Amazon’s “American Playboy: The Hugh Hefner Story” is about a man’s fight against the status quo. At least, that’s how the Playboy founder’s son Cooper Hefner sees it.
What he also sees from his perch at the top of the Playboy kingdom: a fight that’s not really over.
“There seems to be a resurrection of the conservative movement,” Hefner, who took on the role of chief creative officer in 2016, told CNN in a recent interview. “For me, I step back and say, ‘Well, we have a soap box. How do we make sure that we’re continuing to participate in that conversation and that fight while making sure to celebrate our past.”
At 25, Hefner has already won what he saw as a significant battle. In February, Playboy decided to reverse its decision to eliminate nude pictures less than a year after a splashy announcement declared they would end the practice.
He called the decision to do away with nudes “an example of PC culture overwhelming the office.”
Executives and the management team had fought to go non-nude because their view was that the magazine “had won the sexual revolution,” Hefner claimed.
“I was the only person sitting the room saying ‘How on earth does that make sense?’ The very notion of covering up is an indication that the war is still being fought,” he said. “And that’s just one example of many that I think [show] there’s internal conversation about who we should be today. I almost think that we’re in a point in time where the world is going through a bit of an identity crisis.”
Hefner calls “American Playboy” a “docu-show” because it combines interviews and archival footage with reenactments.
But documentary is a generous label. As critics have noted, the biography is absent is anything that’s a less-than glowing portrayal of Hefner.
That’s to be expected, however, since the elder Hefner had a major hand in the project.
“We would finish it and get to a place where we were all happy with it and we’d send it his way and his notes would come back and they’d be bigger than the script we just sent,” Hefner said.
Hefner’s father skipped last week’s premiere party, raising some eyebrows. But ahead of the bash, Hefner said his father is “absolutely fine.”
“He has a terrible back,” he said. “He’s turning 91, so that’s not surprising….He’s just stepped back and is really enjoying life at the mansion.”
“American Playboy: The Hugh Hefner Story” is streaming now on Amazon.
