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Brett Ratner, the director of the newest X-Men movie, would rather be taking photos of naked celebrity women.
Brett Ratner, director of “X-Men: The Last Stand,” might not be dating her at the moment, but he seems to have a thing for 19-year-old Lindsay Lohan. “I’ve shot a lot of guys – I want to shoot some girls,” the 37-year-old Ratner told Lowdown at a party celebrating his other career as a portrait photographer. “Mariah Carey is like the only woman I’ve shot. I want to shoot some women. Halle Berry would be cool. And Lindsay Lohan.”
Ratner added that what he’d really like to do is photograph them naked. “I’d like to shoot the Pirelli calendar. Wouldn’t that be awesome? Hot!” Ratner gushed, referring to the famed calendar featuring nudes.
[...]
Speaking of women in their birthday suits, he had nothing but praise for “X-Men” star Rebecca Romijn: “She was naked, and she looked great in the blue makeup.”
       
I’ve never seen Halle Berry or Lindsay Lohan nude and painted blue before, but I’m sure they’d look okay.
Popularity: 43% [?]
UPDATE 11/1: Here are seven nude photos from the Cindy Margolis Playboy spread, released today.
UPDATE 11/3: Playboy has claimed copyright infringement and has asked that we take down the nude Cindy Margolis photos. We have complied.
Cindy Margolis has agreed to get naked for Playboy, reports WaPo’s Kathy Hanrahan.
Cindy Margolis, known as the “Most Downloaded Woman” on the Internet, is following up her win on “Celebrity Cooking Showdown” with a career first — posing nude for Playboy. The mother of three told The Associated Press that she finally agreed to pose for the magazine when they called on her 40th birthday.
“Thank goodness for ‘Desperate Housewives.’ You’re not dead just because you are married and have children,” the actress and model said Monday, on the phone from her Los Angeles home. After turning down offers to pose for the magazine in the past, Margolis said she accepted this time because she felt posing nude at the age of 40 is empowering. “In the past it would have been for gratuitous reasons,” she said. Now, Margolis said, she is enjoying being the ultimate desperate housewife. “It will be fun to go up against the 20-year-olds and show them that they don’t have anything on me,” she said.
The story notes that Margolis is a former “Price is Right” model, which I had not known. She’ll join Dian Parkinson, who did several stints in Playboy, also relatively late in her career.
Egotastic’s Phil, displaying the agism so common in the Gossiposphere, is not impressed.
This is the problem with Playboy magazine. They always have people posing well after anyone ever cared to see them naked. They should save the cash they would have paid for all these nobodies so that they can pile it all together, and finally have an offer that Jessica Alba will say yes to.
While that may indeed be a good business plan, I’m sure there are plenty of folks out there who have been waiting for years to see Cindy Margolis nude.
 Phil partially make ups for his comments by posting several enormous photos of Margolis’ famous cleavage, such as the one on the right. I’m resized them so they’ll fit onto my page. He has several originals that are so large that you’ll have to scroll to see them. They are simply enormous.
Popularity: 63% [?]
 Keri Russell nude in the current Vanity Fair. Granted, VF has more celebrity nudes than Playboy these days and the photos are even tamer. As the thumbnail on the right makes sadly apparent, Russell’s photo is no exception. (As always, click for a larger photo.)
Still, “the 7th Heaven” and “Felicity” star generally keeps her clothes on in public, so it’s not like they scored Demi Moore again. Indeed, the photos below are the most provocative non-PhotoShopped images of Russell I could find:
   
The woman’s practically a nun. Compared to these images, the VF photo is veritable porn.
Popularity: 44% [?]
Playboy creator Hugh M. Hefner is in the middle of an interview about his 80th birthday when a TV cameraman asks him to move a statue of former girlfriend Barbi Benton from the shelf behind him. The statue’s nude breasts were in the shot and that might not pass muster with TV decency standards. “As much as things change, they stay the same,” Hefner remarks, disappointment in his voice. “There is still controversy about, maybe even more than before, not just nudity — a nude statue.”
Benton’s heydey was a quarter century ago but she’s still amazingly popular. I still get visitors from a throwaway line about her in the comments section of a November 2003 post. She was almost certainly the premier Playmate of the era, crossing over into mainstream success with many appearances on popular television shows.
You can see why after the jump. (Not safe for work, needless to say).
  
