Description from TIFF 2013 catalog by Thom Powers:

From MCA head Lew Wasserman to Harvey Weinstein to Garth Drabinsky, veteran filmmaker Barry Avrich has profiled a succession of the most powerful and controversial figures in the world of entertainment. With Filthy Gorgeous, he turns to another notorious culture (anti-?)hero: Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione, whose raunchier twist on the Playboy formula helped make pornography a key cultural battleground in the 1970s. In Avrich’s energetic and well-researched account, Guccione emerges as a gambler who didn’t know when to stop: though his Penthouse dollars enabled him to launch other successful publications like Omni and Spin, when he started investing in everything from nuclear reactors to his self-financed X-rated epic Caligula to, most disastrously, Atlantic City casinos, his luck definitively ran out. Boasting some amazing archival and home-movie footage, Filthy Gorgeous is part Horatio Alger story, part American tragedy, and part alternative social history.