In possibly the most perfect match of director and subject since Orson Welles decided to make a film about a wunderkind newspaper mogul, playboy Brett Ratner has signed on to direct a biopic of playboy Playboy founder Hugh Hefner, to be titled (unsurprisingly) Playboy.
But it's not all going to be paisley dressing gowns and multiple silicate bimbo girlfriends. Hefner came from a puritanical childhood to become the world's best-known pornographer, but Hollywood being a bit puritanical itself, much is being made of his battles for free speech and civil rights along the way. For example, he put James Brown on his nationally televised show Playboy After Dark at a time when black artists didn't get such chances, and encouraged his magazine to take a pro-civil rights stance.
Ratner is determined to cover all these bases "from the First Amendment struggles to his first orgy to the stroke in the 1980s that almost killed him." So all the really important moments then.
This isn't the first time that there's been an attempt to bring Heff's life to the big screen. Since producer Brian Grazer bought the rights several years ago, there's been an attempt to turn it into a musical by 8 Mile scribe Scott Silver, and several drafts from Oliver Stone. Ratner apparently sent Grazer his Playboy pinball machine* as a gift when Grazer made his original deal with Hefner, and it's clearly paid off, because at last Ratner and Grazer, with John Hoffman as scriptwriter, got sign-off from Hugh last week at the Playboy Mansion.
But this may not be Ratner's next film. He's also got a heist drama set at Trump Towers that he's planning, with Russell Gerwitz currently rewriting a script that is to star Eddie Murphy and Chris Rock as well as (Ratner hopes) Dave Chapelle, Jamie Foxx, Denzel Washington, Sidney Poitier and Chris Tucker (spot the odd one out). With Hoffman just started writing this film, it's a screenwriting race to see which goes into production first.
Anyone else have really strange mental images of what a Playboy pinball machine might involve? Just us? Oh dear.