline-grabbing revelations. It’s very possible that the potency of that effort helped convince the magazine’s editors that the formula of a high-profile writer making cocktail chatter with a celebrity of the day was a recipe for success. Alex Haley interviewed jazz musician Miles Davis for the first Playboy Interview in September 1962, followed by question and answer sessions with Peter Sellers and Jackie Gleason.
| As Mel Gibson’s adventures this year with The Passion of Jesus Christ prove, religion – along with politics – still have the ability to inflame. But short of George W. Bush duplicating Jimmy Carter’s November 1976 Playboy confession that he “lusted in his heart,” it may well take an interview with Jesus himself to vault Playboy back ahead of Vanity Fair, the New York Times Sunday Magazine, Charlie Rose and any other number of in-depth interview purveyors.
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Or, as the late McLuhan, who died on New Year’s Eve 1980, put it, “TV and all the electric media are unraveling the entire fabric of our society. As a man who is forced by circumstances to live within that society, I do not take delight in its disintegration.”
[Every Wednesday, Hollywood Spin takes an opinionated look at Hollywood media, PR and marketing related matters. To reach the author, please email rhorgan@filmstew.com. To comment on this week’s topic, please go to our Hollywood Spin Discussion Board.]
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