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Fiction by Stephen King - Guns
in Hollywood ۰ The Interview:
Billy Bob Thornton ۰ Kim Gordon .
200 With Anna Kendrick ٠
Reggie Watts - Miss December
Eniko Mihalik

moods of norway

7964 Melrose Ave. Los Angeles

ofnorway.com

. www.moods

7964 Melrose

www.moodsofnorway.com

Aaron Feaver

Photographer Feaver spent his early
years drifting between the United
States, France and Cameroon, ulti-
mately settling in Portland, Oregon.
After college he ditched the drizzly
land of beer and coffee for the more
cheerful sunshine of Los Angeles—the
vibrant hues of which now influence his
work, as displayed in All That Glitters.

Danielle Bacher

A journalist, columnist and pop culture
glutton, Bacher has partied with every-
one from Ariel Pink to Jena Malone to
Smoke DZA for her celebrity profiles.
This month she breaks bread with Anna
Kendrick for 2008, in which the actress
discusses her new book of personal es-
says and details surviving before fame,
being broke and battling self-doubt.

PLAYBILL

Stephen King

It’s been 10 years since PLAYBOY fea-
tured King's short story Willa, about
the horrors a group of passengers en-
counter after their train derails. This
month King returns to our pages with
another unsettling tale, The Music
Room (inspired by an Edward Hopper
painting), which may leave you suspi-
cious of friendly bar patrons.

Kristin Gallegos

Justtwo years ago, Gallegos picked up a
cameraand started shooting as a hobby.
Now the California-raised makeup art-
ist and former classical ballet dancer
makes her PLAYBOY debut with Memory
Lane, a seven-page pictorial featuring
model-designer Paige Elkington that
melds Gallegos's feminine-focused lens
with retro flair.

Kim Gordon

For three decades the Sonic Youth co-
founder occupied the apex of alterna-
tive rock, and she remains a cultural
icon today. Gordon manifests her voice
across multiple disciplines as half the
music duo Body/Head, whose latest
record, No Waves, is out now, and as a
conceptual painter, whose work we cel-
ebrate in Artist in Residence.

Jessica P. Ogilvie

"Culiacán is incredibly safe because of
the cartel," says Ogilvie of the Mexican
city that's the backdrop for The Beau-
ties of Sinaloa, her article on the women
who compete for pageant titles—
and the attention of narcotraffickers.
Ogilvie spent 10 days in the drug lords'
orbit, without incident. "Don't fuck with
them and they won't fuck with you."

Chloe Aftel

This year Aftel was honored by Lens-
Culture, a popular photography site,
for her series on gender-queer sub-
jects. In her work, she sees "each per-
son as someone with a story to tell."
For 200, Aftel captures Anna Kend-
rick, herself a storyteller, as she speaks
candidly about everything from fake
kissing to worrying about going to hell.

Mike Rougeau

Before becoming a PLAYBOY contrib-
utor, Rougeau spent years covering
America's true favorite pastime—video
games—for dozens of outlets. In The
(Insane) Year in Gaming, Rougeau
runs down 2016's biggest successes,
surprises and disappointments in the
world of virtual gameplay. Yes, Poké-
mon GO made the cut.

CREDITS: Cover and pp. 78-91 model Eniko Mihalik at the Society Management, photography by David Bellemere, styling by Liz McClean for Brydges Mackinney, hair by Cecilia Romero for the Wall Group, makeup by Aidan Keogh, styling assistance by Emily Briggs, panties

(cover) by Eres, ring (cover) by Catbird. Photography by: p. 4 courtesy Chloe Aftel, courtesy Danielle Bacher, courtesy Aaron Feaver, courtesy Kristin Gallegos, courtesy Jessica P. Ogilvie, courtesy Mike Rougeau, Shane Leonard, Annabel Mehran; pp. 24-25 courtesy La Valise
Hotel, Alessandro Digaetano/LUZ/Redux, Peter Frank Edwards/Redux, Berthold Steinhilber/laif/Redux, Cathrine Stukhard/laif/Redux; p. 38 courtesy Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures; p. 48 Molly Cranna; p. 70 AP Photo/Eduardo Verdugo; p. 75 courtesy Brooks England,
courtesy Faribault Woolen Mill, courtesy Misc. Goods Co.; p. 76 courtesy Horse Brand, courtesy Leica, courtesy Nintendo; p. 77 courtesy House of Marley, courtesy Orlebar Brown, courtesy Postalco; p. 96 courtesy Activision; p.99 Room in New York, 1932 by Edward Hopper, oil

on canvas, Sheldon Museum of Art, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Anna R. and Frank N. Hall Charitable Trust, photo © Sheldon Museum of Art; p. no David Black; p.114 PLAYBOY archive. Pp. 98-101StephenKing, The Music Room, excerpted from In Sunlight or in Shadow: Stories

Inspired by Edward Hopper, Lawrence Block, ed. (Pegasus, December 2016).P. 15 styling by Jessy Cain for the Wall Group, hair by Dallin James for the Wall Group, makeup by Amy Chance for TACK Artist Group, styling assistance by Harry Pinkerton; pp.16-17 prop styling by
Janine Iversen; pp. 20-21 prop styling by Janine Iversen; pp. 34-37 styling by Taylor Jacobson for Atelier Management, hair by Craig Gangi for Exclusive Artists Management using Brazilian Blowout, makeup by Vanessa Scali for the Wall Group; pp. 40-41 grooming by Cheri
Keating for the Wall Group, jacket by Bindle & Keep; pp. 58-64 model Paige Elkington, styling by Chloe Chippendale, hair by Nikki Providence for Forward Artists; pp. 74-77 prop styling by Robert Doran; p.79 panties by Eres, bracelet by Catbird; p.8o jewelry by Catbird; p.81dress
byIsabel Marant; pp. 82-83 panties by Angela Friedman; p.84 vintage T-shirt by Stoned Immaculate, panties by Araks; pp. 102-109 model Maya Singer at Vision Los Angeles, styling by Henna Koskinen for Opus Beauty, hair by Tony Vin, makeup by Tami Shirey for the Rex Agency.

295

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CONTENTS

Departments

NO FILTER Bibi Bourelly is more than just the woman behind some of Rihanna’s biggest hits 15
FOOD Chef Ray Garcia proves all vegan tacos are not created equal 16
TRAVEL From Paris to New Zealand, where you absolutely should be wandering in 2017 24
ADVISOR Home (and single) for the holidays? Bridget Phetasy lays out the rules of ex sex and other hookups 28
MY WAY How Shawn Stussy became the street-style god we know today 30
ALSO: Sherry gets a much-needed revamp; what it’s like to whip it in the new Nissan GT-R
THE RABBIT HOLE By the numbers: Ben Schott documents America’s infatuation with video games 33
200 The quick-witted, unapologetic Anna Kendrick decodes dick pics and shares her sex dreams 34
FILM The man behind Rogue One's freshest new droid has something to say about C-3PO and R2-D2 38
TV Stand-up is undergoing a renaissance, and we have Reggie Watts to thank 40
FRANCOFILE George Pelecanos tells James Franco how Washington, D.C. shaped him as a writer 44
SEX We take a crash course on cuckolding—the fascinating fetish of being turned on by infidelity 46

ALSO: Gaming's 10 WTF moments this year; the perilous presidential politics between Election Day and January 20
Features

INTERVIEW Colorful Hollywood outcast Billy Bob Thornton still doesn't give a damn about show business 0
MEMORY LANE Anostalgic romp with Paige Elkington 58
THE BEAUTIES OF SINALOA Deep in El Chapo territory, narcos and pageant queens have an uneasy courtship 66
HOLIDAY GIFT GUIDE wish-list cheat sheet: This is the gear we’re coveting this year 4
MISS DECEMBER Hungarian model Eniko Mihalik leaves us ravenous for more 78
WHO PUTS GUNS IN THE MOVIES? How Hollywood's long-lived obsession affects real-life weapons culture 92
FICTION Master of suspense Stephen King tells an eerie tale of Northern hospitality in The Music Room 98
ALL THAT GLITTERS Maya Singer makes it rain like it’s New Year's Eve 2
ARTIST IN RESIDENCE The visual music of Sonic Youth frontwoman Kim Gordon 110

ON THE COVER (AND OPPOSITE PAGE) Miss December Eniko Mihalik, photographed by David Bellemere.

VOL. 63, NO. 10—DECEMBER 2016

PLAYBOY

HUGH M. HEFNER
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

JASON BUHRMESTER EDITORIAL DIRECTOR
MACLEWIS GREATIVE DIRECTOR
HUGH GARVEY DEPUTY EDITOR
REBECCAH. BLACK PHOTO DIRECTOR
JAREDEVANS MANAGING EDITOR

EDITORIAL
CAT AUER, JAMES RICKMAN SENIOR EDITORS; SHANE MICHAEL SINGH ASSOCIATE EDITOR
WINIFREDORMOND COP Y CHIEF; SAMANTHA SAIYAVONGSA, ELIZABETH SUMAN RESEARCH EDITORS
GILBERT MACIAS EDITORIAL COORDINATOR; AMANDA WARREN EXECUTIVE ASSISTANT TO THE EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
CONTRIBUTING EDITORS: VINCE BEISER, DAVID HOCHMAN, STEPHEN REBELLO, DAVID RENSIN, DAVID SHEFF, ERIC SPITZNAGEL, DON ۷

JAMES FRANCO EDITOR AT LARGE

ART
CHRIS DEACON SENIOR ART DIRECTOR; AARONLUCAS ART MANAGER; LAURELLEWIS ASSISTANT ART DIRECTOR

PHOTOGRAPHY
EVAN SMITH ASSOCIATE PHOTO EDITOR; ANNAWILSON PHOTO COORDINATOR
KEVIN MURPHY DIRECTOR, PHOTO LIBRARY; CHRISTIE HARTMANN SENIOR ARCHIVIST, PHOTO LIBRARY
AMY KASTNER-DROWN SENIOR DIGITAL IMAGING SPECIALIST
ELAYNELODGE STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

PRODUCTION
LESLEY K. JOHNSON PRODUCTION DIRECTOR; HELENYEOMAN PRODUCTION SERVICES MANAGER

PUBLIC RELATIONS
TERITHOMERSON, TAMAR APRAHAMIAN

PLAYBOY ENTERPRISES INTERNATIONAL, ING.
BEN KOHN CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER
DAVIDG. ISRAEL GHIEF OPERATING OFFICER, PRESIDENT, PLAYBOY MEDIA
JARED DOUGHERTY GHIEF MARKETING OFFICER
COOPER HEFNER GHIEF GREATIVE OFFICER
JOHN VLAUTIN GORPORATE COMMUNICATIONS

ADVERTISING AND MARKETING
PHILLIP MORELOCK CHIEF DIGITAL OFFICER AND PUBLISHER; MARIEFIRNENO VICE PRESIDENT, ADVERTISING DIRECTOR
CHANNINGCHOR VIGE PRESIDENT, BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT
NEW YORK: MICHELLETAFARELLA MELVILLE SENIOR DIRECTOR, ENTERTAINMENT AND BEAUTY; ADAMWEBB SENIOR DIRECTOR, SPIRITS
ANGELALEE DIGITAL CAMPAIGN MANAGER; OLIVIABIORDIMEDIA SALES PLANNER
KARIJASPERSOHN ASSOGIATE DIRECTOR, MARKETING AND ACTIVATION; GRETCHEN MAYER ASSOCIATE CREATIVE DIRECTOR
AMANDA CHOMICZ DIGITAL MARKETING MANAGER; VOULALYTRAS EXECUTIVE ASSISTANT AND OFFICE MANAGER
CHICAGO: TIFFANY SPARKS ABBOTT SENIOR DIRECTOR, MIDWEST
LOS ANGELES: KRISTIALLAIN SENIOR MARKETING MANAGER

Playboy (ISSN 0032-1478), December 2016, volume 63, number 10. Published monthly except for combined January/February and July/August issues by Playboy in national and regional editions, Playboy, 9346 Civic Center Drive,
Beverly Hills, California 90210. Periodicals postage paid at Beverly Hills, California and at additional mailing offices. Canada Post Canadian Publications Mail Sales Product Agreement No. 40035534. Subscriptions: in the U.S.,
$32.97forayear. Postmaster: Send all UAA to CFS (see DMM 707.4.12.5); nonpostaland military facilities, send address changes to Playboy, P.O. Box 62260, Tampa, FL 33662-2260. Forsubscription-related questions, e-mail playboy@
customersvc.com. To comment on content, e-mail letters playboy. com.. We occasionally make portions of our customer list available to carefully screened companies that offer products or services we believe you may enjoy. If you
do not want to receive these offers or information, please let us know by writing to us at Playboy Enterprises International, Inc. c/o TCS, P.O. Box 62260, Tampa, FL 33662-2260, or e-mail playboy(? customersvc.com. It generally
requires eight to 10 weeks for your request to become effective. e Playboy assumes no responsibility to return unsolicited editorial or graphic or other material. All rights in letters and unsolicited editorial and graphic material will
betreated as unconditionally assigned for publication and copyright purposes, and material will be subject to Playboy’s unrestricted right to edit and comment editorially. Contents copyright © 2016 by Playboy. All rights reserved.
Playboy, Playmate and Rabbit Head symbol are marks of Playboy, registered U.S. Trademark Office. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form by any electronic, mechanical,
photocopying or recording means or otherwise without prior written permission of the publisher. Any similarity between the people and places in the fiction and semi-fiction in this magazine and any real people and places is purely
coincidental. For credits see page 4. Two Bradford Exchange onserts in domestic subscription polywrapped copies. Certificado de licitud de título No. 7570 de fecha 29 de Julio de 1993, y certificado de licitud de contenido No. 5108
de fecha 29 de Julio de 1993 expedidos por la comision Calificadora de publicaciones y revistas ilustradas dependiente de la secretaría de gobernación, Mexico. Reserva de derechos 04-2000-071710332800-102. Printed in USA.

RAISE YOUR GLASS.
RAISE YOUR GAME.

#EFFENVODKA

Drink Responsibly. EFFEN® Vodka, 100% neutral spirits distilled from wheat
grain,40% alc./vol. (80 proof) ©2016 EFFEN Import Company, Deerfield, IL

DEAR PLAYBOY

DOUBLE YOUR PLEASURE

I loved your October issue with Sky Ferreira,

but I saw a guy at the airport reading a PLAYBOY

with a different cover photo. What gives?
James Johnson
Rockford, Illinois

A special issue deserves special treatment,
so we created a dual print run of two different
covers, both featuring Sky.

CAREFUL WITH KILLER ROBOTS
Matt Jancer’s article on the use of robots to
kill Dallas mass shooter Micah Xavier John-
son is right to highlight the fact that the situ-
ation was unusual—“high, if not the highest,
rung on the use-of-force continuum,” as one ex-
pert he quotes put it (What Does It Mean When
Cops Can Kill a Man With a Robot?, October).
Whether a lethal use of force is constitutional
depends on whether an individual poses an
imminent threat to others, not on the weapon
used. Nobody wants police officers unnecessar-
ily placed in harm’s way when dangerous situa-
tions arise. That said, some very serious policy
issues need to be worked out before law enforce-
ment deploys robots to use force remotely.

The biggest danger of introducing robots
into policing is that by allowing force to be ap-
plied more safely and easily, it is more likely to
be used. Things that are risk-free and easy are
inevitably overused, as we have seen with the
use of lethal robots overseas—drones—as well
as with surveillance technology. The danger
is that force-by-robot evolves from something
reserved for extraordinary circumstances into
something used in more everyday situations.
This is especially likely to happen when robots
are armed with “less lethal” weapons such as
Tasers, tear gas and rubber bullets. (These
weapons are not nonlethal; they can and do
kill people.) In addition, when officers are op-
erating remotely, their perception of a situa-
tion is more likely to be confused, and they’re
more likely to use force inappropriately or on
the wrong targets.

Jay Stanley
Washington, D.C.

Stanley is senior policy analyst for the Amer-
ican Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy
and Technology Project and editor of the Free
Future blog.

YOU’RE VERY WELCOME
My girlfriend always laughs when I tell her
how much I enjoy your articles, but I really

Surf and salvation with Greg Long.

do. I would subscribe even if there weren’t any
pictures of beautiful, scantily clad angels.
(But please don’t stop publishing them!) Cul-
turally, PLAYBoy remains on the cutting edge.
You have the most relevant articles for a wide
audience and aren't afraid to take a stance on
issues. Thank you for your publication.

Ron Robertson

Indianapolis, Indiana

GLORIOUS GLOBES
Please settle a bet. My brother swears Denise
Richards graced a December PLAYBOY wearing
enormous, shiny Christmas-ornament ear-
rings. I agree it was a beautiful brunette but
am positive it was someone else.

Mark Hanson

New York, New York

You’re both right. Denise is on our December

2004 cover (silver earrings); Brooke Shields in
1986 (red). Other memorable models featured on
PLAYBOY Christmas covers past include Raquel
Welch, Naomi Campbell and Kim Kardashian.

THANKS BE TO GREG
I’m an ironworker, a subscriber and a longtime
PLAYBOY fan. In the past three years I’ve had

health issues and personal losses that have pre-
vented me from being able to work and enjoy
life the way I desire. I often wonder when my
life will return to what it was. Greg Long's story
(My Way, September) brought tears to my eyes.
This awesome surfer’s words—comparing our
beautiful, mysterious oceans to life—are in-
spiring. I will continue to live, like Long,
through my own “never-ending sequence of
radical events.” I will also strive to make my-
self a better person and to seek the grace and
love he speaks of, and I will carry this article in
my pocket as I search for what brings me happi-
ness. To Greg Long: Thank you, sir.

Tyler Davidson

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

COVER STORY

From his pleasant perch on
the best seat in the house, our
Rabbit wishes you and Miss
December Eniko Mihalik a
very happy holiday season.

E-mail letters@playboy.com, or write to us at

9346 Civic Center Drive, Beverly Hills, California 90210.

DANE PETERSON

FOLLOW THE BUNNY

090000

/playboy @playboy @ playboy playboy + playboy

Y PLAYBOY SHOP com

Exclusively from Playboy. Shop now.

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PHOTOGRAPHY BY OLIVIA JAFFE

When | entered the
game, | was around the
richest people in the
world—who wanted

to use my sound to
reinvent themselves. In
he same breath, | was
around the poorest
people. I’ve realized

hat we’re all out there
winging it, from the
57-year-old truck driver
who’s alone in life to

he 15-year-old girl who
doesn’t want to eat her
food, and it’s fucking
fine, because the ideals
hat have been pushed
down our throats are
all lies. Nobody comes
from glory. Pain is
inevitable—whether you
just got fired or just got
dumped—but we need

pain to live. We shouldn’t
be victims; we should
allow pain to push us to
change shit and work
toward the evolution of
humanity. My purpose

in music is to inspire
people to be who they
are, despite race, sexual
orientation, gender or
where you're from. |
want people to free the
truth within themselves.
My goal is to glorify life.
Singer-songwriter Bibi
Bourelly skyrocketed

to fame last year after
co-writing “Bitch Better
Have My Money.” Her
second EP, Free the Real
(Pt. #2), is out this win-
ter; her full-length debut
drops early next year.

FOOD

ALL HAIL
THE NEO
TACO

This supersavory
version from chef Ray
Garcia redefines the genre

BEET PIBIL TACOS

Ray Garcia, mastermind behind L.A.’s B.S.
Taqueria and Broken Spanish, makes a vegan
taco delicious enough to convert a carnivore.

Serves six

1% tbsp. annatto seeds

Ya tbsp. dried Mexican oregano

1; tsp. cumin seeds

Y tsp. allspice

Y tsp. black peppercorns

1 tbsp. vegetable oil

8 oz. water

4 oz. coconut vinegar

2 oz. distilled white vinegar

2 oz. fresh orange juice

Saltto taste

1medium white onion, peeled and quartered
1habanero chili, de-stemmed

12 yellow beets, peeled

Corn tortillas

Garnish: arugula, baby kale, pickled onions,
mustard greens, mustard frills

Grind spices in spice mill until smooth. In large
pot, heat thin layer of oil over medium heat. Add
ground spices and cook two minutes, stirring
constantly. Add liquids and salt and bring to
simmer. Add onion, habanero and beets, cover
tightly with aluminum foil and lid, and cook
over medium-low heat until tender, two to three
hours. Remove beets from liquid and let cool. In
blender, combine remaining liquid, onion, haba-
neroand two beets, and blend until smooth. Pass
through fine strainer and set aside. Toss remain-
ing beets in oil, place on sheet pan, season with
salt, and roast in 400-degree oven until deeply
caramelized. Slice beets, place on tortillas, driz-
zle with blended sauce, and garnish.

PHOTOGRAPHY BY GRANT CORNETT

PLAYBOY

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DRINKS

SHERRY

SHAKES IT UP

Top bartenders and restaurateurs are reviving and reinventing the Spanish wine

If you want to know what everyone will be
drinking next, ask your favorite bartender
what he or she is into right now.

Perhaps because they deal with the stan-
dard spirits at work, professional mixers tend
to pick less-common libations when they drink
for fun. And lately those libations lean toward
sherry, a fortified wine from the Jerez region,
at the southern tip of Spain.

What makes sherry stand outis an aging pro-
cess that creates unique flavors. With the solera
method, the wine ages by passing through a se-
riesofbarrelsthatare never completely emptied.
Lighter varieties—finos and manzanillas—age
under flor, a layer of yeast that prevents oxida-
tion and leads to a dry, citrusy and bright flavor,
while oloroso sherries, which don't have flor,
display nutty, cooked-fruit notes thanks to in-
teracting with oxygen. (Amontillado sherry
splits the difference, aging for some time with

flor and some time without.) There's also Pedro
Ximénez (usually called PX), a very sweet style
named for the grape it's made from.

“The first sip, I fell in love,” says Washington,
D.C. bar professional Derek Brown of his intro-
duction to sherry in a cocktail a decade ago.
“The depth of flavor, the layers—it was unique.
It’s like getting a song stuck in your head: I
wanted to learn everything about it.” One of
the capital’s most famous mixologists, Brown
operates four bars, including Mockingbird Hill,
which specializes in sherry and opened in 2013
with more than 60 bottles
on the menu.

