Interview's celebrity interview format

Interview magazine’s celebrity interview format made conversation itself a form of celebrity media: stars were invited to speak in their own words, ideally to other stars, while the resulting access and exposure drew new faces into Andy Warhol’s orbit. Its promise of candid speech sat alongside a carefully maintained magazine image and a larger apparatus of photography, portrait-making, and editorial choice.

Origins and Editorial Principle

When Andy Warhol conceived Interview magazine in 1969, he wanted it to focus on movies and to let stars talk in their own words without editing. Where possible, one star would interview another. The arrangement departed from the usual magazine interview by making celebrity conversation, rather than an outside writer’s account of a star, the feature. It also gave the participants a role in shaping the encounter and its public presentation.

The project began on a very low budget, consistent with Warhol’s practice of financing ventures himself and building them slowly so that he would retain a larger share if they became valuable. The lean operation made the editorial ideal unusually literal: the magazine could publish a conversation, but a legal problem discovered after the first issue had gone to press required a hands-on correction. After a lawyer warned that a phrase describing a movie critic could be libelous, Warhol, Paul Morrissey, Fred Hughes, Jed Johnson, Gerard Malanga, Bob Colacello, and others spent about six hours marking up bundles of already-printed copies with black felt-tip pens. The episode exposed the practical friction between preserving unedited speech and meeting the legal demands of print publication.

The Magazine Becomes a Social Currency

The magazine’s organization and reach changed over time. In 1974 Bob Colacello became its executive editor, shaping an image described as politically conservative and sexually androgynous. Its editorial and advertising ambitions were unapologetically elitist. In 1975 Warhol bought out Peter Brant to become sole owner and publisher, while Fred Hughes became president. Warhol, previously distant from the magazine’s daily operations, began visiting the office to review Marc Balet’s layouts and pitch Interview magazine to prospective advertisers over lunch.

By 1976, circulation had grown year after year, and the magazine had acquired a glamorous, self-mocking sensibility that made celebrities want to appear in it. Warhol often conducted cover interviews himself, sometimes with a staff member. The steady need to fill each issue brought a stream of new people to the office, and the magazine offered a new kind of access where the early Factory films had once provided the principal attraction. His recurring offer to put someone in the magazine took the place of his earlier promise of a movie role. Page headings such as Interman, Viewgirl, Upfront, and First Impression organized photographs of young men and women who had not appeared in print before. Interview magazine was not merely reporting on celebrity: appearing in it could itself confer glamour and visibility.

Interviews, Photography, and the Managed Persona

The contrast between a star’s public answers and behavior around cameras appears in Warhol’s account of interviewing Shaun Cassidy at The Plaza Hotel. Because Cassidy’s fans were young, the interview had to remain clean, and his answers initially seemed conventional. In the lobby, however, the screaming fans coincided with a sudden change in his manner; later, while being photographed by Barry McKinley, Cassidy seemed to transform again. Warhol observed that the act of being photographed made Cassidy fall in love with his image, and he taped McKinley’s forceful directions during the shoot. The interview, the fan encounter, and the photo session revealed different performances of the same star persona rather than one stable, private self.

A 1981 encounter with David Hockney shows the magazine’s format working across media. David Hockney came to lunch, Vincent Fremont made a video of him, and Hockney then went into another room to do the interview. The sequence placed conversation beside moving-image documentation, treating the visit as both an interview and an occasion for producing a public likeness.

The Visual Companion: Commissioned Portraits

Interview magazine’s celebrity culture existed alongside Warhol’s commissioned portrait business, a major source of income through most of the 1970s and until his death. The portrait process turned a person’s appearance into a sequence of choices. Warhol took about sixty Polaroid photographs with a Polaroid Big Shot, selected four for conversion into positive images on eight-by-ten-inch acetate, and then chose one image and its crop. He cosmetically altered the selected image—lengthening necks, trimming noses, enlarging lips, or clearing complexions—before it was enlarged to a forty-by-forty-inch acetate and made into a silkscreen. Alex Heinrici printed the images before 1977; afterward Warhol worked with Rupert Smith.

Assistants prepared canvases in advance, using one flesh-toned background for men and a pinker flesh tone for women. Warhol transferred the enlarged image onto the canvas, painted in areas such as hair, eyes, lips, ties, and jackets, and then had the photographic details screened over those colors. Small discrepancies between the screen and the painted areas produced the portraits’ characteristic shifting appearance. The first canvas generally cost about $25,000, with each additional canvas about $5,000. The method makes explicit what the magazine’s celebrity format also implied: a public image was not simply captured but selected, adjusted, and circulated.

Oral Record and Editorial Mediation

The celebrity interview format belonged to a broader interest in recording people’s speech, but it should be distinguished from the daily Diary that Warhol made with Pat Hackett. Before 1976, Hackett kept a sketchy log of business visitors, previous-night events, and Warhol’s cash expenses, often checking details with other people rather than recording his personal perspective. After Hackett said she no longer wanted to work in the office, they agreed that Warhol himself would supply the daily accounts. Their weekday morning phone conversations then became a personal narrative as well as a record of activity and expenses.

The Diary’s production depended on routine and mediation. Hackett called around nine in the morning, took extensive notes, and typed the entry while Warhol’s intonations were fresh; every other week she brought the pages to the office and attached the corresponding taxi and restaurant receipts. They did not make entries on weekends, instead recounting Friday through Sunday in a longer Monday session. When either was out of town, they used calls, notes on hotel stationery, or occasional tapes so that no day was left unrecorded. This was a separate form from Interview magazine’s star-to-star conversations, but it likewise made recorded speech the basis of a published voice.

The published Diary also demonstrates how such a voice could be shaped after recording. Hackett reduced an original 20,000 pages to a single volume, cutting whole days or weeks and selecting among names to preserve narrative flow. She removed most references that made sense only between herself and Warhol, and in the few retained instances recast herself in the third person as PH. That editorial process differs from the founding ideal of Interview magazine, where stars were meant to speak unedited, but both forms make the conditions of mediated speech visible: who speaks, who records, and what reaches the reader all help determine the public voice.