Canadian Oscar winner Brigitte Berman examines politics of Hugh Hefner’s talk show

The Oscar-winning Berman reappraises both series as groundbreaking vehicles for social change in her new documentary “Hugh Hefner’s After Dark: Speaking Out in America.” (File Photo: Brigitte Berman/Facebook)

TORONTO — Much like reading Playboy for the articles, Toronto-based filmmaker Brigitte Berman watched Hugh Hefner’s late-night talk shows for the politics.

On both “Playboy’s Penthouse” (1959-1961) and “Playboy After Dark” (1969-1970), Hefner pressed political trigger points: championing racially diverse talent, challenging the House Un-American Activities Committee, and decrying the American military’s presence in Vietnam.

The Oscar-winning Berman reappraises both series as groundbreaking vehicles for social change in her new documentary “Hugh Hefner’s After Dark: Speaking Out in America.” The film, which is seeking distribution, premiered Friday at the Telluride Film Festival in Colorado, where the industry elite screen festival juggernauts concurrent with the Venice Film Festival and before the Toronto International Film Festival.

“It shows how we have progressed in some ways, but in other ways we have almost regressed,” she says.

It is certainly hard to imagine a musician today speaking for 12 minutes against the American military, as Joan Baez once did on After Dark, without becoming a viral news story and inciting a violent Twitterstorm.

Berman had previously profiled Hugh Hefner for her 2009 film “Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist, and Rebel,” yet she dismisses comparisons between that film and her new work, in which she feels Hefner is almost a supporting character. “This film was about the show and the way he platformed the ideas and the artists,” she says.

“It is a film about these people, about Joan Baez, about Smokey Robinson, about Pete Seeger. It’s about ideas and the importance of speaking out about these ideas.”

That’s why Berman sidestepped Hefner’s controversial legacy as a sexual revolutionary. Both “Playboy Penthouse” and “Playboy After Dark” were set against the backdrop of a swinging cocktail party where beautiful women served as set dressing.

“The sexual politics were not really part of the show,” Berman says.

“Many of us are complex people, and this (political) side of him came out in the show. If you look at the way people are dressed, they are not in Playboy bunny (costumes). They are very suavely dressed.”

“Hugh Hefner’s After Dark” is Berman’s seventh film as a director. In 1985, she won the Oscar for best documentary for the film “Artie Shaw: Time Is All You’ve Got,” about the American jazz clarinetist. With “Hugh Hefner’s After Dark,” she hopes to spark political discourse, something she says the selection committee at Telluride responded to in an early cut of the film.

That aspect had been teased out by Berman’s late husband and frequent collaborator Victor Solnicki. Solnicki, a writer and producer on the film, passed away in 2016 before the film was completed.

Finishing the film without him was difficult, she admits, yet also healing. “It helped me deal with the grief,” she says.

“For all the interviews, he was there. At the end of doing an interview, I would turn around and say, ‘Darling did we miss anything?’ He would say, ‘Let’s talk more about the House Un-American Activities Committee,’ and other times he’d say, ‘No — you covered it like the waterfront.’

“I had his voice still echoing as I was watching the footage. It was very powerful.”