Ciao! Manhattan is a 1972
AmericanThe United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
dramaDrama is the specific mode of fiction represented in performance. The term comes from a Greek word meaning "action" , which is derived from "to do" . The enactment of drama in theatre, performed by actors on a stage before an audience, presupposes collaborative modes of production and a collective...
film starring
Edie SedgwickEdith Minturn "Edie" Sedgwick was an American actress, socialite, model, and heiress. She is best known for being one of Andy Warhol's Muses. Sedgwick became known as "The Girl of the Year" in 1965 after starring in several of Andy Warhol's short films, in the 1960s...
, one of
Andy Warhol's SuperstarsThe Warhol Superstars were a clique of New York City personalities promoted by Andy Warhol during the 1960s and early 1970s. The Superstars appeared in Warhol's artworks and accompanied him in his social life...
. The film centers around the life of an Edie Sedgwick-esque character, the lure of addiction, and the quest for stardom in keeping with the times.
Written and directed by John Palmer and David Weisman,
Ciao! Manhattan is the semi-biographical tale of 1960s
counterculture iconCounterculture is a sociological term used to describe the values and norms of behavior of a cultural group, or subculture, that run counter to those of the social mainstream of the day, the cultural equivalent of political opposition...
Edie Sedgwick.
Ciao! follows young Susan Superstar (Sedgwick) through her tumultuous party years in
ManhattanManhattan is one of the five boroughs of New York City, located primarily on Manhattan Island at the mouth of the Hudson River.New York County, which has the same boundaries as the Borough of Manhattan , is the most densely populated county in the United States, with a 2008 population of 1,634,795...
as one of Warhol's Superstars.
Ciao! Manhattan is a 1972
AmericanThe United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
dramaDrama is the specific mode of fiction represented in performance. The term comes from a Greek word meaning "action" , which is derived from "to do" . The enactment of drama in theatre, performed by actors on a stage before an audience, presupposes collaborative modes of production and a collective...
film starring
Edie SedgwickEdith Minturn "Edie" Sedgwick was an American actress, socialite, model, and heiress. She is best known for being one of Andy Warhol's Muses. Sedgwick became known as "The Girl of the Year" in 1965 after starring in several of Andy Warhol's short films, in the 1960s...
, one of
Andy Warhol's SuperstarsThe Warhol Superstars were a clique of New York City personalities promoted by Andy Warhol during the 1960s and early 1970s. The Superstars appeared in Warhol's artworks and accompanied him in his social life...
. The film centers around the life of an Edie Sedgwick-esque character, the lure of addiction, and the quest for stardom in keeping with the times.
Film overview
Written and directed by John Palmer and David Weisman,
Ciao! Manhattan is the semi-biographical tale of 1960s
counterculture iconCounterculture is a sociological term used to describe the values and norms of behavior of a cultural group, or subculture, that run counter to those of the social mainstream of the day, the cultural equivalent of political opposition...
Edie Sedgwick.
Ciao! follows young Susan Superstar (Sedgwick) through her tumultuous party years in
ManhattanManhattan is one of the five boroughs of New York City, located primarily on Manhattan Island at the mouth of the Hudson River.New York County, which has the same boundaries as the Borough of Manhattan , is the most densely populated county in the United States, with a 2008 population of 1,634,795...
as one of Warhol's Superstars. Through actual audio recordings of Sedgwick's account of her time in
Warhol's FactoryThe Factory was Andy Warhol's original New York City studio from 1962 to 1968, although his later studios were known as The Factory as well. The Factory was located on the fifth floor at 231 East 47th Street, in Midtown Manhattan. The rent was "only about one hundred dollars a year"...
in
New York CityNew York is the most populous city in the United States, and the center of the New York metropolitan area, which is among the most populous urban areas in the world. A leading global city, New York exerts a powerful influence over worldwide commerce, finance, culture, fashion and entertainment...
, paired with clips from the original unfinished script started in 1967,
Ciao! captures the complete deterioration of Sedgwick's fictional alter-ego. The striking similarities between Sedgwick and Susan's life story, especially when recounted by Sedgwick in the midst of drug-induced audio interviews, make the film's candid depiction of excess and celebrity especially haunting. The film is dedicated to the memory of Sedgwick and ends with the actual headlines announcing Sedgwick's (not Susan Superstar's) untimely death, thus inseparably associating the fictional and the genuine figure.
Film production
Production of
Ciao! Manhattan began on Easter Sunday in 1967, as a project of Factory regulars John Palmer, David Weisman, Genevieve Charbin,
Chuck WeinChuck Wein was an American promoter and manager of entertainment acts whose celebrity stemmed from his five-year association with Andy Warhol and from his discovery of Edie Sedgwick who became Warhol Superstar of 1965.Wein graduated from Pittsburgh's Taylor Allderdice High School in 1957 and...
, Bob Margouleff,
Gino PiserchioGino Piserchio was an Italian actor, composer and musician. Piserchio was best known for his role in the 1965 Andy Warhol film Beauty No. 2 starring Edie Sedgwick. Piserchio appeared in two Warhol films, 1965's Space, and most notably, the "hunk in jockey shorts" in Beauty No. 2...
, with supplemental roles and tasks fulfilled by various other hangers-on. The film originallly followed the excessively hip lives of Mid-town scenesters Sedgwick and fellow Warhol Superstar
Paul AmericaPaul Johnson , better known as Paul America, was a member of Andy Warhol's Factory group who starred in one Warhol-directed film, My Hustler...
