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Bob Colacello: you never know who you'll end up meeting at Interview, and as Bob Colacello, the magazine's former editor, reveals, you never know where those encounters will take you
Interview, Oct, 2004 by Claudia Cohen
This month, journalist and former Interview editor Bob Colacello releases the first of his much-anticipated two-volume biography of the Reagans, Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House (Warner Books). Here, his longtime friend, reporter Claudia Cohen, speaks to him about the book, its subjects, and his stint at a groundbreaking new publication called Interview.
CLAUDIA COHEN: You were the editor of Interview from its very earliest days. How did a nice Republican boy like you get hooked up with the wild and woolly Warhol crowd?
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BOB COLACELLO: Initially I had gone to Georgetown's School of Foreign Service, where I was studying to be a diplomat or an international lawyer or something superrespectable. But at Georgetown I fell in love with the idea of becoming an avant-garde filmmaker, so I persuaded my parents to let me go to Columbia to get a master's in filmmaking. As it turned out I was better at film criticism than filmmaking, and Andrew Sarris, my professor of film criticism at Columbia and the then critic for The Village Voice, started publishing my homework-assignment reviews in The Voice. One of the films I reviewed was Andy Warhol's Trash [1970]. In my review I called it a great Roman Catholic masterpiece and said that Andy was redeeming the hustlers, transvestites, and junkies in the film through his art.
CC: How old were you?
BC: Twenty-two. I was living with my parents in Rockville Center, Long Island. They said they'd pay the tuition at Columbia but that I'd have to pay for an apartment; so I was living with them in the suburbs and taking the Long Island Railroad every day into Manhattan. One evening I'm having dinner with them, and the phone rings. It's Paul Morrissey, who directed Trash. He'd gotten my number through The Voice and said, "Andy and I just love your review. How did you know we're all Catholics at the Factory?" And I said, "Well, I didn't, but ..." And he went on, "We have this little magazine called Interview. Maybe you could do some film reviews for us." So I hung up and told my parents, and my father said, "I did not spend a fortune to send you to Georgetown and Columbia so you could work for this creep on Union Square who makes X-rated movies. If you even go to that place I will not only break your movie camera, I will break your legs."
CC: So you were there the next day?
BC: The next day. But I didn't tell my parents. Well, to cut the story short, I wrote a few reviews for a few issues. This was 1970, and the magazine had been started a year before. It was almost exclusively reviews and interviews with people involved in either European cinema or underground American film--not very Hollywood at all.
CC: How did you go from writing a couple of reviews to becoming editor?
BC: One day I went to hand in a review at 33 Union Square West, where the Factory was located. Interview had a little closet of an office on the 10th floor, but it was locked; so I went down to the 6th floor where the Factory was, and Andy was sitting there having lunch. He said, "Oh, I'm so glad you showed up. Paul needs to talk to you." So I went to talk to Paul Morrissey, who told me, "Look, we fired the editor and need a new one. We thought you could do it." And I said, "I don't know how to edit a magazine. I'm still at Columbia." And he said, "Oh, talk to the people at Columbia. I'm sure they'll give you credits for working for us." So I went up there, and they told me they would give me six credits a semester. I asked Glenn O'Brien, whom I had gone to Georgetown with and who was also now at Columbia film school, if he'd like to be my assistant, and he said he'd love to. His wife, Judy, became our first unpaid intern. Initially Paul and Andy offered me $40 a week because they said it was a part-time job, but I got them up to $50. Anyway, no sooner had we started than Andy, Paul, and Fred Hughes, the third person who really counted at the Factory at that time, all took off for Europe. They gave me the address of some hippie magazine where the pages were typeset and laid out, and then this place in Chinatown where you had the whole thing printed. We didn't even have a distributor at the time. We just sort of handed it out at the Museum of Modern Art and places like that.
Before he left, Paul handed me a package of stills from old Rita Hayworth movies like Gilda [1946] and said, "Just put one of these on every page." And I asked, "But aren't the articles about European and underground movies?" And he said, "That doesn't matter. Just put one of these on every page." So being a nice middle-class Catholic boy, I followed the boss's orders and put a Rita Hayworth still next to a review of a Bertolucci movie. And I'll never forget--we went to give the issues to Jonas Mekas, the great Central European intellectual who had a place called Anthology Film Archives, where they gave out the magazine for free, and he went through it page by page and said, "Oh, my God, you've reinvented the magazine." So the next month we put Elvis Presley stills next to all the articles.
