Warhol's "Superstars" concept

Warhol’s “Superstars” concept made celebrity less a title than an invitation into the camera’s field. At the Factory, people did not need an established career or a stable public identity to become part of Warhol’s films: a beautiful model and a delivery boy who happened to enter the frame could both be called “superstars.” The category’s openness was central to the world Warhol built around his movies and, later, his magazine.

An Open Category

The label took shape in the Factory’s “underground” film culture, where people drawn from the social world around Max’s Kansas City and visitors hoping to be discovered appeared alongside one another. Warhol’s films made participation itself a kind of distinction. As the account of the Factory’s early years observes, the term could describe someone already recognized for beauty or someone with no prior claim to notice who simply crossed into a shot while delivering cigarettes.

That refusal to draw a firm boundary was more than loose terminology. Warhol resisted sorting people into settled types; they could move in and out of categories, and “superstar” named that mobility. The camera did not merely record a pre-existing hierarchy of fame. It could make an unexpected participant visible, while leaving the status conferred by that visibility playfully uncertain.

The Factory’s Film Economy

From 1968 through 1972, the Factory’s principal activity was producing feature-length films on 16mm, later enlarged to 35mm for commercial release. People who frequented Max’s or came to the Factory to be discovered supplied these movies with performers. The opportunity to appear in a Warhol film was a practical draw: in the mid-1960s, the possibility of being cast helped bring people to the Factory, where the boundary between social gathering and film production remained permeable.

The films could place Factory regulars beside more conventional performers. In 1968, while Warhol was recovering from gunshot wounds, Paul Morrissey made Flesh, starring Joe Dallesandro as a hustler trying to raise money for his girlfriend’s abortion. The film began a long commercial run at the Garrick Theater that autumn. Its production shows how the Factory’s personnel and filmmaking environment could support a feature with a story and theatrical life beyond the gathering space that had helped produce its performers.

From Film Roles to Magazine Pages

As commercially exhibitable movies became more expensive to make in the 1970s, Warhol had fewer film roles to offer, and a proposed movie no longer guaranteed that anyone would actually be seen on screen. Interview filled much of the resulting gap. After Warhol bought out Peter Brant in 1975 and became the magazine’s full owner and publisher, he took a more active part in its daily operation, meeting new people and helping solicit advertisers.

By 1976, Interview’s circulation was growing and its deliberately sophisticated, self-mocking tone made celebrities willing to appear in it. The promise associated with the Factory’s films shifted into a promise of print: appearing in the magazine replaced appearing in a movie as Warhol’s frequent inducement. Its pages also introduced unfamiliar faces through headings such as “Interman,” “Viewgirl,” “Upfront,” and “First Impression,” extending the magazine’s supply of young, previously unpublished subjects. The Superstar idea therefore persisted as a media practice even as the principal venue changed from the Factory screen to the magazine page.

Making and Reading Celebrity Images

The magazine did not simply document fame; it helped arrange the encounters through which public images were made. Warhol often conducted cover interviews, sometimes with a staff member, while Interview’s pages mixed established celebrities with people new to print. In one account of an interview with Shaun Cassidy, his composed answers about being an idol gave way to a different persona as he walked through a lobby full of screaming fans; later, during a photo session, the act of being photographed seemed to intensify his self-regard. The episode sets public expectation beside the changing performance required by interview, crowd, and camera.

Warhol’s commissioned portraits made that image-making process still more deliberate. He began by taking about sixty Polaroids with a Polaroid Big Shot, chose four for preparation as positive images, then selected and cropped one image and altered it to flatter the subject. The image was enlarged to a 40-by-40-inch acetate and transferred to canvas, where a silkscreen was aligned with painted areas; slight misalignments produced the portraits’ characteristic shifting effect. Although commissioned portraiture was not itself the Superstar label, it extended the same interest in how people became recognizable images—and in how celebrity’s visual language could include subjects beyond show business.

Significance

The concept’s lasting force lay in its refusal to make fame a closed club. A person might be a model, a familiar Factory presence, a delivery boy caught in a scene, a celebrity interviewed for the magazine, or a new face introduced to readers. Those positions were not equivalent in conventional status, but Warhol’s practice let them enter the same system of visibility. His Superstars were defined less by a settled rank than by movement between social life, performance, photography, film, and print.