Bob guccione biography filmography tom
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Bob Guccione dies at 79; founded Penthouse magazine
Bob Guccione, who founded Penthouse magazine and created a corporate empire around it, only to see it crumble as his investments soured and the world of pornography turned toward video and the Internet, died Wednesday at a hospital in Plano, Texas. He was 79.
His wife, April Dawn Warren Guccione, said he had battled lung cancer for several years.
Penthouse reached the pinnacle of its popularity in September 1984, when it published nude pictures of Vanessa Williams, the first black Miss America. Williams, now a singer and actress, was forced to relinquish her crown after the release of the issue, which sold nearly 6 million copies and reportedly made $14 million.
A frustrated artist who once attended a Catholic seminary, Guccione started Penthouse in 1965 in England to subsidize his art career and was the magazine’s first photographer. He introduced the magazine to the American public in 1969 at the height of the feminist movement and the sexual revolution.
Penthouse quickly posed a challenge to Hugh Hefner’s Playboy by offering a mix of tabloid journalism with provocative photos of nude women, dubbed Penthouse Pets.
By 1982 Guccione was listed in the Forbes 400 ranking of wealthiest people with a net worth of about $400
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Canadian filmmaker Barry Avrich has a thing for demythologizing entrepreneurs whose impact on culture was only exceeded by the size of their personalities.
His documentaries have dug into the psyches of super-agent and studio honcho Lew Wasserman (“The Last Mogul,” 2005), movie kingpin Harvey Weinstein (“Unauthorized: The Harvey Weinstein Story,” 2010) and Cineplex Odeon co-founder Garth Drabinsky (“Show Stopper: The Theatrical Life of Garth Drabinsky,” 2012).
Premiering on EPIX on Friday night is the film that Avrich, 50, says “completes my box set on moguls”: “Filthy Gorgeous: The Bob Guccione Story.” The decade-spanning portrait of the creator of the Penthouse empire attempts to peep beyond the gaudy gold chains, V-neck silk shirts and thick carpet of exposed chest hair that were the cornerstones of this skin-mag Caesar’s public image to reveal a self-made intellectual and recluse who prided himself on celebrating pursuits of the mind as well as the body.
Guccione, an Italian-American Jersey boy who introduced his brand of male fantasy to America in 1969 as a rival to Hugh Hefner’s Playboy, might be best known for crossing the bikini line photographically to confirm that most women who posed for s