Those photos certainly seem tame, don’t they? They could just about appear in Maxim or the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition today.
That is Hefner’s point — that Playboy with its mission of sexual liberation is as relevant as ever in these days of federal government crackdowns on television content that some consider indecent. “Attitudes toward nudity and Playboy have changed, in many ways, very little,” says the man who gave the world the Playboy centerfold. “In some ways it is even more political than it was in the ’50s and ’60s.”
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Hef has a lot to make him feel young. He lives with three young, blonde girlfriends in his ornate mansion in Holmby Hills. Their life is being documented in a hit reality TV show on the E! channel, “The Girls Next Door.” His company is opening a new Playboy club in Las Vegas and a new edition of the magazine has debuted in Indonesia, sparking controversy in that largely Muslim nation.
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Although he continues to personify the Playboy philosophy, he is not unaware of the passing years. “You come to a point in life in which you begin to lose some very dear friends, some of whom are peers in terms of age,” he said. “In the last few years, I have lost some very dear contemporaries, including my best buddy in high school, the first girl I went steady with, Mel Torme, one of my closest friends.”
Any regrets? “Certainly it is a life well-lived and I wouldn’t trade places with anybody,” he said. “My life has been so rewarding and so satisfying, I would be hesitant to change anything.”
You’d think that his lifestyle would kill a man of his age. It may well be that it instead keeps him young.
Jerry Norton of Reuters reported Friday on the controversial Indonesia Playboy
 Playboy magazine may no longer rate on the sexual cutting edge in some places, but the first edition in Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim nation, caused a stir Friday. Although the pictures inside showed less skin than U.S. issues 50 years ago, copies were being passed from desk to desk in Jakarta offices, high demand was reported, and newspapers and broadcasters dwelt at length on the Indonesian issue. A leader of one militant Islamic group threatened to use force, if necessary, to get the magazine withdrawn.
Like the iconic original, the Indonesian Playboy included a serious interview, in-depth articles and color pictures of women, including a fold-out. But no nipples were exposed in the photos, let alone anything approaching full nudity. “I didn’t see any surprising thing in this magazine. It depends on how people interpret it. For me, no problem,” Alex, a white-collar worker who did not want to give his full name, told Reuters Television.
A 40-year-old housewife, Maya, disapproved. “Surely it is against the new anti-pornography law,” she said. Condemnation also came from Chamammah Soeratno, head of the women’s wing of major Muslim moderate group Muhammadiyah. “Everyone knows it’s a pornographic magazine. The first edition may not have any nudity. That’s a very clever move by the publishers,” she told Reuters. Indonesia’s parliament is debating a law to significantly tighten control of media as well as public behavior in an effort to reduce what its proponents see as pornography.
Indonesia has many magazines on news stands that go further than the new Playboy in the sexual content of their articles and at least as far in their pictures. In fact, magazine and newspaper agent Azis, 41, told Reuters Playboy was not different enough from an existing upscale Indonesian men’s magazine, Matra. But even months ago the Playboy image and its Western origin had sparked protests at the mere news of plans for the Indonesian edition, despite promises of a tame version.
Then again, Playboy is still controversial in the United States, where there have been efforts to get the magazine taken off the shelves of military exchanges. Because, while we may send our soldiers off to war, we shouldn’t expose them to bare bosoms.
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Popularity: 28% [?]
Steve Ryfle wonders whether being pictured nude in magazines can help an actress’ career.
There’s nothing like a little exposed skin to boost a starlet’s public profile. Plaster a titillating image of her nude frame on the cover a glossy monthly, and she’s instantly grabbed the attention of millions. When 20-year-old Scottish diva Keira Knightley and 21-year-old Scarlett Johansson stripped and strategically struck PG-13 poses for the cover of the March issue of Vanity Fair, the press types deemed it a risky and risqu? move (one British tab called the pic “shocking and provocative”). But it’s nothing new: from Marilyn to Madonna and beyond, lots of actresses have flashed a little flesh in mainstream mags as a way of upping their, ahem, visibility.
If you’ve been perusing the newsracks in recent years, you may have noticed Rachel Weisz, she of the “Mummy” movies fame, clad only in a boa constrictor for the April 2004 cover of Esquire. You may have been nonplussed by the sight of a topless Paris Hilton (covering her assets, of course) on the October 2005 cover of Vanity Fair. Sharon Stone graced the cover of December 1999′s Esquire in the buff, while in 2003, Britney Spears went pantless for Esquire and topless for Elle. And if you got past the cover of the Knightley-Johansson issue of Vanity Fair, you’d have found a photo inside of Angelina Jolie, reclining nude in a bath tub. In May 2003, all three Dixie Chicks dropped their drawers for the front of Entertainment Weekly.
Yes, it’s legal eye candy for adolescent boys of all ages, but other than a momentary blip on the tabloid radar, do stars reap any long-term benefit by baring it all?
“Keira Knightley and Scarlett Johansson can only benefit from their recent unclothed appearance on the cover of Vanity Fair,” says Mr. Skin, otherwise known as James McBride, a movie nudity expert who runs MrSkin.com and author of “Mr. Skin’s Skincyclopedia.” “After all, here we are talking about them. Both Keira and Scarlett, although they’re young, are established Hollywood stars and this blast of bare flesh is going to propel them upward into the next echelon of fame. That cover is being, well, covered all over the world, and it will be collected, fussed over and looked back on fondly for decades to come. As to which woman will benefit more, well Scarlett actually shows more skin in the photo.”
  