As chief spirits advi-
sor to the National Ar-
chives Foundation (“I’m
the highest-ranking bar-
tender in the federal
government,” he jokes),
Brown cites sherry’s long
history in America: The
founding fathers and their
contemporaries sucked
down gallons of sherry,
port and madeira back

Gonzalez Byass
Alfonso oloroso sherry
Portland bartender and
writer Jacob Grier uses
this oloroso for a per-
versely primitive drink
known as the bone luge,
which
ing the sherry througha
hollow roasted marrow
bone. It offers intense
flavors of oak, hazelnut,
dried fig—and roasted
marrow bone.

in the 18th century. And a top cocktail of the
19th century was the sherry cobbler, a refresh-
ing mix of sherry, sugar and fruit served over
crushed ice that was beloved in part because
its low alcohol content allowed imbibers to
drink it all day long.

Today, with low-ABV cocktails back in vogue,
David Rosoff of Bar Moruno in downtown L.A.
recommends a new version of the classic cobbler.
His Grand Central Mar-
ket spot has an extensive
list of sherries that go
well with the Spanish-
North African flavors
on the menu. “Sherry is
a natural for a low-ABV
cocktail, whether you
want salinity with a fino
or sweetness with a PX,”
Rosoff says. Also, to put it
less technically, less alco-
hol means you can drink
more.—Jason Horn

involves drink-

PX OLD FASHIONED
by Derek Brown, Mockingbird Hill,
Washington, D.C.

Brown uses PX sherry in place of
sugar in an otherwise traditional old
fashioned to create a more complex
and fruity cocktail.

INGREDIENTS

2 oz. bourbon (such as Nelson’s
Green Brier Belle Meade Sherry
Cask Finish)

PHOTOGRAPHY BY GRANT CORNETT

14 oz. Pedro Ximénez sherry
(such as Williams & Humbert
Collection Don Zoilo Pedro
Ximénez 12 Years Old)

1 dash aromatic bitters

Glass: old fashioned

Garnish: orange twist

Add bourbon, sherry and bitters to
a mixing glass filled with ice. Stir,
then strain into an old fashioned
glass containing one large ice cube.
Garnish with orange twist.

SHERRY COBBLER
by David Rosoff, Los Angeles

Rosoff’s twist on the classic sherry
cobbler (pictured at right) combines
nutty oloroso sherry with rich Irish
whiskey, bitter Amaro Montenegro and
a bright grapefruit liqueur.

INGREDIENTS
1strawberry

1tsp. Sugarcane syrup
2% 02. oloroso sherry

% oz. Irish whiskey

VY? oz. Amaro Montenegro

Ye oz. Combier Creme de
Pamplemousse Rose liqueur

Glass: wine

Garnish: strawberry, grapefruit
wedge and powdered sugar

In wineglass, gently muddle strawberry
and sugarcane syrup. Add remain-
ing ingredients, fill glass with crushed
ice and stir. Garnish with strawberry,
grapefruit wedge and powdered sugar.

TRAVEL

PORTLAND, MAINE

Portland is the new Portland

Discussions of which up-and-coming Ameri-
can city is the “new Portland” seem, ironically,
to ignore the obvious: the original Portland.
Friendly, diverse and easily navigable, this New
England town is equal parts old-school charm
and modern sensibility. In spring and summer,
the Portland Sea Dogs play at Hadlock Field,
one of the best minor league stadiums in the
country, complete with a replica of Fenway's
Green Monster. Good spots for steamed clams
and lobster rolls naturally abound, but you’d be
well advised to stop atthe Honey Paw for Asian-
inspired comfort food such as Korean fried
chicken with corn bread, and tagliatelle with
roasted chili ragú. End the night at Vena's Fizz
House, a combination mixology shop and cock-
tail bar where the bow-tied bartenders are happy
to create a drink to your specifications. Port-
land is dead, long live Portland.— Jeremy Freed

PARIS

Eat better for less in the City of Light

It’s an open secret that the Paris food-and-drink
scene had gone stale in recent decades. Now, an
embrace of farm-to-table cooking, natural wines
and the cocktail revolution have made the city
an exciting culinary destination again. The best
deal is in Le Marais at the oldest covered mar-
ket in town, Marché des Enfants Rouges. At Chez
Alain Miam Miam (below left) a silver-haired
man wearing a WHO THE FUCK IS SHAWN CARTER
T-shirt will make you a delicious Comte-and-
ham sandwich for just eight euros. For dinner,
hit Le Verre Vole, a tiny wine shop-restaurant
that serves rustic fare including Normandy beef
atop bean salad, and whole shrimp tossed in dill.
After dinner, head to Pasdeloup restaurant for
a nightcap. Tucked in the back is one of Paris’s
best cocktail bars, helmed by American expat
Amanda Boucher, who mixes stellar drinks both
classic and new.— Jeremy Repanich

LJUBLJANA, SLOVENIA

Reuse your imagination

The European Grand Tour is old news. You've out-
grown Ibiza; you've done a stint in Berlin. Maybe
you're itching to find the cool kids, in which case
you should follow the graffiti all the way to Lju-
bljana. Asthe city shakes offits Eastern Blocvibe,
the mood is one of radical excitement. The living
is good and cheap, the food is wild (deer tartare!
bear paw!), and the wine scene is strong—Dvorni
Bar is a good place to start your education in the
local varieties. Street art of the Banksy kind is
public and vibrant. Old buildings have been given
new life at venues suchas Stara Elektrarna, a for-
mer power station that now hosts live shows, and
Metelkova (pictured), a barracks turned mod-
ern art museum. A stay at Vander Urbani Resort,
in the heart of the city, will do you right with its
clean, spare, modern rooms, strong coffee and
superfast wi-fi—signs that the chic millennial
traveler is here to stay.—Jeralyn Gerba

COROMANDEL PENINSULA, NEW ZEALAND

Down under, move ove

Surfers (and even suits with a beach-bum mentality) have been following the tide all the way to the
Coromandel Peninsula -a sandy hot spot with underground springs at Hot Water Beach, excellent]eft-
hand surf breaks at Whangamata and killer snorkeling in Opito Bay (pictured). The 309 Road gives
Route 66 a run for its money with waterfalls, trekking trails, impressive summits and chill local char-
acters. When all that vacationing demands you go in even slower motion, ferry over to nearby Waiheke,
asupercool under-the-radar island 30 minutes off the coast of Auckland. It's Kiwi with hints of Hawaii,
with chic hotels (the Boatshed, the Oyster Inn), a community art gallery and dozens of wineries (Syrah,
cab and merlot feature heavily) to ensure that the air, sun and sand all go to your head.—Jeralyn Gerba

MEXICO CITY

America's hippest destination may be south
ofthe border

Decked out with bonsai, raw concrete and
immaculate midcentury modern furniture,
Xaman Bar could be the hottest new signless
spot in New York or Tokyo. The cocktail list,
however, is quintessentially Mexico City. Like
the drinks, which fuse Mexican botanicals with
top-shelfgin and mezcal, this chaotic metropo-
lis excels at combining the traditional with the
modern and cosmopolitan. At La Valise, athree-
suite designer hotel set amid the coffee bars and
streetwear shops of Roma Norte, the rooftop op-
tion (pictured) features vintage furniture and à
bed on rails that slides out onto a private terrace.
A short walk away at Contramar, the raw hama-
chi tostadas with avocado and spicy mayo are
a brilliant marriage of Mexican and Japanese.
Save room for a late-night torta, Mexico City's
preeminent street snack.— Jeremy Freed

n
Y

A WORLD-GLASS JAPANESE
SUPERCAR BY ANY NAME

You could call it Godzilla or the Skyline, but definitely call the Nissan GT-R amazing

It was around the third or fourth turn, as I cor-
nered the 2017 Nissan GT-R on a tight canyon
road high above the cliffs of Malibu, that it hit
me: This thing is utterly mind-boggling. Notin
the purely figurative sense, but mind-boggling
in a literal way that leaves one open to the pos-
sibility that, just maybe, there’s some myste-
rious place in the universe where mind can
control matter. Such is the power of the latest
iteration of the famed Japanese car also known
by the nickname Godzilla. Fans of the mas-
sively popular and pioneering driving video
game Gran Turismo may also know earlier
models of the GT-R as the Skyline, which par-
tially explains why I caught so many Los Ange-
les millennials drooling over the car.

PHOTOGRAPHY BY CHANTAL ANDERSON

This wasn’t my first time driving a GT-R. I
recall trying to contain my excitement after
tackling a few Michigan back roads in the out-
going model some years ago. But the 2017 GT-R
is far more exhilarating.

Much of that can be credited to a stiffer
frame, which improves the car’s handling in
situations that call for tricky maneuvering.
The GT-R’s award-winning twin-turbo 3.8-
liter V6 engine has also increased by 20 horse-
power, for a total of 565 hp, which allows for
quicker acceleration when you hammer down
on the gas pedal. All that power is perfectly
balanced by one of the most revolutionary
all-wheel-drive systems in the game, lead-
ing to unparalleled confidence on the road.

The GT-R’s six-speed dual-clutch transmis-
sion has been refined for smoother shifting
in normal city driving, but it’s clear that the
beast, which starts around $110,000, is most
comfortable revving at higher speeds.

Cosmetically, the 2017 GT-R has an entirely
overhauled face and hood, redesigned to im-
prove the car’s overall performance. And the
interior has undergone upgraded modifica-
tions as well, including a new dashboard and an
eight-inch touch screen, creating a more pre-
mium luxury feel. Still, it’s the intoxicating,
thrilling feeling I get when pushing the GT-R
through a wicked turn that sells me on the idea
that there’s so much more to this supercar than
its sheer power.—Marcus Amick

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ADVISOR

When You're Home for the Holi

What Are the Rules for سپ‎ y Up
ays?

e [90 back home for the holidays every
O year and stay with my parents. Im the

only person in my group of high school friends
who is single. It allmakes me stir-crazy. Going
on a date seems like a good excuse to get out
of the house, but I don’t know where to start.
Should I hit up an old flame on Facebook? What
if she asks to come back to my place?

As Few things put me in the mood quite
@ like cranky shoppers, ugly sweaters
and tipsy cousins on politi-
cal rants. For many singles,
being home for the holidays
means watching Elf on a basic-cable loop and
pretending to have answers to such questions
as “What are you doing with your life?” When
you come out of your turkey-induced coma, you
realize the only physical contact you’ve had of
late has been with your uncle’s new wife with the
new boobs. In the middle of your second Law &
Order marathon, it hits you: You need to get laid.

Remember that technology is your friend,
whether it’s Tinder, Bumble or OkCupid. Just be

2۷ BRIDGET PHETASY

prepared to swipe through every option in your
suburban radius in five minutes. You'll probably
see old classmates and think, Tinder over the hol-
idays? That's sad. But know this: They're think-
ingthesame about you. You've already drunkenly
cyberstalked your high school girlfriend since
breaking up with her years ago, so skip the judg-
ment and just swipe right. Don't underestimate
the joys of a mutual pity fuck. Ex sex is often the
best sex, because a stranger rarely pleases the
way someone who most likely remembers your
kinks can. That being said,
ex sex can be a terrible idea if
younever got closure. It could
release residual emotions, making it that much
harder to survive the holidays alone. If the rela-
tionship is still complicated, swipe left.

Finding privacy can be a bigger issue than
finding a match. If your childhood bedroom
isn't full of abandoned workout equipment, it's
a decent venue, especially since the risk of get-
tingcaught heightens pleasure. If your bedroom
is now a wrapping room, consider the places I've
hooked up in my hometown: Dive-bar bath-

rooms, movie theaters, garages and basements
are all fair game. My go-to is the car, but steer
clear of this option if your hookup isn't someone
you already know. Car seats don’t leave much
room for foreplay, and taking a Bumble date to
an abandoned parking lot will definitely raise
red flags. If you're in your parents’ car, clean up
the DNA and condom wrappers. Crack the win-
dows during sex and air out the car afterward.
A final note about everyone’s favorite sea-
sonal activity: drinking. Booze and being sin-
gle during the holidays go together like whipped
cream and pumpkin pie. Don’t get sloppy, but if
you do, remember not to bring your date home,
where you'll inevitably end up making out on the
couch and leaving her there to be discovered by
your parents on Christmas morning. Yes, I have
been in this situation. I'll never forget groggily
waking up with a raging headache to Mr. John-
son saying, “Merry Christmas, Bridget. Would
you like some coffee?” Learn from my misfor-
tune and buy your one-night stand the best
Christmas gift ever: an Uber ride home.
Questions? E-mail advisor@playboy.com.

E amoto

HAVE FUN.
BE SAFE.

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ZERO
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MY WAY

SHAWN
STUSSY

The world's most influential street-style genius on growing up with
design and returning to his original craft

as ToLo To ETHAN STEWART

It was always about surfboards. I made my first
one at 13. Since then, that’s been my job. Way
before designing or my clothing line or even
thinking about design, it was surfboards.

My parents had a printing shop that we hung
around in as kids. They would pick us up from
school, and we would go there and hang out
until nine or 10 at night. I learned about print-
ing and typesetting and old letterpress, past-
ing up negatives and chalking out the dust. My
whole family was exposed to that at ayoung age.
It was as if my dad had been a tailor or some-
thing; it was the family business. Graphic de-
sign, at least in terms of manipulating fonts
and layouts, was something I grew up with.

Looking back, I still can't separate the two,
surfboards and designing. I was always draw-
ing stuff or doing little graphic typesetting
things, so even when I was making my first
boards I thought, Ooh, where am I going to
put my little logo? How am I going to write
“Stussy”? I wasn’t thinking about these things
specifically or individually; it wasn’t “design”
in that way. They were just happening. I was 13
years old, and it was life.

It was never a conscious plan, not in a mil-
lion years. I was never like, “Hey, I’m going to
make surfboards for my job in my adult life and
starta clothing company based on the logo I put
on those surfboards.” I was just doing what I
loved, staying interested and seeing where it
led me. Luckily, it ended up being sustainable,
but you don’t know that when you’re starting

PHOTOGRAPHY BY JEFF JOHNSON

out. Often you still can’t see it when you're half-
way down the road. At a certain point, I guess
you have to trust yourself.

I started so young that by the time I had to
make decisions about the worth of my work
and my so-called talent, I already had a track
record. It wasn’t like I was 21 or 22, just out of
college, and had to say, “Okay, now what am I
going to do?” I never had to face that moment.

Nowadays, we’re force-fed visuals. We down-
load so much visual activity in any given day
that it has become nearly impossible to find
images we're passionate about. You just cruise
through all these pictures with one flick of your
hand. We all doit. It’s aton of information, but
in the end, we’re all looking at the same things.
Originality gets harder. You can sit in your un-
derpants in Prague and know where the hip
Japanese guy was partying the night before.
You used to have to go and physically find your
influences; you had a real sense of discovery.

When I started doing my thing, there weren't
a lot of original ideas either. I was appropriat-
ing. I was always getting little glimmers from
somewhere else, but maybe those somewheres
were more personal to me. I had to choose to
seek them out. I had to get ona plane and leave
the country, go to a gallery or find a certain
magazine store in Tokyo. It wasn’t easy, and
10,000 other people weren’t looking at the
same glimmer at the same time. I was watching
my own campfire, just staring into the flames,
and the ideas would come from that. E

IN THE END, WE’RE ALL LOOKING AT THE SAME
THINGS. ORIGINALITY GETS HARDER.

H
1 ٠

THE RABBIT HOLE

On Video Games

— STATE OF PLAY — ——

Almost half of American adults play video
games, accordingtoa2015 Pew Research Center
poll; only 10% of Americans identify as gamers:

PLAY GAMERS DON'T PLAY

10%

Among men, 15% identify as gamers, com-
pared with 6% of women. Y According to the
Entertainment Software Association, the best-
selling video games of 2015 were:

(1) CALL OF DUTY: BLACK OPS III
(2) MADDEN NFL 16 ۰ (3) FALLOUT 4
(4) STAR WARS BATTLEFRONT
(5) NBA 2K16 ۰ (6) GRAND THEFT AUTO V

The video game market is worth $99.6 billion,
up 8.5% from last year, according to Newzoo:

Region share revenue change
Asia-Pacific 47% $46.6b . 410.796
N. America 2596 $25.4b +4.1%
EMEA 24% $23.5b +6
Latin America 496 $4.1b +206

Annual gaming growth is now led by mobile:

Cell phone +23.7% 1 PC 44.296
Tablet +15.1% Web games -7.5%
TV console +4.5% Handheld -24.1%

sr BEN SCHOTT

READY PLAYER ONE

— CONTROL ALT DELETE

Y Alongside “It’s-a-me, Mario!" the

> most famous video game catchphrase

is surely “All your base are belong to

us" from the Japanese shoot-'em-up

Zero Wing (1989). The Japanese-to-English

translation is made even more memorable by

agrating voice synth. Y Thetitles currently in
the World Video Game Hall of Fame are:

DOOM +: GRAND THEFT AUTO III ۰ PONG +
THE LEGEND OF ZELDA ۰ THE OREGON TRAIL +
PAC-MAN ۰ THE SIMS ۰ SONIC THE HEDGEHOG ۰

SPACE INVADERS ۰ SUPER MARIO BROS. ۰

TETRIS - WORLD OF WARCRAFT

Y The dullest game is Desert Bus, devised by
Penn & Teller in 1995 to mock the knee-jerk
practice of blaming video games for juvenile
delinquency. Players drive a constantly drift-
ing bus in real time from Tucson to Vegas—an
eight-hour journey—on a road that's completely
straight, requiring ceaseless vigilance in a game
that can't be paused. Y The Bartle taxonomy
classifies gamers as killers, socializers, achiev-
ersor explorers, based on how they interact with
agame's environment and other characters.

—— DIRTY SEXY MONEY ——

Sex has been partof gaming since Donkey Kong
(1981) saw Mario rescue his girlfriend from a
phallically nicknamed gorilla. Today, though
many explicit titles are sold, 89% of games
rated by the Entertainment Software Rating
Board are fit for players under the age of 17:

EVERYONE
EVERYONE 104

3776
23%

TEEN 29%
MATURE/ADULT 11%

Indeed, a recent analysis of 571 games
released between 1983 and 2014 showed a sig-
nificant decline in the sexualization of female
characters over the past eight years.

WAR GAMES

Violence has been part of TT?
gaming since Spacewar!
(1962) enabled MIT students
to blow the crap out of enemy
spacecraft. Since then, the a:

debate has raged: Do violent games beget vio-
lent beings? The answer is...unclear. Granted,
some mass murderers have been avid gamers.
Anders Breivik, for example, “trained” on Call
of Duty before he killed 77 people. Yet as video
game sales have soared since the late 1990s, the
rate of violent crime in America has plummeted.

FALLING DOWN GHOSTBUSTERS
Tetris (1984) is based on seven four-square Tetrimino blocks: Below are the four ghosts that pursue, and flee, in Pac-Man (1980):
<p “o” * 3 p “g” agr
EEE EEE JAPANESE ENGLISH

HA ada rrF aa" "a character nickname character nickname PERSONALITY TRAITS
In classic Tetris the shapes appear not randomly but in a roughly even KR Oikake Akabei Shadow Blinky leader of the pack
distribution. To test gamers’ skill (and sanity), tough Tetris clones ff; Machibuse Pinky Speedy Pinky dogged in pursuit, ambush
have been devised, including Sam Hughes’s Hatetris (2010), which fí Kimagure Aosuke Bashful Inky shy, unpredictable
sadistically delivers the statistically least-helpful Tetriminos. f$ Otoboke Guzuta Pokey Clyde slow and dumb, yet sly
EVERY POKEMON IN POKÉMON GO: Bulbasaur - Ivysaur - Venusaur ۰ Charmander ۰ Charmeleon - Charizard ۰ Squirtle ۰ Wartortle - Blastoise - Caterpie - Metapod - Butterfree - Weedle ۰ Kakuna ۰ Beedrill ۰ Pidgey ۰ Pidgeotto - Pidgeot ۰

Rattata - Raticate - Spearow - Fearow - Ekans - Arbok - Pikachu Raichu - Sandshrew - Sandslash - Nidoran - Nidorina - Nidoqueen ۰ Nidoran ۰ Nidorino ۰ Nidoking - Clefairy - Clefable - Vulpix - Ninetails - Jigglypuff ۰ Wigglytuff -
Zubat ۰ Golbat ۰ Oddish - Gloom ۰ Vileplume - Paras ۰ Parasect - Venonat - Venomoth ٠ Diglett - Dugtrio ۰ Meowth ۰ Persian - Psyduck ۰ Golduck - Mankey - Primeape - Growlithe - Arcanine - Poliwag - Poliwhirl - Poliwrath ۰ Abra ۰
Kadabra - Alakazam ۰ Machop - Machoke ۰ Machamp ۰ Bellsprout ۰ Weepinbell ۰ Victreebel - Tentacool - Tentacruel ۰ Geodude - Graveler - Golem - Ponyta - Rapidash - Slowpoke - Slowbro ۰ Magnemite ۰ Magneton ۰ Farfetch'd ۰ Doduo -
Dodrio ۰ Seel - Dewgong - Grimer - Muk - Shellder ۰ Cloyster - Gastly - Haunter - Gengar - Onix - Drowsee - Hypno ٠ Krabby - Kingler ۰ Voltorb - Electrode - Exeggcute ۰ Exeggutor - Cubone - Marowak - Hitmonlee - Hitmonchan -
Lickitung - Koffing - Weezing - Rhyhorn - Rhydon ۰ Chansey ۰ Tangela - Kangaskhan - Horsea - Seadra ۰ Goldeen - Seaking - Staryu - Starmie - Mr. Mime - Scyther - Jynx - Electabuzz - Magmar - Pinsir - Tauros ۰ Magikarp - Gyarados -
Lapras ۰ Ditto - Eevee ۰ Vaporeon ۰ Jolteon - Flareon - Porygon - Omanyte - Omastar - Kabuto - Kabutops - Aerodactyl - Snorlax - Articuno - Zapdos Moltres - Dratini - Dragonair ۰ Dragonite - Mewtwo ۰ Mew ۰ Gotta Catch Em All!

