In 1973, award-winning film director Tony Palmer offered the world an inside peek into the life of one of the most notorious magazine editors of all time, Hugh Hefner. Described by The Times as “a brilliant, thoroughly good humoured and subtle dissection of an extraordinary man by a master film maker” the documentary film The World of Hugh Hefner tracks his meteoric rise to fame in Hefner’s own words with guest appearances and inputs from some of Hefner’s closest friends including Mary Whitehouse.

Hefner was born in 1926 in Chicago during the Prohibition era to a working-class Methodist family (his mother wanted him to become a missionary). In 1953 he started the infamous Playboy empire with a bank loan of $600, $1,000 from his mother (which he explains was “not because she believed in the venture but because she believed in her son”) and a fund of $8,000 from 45 different investors.

Playboy magazine's first issue featured Marilyn Monroe on its cover and sold over 50,000 copies launching the Playboy era. The magazine was not just known for its bevy of nude beauties however, Hefner commissioned some of the greatest writers of his time to contribute to Playboy; after Charles Beaumont’s The Crooked Man was rejected by Esquire magazine in 1955, Hefner agreed to publish the story in Playboy. He also featured articles from James Baldwin, helped launch the career of Dick Gregory and sent Alex Haley to interview George Lincoln Rockwell, Malcom X and Martin Luther King Jr. for his famous 1962 “playboy interview”.