Oui (magazine)
Encyclopedia
Oui is a men's adult pornographic magazine
published in the USA
and featuring explicit nude photographs of models
, with full page pin-ups, centerfolds, interviews and other articles, and cartoons.
under the name Lui
by Daniel Filipacchi
(first French issue January 1964), as a French equivalent of Playboy. In 1972, Playboy Enterprises
purchased the rights for a U.S. edition, changing the name to Oui, and the first issue was published in October of that year. Jon Carroll
, formerly assistant editor at Rolling Stone
magazine and editor of Rags and later editor of The Village Voice
, was selected as the first editor.
Arthur Kretchmer, the editor of Playboy, however, had a role in assuring that editorial choices would be in line with Hugh Hefner's vision.
The intention was to differentiate the audience in mass-market men's magazines, in an attempt to answer the challenge brought by Penthouse
, with its more explicit photography, and therefore compete on multiple fronts. At first Playboy considered a direct response by following Penthouse in a nudity escalation (Pubic Wars
), but Playboy management was hesitant to alter the magazine's philosophy, based on a more 'mature' and 'sophisticated' audience (one-third of Playboys readership at that time was estimated to be over 35 ). Instead a separate publication, Oui was introduced in order to pursue a younger readership, offering a combination of a "rambunctious editorial slant with uninhibited nudes pictured in the Penthouse mood."
?" (April 1977) by Lorne Blair (lately famous for the Ring of Fire documentaries), beginning with a photograph of a grinning New Guinea
native, told by the intrepid anthropologist/reporter who journeyed to New Guinea, interviewed people who had known Michael Rockefeller, then ventured into the jungle and talked to members of the tribe from whom Rockefeller had bought native art artifacts, including totem pole
s. In the end, he found a man who claimed he had eaten the unfortunate collector.
Oui also hosted several reportages about Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
activity, like the article "CIA vs. USA – The Agency's Plot to Take Over America" by Philip Agee
, about an alleged Operation PBPrime
, whose leaders were the top four men in the Central Intelligence Agency and whose target was the control of the U.S. government.
In a more humorous vein, Oui also published the essay "The 3 Most Important Things in Life" by Harlan Ellison
in its November 1978 issue. The three things in question were sex
, violence
and labor relations
, each illustrated by anecdotes from Ellison's life. The sex anecdote involved a less-than-successful assignation with a young woman, the violence anecdote was about witnessing a murder in a movie theater during a screening of Save the Tiger
, and the labor relations anecdote was Ellison's version of the story of his being fired after only one morning at The Walt Disney Company
for jokingly suggesting the making of a pornographic cartoon using the primary Disney characters. The piece has since been republished in Ellison's Stalking the Nightmare
and Edgeworks 1. Oui also published short fiction.
A 1977 interview by Peter Manso to the then 29-year-old emerging actor Arnold Schwarzenegger
on issues like sex, drugs, bodybuilding and homosexuality produced some embarrassment twenty five years later to candidate Schwarzenegger in the 2003 California
gubernatorial campaign.
Initially, Laurant featured celebrity nudity in Oui, peaking in 1982 with pictorials of Linda Blair
, Demi Moore
and Pia Zadora
. The magazine has since experienced a significant decline in circulation. As had many of its competitors, Oui expanded its photo content to hardcore in the early 2000s, which included depictions of couples having sexual intercourse, including explicit penetration.
Pornographic magazine
Pornographic magazines, sometimes known as adult magazines, sex magazines or top-shelf magazines are pornographic magazines that contain content of a sexual nature. Adult magazines are mainly aimed towards men, and in some parts of the world, many men's first sight of a naked woman has been in an...
published in the USA
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
and featuring explicit nude photographs of models
Model (person)
A model , sometimes called a mannequin, is a person who is employed to display, advertise and promote commercial products or to serve as a subject of works of art....
, with full page pin-ups, centerfolds, interviews and other articles, and cartoons.
Playboy years
Oui was originally published in FranceFrance
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
under the name Lui
Lui
Lui is a French adult entertainment magazine created in November 1963 by Daniel Filipacchi, a fashion photographer turned publisher, Jacques Lanzmann, a jack of all trades turned novelist, and Frank Ténot, a press agent, pataphysician and jazz critic..The objective was to bring some charm "à la...
by Daniel Filipacchi
Daniel Filipacchi
Daniel Filipacchi is the Chairman Emeritus of Hachette Filipacchi Médias.His life and career have been noted for his passionate involvement in art collecting, photography, and jazz...
