When Andy Warhol Got 15 Minutes of MTV Fame

It was inevitable that Andy Warhol would embrace a network that blurred the boundaries between visual art and pop culture even more effectively than his immortalizations of Marilyn Monroe. In 1984, the icon directed—and made a cameo as a bartender in—the video for The Cars’ playlist staple “Hello Again.” But it was as an unlikely talk show host a year later that he truly got acolytes demanding, “I want my MTV.”

Warhol on the Small Screen
The Legacy of 15 Minutes

Warhol on the Small Screen

Andy Warhol’s 15 Minutes of Fame—a reference to his career-defining quote to Time magazine back when The Factory was the Swinging Sixties’ hottest hangout—wasn’t the icon’s first rodeo. In 1979, he peered behind the catwalk curtains for a Manhattan Cable Network show titled Fashion. Then, at the dawn of the following decade, he widened its horizons to a mixture of the sartorial and showbiz chat and renamed the show Andy Warhol’s TV. “It was another tool he used to get to know people and simultaneously reach as many people as he could,” the Andy Warhol Museum’s film and video curator Geralyn Huxley explained about his fascination with the small screen.

Warhol got the chance to reach more people than ever before in 1985, when he signed up with MTV to create another eponymous vehicle that would pride itself on subverting the norm. For one thing, the show didn’t feature any music videos—something of a rarity in the days before the channel became swallowed whole by reality TV. For another, it barely paused for thought: The majority of celebrity conversations lasted barely long enough to eat a spoonful of Campbell’s soup. Even its title was misleading; each of the five episodes offered half an hour of unadulterated, unorganized chaos.

The first episode—which aired 40 years ago this month—certainly set the fever dream tone. Debbie Harry announced the episode’s theme, “Sex, Vegetables, Brothers and Sisters.” In keeping with that bizarre combination, She’s Gotta Have It star Tracy Johns revealed she was a “broccoli freak” and John Oates put forward the bizarre theory that “There hasn’t really been any sex in New York since 1983.”

Elsewhere in the episode, there was a visit to New York’s Pyramid Club, where, according to Harry, “a talented family of self-styled freaks entertain in high style”; a montage celebrating the front cover history of Warhol’s Interview magazine; and random cameos from novelist Tama Janowitz and Frank Zappa’s kids Moon Unit and Dweezil. Warhol also advises Jerry Hall to dump then-husband Mick Jagger and instead play the groupie for Curiosity Killed the Cat, an emerging blue-eyed-soul boyband he’d later direct in their video for single “Misfit.”

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The show certainly wasn’t Warhol’s only flirtation with MTV. He also helmed the promo for Ric Ocasek’s “True to You,” was pictured alongside Grace Jones at the 1986 MTV Video Music Awards before appearing in her video for “I’m Not Perfect (But I’m Perfect For You),” and worked his pop art magic on a moonwalking Buzz Aldrin, the same image the channel had appropriated to launch their own giant leap for mankind.

Warhol was an avid viewer, too. In one 1984 diary entry, he bemoaned the homogeny of MTV’s playlist, writing, “I don’t know what else you can do to these videos to make them different. They’re all the same.” Three years later, he recalled falling asleep to the channel and having “rock-video nightmares.”

Andy Warhol’s 15 Minutes proved to be the best example of his ability to gather the bohemians of the day all under one umbrella. The second episode saw artist Kenny Scharf cruising the Big Apple streets in his graffiti-strewn Cadillac and photographer Peter Beard swinging on a swing while discussing swinging New York. In episode three, garage rockers The Fleshtones provided the musical backing to a Shakespeare sonnet read out by Ian McKellen. And the stacked finale boasted an interview with a relatively unknown Courtney Love—then better known for appearing in the spaghetti western Straight to Hell than as a grunge goddess—and The Ramones tearing into the modern rock landscape before performing anti-Reagan protest “Bonzo Goes to Bitburg.”

Sadly, the latter also came accompanied with footage of its creator’s memorial. In fact, it was while shooting 15 Minutes that Warhol was rushed to New York Hospital to undergo gallbladder surgery. The following day, the man who revolutionized the art world, the concept of celebrity, and, to a lesser extent, the TV talk show, was dead.

The Legacy of 15 Minutes

Andy Warhol’s 15 Minutes might not be as celebrated as Warhol's experimental art house films or his silkscreen paintings. At best, it served as a minor footnote in all the eulogies that followed, and the only evidence of its existence is various VHS-quality uploads on YouTube. Still, it highlights Warhol’s ability to think ahead of the curve, foreshadowing the kind of gonzo style that became de rigueur for the shows desperately trying to attract the nation’s youth. And its insights into fascinating counterculture movements (however brief) and acts that wouldn’t typically fit within MTV’s remit opened a window that, for the mainstream, had previously been kept firmly shut.

Perhaps most significantly, it also introduced the host's immeasurable talents to a whole new generation. “More and more kids were watching MTV,” producer Vincent Fremont said in 2017. “I don’t know if they knew that Andy was a famous artist, but to them he was certainly a television personality.”

That would have undoubtedly satisfied Warhol, a man who—despite his pioneering status elsewhere—always longed to be accepted on the box.

“The few times in my life when I’ve gone on television, I’ve been so jealous of the host on the show that I haven’t been able to talk,” he once wrote. “As soon as the TV cameras turn on, all I can think is, ‘I want my own show … I want my own show.’” Luckily for fans of lo-fi, leftfield, late-night broadcasting, his wish was fulfilled.