'Maxim' Founder Gets Hollywood Treatment

Felix Dennis -- poet, polyamorist and publishing gazillionaire -- has led a life of big-screen proportions.* So it's only fitting that he will soon be immortalized in film, appearing as a character in next year's Hippie Hippie Shake.

Starring Sienna Miller and Cillian Murphy, the movie is based on a 1996 memoir by Richard Neville, publisher of the short-living British counterculture magazine Oz. Dennis served as co-editor, and was one of the defendants in a celebrated 1971 obscenity trial over the magazine's "School Kids Issue."

Dennis and his co-defendants, who wore schoolgirl costumes to one of their hearings, were convicted, with Dennis receiving a shorter sentence from a judge who deemed him less culpable by reason of being "very much less intelligent" than the others. (The convictions were later overturned.) That assessment, of course, has become something of a joke in the years since, with Dennis amassing several publishing fortunes, most recently with Maxim, which he sold this year for more than $235 million.

He'll be played in the film by Irish actor Chris O'Dowd.

*Correction, 2:58 p.m.: "Polyamorist" originally read "polygamist," until a reader pointed out that "polygamist" refers specifically to those who have more than one wife. Dennis makes no secret of his multiple girlfriends, but that's quite a different matter, legally speaking.

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Photo of Chris O'Dowd, left, by Chris Jackson/Getty Images
Photo of Felix Dennis by Katrina Wittkamp/The New York Times/Redux