I’ll be honest: Miss November 1995, Holly Witt, mainly bores the crap out of me, and I feel like Playboy did not put their best effort forward with this pictorial’s disjointed themes, nor did they demand enough of the model.
Photography by Arny Freytag and Stephen Wayda
I just feel like this shoot could have been done better. I’m surprised Arny Freytag was involved. Possibly he only did the centerfold and this Wayda character did the rest.
The kiddie pool picture is actually pretty good. And the one below of her in the salon chair with her hand to her head is okay. But the rest come off wooden to me and look like something from a much cheaper magazine. It’s a shame that they let her get away with just doing the kind of arched back, pouty mouth thing, because I think she was capable of more. Some more stringently unusal or less stiff poses could have made the shoot kind of this interesting and erotic, challenging look at the trope of the slutty housewife: the set dressing and pastel but somehow lurid, vivid colors would have worked great with that.
Instead, because she was allowed to go with Porn 101 posing of chipmunk face and out-thrust breasts (not that there is anything wrong with that pose in its appropriate context), the shoot just falls in to pornographic fantasy pictures instead of doing the more dynamic and interesting thing by elevating it a level further and erotically, cleverly referring to that genre, rather than crassly being it. Does this make sense?
Anyway, fuck this shoot. The rest of the text is going to be quotes from an interview that also ran in this issue by contributing editor Lawrence Gobel with none other than superbomb flyass mothafucka Mr. Harvey Keitel.
PLAYBOY: You must be aware of how people react to you. You’ve developed a reputation as a powerful actor willing to dare exposure.
KEITEL: I’m smiling now as you say dare. I mean, that’s what I do. I don’t know what to say, except that it comes naturally to me. You want to call it daring? OK. I look at it as being.
KEITEL: Here’s a man who is doing the job of a pimp and a girl who is working as a prostitute. It’s monstrous, it’s horrible. But that wasn’t my approach to it. My approach was as a working man. Often, pimps are brilliant people caught up in life’s misfortunes. It’s like this whole debate going on about the welfare system: Is it the fault of the poor or of their circumstances? I believe a great deal of it has to do with their circumstances, not just because they are irresponsible.
PLAYBOY: How could Reservoir Dogs have gone further?
KEITEL: Perhaps there was some way to make the universal quest more obvious to an audience.
PLAYBOY: You may have a point—most people saw it as a violent movie, not one of some Arthurian quest.
KEITEL: I never saw it as a violent film. … I see it more as a story about a man who is in need of nourishing a younger man, of being a father figure, of being an example. It’s a quest we’re all on.
You can read the full interview here, which I strongly recommend because Keitel mercilessly fucks with Gobel the entire time; he is enigmatic and a dick and just all-around brooking no publicity machine bullshit. He is the consummate Man. I love him so well.
In closing and to bring it back to the subject of this entry, I will merely add that if you are on a date with the lovely and talented Ms. Witt and are thinking of impressing her with a story about Pythagoras or Fermat, shut your piehole, because she lists among her turn-offs “math and history.” Awesome.
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