Mad Men In Chicago: Story Of The Playboy Club Coming To NBC

By Steven Pate in Arts & Entertainment on Feb 21, 2011 8:40PM

51 years ago, on a typically cold Febuary day in Chicago, a line of eager patrons waited outside on the sidewalk for a new club to open up at 116 E. Walton St. $50 got them a lifetime membership to Hugh Hefner's first Playboy Club entitling them to a key with the bunny logo stamped into it, $1.50 meals, drinks, and a formidable variety of entertainment at the members-only establishment. And of course, there were the he soon-to-be famous bunny-attired cocktail waitresses. The formula worked, with nearly 17,000 visitors in the first month and over 100,000 in its first year. The club became a phenomenon and, along with the magazine and Hefner himself, a touchstone.

On March 7, principal photography is scheduled to begin on a Playboy, T.V. pilot for NBC about the Playboy club. Set in 1963, Laura Benanti is slated to play a Playboy Club star on the wrong side of 30 realizing her days are numbered. Given that NBC has hired Alan Taylor, who directed the Mad Men pilot, it's a safe bet that Playboy will seek to explore the sexual and cultural upheavals of the 1960s.

There is no disputing that the Playboy empire was an early and contested front in the battles for sexual liberation and gender equality, and we're hoping that Taylor and writer Chad Hodge bring the same nuanced engagement with the subject matter as we have seen in Mad Men. Of course, we're also hoping that there are a lot of loving portrayals of 1960s Chicago during the moment when Art Buchwald dubbed the city the "sex capital of the United States."