Build a pin-up collection of your own with our sexy Playmate posters.
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by Felicia Feaster
 ut of the night sky comes a huge, white Rabbit Head, hovering above the makeshift amphitheater of restless GIs like an apparition. The chopper bearing the emblem touches down on the landing pad and a Hollywood emcee leaps down to make the introductions. The men erupt into thunderous applause as two Playmates, scantily dressed in buckskin and fringe, shimmy to the edge of the stage. Above the scene rises fictional Playmate of the Year Carrie Foster (played by 1974 Playmate of the Year Cyndi Wood), decked in hot pants and a cowgirl hat.
With Creedence Clearwater Revival's Suzie Q blaring over the speakers, she is carried to the stage on a platform. Blowing the smoke from her "fired" pistols and riding an imaginary steed with sultry abandon, the cowgirl drives the horny soldiers into such a frenzy that they rush the stage, frantically lunging for an autograph and a feel. Hollywood hustles the Playmates back into the craft, which takes off with two soldiers clinging tenaciously to the landing skids.
This scene in Apocalypse Now was a definitive film moment for Playboy and for renegade filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola. Coppola's use of the Playmates provided a powerful commentary on how different Vietnam was from other wars -- this was a conflict without rules or ethics. A rising star of the Seventies renaissance in American film, Coppola -- like fellow filmmakers Martin Scorsese and Robert Altman -- crafted movies that questioned the all-American, patriotic assumptions of the previous cinematic generation.
While the freewheeling flicks of the Sixties expressed a seeming contentment to make merry after a decade of sexual repression, Seventies films reflected a conflicted era. Though lip service was given to sexual freedom and expression, as in the Fifties the roles offered to women at the time often displayed a great deal of hypocrisy. Playmates in films of the Seventies reflected that caught-between-a-rock-and-a-hard-place mentality. Some, like Wood, appeared in films that challenged the status quo. However, the majority of Playmates were continually cast as sex objects by movie directors and producers. The sexual revolution of the Sixties meant nudity was no longer taboo -- although, due to the movie industry's double standard, women were still penalized for appearing nude, as more than one Seventies Playmate will attest.
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All featured Playmates are in The Playmate Book.
When the cameras stopped rolling, the real show started. Read all about it in The Mansion Book.
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