(first French issue January 1964), as a French equivalent of Playboy. In 1972, Playboy Enterprises
Playboy Enterprises
Playboy Enterprises, Inc. is a privately held global media and lifestyle company founded by Hugh Marston Hefner to manage the Playboy magazine empire. Its programming and content are available worldwide on television networks, Websites, mobile platforms and radio...
purchased the rights for a U.S. edition, changing the name to Oui, and the first issue was published in October of that year. Jon Carroll
Jon Carroll
Jon Carroll is a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, beginning in 1982, at that time succeeding Charles McCabe's column. He is featured on the back page of the Datebook on weekdays. Locally, he is best known for his moderate-to-liberal politics and his cat columns.Carroll was born in Los...
, formerly assistant editor at Rolling Stone
Rolling Stone
Rolling Stone is a US-based magazine devoted to music, liberal politics, and popular culture that is published every two weeks. Rolling Stone was founded in San Francisco in 1967 by Jann Wenner and music critic Ralph J...
magazine and editor of Rags and later editor of The Village Voice
The Village Voice
The Village Voice is a free weekly newspaper and news and features website in New York City that features investigative articles, analysis of current affairs and culture, arts and music coverage, and events listings for New York City...
, was selected as the first editor.
Arthur Kretchmer, the editor of Playboy, however, had a role in assuring that editorial choices would be in line with Hugh Hefner's vision.
The intention was to differentiate the audience in mass-market men's magazines, in an attempt to answer the challenge brought by Penthouse
Penthouse (magazine)
Penthouse, a men's magazine founded by Bob Guccione, combines urban lifestyle articles and softcore pornographic pictorials that, in the 1990s, evolved into hardcore. Penthouse is owned by FriendFinder Network. formerly known as General Media, Inc. whose parent company was Penthouse International...
, with its more explicit photography, and therefore compete on multiple fronts. At first Playboy considered a direct response by following Penthouse in a nudity escalation (Pubic Wars
Pubic Wars
Pubic Wars, a pun on the Punic Wars, is the name given to the rivalry between the pornographic magazines Playboy and Penthouse during the 1960s and 1970s. Each magazine strove to show just a little bit more than the other, without getting too crude. The term was coined by Playboy owner Hugh Hefner...
), but Playboy management was hesitant to alter the magazine's philosophy, based on a more 'mature' and 'sophisticated' audience (one-third of Playboys readership at that time was estimated to be over 35 ). Instead a separate publication, Oui was introduced in order to pursue a younger readership, offering a combination of a "rambunctious editorial slant with uninhibited nudes pictured in the Penthouse mood."
Article content
In the late seventies, Oui published some interesting articles, including "Is this the man who ate Michael RockefellerMichael Rockefeller
Michael Clark Rockefeller , was the youngest son of New York Governor Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller and Mary Todhunter Rockefeller and a fourth generation member of the Rockefeller family...
?" (April 1977) by Lorne Blair (lately famous for the Ring of Fire documentaries), beginning with a photograph of a grinning New Guinea
New Guinea
New Guinea is the world's second largest island, after Greenland, covering a land area of 786,000 km2. Located in the southwest Pacific Ocean, it lies geographically to the east of the Malay Archipelago, with which it is sometimes included as part of a greater Indo-Australian Archipelago...
native, told by the intrepid anthropologist/reporter who journeyed to New Guinea, interviewed people who had known Michael Rockefeller, then ventured into the jungle and talked to members of the tribe from whom Rockefeller had bought native art artifacts, including totem pole
Totem pole
Totem poles are monumental sculptures carved from large trees, mostly Western Red Cedar, by cultures of the indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast of North America...
s. In the end, he found a man who claimed he had eaten the unfortunate collector.
Oui also hosted several reportages about Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
Central Intelligence Agency
The Central Intelligence Agency is a civilian intelligence agency of the United States government. It is an executive agency and reports directly to the Director of National Intelligence, responsible for providing national security intelligence assessment to senior United States policymakers...
activity, like the article "CIA vs. USA – The Agency's Plot to Take Over America" by Philip Agee
Philip Agee
Philip Burnett Franklin Agee was a Central Intelligence Agency case officer and writer, best known as author of the 1975 book, Inside the Company: CIA Diary, detailing his experiences in the CIA. Agee joined the CIA in 1957, and over the following decade had postings in Washington, D.C., Ecuador,...
, about an alleged Operation PBPrime
CIA cryptonym
CIA cryptonyms are code names or code words used by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency to reference projects, operations, persons, agencies, etc. The cryptonyms as described in this article were in use at least from the 1950s to the 1980s...