200

ANNA

The actress and singer discusses her revealing new book, her star turn in Up in the Air and the

quirks that fuel the work. Also, dick pics

sy DANIELLE BACHER »-ortocraphy sy GHLOE AFTEL

@1: When did it hit you that you were no longer
a struggling young woman living in a shit hole in
Los Angeles?

KENDRICK: Weird things will trig-
ger that sensation of “Holy crap! How
did I get here?” It will be like when I'm
checking out at the doctor’s office. I
vividly remember being 19 years old,
not having health insurance and mov-
ing to Los Angeles. I needed to go to
the doctor, and it was 30 times more
expensivethan I was expectingitto be.
Now when I'm checking out and there's
a balance of $70, I’m like, “Yeah, I’m
making it rain up in this doctor's
office!” Ivery distinctly remember not
having $70.

Like when I was 25, I wanted to buy a
rug. Why didn't anyone tell me that
rugs are like the most expensive thing
in the world? People are selling rugs
for $10,000 as if that weren't absolute
insanity. Why isn't that mentioned at
some point in your life? “Oh, by the way,
people are going to try to sell you rugs
that cost so much money that you're
going to want to smash a window.”

Q3: You're now 31. Do you feel younger than

you actually are?
KENDRICK: I definitely feel like a little
old lady at heart. I’m very grumpy and
grizzled but simultaneously really imma-
ture. So I’m the worst of a child and the
worst of an old lady. I’matreat, basically.

05: Your parents divorced when you were 15.
Why did you leave that out of the book?

KENDRICK: Honestly, it was one of
many things I wanted to write about,
but it just didn’t end up jelling. It felt
more like a police report than a chapter.
The miraculous thing about that situa-
tion was that my parents were so civil
and respectful throughout the process.
It made me a poster child for divorce.
If they'd stayed together and been un-
happy, it would have messed up my
understanding of what marriage should
look like. I’m very pro-divorce. I know
that sounds crazy, but Louis C.K. did
this great bit about how divorce should
never be sad. There are never two peo-

ple madly in love and perfect for each
other who get divorced.
Q6: You've said that you feel unworthy of

Q4: You also say that you're a “loud, hyperactive
loser.” Was it difficult to publish such sharp words
about yourself?

Q2: In your new book, Scrappy Little Nobody,
you say you knew you were crazy at a young age.
Why haven’t you ever seen a therapist?

KENDRICK: I never felt normal, but I
actually think that’s a way more com-
mon feeling than I realized. Honestly,
I haven’t been to a therapist because it
was one of the many things I thought I
would magically know how to do as an
adult, but I don’t. I thought someone
was going to tell me so many things.

KENDRICK: I guess the best I can hope
for is that people relate to that feeling.
If you can’t get on board with overthink-
ing, I don’t know how much we can con-
nect. I’manovertalker. When I'm trying
to figure out what to do about something,
I'll bend someone's ear. I understand if
they just want to duct-tape my face shut.

success. Why?

KENDRICK: It's notthat I feel unworthy;
it's just that I used to buy into the idea
that some people are better. I'm learn-
ing every day, over and over, that we're
all the same. Really, it was more that I
just wanted to pay the bills doing what I
love and, ideally, not have a second job.

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It was the biggest dream 1 allowed my-
self to have.

Q7: You've sung and acted on Broadway and

in movies including the Pitch Perfect franchise

and Into the Woods. Which is weirder, watching

yourself sing or watching yourself act?
KENDRICK: Growing up, people told
me I should sing in a recital or some-
thing, but it was mostly a way to com-
batthefactthatIwouldn't fucking stop
singing. I really liked to scream-sing.
If I'd kept on singing like that, I would
have lost my voice before I hit the age
of seven. I think it's less weird to watch
myself sing than watch myself act.
When I watch myself sing, I can appre-
ciate the music because I didn't write
it. I’ve never written a script either, but
there's something a little rawer with
acting. I tried to watch one of my mov-
ies alone in a screening room, and the
entire time I was thinking, You are a
monster. You are terrible!

Q8: It seems every time you smoke weed, you

get really paranoid. Why the hell do you do it?
KENDRICK: [Laughs] About two years
ago I had one of those game-changing
paranoid experiences, and I haven't
smoked weed since. I was probably re-
membering all the bad trips. It was a
big pastime. For whatever reason, I
had more bad experiences than good
experiences, so I thought I shouldn't do
itanymore. I've never been addicted to
anything. I would be a much more in-
teresting person if I were addicted to
OxyContin.

Q9: You mention in your book that you kept a

journal. What did you write about losing your

virginity?
KENDRICK: I just wrote, ^When am I
goingtolose my virginity? Like, really,
when is it going to happen? What is it
going to be like? How long, and at what
point will it be too late and I'll have to
be a virgin forever because you can't
lose your virginity pasta certain age?"
I remember literally writing, "It's
going to happen at some point and
someone is going to be on top of me,

and we'll be having sex and I'll prob-
ably think of this diary entry." It's a
pretty meta diary.

Q10: We've heard that you have a lot of sex

dreams. What's the craziest one?
KENDRICK: Oh my God, do I? I don't
want to name the actor, but I dream
about someone I find really creepy but
other people might find totally attrac-
tive. I've had two sex dreams about
him, which is really awkward. I woke
up like, What the hell was that about?
I can have a sex dream about anyone in
the world and it was that guy? Thanks a
lot, dream brain!

Q11: Are you pro- or anti-dick pic?
KENDRICK: Now, this is a lose-lose
question for me. I can't be pro, because
then I'll get a bunch of dick pics. And
I can't be anti, because I'll also get a
bunch of dick pics. It's just setting me
up for failure. A friend of mine once
said she had been to a comedy show, and
it changed her perspective on it. This
guy said, “If you think you're hot shit
but don't have a dick in your phone, you
need to reconsider it." I guess that is a
way to recontextualize.

Q12: What's the most awkward song you've had

sex to?
KENDRICK: “Lapdance” by N.E.R.D. It
was just too on the nose, and we ended
up laughing. It's a really sexy song, but
then it was just kind of like...eh. It came
on shuffle, and we were both trying to
stay in the moment. We were like, “Are
weina music video? What is going on?"

Q13: Why are you so uncomfortable doing nude

and kissing scenes?
KENDRICK: It's so mechanical; it wasn't
the actor's idea to kiss me. We just have
to look at each other and say, *Okay,
I guess we are doing this now." For
women, the fact that someone wants to
kiss you is the exciting part. If some-
one's kissing you when they don't par-
ticularly want to be, it takes the fun out
of it. Also, it's the makeup department's
jobtohave mints, which is random. Why
the makeup department?

Q14: How much did you relate to your extremely

type-A character in Up in the Air?

KENDRICK: I related to my character a
lot, but I think that's because she's prob-
ably one ofthe only people on the planet
who's more uptight than I am.

Q15: What about acting with George Clooney?
KENDRICK: Everything you want George
Clooney to be, he is that. I was nervous
to act with him, but he was really warm
and accommodating. He’s probably used
to people being nervous around him at
this point.

Q16: Your new movie The Accountant came out

this October. Ben Affleck’s character is an autis-

tic savant with obsessive-compulsive disorder.

How did his condition affect your portrayal of

your character?

KENDRICK: Ben and Gavin O’Connor,
the director, did a lot of research for
this film. They really understood the
responsibility they had to portray
someone who’s on the spectrum. I did
my research through reading, and I
prepared myself to interact with Ben
however he decided to play that charac-
ter. What was nice for me was playing
someone who’s probably the only person
in that character’s life who’s in awe of
him. She’s not freaked out; she thinks
he’s amazing. Since Ben’s character is
more closed off, it forced me to listen a
lot, which is the best thing you can do as
an actor anyway.

Q17: You’ve said that singing at the Oscars last

yearis one of your top three scariest experiences.

What was another?

KENDRICK: One was when I did Let-
terman, because I had never done a
talk show before. What if I sit down
and start screaming? What if the uni-
verse swallows me up? He's terrifying.
He wanted me to do “Cups” from Pitch
Perfect, and I was like, “Well, yeah,
whatever he wants, because he is so
biting and his wit is so icy and if you
get on his bad side.. Afterward, I just
got the hell out of there, ran to my hotel
room and waited for it to come on. I
was also on Twitter while watching it,

IF YOU GAN’T GET ON BOARD
WITH OVERTHINKING, I DON’T KNOW
HOW MUCH WE CAN CONNECT.

which I would never do now. That's just
setting yourself up for disaster.

Q18: Let's take it a few steps further: Why do you
fear death so much?

KENDRICK: It's like from that song: “I
swear there ain't no heaven, but I pray
there ain't no hell.” I was raised going
to church, and 1 had horrible anxiety
about going to hell. My parents were
like, “Of course you are not going to
hell. You are a little girl. What are you
thinking?” Were they not paying atten-
tion in church when they said that ba-
sically anyone who ever does anything
bad is going to burn in a fire forever? I
wasn't even Catholic; I was raised Prot-
estant. Ithink the previous generation
got so messed up by Catholic guilt that

they went Episcopalian. They thought,
Oh, my kids are going to love church.
But they're still reading from the Old
Testament. So yeah, I think I'm afraid
of being tortured forever. What if hell
is real? I'm going to do some good deeds
justin case.

Q19: How close is the real Anna to the one we
see in the media?

KENDRICK: [Laughs] I don't know.
Oh my God, I'm going to pee so much
after this interview. I was just think-
ing that if I died and somebody talked
to every single friend and acquain-
tance of mine, and read every journal
and diary entry I'd ever written, I don't
think they would know anything about
me. I mean, it's not like my goal is for

everyone in the world to know com-
pletely who I am.

Q20: What was it like having cake smeared all
over your face in the upcoming Table 19? Would
you ever bring a cake fight into the bedroom?

KENDRICK: I loved the cake all over my
face. Itweeted at the time that I was cov-
ered in frosting and Lisa Kudrow had
to brush my frosted hair away from my
face. I was living some weird 1990s fan-
tasy. But yeah, I think food in the bed-
room could totally go hand in hand,
specifically with vanilla frosting. Choc-
olate I don’t understand. It’s too scato-
logical; it looks like poop. But vanilla
frosting I can get on board with. I was
trying to be a lady in talking about poop,
but I’m not a lady. E

FILM

Sci-Fi's Secret Weapon

Alan Tudyk was uniquely qualified to play K-2SO, the towering droid of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. Having
starred inthe 2004 film I, Robot, he already knew his way around a motion-capture suit. As for the stilts that lend R
its height, he was experienced there too—thanks to an East Village clown show. Maybe Tudyk has more in common
with K-2 than he does with Wray Nerely, his hapless alter ego on the comedy series Con Man. Both men are science-
‚Fiction veterans, but unlike Tudyk, Nerely hates the convention circuit. Here's Tudyk on his absurd, happy life in sci-fi.

Alan Tudyk

ON BECOMING K-2SO
"The stilts were pretty
easy to learn on: | had
done some stilt work in a
clown show off-off-off-
off-Broadway a few years
ago. had to do this salsa
dance in stilts. They were
definitely not engineered
by ILM, and they were a

lot higher than the ones |
learned to run around in
for Rogue. K-2's really cool
to have in a room—even if
I’m just standing in a scene
wearing my stilts and what
look like pajamas."

ON DROID MAGNETISM
“Pm blown away by how
well-rounded C-3PO is. His
face doesn't move at all;
it's his voice. R2-D2 and
BB-8 don't even speak a
language you can under-
stand, but in this world it's
how people react to them.
| feel like | originally saw
BB-8 in Cast Away, play-
ing Wilson. | don't know if
it was a substance-abuse
thing, because he really
dropped off, but then he
came back and it was like,
‘Whoa, way to go!’”

ON FAN LOVE

"The main difference be-
tween me and Wray, and
the whole point of Con
Man, is that he's miss-

ing how great his life is.
It's hard to miss it when
you're surrounded by peo-
ple who appreciate the
work you've done—things
you've put time and work
into that other people
haven't seen. But when
somebody comes up to
Wray and says, ‘I love that
you did that,’ he takes it as
an insult."

ON DRAWING FROM LIFE
"Nathan Fillion and | did
Halo 3. | asked him, ‘So
what was it like, dude?'
And he was like, ‘It was
great. | did all the, you
know, [in gruff voice] “Fol-
low me, this way! We've
got them on the run!”’ And
all of mine were, 'Owww,
that hurt! They're usin'
real bullets! | got a new
plan: Let's hide!’ So I’m
that guy—all the chicken-
shit soldiers in Halo 3. But
then | got to make fun of
that on Con Man.”

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ONE SMALL STEP

FOR STAND-UP

Reggie Watts and the diverse, digital and beautifully weird new age of comedy

“We here at Netflix believe: Fuck TV,” Reggie
Watts tells the crowd with a smile. “We're mov-
ing into the future. This is an experimental
show. You might not even see this on Netflix.
This is an incubator R&D program designed
to test the limits of what a viewer can stand.”
Those who know the co-
median from his stream-of-
consciousness stand-up, his
meta-hysterical TED Talk or his bandleader
gig on The Late Late Show will tell you that
this moment, from his new special, is just
Reggie being Reggie. But no matter how far
out there he gets, Watts always has a point,
and that Netflix line is no exception. The past

sy BRIAN HEATER

few years have found the streaming service
drastically increasing its output of original
stand-up specials—testing the limits of how
much stand-up a viewer can stand. Clearly we
haven’t hit one yet.

Watts’s special, Spatial, is his latest entry in
what The Wall Street Journal
has called “the new comedy
economy,” a recent surge in
the form's evolution led by a handful of stream-
ing services. In August, Netflix announced
Watts’s special along with seven others, from
bigwigs including Dana Carvey and Cedric the
Entertainer to fresh faces like Michael Che.

To date, Netflix has produced 43 of its own

comedy specials—19 this year alone. Nearly
triple that number of non-Netflix-produced
specials are currently available for streaming
through the U.S. version of the service. Mean-
while, Comedy Dynamics, the country’s larg-
est independent stand-up comedy producer,
has seen its own number jump several times
in the past few years, from seven specials in
2006 to 51 in 2016.

“There’s a story I like to tell,” says Comedy
Dynamics president and founder Brian Volk-
Weiss. “At the end of 2015, we had a company-
wide meeting. I told the company that the year
was an anomaly and we would never make that
many specials again. Sure enough, I looked

like an idiot, because this year we produced
about 35 percent more.”

You could call it a second golden age for
recorded stand-up, a return of sorts to the
glory days of the 1980s, when Robin Williams,
Eddie Murphy and Comic Relief specials pop-
ulated screens both big and small. But back
then there was no YouTube.

That medium, so widely bemoaned by come-
dians as a joke burner, has actually reignited
interest in the genre. When comedy is served
up in free, joke-length portions, it’s much eas-
ier to discover new voices without having to pay
for cable or wade through hour-long specials.
And more content means more power to under-
represented artists and communities.

“As long as it means more access to more
unique voices that are talking about their ex-
perience in comedy, I say the more the better,”
says comedian Patton Oswalt, whose first
Netflix special, Talking for Clapping, arrived
in April. “It makes the world feel more con-
nected and way less scary and lonely if there
are more people talking about different expe-
riences and making them something every-
one can relate to.”

No one embodies this breaking of barri-
ers like Watts, one of the most idiosyncratic
and innovative comic performers working
today. “I think he’s brilliant,” Oswalt says.
“He’s a unique voice. He takes what has be-
come common grammar and really tweaks
it to his own sensibility. That’s the sign of a
great comedian.”

For its part, Netflix seems to have taken a
page out of HBO’s stand-up playbook by giving
performers a platform to be themselves. And
without the bureaucratic baggage of tradi-
tional networks, Netflix is better equipped to
take on a project as flat-out weird as Spatial.
The show opens with the words “Somewhere
in the Vega star system” and unfolds into a
mélange of free-form improvised musical
comedy, absurdist sitcom sketches, colorful
costume changes and a shadowy striptease.
Watts presides over much of the entropic
proceedings in a T-shirt bearing the words
CHAOTIC GOOD in big block letters—the per-
fect two-word distillation of Watts’s genius.

“In away, Netflix is thinking like an artist,”
Watts says, referring to its rapid development
pace. “They’re able to keep their minds in a

more creative space and kind of go for it, and
they’re being rewarded for that.”

It might just be the ideal platform for the
comedian, whose work is typically a combina-
tion of telepathic wordplay and complex come-
dic musical improvisations created live on stage
with a sampler. “Pretty much the whole special
is improvised,” Watts says. “They were able to
make that happen. And I think in that format,
given the constraints we had, we were able to
achieve quite a bit of what I wanted to have hap-
pen and also some really nice surprises.”

But just as all the chaotic good of Spatial
boils down to Watts’s extraordinary voice, body
and brain, stand-up has remained remarkably
consistent even as distribution methods and
attention spans have shifted. Sketches, cos-
tumes and interpretive dancing aside, Watts
is just a person speaking to an audience.

“Stand-up is about the material and the
delivery,” says Volk-Weiss. “What worked in
1950 you can’t really improve too much in
2016. Comedy is a lot more diverse than it
was, which is a great thing, but you can't really
beat a man or a woman delivering jokes with
a microphone.” H

PHOTOGRAPHY BY AUTUMN DE WILDE

GAMES

THE (INSANE) YEAR IN GAMING

With its expectations, insurgents and scandals, 2016 was gaming's Yeezy year

Whether you're a casual button-masher or an e-sports fanatic, a VR believer or a Bulbasaur hunter, you undoubtedly feltthe gam-
ing world's vertiginous highs and lows throughout 2016. Hotly anticipated games and technologies landed with a thud, while
unheralded titles became cultural touchstones—to say nothing ofunderground-gambling or online-harassment scandals. Clearly
the gaming world, like the world at large, is in a molten state. Join us as we revisit 10 of the year’s key moments.—Mike Rougeau

JANUARY 2016 ©

DESTINY DEFERRED
The year begins with anxious rumors
that Destiny 2 won't get a 2016 release
as expected. (Luckily, September's Rise
of Iron expansion proves to be a more
than worthy placeholder.)

LÀ JUNE

CONSOLE GENERATIONS R.I.P.
Project Scorpio (and PS4 Pro in

YouTubers are caught allegedly promot-

FEBRUARY

E-SPORTS SCORES
Competitive gaming goes mainstream
as TBS launches ELeague featuring
Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, airing
on live TV and misbehaving just
like traditional sports.

E-SPORTS FOULS POKEGEDDON

MARCH ©

DARK SOULS SLAYS
The Souls franchise, legendary for its
rich atmosphere and insane difficulty,
offers up Dark Souls III, a brutal, trium-
phant end to the trilogy. Dying repeat-
edly has never been so much fun.

APRIL

VR ZZZZZ...

September) announced. New bells and
whistles aside, they're essential only
for the hardcore.

ing a secret Counter-Strike gambling
site—one they secretly own—to an au-
dience that includes minors, offending

everyone from parents to the FTC.

Everyone with a smartphone goes mad
(and starts caring about an aging 1990s
phenom again) over Niantic’s shock-
ingly successful mobile game Pokémon
GO, a true sleeper hit.

JULY e e

The future of entertainment, fore-
shadowed in decades' worth of science
fiction, arrives with the Oculus Rift
and the HTC Vive—and some deeply
underwhelming gameplay.

THE LAST GUARDIAN COMETH
Fumito Ueda and Sony's long-awaited
Shadow of the Colossus successor The
Last Guardian arrives, closing out the
year on a high note (we hope).

LÀ DECEMBER

AUGUST ©

دی
VW‏

NO MAN’S SKY KEEPS
IT QUINTILLION
No Man's Sky, the game of near-infinite
exploration made by a tiny U.K. studio,
is met with inevitable disappointment,
considering the galactic expectations.

NOVEMBER

SEPTEMBER e.

MARIO THINKS DIFFERENT
Forget the iPhone 7; the big Apple
news is Mario coming to the iPhone
via Nintendo's swipe-and-tap game
Super Mario Run—a first for the
beloved plumber.

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COLUMN

FRANCOFILE

Writer George Pelecanos on the joy of the 1970s, what makes a good crime writer,
working on The Wire and why he isn’t afraid to make you uncomfortable

JAMES FRANCO: A lot of your books

are set in Washington, D.C. in the

1970s, when you were a teenager. How

did that city become such a big part of

your writing?

GEORGE PELECANOS: My dad hada

diner in Washington, and I worked for

him from avery early age. When I was

11, I was out there delivering food on

foot. I fell in love with the city, and Im

talking about everything—the people,

the music, the culture and what was

going on at the time. This was right in

the wake of the riots, and D.C. was a

black city. When I was akid, D.C. was,

like, 80 percent black. For a young guy,

it doesn’t matter what color you are.

That’s very exciting, you know? Cou-

ple that with the music, with the funk

and soul movement of the 1970s and
everything, and I just loved it. At the

same time, I noticed that nobody was

really writing fiction about the city.

All the books and movies about Wash-

ington are always about the govern-

ment and never about the people who
actually live there.

FRANCO: You published your debut novel,
A Firing Offense, when you were 35. You've
written a total of 19 crime novels. How did you
develop the inside knowledge to write about
police officers?

PELECANOS: I feel these kinds of books should
take readers where they’re either unwilling or
unable to go. To do that, you have to go there
yourself and experience a lot of shit. So in the
beginning, I used to do what any citizen can do:
Td walk into a police station and say, “I want to
ride with a police officer tonight.” Then you just
sign a form that’s like an insurance waiver, and
you get in the car and ride with these guys at
night. I saw a lot of cool stuff, and I would go to
trials too, which is also a citizen’s right. I would
walk into a murder trial and sit there for a week
and listen to the language. I didn’t care about the
procedural stuff. I wanted to hear the people up
on the stand. I wanted to hear the language, be-
cause there’s poetry in that. When I got involved

PHOTOGRAPHY BY DAVE MA

BY
JAMES FRANCO

with The Wire, it opened a lot of doors for me.
Before I wrote The Night Gardener, I wanted to
write a big novel about homicide police in D.C.,
but homicide is traditionally avery closed family.
FRANCO: Why is that?

