Letter from the editor April 2005

Without Andy Warhol--the magazine's original visionary--there would be no Interview. He is the man who said: "Every minute is like the first minute of my life. I try to remember, but I can't. That's why I got married--to my tape recorder." Of course, these statements are imbued with Andy's typical mix of truth, genius, and a poke of irony. They also reflect his uncanny ability to land on something that seems simple but turns out to be profound. His recognition of the power of the tape recorder may seem obvious today, but who else would have known to put it to use month after month for practically an entire magazine? This was such a revolutionary idea that we are still doing the same thing 35 years later--and month after month the tape recorder is still offering up fresh, new material. It is also still helping us to present you, dear reader, with a window into people's lives--a window that would not otherwise exist.

To me, the tape recorder is the great equalizer. Here again, I'd like to go back to a quote by Andy:

"In the early days of film, fans used to idolize a whole star--they would take one star and love everything about that star. Today there are different fan levels. Now fans only idolize parts of the stars. Today people can idolize a star in one area and forget about him in another. A big rock star might sell millions and millions of records, but then if he makes a bad movie, and when the word gets around that it's bad, forget it."

Consider this in the context of this month's cover story: a tape-recorded conversation between Ashton Kutcher and Brad Pitt. Pitt's interview gives us a chance to understand the whole Ashton Kutcher; and as a byproduct it also gives the reader an opportunity to know who Pitt is--an understanding that goes way beyond the typical homogenized, commodified media fodder. By reading their wonderful, easy, unguarded dialogue, we have the rare chance to understand these men as human beings, instead of as the usual two-dimensional cardboard-cutout view we're typically fed.

But unlike the old days that Andy spoke of, today's Interview is not about idolizing people. It is about humanizing them--and us--as we find out how real they are. (Okay, not all of us are as chiseled as Brad and Ashton, but you get my point.) Of course, it takes the right combination of subject and interviewer to spark in readers that connection. Individually, some aren't up to the opportunity the tape recorder is waiting to capture. That's where we come in. We try to give you combinations such as Jessica Alba and Benicio Del Toro, Amy Adams and Selma Blair, Jamie Cullum and Elton John, Shooter Jennings and Joaquin Phoenix, R. Crumb and Stella McCartney (all of whom you'll find in this issue)--combinations that provide a portrait as rich for our times as Manet's were for late-19thcentury Paris, or as Sargent's were for Belle Epoque Europe and Gilded Age America.

Which leads me to America now. Guess Who, Kutcher's just-released movie, is a rift on the 1967 classic Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, directed by Stanley Kramer and written by William Rose. When it first came out, the original film--which had a state-of-the-art cast including Katharine Hepburn, Sidney Poitier, Isabel Sanford, and Spencer Tracy--was full of humor, but it brought racism, one of the most serious issues the country was facing at the time, to a movie culture that had barely touched the subject. Now, while not claiming that the new Guess Who can match the old in its social impact, I can say that the movie does something very important: It inherently shows us the distance we've traveled in the last 30-plus years. Things may still be far from perfect, but the fact that the new film can spin the racially driven story of the original on its head implies that we can, indeed, use the word "progress" here. Finding the hope that bursts from that progress-through contemporary conversation--is what this magazine is all about.

COPYRIGHT 2005 Brant Publications, Inc.
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