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Bob Guccione made a name for himself in the adult entertainment industry when he launched the men’s magazine Penthouse in 1965.
The periodical of raunchy record was considered direct competition to Hugh Hefner’s Playboy magazine.
Guccione, who died in 2010, and his exploits were documented in the recent A&E “Secrets of Penthouse” and his son, Nicholas Guccione, got candid with Fox News about his dad’s friendship with Hefner ahead of the show.
Nicholas revealed that his father and the late publisher “were on the same team.”
“There was no animosity whatsoever,” he went on. “We wanted to showcase the beauty of the female form through beautiful photography. And we were both part of the sexual revolution [in America].”
Both Playboy and Penthouse had featured erotic photography and soft-core adult content in their heydays.
Nicholas then explained that he encountered Hefner, who passed away in 2017, “purely by chance when I lived in Los Angeles in the ’90s.”
“He was very cordial, had no entourage. We were in a little hole in the wall on Sunset Boulevard, a strip club . . . He was on his own, just like me . . . We were both on the same team, and we knew it. And we wanted to break new ground,” he recalled.
Enter Hustler CEO Larry Flynt, another trailblazer in the magazine porn business.
Nicholas also remembered meeting Flynt back in the day and joked that the Larry Flynt Publications president “was a different animal.”
He pointed out that Flynt’s outlet had taken “it one step further than Penthouse.”
Hustler was introduced in 1974 and featured more hardcore pornographic media such as showing female genitalia and simulated sexual acts.
“At one point, they published a cover of a woman going through a hamburger meat grinder and coming out as ground meat. Now that’s disgusting,” Nicholas sighed.
“We weren’t close with Hustler and Flynt. They were a little bit skewed. But as far as Playboy and Penthouse, I think we both had a wonderful and healthy representation of lovely ladies showing off their beauty.”
“Secrets of Penthouse” goes behind the scenes about the rise and fall of Guccione and his Penthouse empire through interviews with family members and those who knew him best.
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