The Playboy Interview
In mid-1962, Playboy founder Hugh Hefner was given a partial transcript of an interview with Miles Davis. It covered jazz, of course, but it also included Davis’s ruminations on race, politics and culture. Fascinated, Hef sent the writer—future Pulitzer Prize–winning author Alex Haley, an unknown at the time—back to glean even more opinion and insight from Davis. The resulting exchange, published in the September 1962 issue, became the first official Playboy Interview and kicked off a remarkable run of public inquisition that continues today—and that has featured just about every cultural titan of the past half century. Those figures include Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali, Fidel Castro, Jimmy Hoffa, Frank Sinatra, Steve Jobs, Orson Welles, Marlon Brando, Truman Capote, Ayn Rand, Jean Paul Sartre, Salvador Dali and countless others. It is a stunning list of heavyweight names that will never again be replicated. These interviews exist only in the Playboy archives and for the first time, EVER, they have been optioned to an outside party to develop. As such, Audio Up is taking the conversational format of the interview and turning each one into a 45 minute teleplay akin to Frost/Nixon. The idea is to recreate what it was like to be in the room with these important figures as it was happening. Period music, archival radio and television clips and other sources will be used to build these unique worlds with canny sound design. The result will be like nothing ever heard before on a podcast; raising the game substantially.
