"Andy, as usual, wasn't sure what he wanted to do with TV, and, as usual, was constantly polling his friends and associates for ideas. When I told him about Marshall McLuhan's observation that the word phony entered the language after the invention of the telephone, and that 'People are phony on the phone,' Andy saw a new way to use an old idea.'Let's just do a TV show on the phone'. It can be people calling each other up and fighting.' He loved the idea of people fighting on TV, just so long as he wasn't in the middle of it.' But Andy,' I protested, 'you said I should do my book over the phone, and Pork is all phone calls; it's the same old thing.''No, it's not, argued the artist... One's a book, one's a play, and one's a TV show' (BC)
They started videotaping with Brigid Berlin and Charles Rydell as the people fighting, with Warhol coming up with a new title: Nothing Serious. Warhol thought it would be best to combine the fighting with interviews, soap opera and a talk show. Instead of fighting over the telephone, Warhol thought it would be better to fight over dinner, with celebrities talking about their new projects while the regulars battled. He thought the dinner table could be Maxime de la Falaise McKendry's because she wrote a food column in Vogue which she was hoping to develop into a cooking show for television. Warhol thought she could give recipes "when she wasn't interviewing and fighting... The day after each shooting when it was all played back at the Factory, we'd realize that it was just too amorphous and amateurish to make it into anything viable. Nothing Serious was really nothing serious." (BC141)
Vincent Fremont, producer of Andy Warhol's TV, Andy Warhol's Fifteen Minutes, and more recently, Pie in the Sky: the Brigid Berlin Story was also involved with the Phoney project which started out as Soap Opera. Fremont lists the date of the video as 1973. The tape of Brigid Berlin and Charles Rydell fighting was named Fight (1975). Fight, along with segments of Phoney were shown at the Whitney Museum in 1991 in Andy Warhol's Video & Television Retrospective. (UW72)