When Lance was thirteen years old, he wrote a letter to his childhood idol, Andy Warhol. To the complete surprise of the Loud family, Warhol wrote back. Their correspondence, and occasional late-night phone calls, continued until Andy Warhol was shot in 1968 and became much more reclusive.

The Lance Loud captured on film in 1973's An American Family was very much inspired by Warhol. "I was so influenced by him, in the idea of being outrageous," Lance remembered in 1996. "When the cameras were on me I was really thinking, you know, Chelsea Girls and Bike Boy and stuff like that when they were filming. I was just so taken with... I felt like I was in Chelsea Girls II, the sequel."

In 1973 Lance returned to New York, largely to capitalize on the publicity he'd received from An American Family. Shortly afterwards, he met Andy Warhol at a party. Warhol had seen the show and remembered his old pen pal. They quickly became friends, and Lance soon saw Warhol as a father figure. "He was always kind of parental, and that was great," Lance recalled. "That was one of the nicer things to come out of the series."

Their friendship continued, and Lance was given a column called "LoudSpeaker" in Warhol's Interview magazine. Andy also appeared in a student film produced by Lance in the l980s. Lance would continue to write for Interview from 1975 to 1990.