, whose leaders were the top four men in the Central Intelligence Agency and whose target was the control of the U.S. government.
In a more humorous vein, Oui also published the essay "The 3 Most Important Things in Life" by Harlan Ellison
Harlan Ellison
Harlan Jay Ellison is an American writer. His principal genre is speculative fiction.His published works include over 1,700 short stories, novellas, screenplays, teleplays, essays, a wide range of criticism covering literature, film, television, and print media...
in its November 1978 issue. The three things in question were sex
Sex
In biology, sex is a process of combining and mixing genetic traits, often resulting in the specialization of organisms into a male or female variety . Sexual reproduction involves combining specialized cells to form offspring that inherit traits from both parents...
, violence
Violence
Violence is the use of physical force to apply a state to others contrary to their wishes. violence, while often a stand-alone issue, is often the culmination of other kinds of conflict, e.g...
and labor relations
Labor relations
Industrial relations is a multidisciplinary field that studies the employment relationship. Industrial relations is increasingly being called employment relations because of the importance of non-industrial employment relationships. Many outsiders also equate industrial relations to labour relations...
, each illustrated by anecdotes from Ellison's life. The sex anecdote involved a less-than-successful assignation with a young woman, the violence anecdote was about witnessing a murder in a movie theater during a screening of Save the Tiger
Save the Tiger
Save the Tiger is a 1973 film about moral conflict in contemporary America. It stars Jack Lemmon, Jack Gilford, Laurie Heineman, Thayer David, Lara Parker and Liv Lindeland. The film is directed by John G...
, and the labor relations anecdote was Ellison's version of the story of his being fired after only one morning at The Walt Disney Company
The Walt Disney Company
The Walt Disney Company is the largest media conglomerate in the world in terms of revenue. Founded on October 16, 1923, by Walt and Roy Disney as the Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio, Walt Disney Productions established itself as a leader in the American animation industry before diversifying into...
for jokingly suggesting the making of a pornographic cartoon using the primary Disney characters. The piece has since been republished in Ellison's Stalking the Nightmare
Stalking the Nightmare
Stalking the Nightmare is a 1982 collection of short stories and nonfiction pieces by Harlan Ellison. The short stories are interspersed with "Scenes from the Real World" sections, which are essays on a variety of topics. Although most of the stories had not previously appeared in any of...
and Edgeworks 1. Oui also published short fiction.
A 1977 interview by Peter Manso to the then 29-year-old emerging actor Arnold Schwarzenegger
Arnold Schwarzenegger
Arnold Alois Schwarzenegger is an Austrian-American former professional bodybuilder, actor, businessman, investor, and politician. Schwarzenegger served as the 38th Governor of California from 2003 until 2011....
on issues like sex, drugs, bodybuilding and homosexuality produced some embarrassment twenty five years later to candidate Schwarzenegger in the 2003 California
California
California is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third-largest by land area...
gubernatorial campaign.
Post Playboy years
Despite its popularity, Oui was unable to produce a profit. Furthermore, management realized that Oui was stealing more readers from Playboy than Penthouse. So, in June 1981 Playboy Enterprises ended its Oui experiment. The magazine was sold to Laurant Publishing Ltd. in New York; its new president and chief operating officer was Irwin E. Billman, former executive vice president and chief operating officer of the Penthouse Group.Initially, Laurant featured celebrity nudity in Oui, peaking in 1982 with pictorials of Linda Blair
Linda Blair
Linda Denise Blair is an American actress. Blair is best known for her role as the possessed child, Regan, in the 1973 film The Exorcist, for which she was nominated for an Academy Award and two Golden Globes, winning one. She reprised her role in 1977's Exorcist II: The Heretic.-Biography:Blair...
, Demi Moore
Demi Moore
Demi Guynes Kutcher , known professionally as Demi Moore, is an American actress. After minor roles in film and a role in the soap opera General Hospital, Moore established her career in films such as St...
and Pia Zadora
Pia Zadora
Pia Zadora is an American actress and singer. After working as a child actress on Broadway, in regional theater, and in the film Santa Claus Conquers the Martians , she came to national attention in 1981 when, following her starring role in the highly criticized Butterfly, she won a Golden Globe...
. The magazine has since experienced a significant decline in circulation. As had many of its competitors, Oui expanded its photo content to hardcore in the early 2000s, which included depictions of couples having sexual intercourse, including explicit penetration.
External links
- ouimagazine.com at Internet ArchiveInternet ArchiveThe Internet Archive is a non-profit digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It offers permanent storage and access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, music, moving images, and nearly 3 million public domain books. The Internet Archive...