Published on
7 January 2022
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Written by John Wilcock
Conceived on the 6th floor of 33 Union Square West, better known as Andy Warhol’s Factory, the inaugural issue of Interview Magazine is a glorious splurge of avant-garde, counterculture and mass culture, filtered through the Pop artist’s particular obsessions – with fame and celebrity (or the yearning for it), with the pitch-black underside of Tinseltown, with art and film and gossip.
Printed on newspaper and sold for 35 cents, the ever-prescient Warhol emblazoned it with “collector’s edition”, correctly forecasting its colossal future influence on pop culture.
Issue one is a perfect time capsule of late 1969, a moment brimming with end-of-the-decade portent that was catnip to the artist and his ever-present tape recorder. Inside, Factory-regular Gerard Malanga captures the dread creeping through LA’s canyons post-Manson killings with an elegy to Sharon Tate and her “black forest of an unhappy ending” on Cielo Drive. There’s a feature on the paranoid epic of that decade, Easy Rider, painting the film as a collective dream, death-wish included, with Hollywood brat Peter Fonda as its ringleader.
Elsewhere, high and low, intellectual and mainstream jostle together just as it did in all of Warhol’s output: A photo series on 1920s Hollywood starlets – hopefuls high-stepping in chorus lines whose names never quite caught fire – sits alongside an essay on avant-garde film and a column on the Doors’ road-trip documentary, Feast of Friends.
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Interview’s first iteration gathered Warhol’s ideas, people, and peccadilloes into a diary of Downtown cool
And, of course, there are the interviews that became the magazine’s signature, gossipy delight – conversations that read more like miniature plays, barely edited and filled with irreverent asides. Nouvelle-vague queen Agnes Varda speaks in poetic riddles about her docufiction film Lions Love: “The movie is about trees, television, the end of youth, plastic flowers, political heroes, swimming pools, coffee and who is supposed to bring coffee to bed in the morning,” she says.
The newly minted stars of Antonioni’s trippy soon-to-be-classic Zabriskie’s Point talk about falling in love in Death Valley – before getting freaked out by the arbitrary questions thrown at them. And a deliciously candid interview with Hollywood luminary George Cukor pulls back the curtain on behind-the-camera conflicts during the making of his drama of sex and political intrigue, Justine.
Warhol superstars and Downtown faces are liberally sprinkled through its pages, rendering the magazine a little like attending a party thrown by him: there’s a nude Viva sprawling across the cover, a sardonic short story by Taylor Mead, film reviews by Ondine and, behind the scenes, a masthead of Factory acolytes bringing it all together. In the future, the product would be slicker: there would be indelible fashion photography and iconic covers of Cher, Madonna, Grace Jones and more. But Interview’s first iteration gathered Warhol’s ideas, people, and peccadilloes into a diary of Downtown cool, an eccentric experiment that would evolve into one of the most influential publications in history.