PELECANOS: They don’t trust writers for
the simple reason that journalists often write
things about them that aren’t accurate or
true, and that extends to novelists. They don’t
give a shit. They’re not impressed. If you’re
Michael Connelly, you’ve got complete access
to the LAPD. I was just a guy writing these lit-
tle books in D.C. But when The Wire came out,
they opened their arms to me. The police like
The Wire because we always shit on the brass.
FRANCO: Your books often deal with race rela-
tions. Is that hard to navigate as a white writer?
PELECANOS: It is endlessly fascinating to me
having grown up the way I did and in that era.
I also have two black sons. I’ve watched them
grow up in the world and seen them shaken
down many, many times because of the color of

their skin. So I’ve sort of experienced
that side of it too as a white guy, which
is an odd thing. Fifteen years ago I
wrote a book called Right As Rain,
which is about the police shooting a
guy because he’s black. The victim is
a black police officer who isn't in uni-
form and wanders onto a crime scene,
and he’s shot by a white police officer.
Thad walkouts when I was on that book
tour. I had people walking out when I
started talking about this stuff, as if
it wasn’t true. And look where we are
today. It took a black president to show
people how much racism there is still
in this country. That was supposed to
be solved, right? Everybody thought
that was over until we had a black
president. So I think it’s still worth
talking about.
FRANCO: You and I deal with that on
the show we’re shooting, The Deuce,
which is also set in the 1970s. How do
you depict both the period and the be-
havior of people accurately but not
come across as though you support the
prejudice of the characters?
PELECANOS: I feel strongly that you have to
let the characters speak as they would speak in
their time and trust the viewer or the reader to
know that you’re writing honestly. When your
character, Vincent, talks about the character
Paul, he talks about “fag bars” and “fairies,”
but he’s not a bad guy. He’s a guy of his time
who means no malice, but he was brought up
a certain way in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. That's
what he would say. I can't worry if a viewer sees
that and is offended or thinks that Vincent is
homophobic, because I know those are the
words Vincent would use in 1971. And the
same thing goes with dropping the N word.
If somebody's going to do it, if a character
would do it, I have no problem with writing it,
because it's honest. Doing the opposite is the
death of art, man. That's what tarnishes your
work, givingup the honesty. To placate people
or make them less uncomfortable is always the
wrong thing to do. Bl

$.
„BURTON x Y PLAYBOY

With all due respect, we’re back at it again, with a collection

of Playboy inspired Winter Necessities. Here we have Mikkel Bang

finding wild with Playmate Gia Marie

VISIT AN AUTHORIZED DEALER OR PLAYBOYSHOP.COM

© 2016 Playboy Enterprises International, Inc. Playboy and the Rabbit Head Design are trademarks
of Playboy Enterprises International, Inc, and used under license by Bu

Janine had always lived a relatively monoga-
mous life—that is, until her husband of less
than a year revealed he wanted to watch her
have sex with another man. “I tried it out
of fear of disappointing him,” she says. The
31-year-old advertising manager says she was
initially buoyed by the act because of her abil-
ity to please her husband. “I’ve never been so
sexual or confident,” she says. One night, as
her husband was ostensibly savoring the sight
of Janine having sex with another man, he
interrupted them. “Keep going. I'll be right
back,” her husband said, leaving the room.
Twenty minutes later, Janine found him
watching TV in the living room. “I was doing
this for him, and he wasn't even actively par-
ticipating,” she says. That night Janine felt
used by her husband. This scenario reflects
the complicated psychology behind the sexual
fetish of cuckolding.

The traditional definition of a cuckold is a
man who is made a fool by his obliviousness
to his wife’s infidelity. Most men are unlikely
to belittle their own manhood or tolerate see-
ing the woman they love sleeping with some-
one else. Except that some men want just that.

As asexual fetish—and it is a notable fetish,
the subject of hundreds of porn scenes—
cuckolding is when a man watches his wife
having sex with another man, called a bull,
and gets off on the psychological tension the
situation creates. “Being a cuckold is to ex-
perience a form of masochism in which emo-
tions are the sources of pleasure,” explains
Ricardo Rieppi, a psychologist in New York
City. “Cuckolds need to experience these feel-
ings in order to experience a high.”

Unlike the more common “hot wife” fantasy,
which focuses on wives having sex with other
men to enhance their own pleasure, cuckold-
ing centers on men achieving pleasure through
their own humiliation. “Many modern couples
interested in new paths to pleasure and fun use
‘hot wife’ and ‘cuckold’ interchangeably,” says
Heather McPherson, asex therapist in Austin,
Texas and CEO and founder of the Southwest
Sexual Health Alliance. “But the hot-wife life-
style is about fulfilling the fantasies for one or
both partners, as well as the wife’s personal
growth, sexual exploration and freedom.”

Cuckolding, on the other hand, is all about
the man’s desire, and it’s not just about the
pleasure of submission or humiliation; if that
were the case, one would imagine that leather
whips, furry handcuffs or bondage ropes could
achieve the same result. For cuckolds, it’s
also about control. “The male partner may be

SEX

submissive, but he also holds all the power,”
McPherson explains. That’s because while his
wife is having sex with another man, acuckold
can look or walk away at any time—which is ex-
actly what happened to Janine. In cuckolding,
the man is always in command, even if he bows
out in the middle of an intimate encounter.
Having multiple sexual partners is more ac-
ceptable in today’s society than in past eras,
but that doesn’t mean people are more open-
minded about extramarital sex. In fact, a 2015
study of America’s shifting attitudes toward
sex, published in the Archives of Sexual Be-
havior, found that extramarital sex remains
taboo, even as people have become more toler-
ant of adolescent sex, premarital sex and same-
sex sexual activities over the past four decades.
In 1973, four percent of respondents said cheat-
ing was tolerable; in 2012, only one percent did.
While changing attitudes have allowed
prime-time TV to air heterosexual represen-
tations of once-deviant sex acts such as peg-
ging (Broad City), rimming (Girls) and anal
sex (The Mindy Project), cuckolding has yet
to break into mainstream pop culture. It isn’t
expected to anytime soon, nor is participating
in it likely to be a goal in most relationships.
Just consider how icky most of us feel watch-
ing fictional TV characters jump from one
person’s bed to another’s (Friends) or cheat
on their partners (The Walking Dead). That
material is tame compared with the tricky
nature of accurately portraying—and thus
normalizing—infidelity
as a sexual turn-on. Ad-
mitting to an interest in
cuckolding can be intimidating, but under-
standing the science behind such urges may
help aman explain his curiosity to his partner.
According to David J. Ley, author of Insa-
tiable Wives: Women Who Stray and the Men
Who Love Them, aman’s desire to be cuckolded
is almost universally based on a male fantasy.
Ley identifies such motivations as vicarious bi-
sexuality or the excitement a man feels watch-
ing a woman be fulfilled in ways he can’t offer.
The desire to be cuckolded may also be hard-
wired in the brain. “Our evolutionary history
of sexual competition has affected how men re-
spond to the idea that their female mate may
have been unfaithful,” says Ley. “Men have
more vigorous sex, they get erect again sooner
and their orgasms are more powerful, deliver-
ing greater quantities of sperm. All of this is
designed to psychologically and biologically
compete with the sperm of another man.”
While cuckolding is primarily focused on

sy ELIZABETH WEISS

male pleasure, it can have sexual benefits for
women too. Instead of feeling unhappy about
her husband’s desire to be cuckolded, Karen,
a stay-at-home mom in her 30s, was titillated.
Their cuckolding stayed private initially, with
Karen arousing her husband by telling him
about a well-endowed former boyfriend. “I
realized the more jealous and humiliated my
husband was, the more turned-on he got,” she
says. In turn, his lust stimulated her.

McPherson tells the tale of another woman
who had slept only with her husband, leading
to long-suppressed sexual cravings. “She sug-
gested the cuckold lifestyle as a way for her
to experience having sex with another man,”
McPherson says, “and the fantasy happened to
turn on her husband. They started exploring
the lifestyle, and she became more confident
and assertive. Cuckolding freed them both
and encouraged them to pursue their desires.”
In fact, while some couples experiment with
cuckolding because the husband can’t satisfy
his wife’s sexual appetite, others simply try it
to spice up their sex lives.

There is a consensus among mental health
experts that this lifestyle—indeed, any non-
traditional sexual lifestyle—must be highly
individualized and mutually pursued in
order to function. “Both partners have to
want it. If it is just the husband’s fantasy, it
won't work,” says Karen. Communication is
of the utmost importance, in and out of the
bedroom. “A wife needs to be verbally open
with her husband and en-
sure that his sexual desires
are being met,” she says.
“Any jealousy needs to be communicated
often and openly between spouses.”

So how does a man find a bull and invite him
to have sex with his wife? Both partners often
have a say in who will join them, though every
couple develops their own set of fetish rules.
“Although the fantasy is that men will be lin-
ing up to screw your wife, lots of couples report
that those are not the kind of men they want to
trust with their secret, let alone their sex lives
and the wife’s body,” Ley says.

Unlike Janine’s now ex-husband, who found
their bulls anonymously online, Karen pro-
posed that she and her husband invite his best
friend to be their first, after the friend had pri-
vately made a pass at her. “I don’t have sex with
just anyone. There has to be some emotional
connection,” says Karen. “The main rule,
though, is that there’s no cheating. I can’t go
to bed with another man without my husband’s
knowledge. He wants to be there to watch.” E

PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY KALEN HOLLOMON

POLITICS

HOW TO BUILD A BETTER

WHITE HOUSE

The following months will determine whether the president-elect will succeed or fail
before even setting foot in the Oval Office

For a new president, no time is more
fraught with peril than the period be-
tween Election Day and the swearing-in
ceremony on January 20. This so-called
transition period costs about $40 mil-
lion and amounts to the biggest power
grab in the world. More important, how
the president-elect plays this interval
will determine whether the nezt four
years are atriumph or a disaster.

“Presidential campaigns are like an
MRI for the soul —whoever you are, even-
tually people will find out.” That's the
famous line Barack Obama's chief strat-
egist, David Axelrod, uses to describe
the long national nightmare we've just
endured. But the first few days post-
election and how our new president
spends them are just as revealing.

The groundwork began in earnestthis
summer when Hillary Clinton and Don-
ald Trump established their transition
offices in Washington, D.C. The incoming pres-
ident must fill about 8,000 jobs and so must be
ready to put operations into overdrive the morn-
ing after Election Day. It's a painstaking process:
The FBI performs background checks on all new
employees, and 800 of them will have to undergo
U.S. Senate approval. “The FBI checks are quick
if you have no financial holdings, you have never
traveled and you have lived in the same place for
30 years, said an aide who worked for President
George W. Bush in a New York Times interview.
No wonder many presidential appointees will
still be running the gauntlet in August.

“Bill Clinton would ask for more names, say-
ing the lists didn’t have enough people of stature
or anyone who'd helped get him elected,” says
political journalist and author Elizabeth Drew,
who covered the first few years of his presidency.

When Clinton tried to fast-track the nomina-
tion of Zoé Baird for attorney general, his team
didn’t perform enough due diligence and was
embarrassed when it was revealed that Baird
had employed an illegal immigrant as a nanny.

sy JOHN MERONEY

This erupted into one of those minor Washing-
ton scandals that won’t go away. Clinton was
forced to rescind Baird’s nomination and start
over, costing his presidency valuable time.

The other risk for the president-elect is dis-
loyal new employees. Jimmy Carter won the
White House as an outsider campaigning
against the establishment, including members
of his own Democratic Party. But there weren’t
enough qualified outsiders to join him in office,
so he hired party hacks—many of whom hated
him. In three years, they turned on an embat-
tled Carter and massed around Senator Ted
Kennedy, who challenged him for renomina-
tion. “If Kennedy runs, I'll whip his ass, Carter
said, and though he did just that, the internal
party opposition wounded Carter and contrib-
uted to his failure to win reelection.

The most successful presidents come into
office with a clear legislative agenda. Ronald
Reagan focused on turning around an economy
that was in recession, even pushing his budget
and tax policies through Congress while recov-

ering from an assassination attempt.
Before summer ended, he'd made a deal
with Congress that he signed into law.
When Reagan was reelected in 1984, he
won in a landslide of 525 electoral votes.
Advisors to Bill Clinton still comment
on how he just couldn’t stop campaign-
ing after his first election—from talking
to volleyball players in Santa Barbara
to greeting 30,000 shoppers at a Los
Angeles-area mall. By the time he took
office, he was overwhelmed. “It was to-
tally chaotic,” says one of his transition
staffers. It didn’t help that Clinton’s
agenda was a hodgepodge—gays in the
military, health care overhaul, economic
policies. The Republicans exploited his
lack of focus and in two years won back
control of Congress, creating a GOP op-
position that spiraled for the rest of Clin-
ton’s presidency and continues today.
Perhaps most important is knowing
how to “work the levers of power in Washing-
ton,” says commentator Chris Matthews. He
was a speechwriter for Carter and then worked
for Democratic House Speaker Tip O’Neill dur-
ing the Reagan presidency. Reagan was a mas-
ter at getting cozy with Congress in his first
term, something Obama ignored. “Reagan was
fond of O’Neill’s motto that political battles
ended at six o’clock,” Matthews says. “When
he would call O’Neill, Reagan would say, ‘Hello,
Tip, is it after six?’”

President John F. Kennedy’s speechwriter
Ted Sorensen once said that in those early days
of a new administration, failure is unthink-
able. “In the heady atmosphere of infallibility
that follows successful campaigns, it is hard
not to be impressed by the secret maps, arcane
terminology, gold braids and experts’ crisp,
confident manner,” he wrote. “Success is in
the air"—and after surviving the arduous ad-
venture of getting elected, that’s exactly when
some of the greatest presidential campaign-
ers have faltered as presidents. 2

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INTERVIEW

BILLY BOB THORNTON

The tattoos alone tell a wild story. All those cherubs and arrowed hearts adorning Billy Bob
Thornton’s razor-sharp frame are like anilluminated manuscript on love, loss and squirrelly
good times. NOTHIN DOIN’, scripted on his left biceps, is the name of aparty band he played with
in the 1970s. The magic mushroom on his right calf celebrates his beloved Allman Brothers and
Lord knows what else. Thornton’s kids (he has four by three women) leave their marks too, as
does Connie Angland, his current wife—Mrs. Billy Bob number six. The most striking is avi-
brant angel in the crook of his left arm, shedding bloodred leaves. It now reads PEACE, though
it once spelled ANGELINA. “That was probably the most painful one to ink,” Thornton says.

Here’s alittle show-business secret: Some of
our finest character actors are absolute bores
off-screen. We’re talking celebrated Oscar
winners you wouldn't want to share a cab with.
There’s no such disappointment with Thorn-
ton. He's tackled wide-ranging roles in mov-
ies such as Sling Blade, Friday Night Lights,
A Simple Plan and Armageddon, and he’s
every bit as riveting when he’s sitting straight
across from you. The intensity, the oddness,
the feeling that he’ll forever be an outsider—
it’s downright mesmerizing. And contagious:
You feel his influence in the brooding back-
woods banter of Matthew McConaughey’s
Rustin Cohle character from the first sea-
son of True Detective and in Bradley Cooper’s
emotional transparency in American Sniper.
Existentialist torment with a country twang—
that’s Thornton.

In the past two years alone, Thornton has
worked on more than a dozen films and tele-
vision shows, including Our Brand Is Crisis,
Bad Santa 2 (out this holiday season), FX’s

Fargo and David E. Kelley’s new legal drama,
Goliath, on Amazon. His return to the ever-
shifting ground of TV (one of his earliest roles
was a bit part on Matlock) is resulting in some
of his best work yet.

Billy Bob Thornton is his real name, be-
stowed on him August 4, 1955. His father, Billy
Ray, was a high school history teacher and bas-
ketball coach, and his mother, Virginia—who
is Native American, English and Spanish—
worked at the telephone company and as a psy-
chic. Thornton spent much of his childhood at
the backwoods house his maternal grandpar-
ents owned in rural Alpine, Arkansas. They ate
whatever his grandfather caught, which meant
squirrel and possum on good nights. The fam-
ily later moved to Malvern, where Thornton got
into theater, rock and roll, baseball, drugs and
girls. Adversity was never far: His father beat
him, and a younger brother died of heart fail-
ure at the age of 30.

The gauzy cinematic breakthrough scene
happened after Thornton kicked his worst

PHOTOGRAPHY BY DAN MONICK

habits and moved to Los Angeles. He was work-
ing as a waiter at a show-business party when
he encountered Some Like It Hot director Billy
Wilder, who encouraged him to write screen-
plays. “He told me, “Everybody's an actor, ”
Thornton recalls. “‘What we need are better
stories.“ Wilder's words pushed Thornton to
focus on the scripts he'd been toying with. A
short film he wrote about a mentally disabled
Arkansas man who murders his mother and
her lover led the way to Sling Blade. The 1996
film earned Thornton, who also stars in it, an
Academy Award nomination for best actor and
the Oscar for best adapted screenplay. He has
been a household name ever since.
Contributing Editor David Hochman,
who interviewed Kevin Hart for the Octo-
ber Playboy Interview, has known Thornton
for more than 20 years. “1 saw a very early
screening of Sling Blade and said, ‘I need to
know more about this guy,“ Hochman says.
“We’ve sat down for some very deep and won-
derful conversations over the years. This

time, we met at the Sunset Marquis, where
Thornton lived on and off for six years from
the mid-1990s to the early 2000s. ‘Dwight
Yoakam’s joke was that every time I got a
divorce, I lived here,’ he told me, ‘which was
pretty often.’ After all this time, and whether
he’s talking women, booze, political correct-
ness or his famous OCD, he’s still got that
twinkle in the eye and a radical way of shar-
ing that makes you go, ‘Billy, you did not just
say those words.“

PLAYBOY: It’s been more than a decade
since you helped set the Hollywood F-word
record for a Christmas film with the original
Bad Santa. Are you still saying
“Fuck the fuck off” in front of
the children?

THORNTON: Yeah. This one
may better that record depend-
ing on how they edit the thing.
I would say this movie is more
emotional and has more of a
human story than the original.
My character, Willie, was just
an abused kid who grew up bitter
and sour because of it. Despite
his salty tongue, he has a heart.
He’s a hero to a lot of people,
talking about the commercial-
ism of the holiday and all that.
But yeah, the material is still
very funny and definitely fuck-
ing filthy.

PLAYBOY: How’s the man under
the dirty beard holding up?
THORNTON: That’s a bigger
question. I guess I feel older in
the sense that the character
would feel older. My youth is be-
hind me. I’m a veteran now. In the old days, if
the character saw a pretty girl on the street,
he would be more likely to go up to her than
he would be now. Now he’s a little more tired
and a bit more mature. I can relate to that. I
think I’m over the stupid shit people do and
say to you. Now it’s like, “Just get out of my
face.” I’ve been in this business for around 30
years at this point. I’ve done pretty much ev-
erything you can do. I’ve been at every level of
success and failure and disappointment and
joy and humiliation and heartbreak. It’s not
like I’m going to do something that will thrill
me other than doing some good work as an art-
ist and being with my kids. Those are the two
things. Ithink I’m more stable, more focused,
more comfortable with myself. It’s kind of like

INTERVIEW

I was on a train for years and I just got off at a
stop I liked. So now it's just, Okay, I’m going to
settle down here.

PLAYBOY: That sounds downright sane for a
guy who has always talked about being a weirdo.
THORNTON: I don’t know if it’s that I’m sane
or just older and wiser. You get to a point where
you don’t want to put up with any more shit.
I’ve always been really co-dependent. I still
am to a large degree, but now I don’t mind
telling people I’m not going to do this or that.
There were times when that wasn’t the case.
Say a director wanted me to do something
that was against my instincts. I used to do it
anyway. These days I'll just say, “I think this

I’m still, at 61,

exactly like

I was in high

school. The

popular kids
don't equate

with me.

dialogue is bad. Why is this scene so shitty?
This doesn't make sense in the story." It's the
same with people. 1'11 say, “Tell that asshole
over there he's not going to manipulate every-
body." If somebody knows more than I do, I'm
delighted. I don't want to be the smartest guy
in the room. But if I get the feeling you don't
know where to put the camera, I'm sure as hell
going to say something.

PLAYBOY: You've admitted you were drinking
during the shooting of the original Bad Santa.
Did you apply the Method acting technique to
this one too?

THORNTON: Not in the same way. On the first
Bad Santa, I was kind of living the life of that
guy. I was having way too much fun. I'm a mil-
lion times tamer now. I'll have a light beer or

two every few weeks, and the next morning it
will feel like I have a sinus headache. When
I was doing the original film, that was one of
the only carefree times in my life. I mean, I've
never allowed myself to be truly happy since
my brother died in 1988, but that period in the
early 2000s was pretty fucking great. I was
doing great movies with anybody I wanted—
The Man Who Wasn't There, Monster's Ball,
Bad Santa. There were a lot of great people
around. It was movie-star time.

PLAYBOY: Those were the Angelina Jolie
years. Looking back, could you have made that
relationship work?

THORNTON: Ultimately, no. I think we could
have lasted a couple more years,
maybe five more, but I kind of
blew it with her.

PLAYBOY: How did you blow it?

THORNTON: I don't know. I
always felt beneath her, and if
you're living a life with someone
you feel you're beneath, that's
not good for either of you. Angie
andIare still friends. That won't
ever go away. We don't talk on a
regular basis; sometimes I won't
see her for five years. But I offer.
I know she's been through a
lot. ^If you ever need to talk, if
you ever need anything..." She
knows that. She's a great per-
son. And she's one of the peo-
ple who didn't abandon me. She
never has.

PLAYBOY: What do you mean by
"abandon" you?

THORNTON: Well, my rela-
tionship with the show-business
world is that generally I feel
apart from it. I mean, I was accidentally or
just a situational victim of it a couple of times,
but I’ve never been much a part of Hollywood.
I don’t have any friends in Hollywood. I have
friends in Los Angeles, though. One guy is a
carpenter who still goes to theater groups and
is working on short films and stuff. I have one
friend who lives in Oregon ina hut. The guys in
my band are my friends. Dwight Yoakam has
been my best friend for years and years and is
still just that. We’re all busy, though. He and
I won't see each other for six months. It’s al-
ways been the same. Outside of that, I’m not
part of that whole rat pack. I was a guy people
used to look up to, but they sort of dropped me
like a hot rock.