In another column, Ryfle considers the issue of celebrities getting naked for the silver screen.
In this day and age, few celebrities are shy about baring it all onscreen. So when bashful Natalie Portman asked director Mike Nichols to cut her nude scenes from the upcoming flick “Closer,” it was newsworthy. Portman — for now, at least — is that rare star who chooses to keep herself under wraps, while much of Hollywood, male and female, is dropping its drawers.
Almost every actress currently on the A-list has done a nude scene or two. Some of them did it a few years before becoming mega-famous, like Reese Witherspoon (“Twilight”) and Catherine Zeta-Jones (“The Mask of Zorro”). A few actresses used an attention-grabbing nude scene to help catapult their careers — witness Halle Berry (“Monster’s Ball”) and Kate Winslet (“Titanic”) — while others have continued taking it all off long after their star status was cemented, like Angelina Jolie (“Taking Lives”) and Nicole Kidman (“Cold Mountain,” among others). And then there was Meg Ryan, trying to rekindle her career by letting it all hang out (“In The Cut”).
“Halle Berry proved that one could garner high accolades while getting down and dirty with her naked sex scenes in ‘Monster’s Ball’,” says Mr. Skin, otherwise known as James McBride, a movie nudity expert who runs MrSkin.com and author of an upcoming book, “Mr. Skin’s Skincyclopedia.”
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What are the benchmarks by which all nude scenes are measured? McBride says the first on-camera nudity by a major celebrity occurs in the “Ecstasy” (1932), in which Hedy Lamarr skinny-dips “and her chest is clearly visible,” he says. Another historic scene, he says, is the wet-dream sequence in “Fast Times at Ridgemont High,” when Phoebe Cates takes off her bikini top. “In my skin-pinion, all previous celebrity nude scenes led to that moment and its greatness looms permanently over all that have come since.”
Some photos from the films in question are thumbnailed below.
  
Click for larger images.
Related Stories from the Archives:
Popularity: 45% [?]
Two Naked Actresses Draw Magazine Buzz
Pick up this month’s Hollywood issue of Vanity Fair and you’ll see two lovely young stars-of-the-moment, Keira Knightley and Scarlett Johansson, posing alluringly in the altogether. Open the foldout, and you’ll even see Johansson’s bare buttocks. What you won’t see is a third, equally lovely young actress, Rachel McAdams of “Wedding Crashers” fame. It seems McAdams arrived at the photo shoot and decided she didn’t want to take her clothes off.
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Is it arty and fun, or does it say something about sexual politics in Hollywood? In 2006, four decades after the launch of the feminist movement, does a serious actress still need to take her clothes off to get attention?
And where, oh where, are the naked men?
The reason female stars disrobe is simple, says Janice Min, editor of the much-read celebrity magazine US Weekly. “It’s tried and true. You show some cleavage on an actress. You make her look sexy. You make her look hot.” She NEEDS to be hot — because in Hollywood, “you have to be sexy to be a successful actress. You just have to be.”
So where’s the nude photo of Brad Pitt? Or George Clooney, who appears later in the issue, dressed, amid a bevy of women in flesh-toned bras and panties? Let’s face it, Min says: Women do like to see sexy men — just not with all their clothes off. “Men just aren’t viewed as sex objects in the same way that women are,” Min says. “Women don’t think about men being naked in the same way that men think about women.” In fact, she says, at her magazine’s offices, when photos come in of a male star with no shirt on, “We say, ‘Gross! Put some clothes on!’” (Imagine that being uttered about an attractive female.)
Investigative journalism at its finest!
Update: Andrew Sullivan notes that,
Of course, gay media outlets have plenty of male nudes, but that’s because they’re read by … men. Men and women are biologically wired to be attracted to different aspects of the people they lust after. Women, for some reason still opaque to me, are sexually attracted to a man’s soul, his character, his style. Men want to see titties, as Dave Chapelle would say. Gay men and straight men are no different in this. And so the single standard VF is using is a simple one: let’s sell as many magazines as we can. I fail to see how they can be criticized for doing their job.
Of course, gay men don’t actually want to see titties. But his point is well taken.
Popularity: 41% [?]
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