Warhol’s film premieres were collaborative improvisations delegated to projectionists.

Evidence

16 The first screenings were essentially rehearsals. Two projectionists, Bob Cowan and Jerome Hiler, both filmmakers, had carte blanch, ordering the reels to suit themselves as Warhol watched. “Andy told me to play around with the image and the soundtrack as I felt like it,” Hiler recalled. “You could have one soundtrack going and then change to the other soundtrack, then you might go back to the first soundtrack. Perhaps even both of them together a little bit. And then you had some gels, some cellophane, and so forth. You would hold the cellophane whenever you felt like it, over one of the projector lenses so that it all went red. And then another one went blue.” Hiler remembers occasionally fluttering his fingers in front of the projection beam and once Warhol learned that it took a few minutes for the projector bulb to warm up to its proper intensity, he encouraged that effect. Hiler would “turn the bulb on when the reel started and just let it slowly come up from a throbbing purple.” — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1960

Categorization

• XREF: Directly instantiates the chapter’s thesis that avant-garde production is collective and delegated, not individual-genius — connects forward to the claim that conditions, not genius, produce invention density.
• CANDY: The image of Warhol films projected through red and blue cellophane with fingers fluttering in the beam is a delightful, self-contained anecdote.