PLAYBOY: Who are you thinking about?

THORNTON: Well, I can't say, because I
don't talk about my enemies. ۲ can't do it.
I’m talking about various actors, mostly.
Most of them were either slightly younger
or a decade younger than me. For a while I
was the senior member of a group of them,
and I was the guy they always wanted to be
around. They would ask me to write them a
script, or they wanted to be in something 1
was directing, orthey wanted to be in a movie
with me. We all hung out here at the Sunset
Marquis or the Whiskey Bar. I’ve reached out
to them, and it's like, “Hey, man,
so good to hear from you.” Butthen
I don’t hear from them anymore. I
mean, it puzzles me. I assume part
of it is my doing. I have things like
obsessive-compulsive disorder and
dyslexia that cause certain behav-
ior that can come across alittle like
Asperger’s. But still, I’ve felt hurta
few times, because I came up with
those guys. There are a handful
I still hear from who I really ap-
preciate. Bill Paxton checks in. I
love him, always will. Bruce Wil-
lis checks in, and Dennis Quaid.
We’re good friends. Kevin Cost-
ner and Dwight, of course. John
Cusack keeps up with me. Other
than that, I’m not close with any-
body in the movie business. I’m
not part of a clique. I’m just like I
was in school. I was an outcast in
school. I hung out with a bunch of
nerdy kids and bad guys. I was with
the music geeks and the guys who
smoked by the incinerator. I didn’t
belong in either of those worlds
completely, but I sure didn’t be-
long in the popular-kid world. I’m
still, at 61 years old, exactly like
I was in high school. The popular
kids still don’t equate with me. But I guess
one thing that has really changed is I’m no
longer envious.

PLAYBOY: You’ve made tons of good movies.
You have an Oscar. What were you envious of?
THORNTON: Maybe that the handsome star
guys got the big parts based on their popular-
ity and looks. I’ve always known whol amas an
actor. I think probably one of the most impor-
tant things you can have as an actor is knowing
who you are. I have friends who don’t work like
they ought to because they insist they’re Clark
Gable, and they’re not. I always knew I wasn’t
Clark Gable, but I still had feelings inside that

INTERVIEW

would create some jealousy or envy or what-
ever. Not that I ever expressed those feelings,
really. I always appreciated other actors, and
I loved my friends. Fortunately, these days it
never crosses my mind what else is going on
out there. I don’t care who’s starring in what.
I really don't. I focus on whatever it is that I’m
doing right now.

PLAYBOY: That sounds like a personal
breakthrough.

THORNTON: My daughter Bella had a lot to
do with it. She’s 12, and she’s a kid who des-

perately needs her father as a friend, not just
as a father. She and I have so many things in
common. We connect on some kind of mag-
ical level. I’m there for her, and she knows
that. In a larger sense, I’m okay with the
overall direction of my life. I have faith that
things are going to pan out okay. That’s not
to say you don’t get thrown for left turns. My
life in particular has had a lot of those. Some
of the people I know, their lives are pretty
much the same as they were 20 years ago. But
mine has had high notes, low notes and ev-
erything in between. I’m just drawn to a cer-
tain type of intensity, I guess. I think it’s an

uncontrollable appetite for life. I can’t get rid
of that passion, just like I can’t get rid of cer-
tain neuroses. You just have to make peace
with them.

PLAYBOY: Your phobias are more famous
than some of your ex-wives. Are you still
apprehensive about antique furniture and
Komodo dragons?

THORNTON: Put it this way: I still have a lot
of eccentricities, and I embrace them all. I
figure if you’ve got them, just live with them.
As long as it doesn’t hurt people, you’re okay.
For instance, I’m often late for
things because I’ve had to drive
around the block more times than
I should have. I have to do it like
three times or the world’s going to
fall apart. It’s part of that lifetime
struggle of having OCD. I used to
watch the clock to see when my dad
was going to come home. When I
was younger than my daughter is
now, probably when I was 10 or so,
I would start looking at the clock.
If my dad was supposed to be home
at 3:30, at 3:25 I would say, “IfIcan
count to 100 20 times before I hear
the car pull in the driveway, every-
thing will be okay.” They say that
for a lot of people who have OCD,
that’s part of it. It’s a way to con-
trol your environment, whether it’s
imaginary or not.

PLAYBOY: Anxiety is a big issue
for you.

THORNTON: I have terrible anx-
iety issues. Mine are all up here
swimming around all the time. I
have anxiety over specific things
sometimes, but usually I'll get
these attacks of anxiety that come
out of nowhere. I'll get a really rapid
heartbeat, numbness in some part
of the body, a feeling of disconnection, every-
thing looking like it has a white film over it.
And trouble breathing, your diaphragm get-
ting right up under your rib cage. You can
breathe in your lungs, but you can’t get a full
breath. It can happen in a social situation
when somebody comes up to me and I don’t
know what to say.

But what’s ironic is, I’m great in an actual
emergency situation. I’m not afraid of any-
thing then. I’m usually the one in charge if
somebody, let’s say, at work runs into the wall
in a harness and gets injured. I’m usually the
one that’s like, “Shut the fuck up. You get over

there. Let me do this. Unhook him.” I’m good
in those situations. I can come to the rescue
both emotionally and physically for people.
Whatever I went through growing up, it helped
me with certain crisis situations. I may weigh
137 pounds, but I still have the hillbilly in me,
anxieties and all.

PLAYBOY: There are therapies and medica-
tions that can help ease these burdens. Have
you tried any of them?

THORNTON: I’ve never taken anything for
it. I think it’s part of what makes you what
you are as an artist. I don’t know. I don’t per-
sonally go for therapy, because it’s kind of
like people in Alcoholics Anonymous some-
times. I think AA is a great
thing to get people sober, but
then the behavior afterward
sometimes doesn’t change. In
addition to that behavior, you
now have this anger and ner-
vousness that was held down
by the drug or the alcohol,
and then there becomes this
very judgmental part of them.
I think sometimes people in
therapy.... Look, I don’t want
to get into that hornet’s nest.
Ithink therapy is good for peo-
ple it works for, andI think AA
is good for people it works for.
I’m saying don’t use it against
everybody else in your life.
Sometimes when people are
in these therapy or group situ-
ations, they come out as a little
higher and mightier than ev-
erybody else. You develop this
personality where you're will-
ing to change everybody else’s
world just so yours works.
PLAYBOY: You don't like people telling you
what to do.

THORNTON: Exactly right. If you’ve made a
change for yourself, that’s fine, but then don’t
tell me I need to quit smoking. There was a guy
I worked with not too long ago who, every day
when I was hanging out in the naughty corner—
me and a couple of the other bad kids he would
come by and go, “If you ever want to stop that
stuff, I know a guy. I have a person.” It’s like, I
really don’t give a shit. I don’t care how many
guys you've got. I know you quit this and that
and the other. That’s fine. But don’t go around
promoting it. I’m not bothering you with my
shit. That’s why I go in the corner. So just leave
me in my corner.

INTERVIEW

We live in a society that’s increasingly
mean-spirited and judgmental. I’m probably
more open-minded than I’ve ever been even
though I grew up as a hippie and a real liberal
guy. Still, I find myself moving a little closer
to the center over certain things. Like I’m not
a fan of political correctness.

PLAYBOY: You're not alone in that. But isn't
political correctness intended to offer protec-
tion to the marginalized and the oppressed?

THORNTON: I was thinking about this the
other day. I grew up in the South during segre-
gation. I experienced separate drinking foun-
tains as alittle kid. When the Civil Rights Act
was passed, I was old enough to know what

Ihave alot of
eccentricities,
and I embrace

them all. I figure
if you’ve got
them, just live

with them.

was going on. We've sure made leaps and
bounds as a country, but on another level, the
divide is greater than it was then. We're more
separate than we've ever been, and there are
problems we've never gotten over. Is politi-
cal correctness helping? In some ways, no.
Artistically, I think things are worse. In this
age of technology we've come a long way, but
in a lot of ways we've gone really backward.
I know this is going to make me sound like
a dinosaur, but in my generation, the water-
mark was higher for our culture. I grew up in
an age when the musical bar was set by the
Beatles. As actors, we all wanted to be Spen-
cer Tracy or Marlon Brando or James Dean.
That was the benchmark.

Now we live in a time when you can't say

anythingor do anything out of fear that you're
going to offend someone. You can't take cre-
ative risks. I'm not saying everybody has to
walk into a Robert Mapplethorpe exhibit and
say, “Oh, this is lovely." But now, when you go
to the movies, it's like anybody who does any-
thing politically incorrect ends up being the
bad guy who gets killed.

I want to be able to tell a joke. I want to be
able to kid with my friends without somebody
outside our group pointing their finger or
wearing Earth Shoes and having a rally about
it. That's the weird thing about some liberals,
and I'm one of them, trust me. They'll go tell-
ing some other religion or lifestyle or what-
ever, “We're standing up for
you." But that's not really their
job. In other words, if I have a
gay friend who doesn't mind
a joke, I want to be able to tell
that joke. Don't you, a straight
guy, come out of nowhere and
interrupt me and my buddy
and say, “That's not right."
PLAYBOY: So do you know any
good jokes?

THORNTON: [Laughs] I can
never remember any jokes,
which is probably a good thing
in this case.

PLAYBOY: Next question then.
What was your toughest movie
to make?

THORNTON: A Simple Plan,
just because of the conditions.
It was cold. Intense. That was
real hard, and I loved every
minute of it. But this movie I
shot recently, London Fields,
was extremely hard to make,
and I'm not sure anybody will ever see it. It's
based on the Martin Amis book. There was a
fight between the producers and the creative
people about the cut. The two approaches
were very different. I saw the director's cut,
which I thought was a masterpiece, but it is
probably going to be tied up for years and
won't come out.

PLAYBOY: One thing already came out from
that movie, which was the rumor this summer
that you were sleeping with your London Fields
co-star Amber Heard, something that alleg-
edly sent her then husband, Johnny Depp, into
a jealous rage.

THORNTON: Here's what's ridiculous about
that: It was not based in reality whatsoever. I
was on tour with my band, just sitting in my

chair, and had nothing to do with any part of
that rumor. The whole thing not only was not
true, but none of it even came close to hap-
pening. And yet there it was on the internet.
A friend of mine calls me and goes, “Hey, did
youseethe news? They're claiming you're from
Mars." Then it all begins. The press is calling
your publicist, asking if you want to make a
statement. No, I don't want to make a state-
ment. This was a stupid made-up story. The
problem is, these days all you have to do is say
something, and it's true. Somebody makes an
accusation—any accusation—and
it sticks with you a little. Especially
if it has anything to do with sex or
something like that.

PLAYBOY: What should men know
about women?

THORNTON: First of all, when you
look at a guy who has been married
as many times as I have, I’m prob-
ably not the best expert. But then
again, maybe I am. Either way, this
is one thing I’ve learned: If you're
with a woman and you're unfaithful
to her one night at a restaurant on
the bathroom sink, she’ll usually
get past that. Because you didn’t
have feelings. It was just some stu-
pid thing you did. However, if you
have feelings for a woman, even if
you don’t have a sexual relation-
ship but you have love or romance,
well, that means way more than
fucking on the bathroom sink.
With men, meanwhile, if your wife
or girlfriend falls in love with an-
other guy, men will somehow get
past that. Guys will be okay. But
I’m telling you, if she confesses to
one time on the bathroom sink,
shit! You are out the door! Guys are
brought up almost as though sex is
an athletic event. We weren't taught the ro-
mance. We were told you’ve got to be the best
and the biggest and the strongest and the
fastest, especially a guy like me, whose dad
was acoach. Fortunately, I’m also a hopeless
romantic. If my wife fell in love with some-
one, it would absolutely kill me, but I would
understand her for it. The bathroom sink I
wouldn’t understand. I couldn’t see her in the
same way again.

PLAYBOY: You and Connie Angland, your
daughter Bella’s mother, have been together
for more than a decade and have been married
since 2014. Is she finally the one?

INTERVIEW

THORNTON: Yeah, I’m done. We’re real. She’s
shown me how to enjoy stability and all that.
She’s truly got my best interests at heart. She
doesn’t need anything outside this life that
we've built. Mostly, she knows who I am. She
knows I’m not ever going to be the guy who's
running around the world to exotic places. She
loves to travel, but she knows I’m never going to
be that guy. Angie knew that about me too. She
knew I was never going to go live in Vietnam or
China or whatever and travel all over the world
and fly to this country and that country. She

knew I would never be that guy. She also knew
that I wasn’t going to be that involved in society.
I’m a bit of a hermit. I still like to stay up at
night and sleep during the day. I’m not some-
body who goes out to things. I’m a guy who’s
pretty content just staying home, watching
the news or whatever.
PLAYBOY: You’ve been doing more television
in recent years. Fargo is a big cult hit, and now
you have a new Amazon series, Goliath. Are you
a binge watcher?
THORNTON: Not at all. If anything, I’ll watch
Andy Griffith and Gomer Pyle and Hogan’s
Heroes and all that. Or sports. I'm a baseball

freak, and I love football too. So I watch sports
and I watch the Smithsonian Channel because
every now and then it will have something
weird on. I’m terrified of flying, so I watch
that show Air Disasters. Sometimes when
you're afraid of something you can’t help but
get into it. I do a little of that. But no, I don't
watch the current TV shows.

I do understand that TV is the place to be
right now. It was certainly enjoyable work-
ing on the recent projects I’ve done. I love the
character I play on Goliath. I think we hit our
stride about halfway through and
realized what it was. The last three
or four episodes are pretty amazing
and intense.

PLAYBOY: Let’s take a step back.
What's your earliest memory?
THORNTON: My grandmother’s
front yard. It’s where I spent my
growing-up years, in a community
called Alpine, Arkansas. The popu-
lation was around 100. The place was
magical. It’s where I started discov-
ering the wonders of life. My grand-
mother Maude Faulkner was the
matriarch. Everybody came to her
little cabin for reunions and what-
not. And not only from my family;
she was a figure for the whole com-
munity. Alpine was in a very back-
woods place; the cabin didn’t have
electricity. But my grandmother was
very intelligent. She was one of the
few literate people around there. She
used to write for magazines. She did
income taxes because other people
couldn’t read or write. These were
logging woodspeople. They wouldn’t
pay her in money. They would give
her a bushel of peaches or make her
a quilt. I really admired how much
she helped other people.

I fantasize all the time about going back
to the beginning and starting all over again.
That's what heaven is to me. You're born into
the same family; you’re exactly who you are
this time—you don’t become a beetle or what-
ever. You get to live the same life again but
with the knowledge of what you did the last
time, and you’re in total control of everything.
PLAYBOY: What would you change?
THORNTON: I would still be relatively poor.
I would become famous in music before mov-
ies in my early 20s. I wouldn’t have to be the
Beatles, just respected, and people would
know I was honest. I think there are three or

Y
Y

four events I wouldn't go through again, like
a couple of health events and a couple of mar-
riages. Obviously I would have my father live
longer. He died when I'd just graduated from
high school. I would love to go back and be
able to talk to him again. What I would talk
to him about would completely change what
he thought of himself. He knew he was never
going to rise above who he was, but he had
more capacity in there. He just didn't know
how to mine it. I think he was a frustrated
guy who longed to live a fullerlife and wanted
to have more.

PLAYBOY: In the autobiography you wrote
with Kinky Friedman a few years ago, you for-
give your father for being phys-
ically abusive to you.
THORNTON: Absolutely. I
think everything is forgivable
except murder. I understand
why my dad was the way he
was. I think he felt a lot of guilt
that he couldn’t provide more
for his family, and that proba-
bly triggered a lot of envy and
jealousy and anger. He took
it out on the very people he
wished he was better for.
PLAYBOY: How old was he
when he died?

THORNTON: He was about 44
or 45. He was a fireman in the
Navy, on a destroyer. Have you
ever seen these mesothelioma
commercials? “Were you in
the Navy? Did you work in the
shipyards? Were you a fire-
man?” He was all of them.
That’s what killed him. The
same thing killed my friend
Warren Zevon. It’s one of those bad dis-
eases. My dad smoked, and you can imagine
what his diet was like back in the South in
the 1960s and 1970s. But he probably would
have lived to the age of 75 if he hadn’t got-
ten mesothelioma. My mom’s still around.
She’s 83 and living in northern California
with my brother and his wife and two of her
grandkids.

PLAYBOY: How are you like your mother?
THORNTON: In almost every way. My daugh-
ter calls me Marlin. He’s the father fish in
Finding Nemo who's terrified for his son and
won't let him go out and swim. My mom and
I, we’re both worriers like that. It’s interest-
ing, because when I’m performing, it’s the
one place where I’m not anxious.

INTERVIEW

PLAYBOY: So you always knew you would be
an actor?

THORNTON: No. I was absolutely going to
pitch for the St. Louis Cardinals. Baseball
was everything to me, but I had an injury
and that sent me in another direction. In
high school, there were always girls in drama
class, which interested me, but I didn’t think
much about being an actor, frankly. I was
good at girls but not very good at school. I had
dyslexia on top of everything else. Then one
of my teachers in Malvern, Arkansas recog-
nized something in me. She said, “Hey, most
people are in this class to goof off and so they
won't have to do math, but I think you’ve got

This might

surprise people,
but I’d love to
doamovie with
Brad Pitt. I think
we’d be great

together.

something and should do this.” That was
really meaningful to me. I never forgot that.
Ibecame an actor, star of the senior play and
all that.

PLAYBOY: Were you a partier in school?
THORNTON: We all did stuff then. That's
just what you did. Drugs, drinking, sex. We
didn't have AIDS, so nobody was worried.
Sex was like, whatever you want to do, go for
it. You might get the clap, but you'd go to the
doctor and get some ampicillin or whatever.
We were living.

PLAYBOY: How long did that lifestyle last?
THORNTON: Well, it gets old pretty fast, or
at least it did for me. I did all kinds of hard
stuff when I was in my late teens and early
20s, and I was fine. We tried everything. I

was mostly a downers guy. It's different now
for kids. I made a joke on a set the other day
about taking reds. They were like, *Reds?
What's that?" It turns out they don't even
make that shit anymore. Drugs never really
interested me after that early experimenta-
tion. Even pot. I think I'm allergic to it. 1
smoke a jointIstartthinking the FBI is after
me. My heart beats real fast, and I'm para-
noid. I'm one of those guys who starts driv-
ing 20 miles an hour. But it was fun when it
was fun.

PLAYBOY: How did you get to L.A.?
THORNTON: I had a friend, Tom Epperson,
who was moving to California to become a
screenwriter. He said to me,
"Look, you were in drama.
Why don't you try to be an
actor?" So I came out here in
the early 1980s. I joined a the-
ater group. I took telemarket-
ing jobs and all kinds of shit to
get by. Inever expected money
from acting. I certainly didn't
expect stardom. But I caught
the acting bug. I wanted to
work as an actor. I got a role
on Matlock and other minor
parts. This was thrilling for
me. Then Tom and I wrote One
False Move, which got a lot of
attention. Critics really liked
it, and audiences did too. It
was a great time. We were in-
venting things to do for our-
selves. That's exactly what
happened with Sling Blade.
PLAYBOY: How does Sling
Blade look to you when you
watch it now?

THORNTON: The same as it did the first
time I ever saw it. That movie is exactly what
I wanted it to be. Here's the thing: I've only
directed in self-defense, to protect the thing
Id written. That's what it was with Sling
Blade. 1 never wanted to be a director. I just
wanted to make sure the movie hit all the
notes I saw in my head. That whole experi-
ence still blows my mind. The fact that people
to this day come up to me saying “Mmm-
hmm" inthat character's voice and say things
about a movie I did more than 20 years ago, I
consider that an absolute honor.

PLAYBOY: You've said that after he saw an
early cut of that movie, Martin Scorsese pre-
dicted correctly that you would win an Oscar for
it. He also predicted that you would never again

have the freedom to make a movie exactly the
way you wanted. Was he right about that too?
THORNTON: Oh, he was definitely right.
That's how it works in Hollywood. When
you're this hot discovery, people treat you one
way, but once they've got you, it's pretty much
all over. Look at Sling Blade. John Ritter
was the most famous person in that movie.
I wasn't any more well-known than the kid
in it. You can never make a movie like that
twice. It's like, let's say, a man meets a girl
who's a rock star. She's got tattoos and pierc-
ings, and the guys are falling all
over themselves, and maybe a cou-
ple of women are too. She plays her
guitar like Jimmy Page in concert,
and you're like, “Wow, this chick
knocks meout." You start going out
with her. Then you go to a concert
and see her up there in her under-
wear, and all the guys, and maybe
some of the women, are still fall-
ing all over themselves for her. But
the next day, you're saying, "Lis-
ten, I want you to get those tattoos
covered up." Sometimes when the
suits get involved, it's like that.
They love how original you are.
They love that you did it your way.
You're gonna be fucking huge. But
once you sign up with them, you're
gonna do it a whole different way.
PLAYBOY: How is it that you've
spent your whole career bouncing
from indie projects to blockbusters?
THORNTON: You know what it is?
It’s that I made my way in indepen-
dent film. I was a guy who could
play a leading man or a character
because I started out playing char-
acter parts, so the audiencelets me
do it. Whereas for guys who made it
as matinee idols, like Tom Cruise
or whoever, the audience sometimes doesn't
allow them to play an extreme character. I
feel bad for them, because I'm sure they want
to. I thought Tom was great in Rain Man with
Dustin Hoffman.

These days, if you do an independent film,
it gets a little distributor, they give you no
money to make it and they want seven movie
stars in it. So you end up casting people who
aren'treally right for the parts, and the whole
point of independent film is that it feels real.
If you've got seven top movie stars in a $3 mil-
lion movie about a guy who lives in a closet or
something, all of a sudden yov're taking out

INTERVIEW

a movie. When independent film went that
way, it kind of was lost. Now it's premium
cable, which is a great format for indepen-
dent film because you can make an eight- or
10-hour movie. That's what Fargo is.
PLAYBOY: Are you happy with the career
you've had?

