Girls on Film

“Girls on Film” is the title of the Duran Duran videotape that drew Andy Warhol to see the band at the Savoy on October 10, 1981. In the diary, the phrase opens onto a larger world of manufactured and shifting public images: a music video leads to a live encounter, while interviews and portraits elsewhere show how carefully celebrity appearance could be performed, photographed, and revised.

The videotape and the encounter

Warhol went to the Savoy because he had seen Duran Duran’s “Girls on Film” videotape and wanted to see the group. The first band was still playing when he arrived. He described Duran Duran as good-looking young men, then met them backstage after they asked to see him and told them how much he liked their music.

The encounter moved quickly from stage to backstage to nightlife. Duran Duran wore heavy makeup and had brought their girlfriends from England. Warhol took the girlfriends as evidence that the musicians were probably heterosexual, while noting that this was difficult for him to believe. The diary records that uncertainty as his impression, not as a settled fact about the group. The band then went with him to Studio 54 in a white limousine, where Steve Rubell welcomed them, led them to the booth, and gave them drinks. Warhol ran into old friends, met new people, and returned home at five in the morning. The videotape’s title thus belongs to a chain of images and encounters: recorded performance, live appearance, backstage meeting, and a further public outing.

Celebrity as performance

The diary repeatedly distinguishes a celebrity’s public presentation from the person encountered away from the formal interview. On August 26, 1978, Warhol went to the Plaza to interview Shaun Cassidy. Cassidy gave stock answers and kept the conversation clean because his fans were young. Warhol noticed dark circles under his eyes and speculated that he might have a secret life. When they crossed the hotel lobby and passed screaming fans, Cassidy seemed to change; later, as he was photographed for Interview, Warhol saw him become absorbed in his own image. The interview, the crowd, the limousine, and the camera each brought out a different version of the star.

Photography itself could unsettle the image rather than simply confirm it. In March 1980, Warhol photographed Sylvester Stallone at the Regency, making him take off his shirt and using ten rolls of film. He found Stallone difficult to capture: his neck and chest seemed to change dramatically between front and side views, as did the apparent size of his hands. In another instance, a video of David Hockney made by Vincent Fremont was followed by an interview. These episodes place the Duran Duran videotape within a continuing record of artists and performers moving between image-making formats and public encounters.

The magazine’s image culture

By 1976, Interview had become a glamorous magazine that celebrities wanted to appear in. Its pages introduced unfamiliar young male and female beauties through headings such as “Interman,” “Viewgirl,” “Upfront,” and “First Impression.” The magazine supplied new faces and social encounters at a time when Warhol’s earlier films no longer offered the same steady stream of roles. The promise of appearing in the magazine had taken the place of the promise of appearing in a movie.

Warhol’s commissioned portraits made that image culture tangible. A sitting began with about sixty Polaroid photographs taken with a Polaroid Big Shot camera. He selected four images for the screen printer, then chose one, cropped it, and altered its features to make the sitter appear more attractive. The selected image was enlarged from an eight-by-ten-inch acetate to a forty-by-forty-inch one for silkscreening. Assistants prepared canvases in different flesh-tone backgrounds for male and female subjects; Warhol traced the image, painted areas such as hair, eyes, lips, ties, and jackets, and aligned the silkscreen over those colors. Small shifts in registration produced the portraits’ characteristic unsettled appearance. The usual price was about $25,000 for the first canvas and $5,000 for each additional one.

Images across media

The diary also records celebrity image-making as paid work and televised process. In April 1980, Warhol agreed to appear in an Omnibus program about Carly Simon having her portrait painted by him, Larry Rivers, and Marisol. He had insisted on payment, and Vincent Fremont negotiated a contract under which Simon would cover most of the cost. In these cases, the portrait was not only an artwork: its making could itself become the subject of television.

“Girls on Film” names a videotape, not a theory Warhol explains in the diary. Its significance in this entry comes from the scene it sets in motion and from the book’s surrounding attention to the production of public images. Duran Duran’s recorded look brings Warhol to a concert; the band’s makeup, girlfriends, and movement through Studio 54 become part of his observation; elsewhere, interviews and staged portraits show stars adjusting to the camera and images being deliberately reshaped. The phrase resonates with that wider pattern without making the music video and Warhol’s portrait process identical.