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Worrisome though it is, the court decision may be a less critical problem for the skin magazines than their own proliferation. Success has spawned successors at a rate now heading toward the suicidal. The great majority of imitators are blatant strip-offs of Playboy's successful format. Guccione, a painter and photographer who has succeeded largely on a genius for promotion, led the drive on Hefner's long monopoly in 1969—and already sells some 3.4 million copies of Penthouse each month (v. Playboy sales of 6.7 million). Playboy maintained a haughty indifference to Penthouse for three years, then replied last October with Oui, which combined a rambunctious editorial slant with uninhibited nudes pictured in the Penthouse mood. Its latest circulation guarantee—the fourth upward revision in a year—promises a base of 1,750,000 sales in October.
The month after Oui's debut, a former computer-company president named Ronald Fenton introduced Gallery, with Trial Lawyer F. Lee Bailey as a minority partner and celebrity publisher (he has since departed). Slavishly imitative of Playboy typography, makeup and design. Gallery has been in editorial trouble from the start—and is now rumored to have equally serious financial problems. Even so, Fenton claims monthly sales of over 1,000,000 —up from 340,000 for the first issue.
If Gallery could draw, what could flop? Among those wondering must, have been the original Gallery staff, many of whom have left to found new imitations. Gallery's first editor, James L. Spurlock, a Playboy alumnus, is now at work on Touch, which he describes as "a combination of Cosmopolitan and Playboy"; 500,000 copies of the first issue are scheduled to descend on newsstands in late August. Ex-Gallery Associate Publisher Stephan L. Saunders left to found Genesis, the first issue of which appeared in June. Financed by Rocky Aoki, owner of a string of successful Japanese restaurants in the U.S., Genesis was primarily notable for offering charter readers two centerfold nudes for the going price of one. Still another former Gallery hand, Photographer George Santo Pietro, 26, jumped ship to lay plans for Coq (pronounced, he insists, "coke"), which has yet another lawyer-on-a-lark (Melvin Belli) scheduled to hold the title of publisher.
Sex-Oriented. There is also a flip side to sexual hip. Playgirl, an unprepossessing California production, appeared in May and sold out 600,000 copies; its print run for September (nude centerfold of the month: Singer Fabian) is scheduled to reach 2,000,000.
By far the most ballyhooed new entry is Guccione's Viva, which is scheduled for an initial press run of 1,000,000 in September. Trade reports have it that Guccione plans to take on Cosmopolitan in the same way that Penthouse challenged Playboy. Guccione says merely that Viva will be "a sex-oriented magazine as Penthouse is."
Is there a ceiling to the market? Wall Street publishing analysts point out that the skin magazines appeal to the same basic audience; more than 60% of Penthouse readers, for example, also read Playboy. In the view of Playboy executives, the success of its imitators owes to the fact that readers have a growing appetite for this kind of magazine—but at some point, obviously, that appetite will be sated.