THORNTON: I didn't think I'd ever be in a
movie, let alone be part of some of the most
fantastic movies of the past few decades. It's
a miracle to me. Monster's Ball, The Alamo,
Friday Night Lights, all those movies. There

are also things I wish I had gotten to do. I was
set to star in Robert Altman's last movie be-
fore he died. That's a regret. I would love to
make a movie with Martin Scorsese. I've al-
ways wanted to work with Woody Allen, Jack
Nicholson, Gene Hackman. I want to play a
college professor in a movie. I always have. I
always wanted to do a World War II movie. I've
played a soldier, but I can be a general now.
Ican play Eisenhower or somebody. Oh, and
this might surprise people, but I'd love to do a
movie with Brad Pitt.

PLAYBOY: That would certainly be interest-
ingto watch.

THORNTON: Yeah, I think we'd be great to-
gether. We'd play a good couple of Southern
guys. We grew up not far from each other,
me in Arkansas, him in Missouri. We come
from the same thing. Brad does a very good
Southern character. There was a little movie
this year called Hell or High Water, about two
brothers who are bank robbers in Texas. They
have to get money to save their family's farm.
Now, the guys who starred in it were around
35, which is natural. But Brad and I could do
our own version of a Southern heist thriller.
PLAYBOY: You've been touring
again with your band, the Boxmas-
ters. Do you ever want to be a full-
time rock star?

THORNTON: Not really. I love bal-
ancing music with acting. We make
good records. Nobody will ever give
us a chance probably, but we do. I
have two concept records that one
of my bandmates and I wrote that
are as good as any concept record
I've ever heard. But (a), where are
you going to sell a concept record?
And (b), who cares about us? The
music business is not a place where
you make a living anymore, unless
you're one of the top pop or hip-
hop or Nashville country stars.
We've had some good reviews and
great tours, but I hope it doesn't
end there. I'd say that if we don't
have an album that's recognized
on a high level at some point, I'll
be disappointed.

PLAYBOY: Goals.

THORNTON: That's right. You
never stop sculpting your life. You
never stop thinking about things
you can do to stretch yourself here
and there. It's not always neat and
clean as you go along. There are a
bunch of things I might like to try over again,
and some people over the years who maybe
I've wronged. I hope I can get around to apolo-
gizing for those things. But I'll tell you some-
thing: Right now, things are pretty good. I'm
happy with my family, happy with my work.
I’m still passionate about everything. I just
don’t care about the party anymore. By “the
party” I mean it in every sense of the word,
not just partying. I don’t need to be part of
the machine. I’ve got my life, and my life is
enough for me. As long as I get to keep doing
things that feel good and making things peo-
ple enjoy, that's all I care about. |

Model-designer Paige Elkington stars in a nostalgic ode to the girl next door—that still-
romantic, archetypal woman who never stops beguiling and makes us dream eternally

PHOTOGRAPHY BY KRISTIN GALLEGOS

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Mexico's beauty-pageant circuit is a place for E

Beauties

women to be discovered by talent scouts—and

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Sinaloa

Chapo to witness the hope and the danger

- s _— سے‎

PHOTOGRAPHY BY

OLIVIA JAFFE

“Silencio, por favor!”

— The chattering audience in the bleachers at
Televisoras Grupo Pacifico’s Culiacan sound-
stage is causing programming director Fran-
cisco Arce Camarena a great deal of stress. It's
9:30A.M.ona Tuesday in late May, and filming of

A acasting for the northwestern Mexican state of
Sinaloa’s most prominent annual beauty pageant
needs to get under way. Behind Arce Camarena,

e 16 young women pose

evJESSIGA in an arc, delicately

P. OGILVIE positioned on an ivory
5 RAF set with the letters NB,

for Nuestra Belleza (“Our Beauty”), written in

pink cursive. So stunning that they look like

onyx-haired Barbies come to life, the women

* have their hands on their outer hips, their front-

facing knees gently bent and smiles twitchingon

their angel-like faces. In accordance with pag-

Ti eant requirements, they’re all between 18 and

24, five-foot-five or taller and at least conver-

sant in English. They’ve arrived from all across

en 1 the state. Those who make the cut today will go‏ آ2

: 2 i Ten onto compete in Nuestra Belleza Sinaloa, whose

_ ry Yi winnerwillbeintherunningfor Nuestra Belleza

1 Mezico, which funnels its titleholder to Miss

| Universe—one of the largest beauty pageants in

AG the world. This morning, the women stand be-

' neath glaring television lights, in front of a now-

silent audience full of their hopeful families

and friends, waiting to be evaluated. But once

today’s casting airs, the judges won’t be the only

. ones watching. The women will be seen by all of

E ; jl | Mezico, including the region's richest and most
mb

۱ 24 dangerous men—members ofthe Sinaloa cartel.
Cr i Widely believed to be one of the most powerful
f * drug-trafficking organizations in the Western
۱ hemisphere, the cartel is among the largest sup-
7 3 pliers of heroin, meth, marijuana and cocaine to
& 8 the U.S. Its leader, Joaguin “El Chapo” Guzman
E Loera, is reportedly worth $1 billion. He made
international headlines the past few years for
. being captured, escaping from prison through a
tunnel, scurrying off on a motorcycle, giving an
interview to Sean Penn and then being captured
— again just a few months later.

1 For decades, men like El Chapo have courted
pageant queens with money and gifts, pursuing
Ln — them as aggressively as real estate moguls chas-
ing a hot piece of property in L.A. or New Vork.
Some women fend them off, wary of the violence
of narco life. Others compete in pageants with
the explicit goal of meeting rich but potentially
dangerous men, weighing the risk against the
chance to lift themselves and their families out

of the poverty from which many of them come.
“Most of the girls know this guy might kill
them any minute, anytime, anywhere,” says
Javier Valdez Cárdenas, a Culiacan-based

reporter and author of the 2010 book Miss
Narco. “But that's the only way to mobilize
in this society. There's no employment here.
That's the only option they see.”

It's impossible to say how cognizant pageant
contestants are of narcos’ covetous eyes when
they sign up. While Nuestra Belleza Sinaloa can
be a legitimate career step, it's also a guaran-
teed way to draw attention—wanted or not—
from the cartel's most powerful operatives.

The pageant's reputation as an avenue for

drug lords to discover new women isn't a secret,
says Valdez Cárdenas. And when it comes to the
money and power they hope will serve as bait,
“nothing can compete against narcotraffickers,”
he says. “There’s no religion, no political body, no
government that can compete—they have more
money and power than anyone.”
Culiacan is Sinaloa’s capital and largest city.
Much of the rest of the state is rural; most inhab-
itants are farmers who produce tomatoes, wheat
and sugarcane, among other things. The fertile
soil is what has made the cartel’s marijuana-
and opium-growing operations so successful.

It sees fewer tourists than other Sinaloan cities,
including the beachside destination of Mazatlan.
Aknown hub of cartel activity, Culiacán has been
painted by international newspapers as the type
of place where foreigners may be shot or kid-
napped as soon as they step off a plane. In reality,
parts of the city look more like a quaint European
village, acolorful medley of one-story buildings,
street murals and outdoor cafés, with sidewalk
stands selling horchata and other aguas frescas.

SINALOA HAS A REPUTATION FOR
PRODUCING SOME OF THE COUNTRY’S
MOST BEAUTIFUL WOMEN. TO NARCOS,
THESE WOMEN ARE PRIZES.

A local museum exhibits works of Sinaloa's most
influential artists.

When I arrive the week before the casting,
the temperature in Culiacán is approach-
ing 100 degrees. The air is tawny brown, and
refracted light bounces off the asphalt. I’m
here, admittedly, without much of a plan; my
months-long attempts to reach pageant orga-
nizers have gone exactly nowhere. But there is
some promise: My fixer, Miguel Angel Vega—
who also works as a reporter for Riodoce, a
Culiacan weekly paper—made contact this

week with a representative who assured him
we would be granted access to Tuesday’s event.

In Mexico, pageants factor far more promi-
nently in the public consciousness than they do
inthe U.S. Titleholders become national celeb-
rities; little girls look up to them, wanting to do
what they do.

And part of what they do, it seems, is get
mixed up with drug lords. One of the first
known 20th century weddings of a narcotraf-
ficker and a Mexican beauty queen was be-
tween the nephew of Chicago mob boss Sam
Giancana and Miss Sinaloa 1958 Kenya Kem-
mermand Bastidas. The following decade, Ana
Victoria Santanares—Miss Sinaloa 1967—wed
Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo, a reputed founder of
Mexico’s Guadalajara cartel.

The tradition was updated in 2007 when El
Chapo himself descended on the small town
of Canelas, Durango in a legendary display of
courtship. According to news reports, Guzman
Loera arrived by plane during a local celebra-
tion, flanked by hundreds of armed men, to woo
17-year-old Miss Coffee and Guava contestant
Emma Coronel Aispuro. The two were soon mar-
ried, and Coronel Aispuro bore Guzman Loera
two daughters. She was by his side when he was
arrested in a Mazatlán condo in 2014.

Coronel Aispuro has remained untouched, but
the same can't be said for other women associ-
ated with the cartel. In 2008, El Chapo's mistress
Zulema Hernández was killed, some suspect by
members of rival cartel Los Zetas. Her body, with
the letter Z reportedly carved into it, was left in
acartrunk. In 2012, beauty queen María Susana

Flores Gámez was caught in a shoot-out between
Mexican soldiers and high-ranking Sinaloa car-
tel member Orso Iván Gastélum Cruz, whom
she was dating. Gastélum Cruz escaped. Flores
Gámez was killed.

The violence hasn't hampered the relationship
between narcos and pageantqueens, particularly
in Sinaloa. The state has a nationwide reputation
for producing some of the country's most beau-
tiful women. To narcos, these women are prizes.

Manuel (not his real name) is a mid-level
trafficker who claims to work for the cartel.

At a ranch in Pericos, a town 30 miles north
of Culiacán, Manuel —who has a wife and two
girlfriends—explains the connection between
cartel members and beauty queens. “Women
and power, they are the same,” he says. If you
have power, you can have women. It's a luxury.
Women love power. That's why we have so many
women—because we can afford them.”

Nelly Pena, 23, steps out of her boyfriend’s beat-
up white sedan into the blazing Culiacan sun.
She’s wearing John Lennon sunglasses, high-
waisted jeans and a white crop top. Her thick
curly hair is piled on top of her head. She seems
a bit short for a beauty queen, but her looks al-
lowed her to work as a model when she was
younger. She says her agency encouraged her to
raise her profile by competing in pageants.

Resting against the car and occasionally rep-
rimanding her Labrador, Simba, that’s running
free in the streets “Simba, fuera! ¡Rápido!”—
Pena explains she took up her agents’ suggestion
as a way to advance her career.

“IwanttobeaTV host, and I want to be good,”
she says. “But my dream is to become an actress.
That’s what really triggers me.”

Inthat sense, many women audition for Nues-
tra Belleza Sinaloa for the same reasons they
might vie for the title of, say, Miss America or
America’s Next Top Model. They want to be ac-
tresses or models, TV hosts or spokespeople.
The pageant can serve as a launching pad.

But Pena was immediately instructed in the
not-so-secret underpinnings of the beauty world.
“Culiacan es muy pequena,” she says. Culiacan
is very small. “The nar-
cotraffickers know the
heads of modeling agen-
cies, so they know who
is competing.”

According to Pena,
those agency heads will
sometimes set up a date
between a narcotraf-
ficker and a woman at
the narco’s request.

“They say, ‘There is
this person who wants to meet you. He can sup-
port you in many ways. He can open doors for

2”

you, says Peña. Sometimes they're more blunt:
“¿Quieres más dinero?’” she says. Do you want
to make more money?

The women are indirectly encouraged to
be nice to the men, to flirt, and soon may find
themselves on the receiving end of expensive
gifts—cars, phones, trips around the world.

“Que S if you say yes to them—“you have a
car outside your house the next day,” says Peña.
Seeing the surprise on my face, she says, “Ifyou’re

—

1. A Sinaloa street. 2. Model and aspiring actress Nelly Peña has entered pageants hoping to elevate her career. 3. Peña at home in Mexico.

impressed, imaginehowtheyfeelwhentheyhave
nothing and all of a sudden they have acar.”

With their activities largely unchecked by
cops—many of whom are threatened or paid
off—narcos are often free to do whatever they
want, to whomever they want. When it comes to
courting the state’s bellezas, their pickup tech-
niques have all the subtlety of clubbing awoman
over the head and dragging her back to a cave.
“When a narco sees a girl he likes, he sends a
worker to follow her,” says Josue (not his real
name), who once ran cash for the cartel. The
worker gets the woman’s address, then the narco
starts sending presents.

Manuel confirms this. “If they’re hot, I will
select them,” he says. “You ask for their phone
number, and you send them gifts—expensive
ones, like diamond rings or gold necklaces.
Then you just take them to bed.

“I told you,” he adds, “women love power. And
they know who holds the power.”

We're in El Chapo's territory now,” Ángel Vega
says on the Friday morning before the casting.

We're driving south toward Televisoras Grupo
Pacifico’s Mazatlan office. We haven’t heard
back from pageant reps after leaving several mes-
sages, and Arce Camarena, our primary contact,
has been slippery. After promising us VIP access
to the casting earlier in the week, he has since
avoided our calls. Angel Vega suggests we make
the more than two-hour trip to drop in and say hi.

Outside the borders of Culiacan, the land-
scape becomes immediately and jarringly rural.
Unlike the piled-up buildings of the city, homes
in the countryside are scattered amid browned
fields. The roadside trails off into dirt with al-
most no separation from the asphalt.

Thirty minutes into our drive, I explain my
original plan for reporting this story: to fly in
and out of Culiacan without the cartel knowing
I was here. Angel Vega—who has been report-
ing on the Sinaloa cartel for almost a decade—
turns to me from the driver’s seat.

“Without the cartel knowing?” he says, then
throws his head back and laughs. “They already
know you're here.”

The cartel has fly lists, he explains. Upon rec-

ognizing the name of an American journalist,
operatives would have looked into me, possi-
bly even found out what story I was trying to do,
then decided whether I would have access or not.

“If they didn’t want you to tell this story, no
one would talk to you,” he says. “You would get
no interviews. You pose no danger to them, so
you're okay.”

This is a blowto myego—as ajournalist, my job
is to pose a danger to certain people. But it also
makes me realize how much I’ve bought into the
mythofthecartelasan underground operation—
and of myself as a sort of secret infiltrator.

Valdez Cardenas explains later that, to
Sinaloans, such an assumption is almost laugh-
able. “You have to understand,” he says, “nar-
cotrafficking is a way of life in this society.
Every single road connects to the narco world.
That’s our reality.”

When we finally arrive in Mazatlan, Angel
Vega finagles our way into the station by say-
ing we have a meeting with Arce Camarena.
We're shown through a series of corridors, then

deposited on a couch outside a production of-
fice. Minutes later, a young dude dressed in
what is apparently the international uniform
for TV bros—distressed jeans, a hoodie over a
T-shirt, Warby Parker-like glasses—comes out.
He speaks to Ängel Vega for a minute in Span-
ish, then Ängel Vegatranslates. ArceCamarena
isn’t here, he says. He's out in the field. But he's
so sorry he missed us, and we're all set with VIP
press access to next week’s casting.

We are both skeptical.
In the Las Quintas area of Culiacán, Conchita
Torres's eponymous beauty salon is on the sec-
ond floor of a white and beige stucco building.
One of the most renowned hair and makeup styl-
ists in the city, Torres says she has been working
with Televisoras Grupo Pacifico for nine years.

With iridescent brown eyes and a shy smile
she can’t help flashing every time something
amuses her, which is often, Torres talks about
the contestants as gently as if they were her
own children. It’s now Monday night, and her
job at tomorrow’s casting is to tweak whatever
looks the women show up with, making them
both pageant- and camera-ready. “I tell them,
‘This is too much’ or ‘This is not enough,’ she
says. “So let's just balance what you 7

Their hair will be styled in soft waves. Their
skin should be even—“not very dark on the arms

and light on the shoulders, or vice versa,” says
Torres—and their makeup will be natural. (Nat-
ural for pageants and television is, of course, a
bit different from natural for every day.)

Asit happens, when we arrive, Torres is also
being visited by Alejandra Rubi Pérez López,
2015's Miss Teenager Mexico and Miss Teen-
ager Earth. Quietly thumbing through maga-
zines in a salon chair, Pérez López is so pretty
it's hard not to stare. She's tall and slim with
delicate features, and her thick, espresso
brown hair pours perfectly over her shoulders.
As of today, Pérez López says, she's been com-
petingin pageants fortwo years. She started as
away to help her family, but she has determined
that the experience also helps her professional
polish; she wants to work in marketing one day.

“You see a lot of people from different places,
and you learn a lot about different countries,”
she says, never dropping her Vaseline smile. “It’s
great for my career.”

Pérez Lopez doesn’t have a boyfriend—she
says her manager has advised her to stay single
until she’s 25. “I have to devote my focus to my
career,” she says. “I’m only 18.”

But should she catch the eye of the wrong
man—even if she turns him down—she may
find someone coming after her.

Raquel Vega works at a different beauty
salon, one that's popular with narco women.

1. Two Sinaloan beauties wait to learn the winner of a
local pageant in 2013. 2. Pérez López having makeup
applied at Conchita Torres's beauty salon. 3. An award
ata custom-gown studio in Culiacán.

For narcos” mistresses, she says, the biggest
risk isn’t the narco himself—it’s his wife.

“The wives send hit men to kill the girl-
friends,” she says. “The wife is the worst enemy
they have.”

Her clients often spend entire days at the
salon—“manicures, pedicures, hair exten-
sions, facial treatments,” Vega says which
can cost up to $600. Many go further, getting
breast and butt implants until they begin to
look like caricatures. “They don't care about
being educated, funny, smart—it's only how
they look on the outside,” she says.

But accepting money from a drug lord comes
at a price, and Manuel isn't shy about the fact
that he expects sex on demand. “Fuck yes,” he
says. “That's why you pay for their shit. I can go
to any of my mistresses, and they better put out.”

In fact, he takes it one step further. “I own
them,” he says. If you have a pet, whose is that
pet? It’s yours! Your brother, your cousin, your
neighbor—they’re not paying for your women;
you are. So you own them.”

Still, the allure of narcotraffickers is well

understood. A young woman I'll call Guadalupe
(she won't tell me her real name) says she com-
peted in Nuestra Belleza Sinaloa several years
ago. She works as a model now, but some of her
friends wound up with narcos. She doesn't be-
grudge them their choices.

“If, in their hearts, they believe their deci-
sions are the best, I wish them well," she says.

It's too soon to say whether Pérez López will
be able to fend off suitors. In the meantime,
she focuses on her pageant talent. Leaning for-
ward in the salon chair, she pulls out her phone
to show us a sample. It's a traditional Sinaloan
deer dance, in which Pérez López plays the part
of the deer.

“Supposedly you are being hunted. You are

hiding from the hunter because you know he is
after you, so you are trying to hide away every
time," she says. *You are prey."
At 8:30 the next morning, the hallway at Tele-
visoras Grupo Pacífico's Culiacán soundstage
is full of women. They are otherworldly, tight
dresses hugging their curves, their hair mag-
nificently cresting down their backs.

We quickly find Arce Camarena, or rather he
finds us. It's then, as we're about to clinch the
story we're actually here to report, that we find
out what has been going on all these months.

First Arce Camarena apologizes—he can't let
us in. The network told him we're with PLAYBOY,
and they don't want to be associated with the
magazine. Then, as we press him, he says he
can’t let us in because we lied about not contact-
ingthe network. (No such lie was told.)

Finally, five min-
utes before the cam-
eras flick on, Arce
Camarena begins a
rapid-fire conversa-
tion with Ángel Vega
in Spanish. I don't
catch all of it, but I do
make out “narcotra-
fico." The real rea-
son they don't want
us here, it turns out,
is because they believe we have nefarious in-
tentions when it comes to the angle ofthe story.

It's a point I can't argue with. Journalists
come to Sinaloa from all over the world to taste
the danger associated with the cartel. Many
have more straightforward assignments than
I do—they want to go to opium fields or inter-
view hit men. But we're all after the same thing:
exposing cartel culture.

Which is why I do not give full disclosure; I
do not tell the truth when Arce Camarena fin-

ishes his conversation with Angel Vega and
approaches me.

“What is your angle?” he asks.

“I want to write about how different beauty
pageants are in Mexico than they are in the U.S.”

“What is your angle?” he repeats.

“Well, I also want to talk about how Sinaloa has
the most beautiful girls in the country.”

He sighs. “Amiga,” he says. “I know you are
going to do whatever you're going to do with your
notes and interviews. But I just ask that you not
take a negative angle.”

Iam embarrassed, Iam humbled, and I briefly
debate calling the story off. After all, I believe
Nelly, and I believe Alejandra, and I believe Gua-
dalupe when they say they entered pageants to ad-
vance their careers. What woman can be faulted
for using a God-given advantage to secure her fu-
ture? If that advantage happens to be beauty, so
be it. Why should I tarnish the image of an orga-
nization that offers them that opportunity?

Arce Camarena decides to let us stay, but we
have to wait outside. He then disappears behind
the two doors separating us from the soundstage.

It’s now one minute to showtime. I standin the
hallway with Angel Vega and our photographer,
all of us unsure if we should leave. Right then, a
blonde woman dressed like a CEO pushes open
the doors and heads inside. Angel Vega, looking
straight ahead, says, “You might make it in.”

Ihave seconds to make the call. I jump up and
follow her into the room.

Arce Camarena is pacing in front of the bleach-
ers, yelling commands to a crew of at least a

dozen. The 16 contestants are now onstage, so
brightly lit that their primary-color dresses
make them look like a box of beautiful crayons:
bright yellow, deep blue, siren red.

Perla Beltran Acosta, Nuestra Belleza
Sinaloa 2008, who now serves as the pageant’s
coordinator, is demonstrating the proper way
to walk. She glides across the stage, turns down
the runway, stops at the microphone, turns
again and glides back. The women laugh at how
easy she makes it look. When she steps away

for an on-camera interview, the competitors
are briefly released to change clothes before
filming officially begins. They scatter to find
their parents and friends. One yells up to the
bleachers: “;Mama!” Her mother tosses down
a multicolored bikini top. “jY los otros!” Down
come the matching bottoms.

