Paramount Pictures

Paramount Pictures occupies a shifting place in the diaries: it is at once a film company, a venue for screenings and meetings, an employer linked to Andy Warhol’s circle, and a powerful presence in the calculations surrounding Interview. Its importance emerges less through a single institutional portrait than through repeated encounters—an interview shaped by a star’s young audience, a film’s disappointing performance, a job secured through Barry Diller, and Jon Gould’s increasingly consequential ties to Hollywood. Across these episodes, Paramount connects the manufacture of public images to the practical business of careers, advertising, and production, while its corporate scale continually presses against Warhol’s personal hopes and anxieties.

A workplace and meeting ground

Paramount enters the diary as a place where New York’s editorial and social life meets the film business. In one early account, Warhol goes to the Plaza to interview Shaun Cassidy. He finds the exchange constrained by Cassidy’s need to keep his answers clean for his young fans, and initially sees the performer as giving stock responses. The change comes in the lobby: surrounded by screaming girls, Cassidy becomes noticeably different, and Warhol observes that his personality shifts again when the limousine arrives. The encounter makes celebrity appear not as a fixed quality but as something altered by audience, setting, and access—a kind of performance that the film industry both depends on and manages.

The diaries also place Paramount among the institutions to which Interview could offer celebrity access. Ron Reagan Jr. reportedly refused another interviewer’s request because he wanted to reserve his interview for Interview and wanted to meet Warhol. The episode had a complication: Lally Weymouth had criticized the magazine as a homosexual publication, and Reagan Jr. was initially upset by that description. After Jamie Kabler bought him a copy, he decided he still wanted to appear in it. The incident shows Interview’s standing as a desirable platform, but also how its public identity could become a point of friction. Paramount’s wider orbit included the Reagan family’s plans for the road: Warhol and Bob Colacello were to take Reagan Jr. and Doria to dinner, while Doria hoped to write a column for the magazine during their four-month trip.

The social arrangements around the family made ordinary hospitality difficult. Warhol and Bob Colacello met Doria, Reagan Jr., and their friend Cal at a screening of Flash Gordon on 53rd Street. The Secret Service sat behind them, and the group later traveled separately to a restaurant. Warhol noted that the protective detail made friendship feel precarious: the guards were so conspicuous that he imagined people might be afraid of being caught in danger simply by spending time with the family. The episode places entertainment, political celebrity, and security inside the same social scene without making them equivalent; a movie outing became an occasion organized around the presence of protection.

Films, publicity, and editorial judgment

Paramount’s films recur not only as entertainment but as objects of evaluation and promotion. Warhol attended a screening of Liza Minnelli’s film Arthur at Halston’s Fifth Avenue screening. He enjoyed it and singled out Dudley Moore’s comedy, while Jon Gould judged it slight and compared it unfavorably with Raiders. Their disagreement is small but telling: a shared screening produces different critical standards, with Warhol’s pleasure set beside Gould’s more dismissive judgment.

A sharper institutional contradiction appears around The Lords of Discipline. Interview held a screening of the film at Paramount, and Warhol hired a limousine because he feared the group would have difficulty getting around. He invited some younger staff members to ride with him, only to be reprimanded by Fred Hughes for violating the office’s hierarchy of invitations. The episode exposes how a film event also reproduced workplace protocol: access to a limousine and a screening was governed by rank, not simply by proximity or convenience.

The film’s commercial prospects then became a source of bafflement. Paramount decided to stop advertising The Lords of Discipline, which was doing only moderately well, with reported receipts of nine million dollars. Warhol could not understand why Entertainment Tonight, a Paramount program, would report that the studio’s own film was slipping rather than simply leave it unmentioned. His confusion registers a conflict between corporate ownership and journalistic presentation: the company could control promotion, yet the television program’s account seemed to him to work against the film. Paramount thus appears as a network of related operations whose behavior did not always look coordinated from the outside.

Paramount also served as a setting for a more personal encounter with illness. Warhol recorded that Jon Gould could not work with him because Gould had to attend the funeral of a male secretary at Paramount who had died of AIDS. Warhol’s response was fear for his own health, despite saying he did nothing that he thought would expose him. The entry documents both the disease’s presence in an ordinary workplace and the fear it generated in Warhol’s social world; it does not turn the funeral into an explanation of Gould’s feelings or of the company’s response.

