Quote:
Originally Posted by JayAllan
Your post is not clear (to me) but .. Penthouse is the heyday had big production shoots by the likes of J Stephen Hicks, Hank Londoner, and Earl Miller. They were lots of lights, lots of makeup, great sets or locations, and very high production quality. Almost every issue had a black and white set shot in Europe. There sales went DOWN and they lost a lot of advertisers when they went harder and sluttier. That was the beginning of their downfall. I know this firsthand.
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Allow me to clarify... you are correct that Penthouse mag sales declined when they went to shots of pissing, hardcore penetration, etc. but that had more to do with getting banned at a lot of their previous sales locations than customer dissatisfaction from what I read and the people involved at the time that I knew working there. However, the point I was making is that Penthouse, in its heydey, did always go much "harder" than Playboy in terms of the types of what we would today call "softcore" with shots of albeit simulated masturbation, un-airbrushed labia and clit shots (looking at Playboy from the same period and you see women with airbrushed pussies that render them about as sexy as a barbie doll) and this did not hurt sales. On the contrary, those high end but also more highly eroticized layouts did make Penthouse a reasonable rival to Playboy. But, let's throw Hustler in the mix... Hustler delivered high end photography, went even more hard, and grew fast and strong as another contender.
Of course, that had to do as much with Flynt Publishing's agressive distribution consolidation but guess what? And this is where my point comes full circle, what was the most popular feature of Hustler? The amateur photos of Beaver Hunt. That is what I am saying specifically, while Dean can criticize the poor photography, with its bad lighting, cropping, model, etc., the point I am making is that even Playboy, contrary to all popular opinion, even to their own bewilderment, does have success with some of it more "amateur" content. The only place really where the standards are preserved at their highest level is in the celeb shoots and the centerfolds, so complaining about all the other stuff that Playboy publishes as looking like crap may not be taking into account where, why, and how Playboy profits from it. Does that make more sense?