Suddenly I feel two large hands on my shoul-
ders. Arce Camarena, somehow, has material-
ized behind me. “Amiga,” he says again, “you
know you're not supposed to be in here.”

I fumble through a shoddy explanation: I
thought only my photographer couldn’t come
in. Couldn’t I just stand back here and watch?
Idon’t even have my notebook with me, see? He
looks at me as if he pities my dilemma and my
general state of existence.

“Fine,” he says, turning to walk away. “But if
I see you recording, I'm kicking you out.”

Ten minutes later, the contestants reappear

wearing only bathing suits and high heels. The
cameras roll, and the contest begins.
In online photos, the women in Nuestra Belleza
Sinaloa’s annual lineup look like lean, classy
Kardashians, all cartoon curves, implausibly
big eyes and hair that seems like it should smell
perpetually of strawberries. In person, they’re
even more unreal. Gathering at the stage’s edge
in groups of three, they step up one by one,
cross to the middle, bear left down the runway
and approach the microphone to answer ques-
tions from the four judges.

The first contestant seems nervous but not
inexperienced. At the end of the runway, she

“NARCOTRAFFICKING IS A WAY OF
LIFE IN THIS SOCIETY. EVERY SIN-
GLE ROAD CONNECTS TO THE NARCO
WORLD. THAT’S OUR REALITY.”

places her hand expertly on her hip. The ques-
tions take about three minutes, and she is then
escorted into a room behind the bleachers.

The second has a bit more spunk. She stops
to pose at the microphone, shaking her extrav-
agant hair out behind her.

Contestant number three speaks in a mature,
soothing alto. Placing her fingertips delicately on
the microphone, she addresses the judges. “Bue-
nos dias,” she says. Why do you think you should
be Nuestra Belleza Sinaloa? “Por mi carisma.”

1. A mausoleum for an
alleged narco girlfriend
at Jardines del Humaya,
an infamous trafficker
cemetery in Culiacan.
2. A custom-made
pageant gown. 3. A girl
walks past street art

in Sinaloa.

SIWA
12221272071

YA
fror

VW YA GUN
, YAA A 1 LIL

The women continue their parade for more
than an hour. Each presents a slight variation on
the aesthetic theme: One has awaistso small her
hands touch when she places them on her hips.
Another looks so young and wobbly her presence
here is almost uncomfortable. One of the last to
take the stage is jaw-dropping: Wearinga purple
keyhole bikini top and matching bottom, she is
allsoft skin and taut muscle. A male judge on the
panel unabashedly asks her to turn and walk to-
ward the back of the stage—twice.

“Why do you want to be Nuestra Belleza
Sinaloa?” he asks her.

“Porque soy hermosa.” Because I’m beautiful.

It’s 11:41 A.M. when the last contestant takes
her turn. The finale is bumpy; she makes it about
halfway down the runway before the worst be-
falls her—she trips, landing on her knees with
a thud. A gasp rises from the crowd. The woman
in front of me covers her mouth with both hands.
But our hero recovers; she stands back
up, takes a deep breath, gestures dra-
matically to the floor, suggesting to
the room that she fell because of a wet
spot, and returns to the back of the
stage, allowing a frantic stagehand
to furiously mop the area in question.
She then starts her walk over again,
steps up to the microphone and gig-
gles. Allis forgotten.

With the contest complete, the
elimination will take place on the
spot. We are barred explicitly from
this portion of the event, so we wait in
the hallway as the contestants learn
their fates. When they emerge, most
breeze right pastus. Their faces reveal
nothing, in true beauty queen form.
Angel Vega and I are driving aim-
lessly around the city. It’s the day after the cast-
ing, and no one will speak to me. Calls to Arce
Camarena go straight to voice mail. Ross Bel-
tran, a pageant trainer, offered yesterday to
introduce us to the current Nuestra Belleza
Sinaloa. Now he won’t answer his phone. Even
the contestants, the women whose stories I'm
looking for, won't take my calls or reply to texts.
(Arce Camarena, when asked later, will deny
having anything to do with this.)

The previous day’s finalists spend the com-
ing weeks training in public speaking, run-
way walking and talent, and on July 2, Nuestra
Belleza Sinaloa 2016 is crowned: Denisse Irid-
iane Franco Pina, the same contestant who
called out to her mother to toss down her bikini.
She is notably exquisite, even, I dare say, more
so than her competitors.

Nothing indicates that this pageant was

fixed, though most culichis say it’s common
knowledge that narcotraffickers buy victories
for their favorite women. Then again, it’s hard
to know what’s real in Sinaloa’s pageant world.
When Maria Susana Flores Gamez was killed in
2012, the story was reported around the world:
“A 20-year-old state beauty queen diedinagun
battle between soldiers and what appeared to be
agangofdrugtraffickers,” wrote the Associated
Press. “A Mexican beauty queen was killed dur-
ing a weekend shoot-out in Sinaloa,” said CNN.

The story told by most culichis, though, is
quite different.

The man with Flores Gámez on the night she
died, Orso Iván Gastélum Cruz, is known col-
loquially as El Cholo Iván. He's a mean-looking
motherfucker; U.S. authorities have called him
one ofthe mostviolent men inthe Sinaloa cartel.
While accounts of their courtship vary, accord-
ing to multiple sources, El Cholo started to pur-

THE WOMEN LOOK
LIKE LEAN, GLASSY

KARDASHIANS,
ALL CARTOON

GURVES, BIG EYES
AND HAIR THAT
SHOULD SMELL OF
STRAWBERRIES.

sue Flores Gamez when she was just 15 or 16 years
old and he was about 25. When she supposedly
turned him down, he decided to force the issue.

“He kidnapped her family,” says one source.
“Su madre y su hermano.” Her mother and
her brother.

Maybe Flores Gamez grew to love the man
some say pushed himself into her life. Or maybe
she was so terrified she didn’t dare leave. But
what’s clear is this: On the day of her death,
she was with El Cholo. When their entourage
was overtaken by the Mexican army in a small
Sinaloan village, El Cholo reportedly told Flores
Gamez to stay in the truck, saying she wouldn’t
be shot because she was a woman. He and some
of his entourage then escaped.

Newspapers would report that Flores Gamez
was holding a gun when she stepped from the
truck. Officials did not confirm whether she

fired. Either way, when she emerged, Maria
Susana Flores Gamez was shot dead.

Not all women who date narcotraffickers have
their lives end in tragedy. Nor do all men who
work for the cartel: After running cash for the
cartel for just one year, Josue was captured by a
rival cartel in Tijuana. He was held for 72 hours
and tortured his hand still bears the scars. But
he feels lucky to have escaped with his life.

“After I got caught and tortured,” he says, “I
thought, I don’t want to die.”

Still, narcos are seemingly in the mind-set of
violence more often than not. Manuel claims he
has never hit a woman, but he has come close.
“Once I was drunk, and I crashed one of their
doors,” he says. “I didn’t hit her, but I destroyed
her fucking room. Then I had to pay for repairs.
Itisa damn circle: fight, reconciliation, make
up. Itis like a fucking war."

But is it really so different, power-
ful men hunting beautiful women,
from what happens anywhere else in
the world? From Los Angeles to New
York, underage girls are routinely se-
duced by middle-aged executives. The
violence is certainlyless flagrant, but
accusations of statutory rape make
headlines—and the alleged perpetra-
tors rarely face consequences.

Beautiful women have one thing

powerful men can't get via their
usual means, whatever those means
may be. The acquisition of that
beauty by force, then, seems to be
met with a blind eye—no matter
what country you call home.
The night before I leave Culiacán,
I visit Pena again to say good-bye.
She lives in a one-bedroom house with her
mother, her boyfriend, her four-month-old
daughter and Simba. Their toilet is broken,
and discarded objects are pushed into corners
throughout the house.

Peña is about to start a job at a television sta-
tion that she hopes will support her family. She
still dreams ofacting—she loves Tarantino mov-
ies, including The Hateful Eight. Angelina Jolie
and Dakota Fanning are her favorite actresses.

Before I leave, Peña's mother acknowledges
that the family doesn't have much. “But,” she
says, ^we are happy."

When it comes to her own daughter, Peña hopes
to raise her the same way she was raised: self-
sufficient, confident and with bulletproof values.

I want to raise her to be the best she can pos-
sibly be and support her in anything she wants
to do,” she says. “Whatever she decides.” [|

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PLAYMATE

PHOTOGRAPHY BY DAVID BELLEMERE

“There are so many moments in my life when I have to pinch myself to check if this is real-
ity,” says Miss December Eniko Mihalik. The daughter of a cop, Eniko was the first in her
family to leave her home country of Hungary, ultimately settling in New York City. There,
her ambition landed her in the famous Victoria's Secret Fashion Show and on magazine cov-
ers with Naomi Campbell and, this month, our Rabbit. That's just part of what makes this
self-made woman the perfect Playmate to cap off a historic year that saw another self-made
woman take ahammer to the glass ceiling. Eniko works hard, stays modest and takes noth-
ing for granted. “Every woman is criticized and torn down,” she says. “I’ve wanted to quit
at times, but I sucked it up and persevered. Considering where I come from, I will always be
fortunate. You can’t please everyone, but you can walk away, close your ears and keep going.”

YA‏ وه

MISS DEGEMBER 2016

ENIKO MIHALIK

BIRTHPLACE: Békéscsaba, Hungary GURRENT CITY: New York

PLL BE HOME FOR CHRISTMAS

1 go back to Hungary for Christ-
mas every year. | love everything
about home because | know it like
the back of my hand. | know the
attitude of the people and | see
the same faces—even the cashier
in the supermarket. Every build-
ing and street brings back a cer-
tain memory. I’m constantly happy
when I'm home, even if l'm bored

out of my mind.

THE BEST ADVICE VE GOTTEN

My grandmother once told me,

“Never chase after boys," which
| didn't understand as a teen-
ager. What's wrong with chas-
ing somebody you want? It took
a while for me to understand the

real meaning, which is to respect

and value yourself. If someone
doesn't do the same, you shouldn't
have to lower your expectations.

STAR WARS FAN, SHEIS

My dad and ۱ have a brother-sister
relationship because | was born
when he was in his early 20s. He
made me watch the Star Wars
movies when | was five years old,
and | remember them being bor-
ing. But last year, my friend took
me to see The Force Awakens, and
۱ laughed my ass off. That movie
is really cute and fast-paced. | en-

joyed it so much | want to go back
and rewatch the old ones now.

SHUT UP AND DANGE WITH ME

My friends and | like to declare
certain nights as "dance night"

@mreniko W @enikoeva‏ ا

once in a while. On those nights,
VII usually go to a club that plays
old-school hip-hop. | stay sober,
wear flats, a T-shirt and shorts
and spend the entire evening just
dancing and sweating nonstop.

CALL ME A GLOBAL CITIZEN

I've thought about applying for
U.S. citizenship, but | feel I’m too
free-spirited to make that kind of
decision and settle down at such
a young age. | have lots of friends
who've started the process, and |
admire them for being so sure of
what they want to do. I, however,
still want to travel so much. | may
actually pack my bags one day, rent
out my apartment and not come
back for two years. | don't see the
point in settling down yet.

WHO PUTS

GUNS

IN THE MOVIES?

As the gun debate divides America, we're unified in our love for movie heroes who pack
heat. We look at how firearms end up on-screen and find out whose finger is on the trigger

“So, are you ready to fire a machine gun?”

In reply, I smile.

My anticipation has been building for more
than an hour—ever since the tour began in the
revolver room, a place that would feel famil-
iar to any policeman from the 1970s (like, say,
Dirty Harry Callahan). Larry Zanoff, a former
soldier in the Israeli mili-
tary and one of Hollywood's
most sought-after armorers,
guides me from the revolver room to the West-
ern room, where I gawk at Gatling guns, lever-
action rifles and double-barreled shotguns,
brand-new and gleaming, racked floor to ceil-
ing in perfect order by year and manufacturer.

“There's a misconception that the guns peo-
ple see in movies are fake,” Zanoff says. “Most
of these are reproductions, but they're real.”

Soon I’m fingering a German Luger from
World War I, cradling a Japanese matchlock
rifle from the 1500s and, later, shamelessly
posing with a vintage 18th century dueling
pistol. But the highlight of my tour through
Hollywood’s biggest armory, where some
16,000 weapons are stored in six rooms, is
the NFA room—named for the 1934 National
Firearms Act, which placed strict regula-
tions on machine guns in the Al Capone hey-
day of bootleggers, bank robbers and public
gangland hits. On display here are grenade

PHOTOGRAPHY BY DAVE MA

sy ADAM SKOLNICK

launchers, mortar tubes, .50-caliber machine
guns, sniper rifles and racks of assault weap-
ons, including—ironically—dozens of semi-
automatic AR-15s.

Although the commercial sale of automatic
weapons remains prohibited in the United
States, the semiauto market is booming and
legal, and its biggest star,
thanks to its versatility and
reliability, is the AR-15. You’ve
heard of it. It’s often stockpiled by those pre-
paring for the apocalypse and publicly flaunted
by open-carry zealots. It has had a leading role
in more than one of our country’s mass shoot-
ings, and judging by recent history, it’s likely to
play avital part in the next big production star-
ring a psychopath near you.

As I drove that morning through pictur-
esque suburban horse country to the converted
government compound northwest of down-
town Los Angeles that houses Independent
Studio Services—Hollywood’s preeminent
prop house—I kept thinking of the AR-15 and
wondering if there’s a credible link between
Hollywood and gun violence in America. And
I hated myself for it. I grew up in the 1980s,
when those Tipper Gore-inspired Parental
Advisory labels on CDs smacked as much of
Bible-thumping censorship as they did of
concern for kids. This is why I typically don’t

blame creatives for what ails us as a culture,
but then June and July happened.

It began with the Pulse nightclub massacre
in Orlando on June 12. Next came Alton Ster-
ling (July 5), Philando Castile (July 6), Dallas
(July 7) and Baton Rouge (July 17). Innocent
civilians and innocent cops, all killed for no
good reason within days of one another. It was
tragic and horrifying, and the resulting anger,
grief, conflict and political opportunism satu-
rated America. Then in the midst of it came the
marketing rollout for Jason Bourne. The poster
was stylish, minimalist, with a background as
black as a midnight shadow, showing only a
sliver of Matt Damon stepping into the light to
aim his Sig Sauer P229R pistol.

Given the timing, it wasn't a good look. Tami
Sagher, co-executive producer of Girls, posted
on her Instagram and Twitter feeds an image of
the ad, taken at a subway stop, with the gun torn
off. She suggested New Yorkers start tearing the
Sig off all the Bourne posters. “So tired of guns,
she wrote. Lena Dunham shared the post, and
suddenly a backlash was brewing so loudly that
Damon addressed it and Universal switched to
a poster featuring the actor sans weapon.

Granted, politics pairs with Hollywood only
slightly better than it does with Facebook and
Twitter, but Sagher and Dunham were hinting
at important, systemic questions we should all

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consider. Does Hollywood embolden a Chicago
drive-by shooting or an ambush of officers on
the job? Does it inspire the itchy trigger finger
of jumpy cops on patrol or the work of spun-out
mass shooters who choose to salve their pain
with innocent blood? Does it condition us to
gawk, grieve, then shrug our collective shoulders
and move on until the next episode? In other
words, does Hollywood have a gun problem?

If film sets are dictatorships, then directors
are emperors, which means making the final
call on which guns their characters use. It's up
to armorers like Zanoff to break down a script
and narrow the director's choices. If the script
specifies a particular gun, Zanoff will oblige,
but more often he factors in the script's histori-
cal time period and the character's background
and skill to determine which guns to bring to
the director for a “show-and-tell” There's a rea-
son Hollywood productions rely on folks like
Zanoff and ISS to stockpile and handle weap-
ons for them: government regulations.

“We provide a legality,” Zanoff says. “Again,
these are all real guns; we can't just give them
to people. So we're responsible for safety, and
we often do actor training and gunfight cho-
reography too.” ISS has eight armorers on
staff, including three gunsmiths who modify
weapons—say, for wars waged in some future
or fantasy world—and, more important,

convert them to shoot only blanks. Live ammo
is never fired on set.

ISS and other armories have to be prepared
for such awide range of stories that they usually
source their stock well in advance. And though
guns were flashed on-screen before “talkies”
became a thing, it wasn’t until 1971 that gun
manufacturers recognized the value of having
their weapons featured in a hit movie.

“It started with Dirty Harry,” says David
Fencl, another A-list armorer, with films such
as Zero Dark Thirty, 13 Hours and the Trans-
formers franchise to his credit. Sales of the
titular character's weapon of choice, the Smith
& Wesson Model 29, “skyrocketed after that
movie,’ says Fencl, founder of the Nevada-
based shop Point Blank Props.

“Nobody knew when they put that revolver in
Clint’s hand that it would boost sales, because
no law enforcement officer ever carried that
gun,” Zanoff adds. “It was an oddball thing.”

“It was designed for fishermen in Alaska to
protect themselves against bears,’ Fencl says.
But that didn’t stop fans of the movie—and
fans of guns—from buying the model, and it
wasn't the last time gun guys bought weapons
or ammo ill-suited for their needs.

Zanoff experienced the power of motion pic-
tures before he was in show business. In the
mid-1980s he worked at a small manufacturer

called Calico Light Weapon Systems. Its sig-
nature gun, the Calico, was featured in Total
Recall, the classic Arnold Schwarzenegger
film. When Zanoff went to work on the Monday
after the movie opened, the company’s voice
mail was filled with messages from people who
wanted those exploding rounds they’d just seen
in the movie. “And we were like, ‘It was a movie.
There are no exploding rounds in nine millime-
ter for this gun; ” he says. But munitions manu-
facturers soon caught wind of the demand and
built an exploding round for the Calico.

Zanoff calls it “life imitating art,” and weap-
ons companies noticed. “After Dirty Harry,
manufacturers realized that getting their
product into a film is worth millions in ad-
vertising, he says. Today many weapons com-
panies regularly ship their best goods to film
armorers, hoping to make the cut.

“We do see value in being placed in a movie,
and on TV shows too,’ says Kevin Wilkerson,
marketing manager for Arkansas-based Wal-
ther Arms, maker of the sleek and stylish PPK
handgun preferred by James Bond. “Armorers
contact me sometimes, and we'll donate prod-
uct, but I haven’t dealt with any who pay for it.”

Sometimes preferential treatment extends
beyond the usual swag weaponry. In 2012,
Fencl was in Amman, Jordan working on Zero
Dark Thirty. According to Fencl, in the raid

Larry Zanoff of Independent Studio Services supplies the fake ammunition and guns, both realistic and fantastic, for many Hollywood movies.

33 HOURS

that killed Osama bin Laden, two SEAL Team
Six members carried HK417 fully automatic
rifles, but at the time the cameras were roll-
ing, that model was available only to armed
forces. Then, just as director Kathryn Bigelow
was preparing to shoot the raid scene, news
broke that a civilian version of the weapon, the
MR308, was about to come out. Fencl placed a
call to the manufacturer, Heckler & Koch.

“Everyone wanted them,” he says,
“but I told them about the movie, and
they sent me the first two ever made.”

Sometimes weapons manufactur-
ers place stipulations on the use of
their products. When Fencl was hired
last year to work on Patriots Day, the
Peter Berg film about the Boston Mar-
athon bombing due out this winter, he
discovered thatthe Boston cops onthe
subsequent manhunt had been carry-
ing Glocks. “Glock typically wants you
to sign something saying it won't be
given to a bad guy,” Fencl says. “Luck-
ily the Tsarnaev brothers didn't use a
Glock, so I signed.”

Zanoff and ISS refuse to make such
guarantees. “We don't promise any-
thing as far as who will hold it or how,”
Zanoff says. “Too many decisions get
made on the fly.”

Some companies are willing to buy assur-
ances. Another Peter Berg film, Lone Survivor,
a surprise hit starring Mark Wahlberg, became
a poster child for firearms product integration
after its 2013 release. The film tells the tale ofa
Navy SEAL team that was overrun in the moun-
tains of Afghanistan in 2005. Although the
real-life SEALs carried Sigs that day, firearms
manufacturer Beretta reportedly paid $250,000
to ensure that when Matthew “Axe” Axelson
(played by Ben Foster) runs out of ammo for his
rifle, he fires his Beretta Mg pistol instead.

Rolfe Auerbach, CEO of Brand In Entertain-
ment, brokered that deal. Auerbach has been in
product integration since 1996, and he insists
Lone Survivor isn't an anomaly. “We've worked
with a number of gun companies,” he says. He
scoffs at the reported amount Beretta paid to
place its product in the movie and suggests it
was higher, though he won't say for sure. He
claims Beretta gotits money's worth. “They did
very well, and that's all I will tell you,” he says.

ISS has also inked product-integration deals

SALES OF DIRTY
HARRY'S WEAPON
OF CHOICE, THE
SMITH $: WESSON

MODEL 29,
SKYROCKETED

AFTER THE MOVIE

GAME OUT.

for firearms, though Zanoff insists it’s rare.
More often, he encounters directors who de-
mand bigger, better and newer. “Every movie
that comes out, especially nowadays, has to top
the last one,” he says.

Is that because we’ve seen too much? Have
we, the audience, become addicts who need a
more potent fix to feel something? If so, there
is a cure. No matter how thrilling the action in
a movie, it can't compete with the real thing.

After the tour of ISS, Zanoff escorts me to
the house gun range and hands me a Heckler
& Koch MP5A2 submachine gun. It feels light
when I lift it to shoulder level, squint through
the sight and point it at a metallic wall. There’s
no target because we’re shooting blanks, which
means no kickback either. But when I squeeze
the trigger, the barrel flames and spent shells
spout from the chamber, clattering at my feet—
just like in the movies. “Can I do it again?” I
ask. This time Zanoff cracks a smile.

So yeah, I liked it, but I couldn’t determine if
that was because of the experience itself or

because I associate guns with the heroes and
stories I love. In other words, was my thrill
theoretical or physical?

Perhaps it was both.

The next time I fire a weapon is only a few
weeks later. My gun of choice: a Heckler & Koch
G36. This time, instead of standing I’m sitting
in a tent set up in the parking lot of the Forum
in Inglewood, California, and the trigger I'm
tickling is that of a game console. In
a few seconds a row of unshaven mil-
lennial men and I—plus a woman or
two—will drop into a game of Call of
Duty: Modern Warfare Remastered.