Careers and corporate connections

Paramount’s most sustained personal connection in the diaries is Jon Gould, whose work in Hollywood shaped Warhol’s expectations and plans. Warhol described his crush on Gould as potentially useful for business, imagining that Gould might persuade Paramount to advertise in Interview. The remark joins affection and commercial calculation without resolving the tension between them. When Gould was in Hollywood, Warhol tried to call Bill Copley about recording material for a play he hoped to make about Copley’s life, and later noted a call from Paramount. Gould was expected in New York on a Friday, but Warhol was leaving then. The company’s business and the missed timing of private contact sit side by side in the diary.

The relationship also gave Paramount’s personnel changes an intimate significance for Warhol. Bob Colacello received a job on the new Paramount television program Entertainment Tonight after Barry Diller called to tell him. The news linked a colleague’s advancement to a senior executive’s personal intervention and to a new television venture. Later, Warhol read that Diller was leaving Paramount for Fox for a reported thirty million dollars. He thought Gould might then work for Frank Mancuso at Paramount, or take another role, and concluded that the change could be better for Gould even while praising the period when Diller had made the company great. The entry turns executive movement into a practical question about Gould’s next position, while registering Warhol’s view that an individual leader had helped shape the company’s character.

Warhol’s own television work also brought him into Paramount’s orbit. He was nervous about appearing on Saturday Night Live and worried that the segment might be bad because it would be seen by so many people. Vincent Fremont filmed him delivering lines for the segment; after an hour and a half of work across three reels, Warhol remained dissatisfied, though Fremont later said the producers liked it and no further filming was needed. His concern was not simply whether the work had gone well in the room, but whether it would be broadcast and exposed to a mass audience. Elsewhere, an upcoming appearance on The Love Boat was expected to keep him away for ten days, while Gould, then working in Los Angeles much of the time, was buying a house in Benedict Canyon. Together, these details show how television work and Hollywood employment pulled Warhol’s circle toward longer stays and more permanent arrangements in California.

Production ambitions and uncertain prospects

The diaries record Paramount as a possible route from ideas and personal contacts to film production. Warhol asked Pat Hackett to prepare a treatment about a 1960s Girl of the Year, hoping to show it to Gould and perhaps interest Paramount. The project grew from a chain of stalled prospects: Hackett had been in Los Angeles trying to sell a screenplay, but Zoetrope had held it for two years without financing it and then went bankrupt. Her treatment for Warhol therefore carried a practical hope that Gould might open another door. Paramount appears here not as a confirmed producer but as a possibility around which work was prepared and expectations organized.

A later report suggested that Gould had a production deal worth one hundred million dollars, with fifty million supposedly coming from a South African crystal dealer and Paramount expected to match it. Warhol heard this from Dr. Li, who said she had spoken with Gould. The account is explicitly secondhand in the diary, and its scale contrasts with the more tentative earlier hope that Gould might help secure interest in a single project. Its significance lies in the way Paramount had become attached to Warhol’s imagining of Gould’s power in Hollywood; the entry records a claim about a deal, not confirmation that the financing was completed.

That pattern continues when the artists McDermott and McGough told Warhol that they had met Gould at Paramount and that he wanted to produce a film based on stories they had told and that Brigid Berlin had typed up. Warhol recognized the project as one he had anticipated and praised Gould’s initiative. The account traces a specific passage from oral stories, to typed material, to meetings at Paramount, and then to a possible film. In this instance, the studio is not merely a name attached to an executive career: it is the setting in which material from Warhol’s own circle might be converted into a production.

An institution seen through daily life

Paramount’s significance in the diaries lies in this accumulation of functions rather than in a comprehensive account of its internal organization. It hosts screenings, supplies jobs and executive connections, intersects with Interview’s promotional ambitions, and becomes a prospective home for projects moving between personal networks and commercial production. The company’s decisions could be legible as a change in advertising, a television report, a new job, or an anticipated financing arrangement; each scale was filtered through the daily concerns of Warhol and his associates.

The entries also preserve the unevenness of that view. Warhol could celebrate a colleague’s appointment, wonder whether Gould’s prospects would improve after Diller’s departure, and remain baffled by a Paramount-owned program’s coverage of a Paramount film. He could treat a crush as a possible business advantage, while also worrying about missed visits and Gould’s growing life in Los Angeles. Paramount consequently functions as both an institution with commercial reach and a recurring instrument through which Warhol’s personal relationships, professional ambitions, and exposure to mass media become visible.