Playboy founder Hugh Hefner's first true love was movies

Perhaps, but this is the graceless age of Internet porn and Hefner's magazine has been receding. It celebrated its 55th anniversary in 2008 but, in an unfortunate coincidence, gave pink slips to 55 employees in October. If the glossy print life is stepping down, Hefner's lifelong fascination for film is moving up among his priorities. The biopic will be co-produced by Playboy's Alta Loma Entertainment, his production company, which is redoubling its efforts in Hollywood. The company was started in the '70s, and after years of making soft-core porn, was a limited partner in August's "The House Bunny," a racy but PG-13 farce that starred Anna Faris and Colin Hanks.

Alta Loma is following that up with the R-rated "Miss March," a comedy about a guy who wakes up from a coma to find his girlfriend as one of Hefner's playmates. It hits 2,000 theaters in March with Fox distributing. There's also talk of a live-action version of Little Annie Fanny, the air-headed and bubble-breasted Playboy comic-strip character created for Playboy in 1962 by Mad magazine alums Harvey Kurtzman and Will Elder.

If it all sounds sophomoric, well . . . Hef, like his magazine, has a penchant for flipping between cartoon lewdness and lofty parlor-room pursuits.

Last month, a limo whisked him over to USC where, for the 13th year, he gave a lecture to a cinema censorship class that he seeded with a $100,000 donation. In 1995 he also gave $1.5 million to endow USC's Hugh M. Hefner Chair for the Study of American Film (held by film historian Richard B. Jewell). He has made major donations to UCLA as well -- $1 million in 2006 to the school's Film & Television Archive, establishing the Hugh M. Hefner American Film program. And according to Dick Rosenzweig, Hefner's longtime lieutenant who runs Alta Loma along with Jason Burns, the mogul has quietly funded a number of documentary productions and film preservation efforts. Hefner, who has a "Maltese Falcon" statuette and a bust of Boris Karloff in his bedroom, said all of it is a valentine to his youth.

"It's my way of trying to pass along some little part of it," he said. "Movies will never have the same impact that they did when I was a kid. I was fortunate to have been born in 1926 and to have grown up during the Great Depression and war years, to have lived through almost the perfect time frame. For me the boy really is the father of the man."