First-person shooters such as Call
of Duty dominate the video game
market because they combine the
experience of being a hero on the
battlefield with the fantasy that
only a good story can provide. The
sounds, graphics and characters
pull you in, and the thrill of scoring
a direct hit and beating your friends
heightens the rush.

While I sit in a tent with the regu-
lar folk, Michael Phelps, Derrick
Rose and Karl-Anthony Towns are in
a VIP room somewhere, doing battle.
The carnival-like event, Call of Duty
XP, is a fan celebration—Activision’s first in
five years—and people have flown in from
all over the world to attend. It’s also a buzz
builder for the release of Call of Duty: Infinite
Warfare. The event features three tents for
playing the game, a paintball battlefield, a
virtual-reality space made from converted
storage containers, a championship e-sports
tournament in the Forum itself, military
vehicles on display and a zip line.

Call of Duty is a gaming Goliath. Each new
release is the biggest entertainment launch of
the year. Last year’s Call of Duty: Black Ops 77
earned Activision $550 million in just three
days, and the video game business as a whole
dwarfs Hollywood, making it an easy target fol-
lowing a mass shooting.

After the Sandy Hook massacre in 2012,
National Rifle Association executive vice presi-
dent and CEO Wayne LaPierre took a shot at
the industry. “There exists in this country...a
callous, corrupt and corrupting shadow indus-
try that sells and sows violence against its own
people,” he said. “Vicious, violent video games.”

Games like Call of Duty: Black Ops II allow us to play both hero and shooter.

Don't blame the guns, LaPierre argued;
blame video games. That's a leap, but if mil-
lions of kids spend endless hours playing
first-person shooter games, it does seem fair
to wonder if they may become desensitized
or even conditioned to violence. Of course,
LaPierre, reductionist that he is, left a few
things out. Like the fact that weapons compa-
nies collaborate with video game developers
and designers to make the games look, sound
and feel like the real thing.

No video game company contacted for this
story agreed to go on the record about its
relationship with gun companies, but Mark
DeLoura, former senior advisor for digital
media in the White House and a 20-year vet-
eran of the gaming industry, has personally
witnessed game designers firing weapons
at a shooting range and recording the vari-
ous sounds for their games. “Realism has be-
come so important,” he says. “Anything game
designers can do to make it more realistic,
they'll do, because they want realism, and
their players want realism.”

“Weapons manufacturers have CAD dia-
grams, the original 3-D models,” says Simon
Parkin, author of Death by Video Game, “so
they can just send all that information to the
video game developer. Because they’re also
working within 3-D software engines, they’re
able to exactly replicate the weapon. I know
that happens in the Call of Duty franchise.”

An anonymous source at Activision says that
the company licenses the weapons featured in
Call of Duty. Translation: Activision pays the
manufacturers of the weapons featured in
its video games. The scope of each licensing
agreement is unknown. It could be a one-time

payment or a small percentage of each game
sold. Either way, it sure looks as though gun
companies—and therefore the NRA—are par-
tially funded by your Call of Duty dollar.

The larger impact of weaponized media
is less clear. “It’s marketing,” DeLoura says.
“People see a weapon in a game and maybe
they want that gun because it’s cool.”

Still, no hard statistics can prove a link
between gun purchases and video games,
and the overwhelming majority of academ-
ics agree there’s no credible cause-and-effect
relationship between the consumption of vio-
lent media—games, films or TV—and an in-
crease in gun violence.

“Tf it’s a factor, it’s 25th out of 25 factors on
a list,” says University of Wisconsin associate
professor Constance Steinkuehler, who stud-
ies video games, education and game-based
learning. “Poverty, mental health issues and
gun control are all much more significant.”

“I haven't found much evidence that watch-
ing violent movies or playing violent video
games makes people angry, more aggressive or
is even correlated to violent crime,” says Stet-
son University psychology professor Christo-
pher Ferguson, who has published widely on
the subject. In fact, the opposite may be true.

A 2014 study out of Villanova University en-
titled “Violent Video Games and Real-World
Violence: Rhetoric Versus Data” notes that
when new versions of popular video games are
released—including especially violent ones
such as Call of Duty—violent crime among
young people drops considerably because so
many kids are attached to their game con-
soles, at least for a while.

Still, I can’t shake the thought that the

media help boost familiarity with weapons,
which breeds increased popularity. And it
isn’t the fault of Hollywood and the video game
industry alone; toss the news and social media
into the mix as well. Consider that in the days
after the Orlando massacre, when it was er-
roneously reported that the shooter, Omar
Mateen, had used an AR-15, Google searches
for that weapon spiked. When it became clear
he had used a Sig Sauer MCX, searches for that
weapon spiked. People wanted to see the gun
he’d used, and some almost certainly bought
one for themselves, which brings us back to
the gun-loving liberals of Hollywood and their
most powerful weapon of all: stories.

For millennia, stories—especially hero
tales—have been used to influence and reflect
human life. Joseph Campbell, anthropologist
and author of the seminal Hero With a Thou-
sand Faces, became famous for documenting
the hero’s journey in myths and legends from
cultures around the world. George Lucas con-
sciously integrated Campbell’s work into Star
Wars. Legions of filmmakers followed suit,
and today’s heroes are almost always armed
for their journey with a gun.

“T think Call of Duty enables gamers to act
out fantasies of empowerment—to be a hero
and live an epic life—in a fictionalized world,”
Steinkuehler says, “and to be honest, that
doesn’t frighten me.”

But what if the unhinged among us are tell-
ing themselves their own hero story? Didn't
a crazed Gavin Long—who, don’t forget, was
a marine—see himself as a hero on the day
he killed three cops in Baton Rouge? What
about Mateen in Orlando or Micah Johnson,
another veteran, in Dallas? They all fanta-
sized and plotted, but most important, they
all had access to assault weapons despite their
mental health issues. We as voters, and the
politicians who claim to serve us, can’t seem
to overcome the NRA’s congressional choke
hold, even though nine out of 10 Americans—
gun lovers and haters alike—support univer-
sal background checks.

The whole world watches Hollywood mov-
ies and plays the same violent video games,
yet firearms-related murders are 25 times
higher in the United States than in other de-
veloped nations—because we have more guns
on the street.

Maybe the real problem isn’t Hollywood
the influencer but Hollywood the reflection.
We're all so comfortable watching the same
damn movies, playing the same games and
feigning the same outrage and heartache,
we've become too blind to see the laser sight
settling right between our eyes. a

if A عم‎ f

FICTION

THE
MUSIC
ROOM

STEPHEN
KING

Guests of the Enderbys receive a special kind of hospitality in this short
story inspired by the Edward Hopper painting Room in New York

Room in New York, 1932.

The Enderbys were in their music room—so
they called it, although it was really just the
spare bedroom. Once they had thoughtit would
be little James or Jill Enderby's nursery, but
after 10 years of trying, it seemed increasingly
unlikely that a Baby Dear would arrive out of
the Nowhere and into the Here. They had made
their peace with childlessness. At least they
had work, which was a blessing in a year when
men were still standing in breadlines. There
were fallow periods, it was true, but when the
job was on, they could afford to think of noth-
ing else, and they both liked it that way.

Mr. Enderby was reading the New York
Journal-American, a new daily not even half-
way through its first year of publication. It
was sort of a tabloid and sort of not. He usually
began with the comics, but when they were on
the job he turned to the city news first, scan-
ning through the stories quickly, especially the
police blotter.

Mrs. Enderby sat at the piano, which had
been a wedding gift from her parents. Occa-
sionally she stroked a key, but did not press
any. Tonight the only music in the music
room was the symphony of nighttime traf-
fic on Third Avenue, which came in through
the open window. Third Avenue, third floor. A
good apartment in a sturdy brownstone. They
rarely heard their neighbors above and below,
and their neighbors rarely heard them. Which
was all to the good.

From the closet behind them came a single
thump. Then another. Mrs. Enderby spread her
hands as if to play, but when the thumps ceased,
she put her hands in her lap.

“Still not a peep about our pal George Tim-
mons,” Mr. Enderby said, rattling the paper.

“Perhaps you should check the Albany Her-
ald,” she said. “I believe the newsstand on Lex-
ington and 6oth carries it.”

“No need,” he said, turning to the funnies at
last. “The Journal-American is good enough
for me. If Mr. Timmons has been reported
missing in Albany, let those interested search
for him there.”

“That’s fine, dear,” said Mrs. Enderby. “I
trust you.” There was really no reason not to;
to date, the work had gone swimmingly. Mr.
Timmons was their sixth guest in the specially
reinforced closet.

Mr. Enderby chuckled. “The Katzenjammer
Kids are at it again. This time they’ve caught
Der Captain fishing illegally—shooting a net
from acannon, in fact. It's quite amusing. Shall
Iread it to you?”

Before Mrs. Enderby could answer, another

FICTION

thump came from the closet, and faint sounds
that might have been shouts. It was difficult to
tell, unless one put one’s ear right up against
the wood, and she had no intention of doing
that. The piano bench was as close to Mr.
Timmons as she intended to get, until it was
time to dispose of him. “I wish he’d stop.”

“He will, dear. Soon enough.”

Another thump, as if to refute this.

“That’s what you said yesterday.”

“It seems I was premature,” said Mr.
Enderby, and then, “Oh, gosh—Dick Tracy is
once more on the hunt for Pruneface.”

“Pruneface gives me the willies,” she said,
without turning. “I wish Detective Tracy would
put him away for good.”

“That will never happen, dear. People claim
to root for the hero, but it’s the villains they
remember.”

Mrs. Enderby made no reply. She was wait-
ing for the next thump. When it came—if it
came—she would wait for the one after that.
The waiting was the worst part. The poor man
was hungry and thirsty, of course; they had
ceased feeding and watering him three days
ago, after he had signed the last check, the one
that emptied his account. They had emptied
his wallet at once, of almost $200. In a depres-
sion as deep as this one, $200 was a jackpot,
and his watch might add as much as $20 more
to their earnings (although, she admitted to
herself, that might be a trifle optimistic).

Mr. Timmons's checking account at Albany
National had been the real mother lode: $800.
Once he was hungry enough, he had been
happy to sign several checks made out to cash
and with the notation “Business Expenses”
written in the proper spot on each one. Some-
where a wife and kiddies might be depending
on that money when Father didn’t come home
from his trip to New York, but Mrs. Enderby
did not allow herself to dwell on that. She
preferred to imagine Mrs. Timmons having
a rich mama and papa in Albany’s Mansion
District, a generous couple right out of a Dick-
ens novel. They would take her in and care for
her and her children, little boys who might be
endearing scamps like Hans and Fritz, the
Katzenjammer Kids.

“Sluggo broke a neighbor’s window and is
blaming it on Nancy,” Mr. Enderby said with a
chuckle. “I swear he makes the Katzenjammers
look like angels!”

“That awful hat he wears!” Mrs. Enderby
said.

Another thump from the closet, and a very
hard one from a man who had to be on the

verge of starvation. But Mr. Timmons had
been a big one. Even after a generous dose of
chloral hydrate in his glass of dinner wine,
he had nearly overpowered Mr. Enderby.
Mrs. Enderby had had to help. She sat on Mr.
Timmons’s chest until he quieted. Unlady-
like, but necessary. That night, the window
on Third Avenue had been shut, as it always
was when Mr. Enderby brought home a guest
for dinner. He met them in bars. Very gre-
garious, was Mr. Enderby, and very good at
singling out businessmen who were alone in
the city—fellows who were also gregarious
and enjoyed making new friends. Especially
new friends who might become new clients of
one business or another. Mr. Enderby judged
them by their suits, and he always had an eye
for a gold watch chain.

“Bad news,” Mr. Enderby said, afrown creas-
ing his brow.

She stiffened on the piano bench and turned
to face him. “What is it?”

“Ming the Merciless has imprisoned Flash
Gordon and Dale Arden in the radium mines
of Mongo. There are these creatures that look
sort of like alligators——”

Now from the closet came a faint, wailing
cry. Within its soundproofed confines, it must
have been a shriek almost loud enough to rup-
ture the poor man’s vocal cords. How could Mr.
Timmons still be strong enough to voice sucha
howl? He had already lasted a day longer than
any of the previous five, and his somehow grue-
some vitality had begun to prey on her nerves.
She had been hoping that tonight would see the
end of him.

The rug in which he was to be wrapped
was waiting in their bedroom, and the panel
truck with ENDERBY ENTERPRISES painted
on the side was parked just around the cor-
ner, fully gassed and ready for another trip to
the Pine Barrens of New Jersey. When they
were first married, there had actually been an
Enderby Enterprises. The depression—what
the Journal-American had taken to calling the
Great Depression—had put an end to that two
years ago. Now they had this new work.

“Dale is afraid,” continued Mr. Enderby,
“and Flash is trying to buck her up. He says Dr.
Zarkov will—”

Now came a fusillade of thumps: 10, maybe
a dozen, and accompanied by more of those
shrieks, muffled but still rather chilling. She
could imagine blood beading Mr. Timmons’s
lips and dripping from his split knuckles. She
could imagine how his neck would have grown
scrawny, and howhis formerly plump face would

100

FICTION

“I CAN PUT A STOP

TO IT, IF YOU LIKE. OF
COURSE, IF IDO THE

DEED, YOU WILL HAVE
TO DO THE CLEANUP.
IT'S ONLY FAIR.”

have stretched long as his body gobbled the fat
and musculature there in order to stay alive.

But no. A body couldn’t cannibalize itselfto
stay alive, could it? The idea was as unscien-
tific as phrenology. And how thirsty he must
be by now!

“It's so annoying!” she burst out. “I hate it
that he just goes on and on and on! Why did you
have to bring home such a strong man, dear?”

“Because he was also a well-to-do man,” Mr.
Enderby said mildly. “I could see that when he
opened his wallet to pay for our second round of
drinks. What he’s contributed will keep us for
three months. Five, if we stretch it.”

Thump, and thump, and thump. Mrs.
Enderby put her fingers to the delicate hollows
of her temples and began to rub.

Mr. Enderby looked at her sympathetically.
“T can put a stop to it, if you like. He won't be
able to struggle much in his current state; cer-
tainly not after having expended so much en-
ergy. A quick slash with your sharpest butcher
knife. Of course, if I do the deed, you will have
to do the cleanup. It's only fair."

Mrs. Enderby looked at him, shocked. “We
may be thieves, but we are not murderers."

“Thatis not what people would say, if we were

caught." He spoke apologetically but firmly
enough, just the same.

She clasped her hands in the lap of her red
dress tightly enough to whiten the knuckles,
and looked straight into his eyes. “If we were
called into the dock, I would hold my head up
andtell the judge and the jury that we were vic-
tims of circumstance."

“And I'm sure you would be very convinc-
ing, dear."

Another thump from behind the closet door,
and another cry. Gruesome. That was the word
for his vitality, the exact one. Gruesome.

“But we are not murderers. Our guests sim-
ply lack sustenance, as do so many in these
terrible times. We don't kill them; they simply
fade away."

Another shriek came from the man Mr.
Enderby had brought home from McSorley’s
over a week ago. It might have been words. It
might have been for the love of God.

“It won't be long now,” Mr. Enderby said. “If
nottonight, then tomorrow. And we won't have
to go back to work for quite a while. And yet....”

She looked at him in that same steady way,
hands clasped. “And yet?"

"Part of you enjoys it, I think. Not this part,

butthe actual moment when we take them, as a
hunter takes an animal in the woods."

She considered this. “Perhaps I do. And I cer-
tainly enjoy seeing what they have in their wal-
lets. It reminds me of the treasure hunts Papa
used to put on for me and my brother when we
were children. But afterward....” She sighed. “I
was never good at waiting.”

More thumps. Mr. Enderby turned to the
business section. “He came from Albany, and
people who come from there get what they de-
serve. Play something, dear. That will cheer
you up.”

So she got her sheet music out of the piano
bench and played “I’ll Never Be the Same.”
Then she played “I'm in a Dancing Mood” and
“The Way You Look Tonight.” Mr. Enderby ap-
plauded and called for an encore on that one,
and when the last notes died away, the thumps
and cries from the soundproofed and specially
reinforced closet had ceased.

“Music!” Mr. Enderby proclaimed. “It hath
powers to soothe the savage beast!”

That made them laugh together, comfort-
ably, the way people do when they have been
married for many years and have cometo know
each other's minds. a

101

move. MAYA SINGER ruorocrarny sv AARON FEAVER

ARTIST IN RESIDENCE

You could not have crashed your way through the 19805 and 19905 indie-rock world without encountering

Kim Gordon, then best-known as the bassist and vocalist of the seminal noise-pop band Sonic Youth. With
long blonde hair cascading over her eyes, a low-slung bass around her neck and an EAT ME shirt on her lanky
frame, Gordon was—and is—a ferocious musician who became an alt-rock style icon, a high-profile feminist
and a muse to everyone from Kurt Cobain to Tavi Gevinson. Y But before she began pursuing music in earnest,
Gordon was an art student with a collaborative streak. In addition to exhibiting her mixed-media work every-
where from Tokyo to London, she has co-founded a clothing company (X-Girl), curated countless art shows
and created work with Yoko Ono, among many others. These days, Gordon’s output is more varied than ever: A
few years ago she launched the cathartic guitar duo Body/Head; in 2015 she published her unflinching mem-
otr, Girl in a Band; and just this September she released “Murdered Out,” her first
single under her own name. Visitors to this year’s Art Basel Miami Beach can
experience her take on music, fashion and art all at once in Proposal for Dance, a
video performance piece in which Gordon and another artist, clad in Rodarte
dresses, mercilessly manipulate electric guitars in front of (and at times in the
middle of) a live audience. ¥ Her recent paintings and sculptural works are rooted
in her downtown No Wave beginnings, visually name-checking bands like Pussy
Galore, using spray paint and trashed canvas and somehow achieving, through the
wreckage and noise, a sublime abstraction. Almost 40 years in, Gordon continues

Above: Portraitof the artist by David to provide areverberating commentary on the high and the low—and a point-blank

Black. Opposite: mirror wreath #2. Spray

paint on mirror, 24 x 18 inches, 2016. look at what she recently called “culture collapsing in on itself." Eric Steinman

ARTIST IN RESIDENCE

Opposite page: Pussy Galore. Acrylic on canvas, 55% x 39% inches, 2015.
Above: Stills from Proposal for Dance. DVD, dir. Philipp Virus, 2012.
Below: Fortress of Glassitude. Acrylic on gessoed canvas with Aqua-Resin and fiberglass, 20 x 30 x 43% inches, 2015.

113

PLAYBACK

WISCONSIN, 1968

Snow Bunnies take a ride through the Lake Geneva woods.

U.S. Postal Service Statement of Ownership, Management and Circulation. 1. Publication title: Playboy. 2. Publication number: 0032-1478. 3. Filing date: October 1, 2016. 4. Issue frequency: 10 times per year. 5. Number of issues
published annually: 10. 6. Annual subscription price: $32.97. 7. Complete mailing address of known office of publication: Playboy Enterprises, Inc., 9346 Civic Center Drive, Beverly Hills, CA 90210. 8. Complete mailing address
of headquarters or general business office of publisher: Playboy Enterprises, Inc., 9346 Civic Center Drive, Beverly Hills, CA 90210. 9. Full names and complete mailing addresses of publisher, editor and editorial director: Pub-
lisher: Phillip Morelock, c/o Playboy Enterprises, Inc., 9346 Civic Center Drive, Beverly Hills, CA 90210; Editor: Hugh Hefner, c/o Playboy Enterprises, Inc., 9346 Civic Center Drive, Beverly Hills, CA 90210; Editorial Director:
Hugh Garvey, c/o Playboy Enterprises, Inc., 9346 Civic Center Drive, Beverly Hills, CA 90210. 10. Owner: Playboy Enterprises, Inc., 9346 Civic Center Drive, Beverly Hills, CA 90210. 11. Known bondholders, mortgagees and
other security holders owning or holding one percent or more of total amount of bonds, mortgages or other securities: Icon Acquisition Holdings, LLC, 9346 Civic Center Drive, Beverly Hills, CA 90210. 12. Tax status (for comple-
tion by nonprofit organizations authorized to mail at nonprofit rates): not applicable. 13. Publication title: Playboy. 14. Issue date for circulation data below: September 2016. 15. Extent and nature of circulation: Average number
of copies each issue during preceding 12 months: a. Total number of copies: 781,561; b. Paid circulation: (1) Paid outside-county mailed subscriptions: 617,409; (2) Paid in-county mailed subscriptions: o; (3) Paid distribution
outside the mails including sales through dealers and carriers, street vendors, counter sales and other non-USPS paid distribution: 45,823; (4) Paid distribution by other classes mailed through the USPS: o; c. Total paid distribu-
tion: 663,232; d. Free or nominal rate distribution: (1) Free or nominal rate outside-county: 587; (2) Free or nominal rate in-county: 0; (3) Free or nominal rate other classes mailed through the USPS: 0; (4) Free or nominal rate
distribution outside the mail: 3,223; e. Total free or nominal rate distribution: 3,810; f. Total distribution: 667,042; g. Copies not distributed: 114,518; h. Total: 781,560; i. Percent paid: 99.4%. Number of copies of single issue
published nearest to filing date: a. Total number of copies: 626,978; b. Paid circulation: (1) Paid outside-county mailed subscriptions: 476,894; (2) Paid in-county mailed subscriptions: 0; (3) Paid distribution outside the mails
including sales through dealers and carriers, street vendors, counter sales and other non-USPS paid distribution: 26,961; (4) Paid distribution by other classes mailed through the USPS: o; c. Total paid distribution: 503,855;
d. Free or nominal rate distribution: (1) Free or nominal rate outside-county: 523; (2) Free or nominal rate in-county: 0; (3) Free or nominal rate other classes mailed through the USPS: o; (4) Free or nominal rate distribution
outside the mail: 2,700; e. Total free or nominal rate distribution: 3,223; f. Total distribution: 507,078; g. Copies not distributed: 119,900; h. Total: 626,978; i. Percent paid: 99.4%.—David G. Israel, CFO/COO, Playboy Media

Y PLAYBOY SHOP com

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