, as they lived life in the fast lane (literally speeding down the
West Side HighwayThe West Side Highway is a mostly-surface section of New York State Route 9A that runs from West 72nd Street along the Hudson River to the southern tip of Manhattan...
on massive amounts of
amphetamineAmphetamine is a psychostimulant drug that is known to produce increased wakefulness and focus in association with decreased fatigue and appetite. Amphetamine is related to drugs such as methamphetamine and dextroamphetamine, which are a group of potent drugs that act by increasing levels of...
). The project was riddled with budget problems, an unfinished, nonsensical script of debauchery, drug use and paranoia. Unreliable actors and rampant drug abuse behind the camera whirled shooting out of control as both Sedgwick and America went missing, putting production on hold. With barely any direction and no end in sight, the film's backers, Bob Margouleff's parents, lost faith in their son's project, and Palmer and Weisman were left with the fragments of a beautifully shot but unpresentable film. To salvage these fragments, Palmer and Weisman decided to reform the script to include the previously shot footage as flashback sequences to tell Sedgwick's tragic story through the
personaePersonas are fictional characters created to represent the different user types within a targeted demographic that might use a site or product. Personas are useful in considering the goals, desires, and limitations of the users in order to help to guide decisions about a product, such as features,...
of Susan Superstar.
In December 1970, they resumed shooting in a mansion in
Arcadia, CaliforniaArcadia is a U.S. city in Los Angeles County, California that is located about northeast of downtown Los Angeles in the San Gabriel Valley, at the base of the San Gabriel Mountains. It is the site of the Santa Anita Park racetrack and home to the Los Angeles County Arboretum and Botanic Garden. ...
; for a month they shot Susan recounting her past through the dazed euphoria of perpetual substance abuse. The shooting lasted only a month and in 1971,
Ciao! finally went into post-production. However, the excitement of the film's near completion was short lived due to Sedgwick's untimely death from acute barbiturate intoxication.
Despite this tragic end,
Ciao! Manhattan premiered in
AmsterdamAmsterdam is the capital and largest city of the Netherlands, located in the province of North Holland in the west of the country...
in July of
1972The year 1972 in film involved some significant events.-Top grossing films :source: http://www.boxofficereport.com/database/1972.shtml- Awards :Academy Awards:*Ben*The Big Bird Cage*Blacula*Bone...
to great acclaim, due in part to Sedgwick's striking presence and representation of a culture that she helped to define.
Critical synopsis
One in hundreds of narratives recounting the youth counterculture of the 1960s,
Ciao's almost naive truth and decadence sets it apart. New York Sedgwick embodies the Sixties, even spraying her hair silver (as in Silver Sixties), her time in New York is documented in black & white, playing on the crisp glamour and ice hard core of a drug-pop life. As the character back home in
CaliforniaCalifornia is the most populous state in the United States, and the third largest by area. California is the second most populous sub-national entity in the Americas, behind only São Paulo, Brazil...
(a narrative actually driven by the character of Butch), Susan's story is told in the full color of the 1970s. Her psychedelic pad and tie-dye dress are Butch's (Hayes) childlike free-wheeling attitude towards life, but also hint at the dizzy and deteriorated mind of a young ingénue.
In the ominous voice-over, Susan even implies that it was Warhol himself that turned her on to the heavy drugs. Butch encounters Susan late in her life (27 years old), and reluctantly looks after her for just enough time to hear the tragic story she has to tell. The latter narrative of Butch serves as the mainstream cooptation of the once counterculture that Sedgwick herself helped to create. Susan's drained swimming pool room, located in the back yard of her deteriorating mansion home, is adorned with various bits of Edie memorabilia (photos, magazine covers, stills from various films, etc.) to be direct references to the events that she shares with Butch. The flashbacks depict both the real narrative of Sedgwick's early romps in New York City, sought after by imaginary pursuers, and Susan's memory of Sedgwick's high times that will never be again. We are caught between a disjointed story of a period that could just as easily be a figment of an actor's imagination or the true underlying sense of personal loss and regret. Sedgwick's sometimes chilling monologues of tragic events of her past often seem too real to have been written into the script. The film ends with real footage of Sedgwick's actual marriage to Michael Post and the newspaper headline:
Edie, Andy's star of '65, is dead at 28, marking the end of both Sedgwick and Susan Superstar.
30th Anniversary
In the years since its original release,
Ciao! Manhattan has become a
cult classicA cult film is a film that has acquired a highly devoted but specific group of fans. Often, cult movies have failed to achieve fame outside of the small fanbases; however, there have been exceptions that have managed to gain fame among mainstream audiences...
, due in large part to the film being Edie Sedgwick's last starring vehicle. On July 19, 2002, exactly thirty years after its world premiere in Amsterdam,
Ciao! opened at New York's Cinema Village. In October 2002,
PlexifilmPlexifilm is an independent DVD label and film production company co-founded by Gary Hustwit and Sean Anderson in 2001...
released a
special editionThe terms special edition, limited edition and variants such as deluxe edition, collector's edition and others, are used as a marketing incentive for various kinds of products, originally published products related to the arts, such as books, prints or recorded music and films, but now including...
DVDDVD, also known as Digital Versatile Disc or Digital Video Disc,is an optical disc storage media format, and was founded in 1995. Its main uses are video and data storage...
with additional 35mm outtake footage, rare pictures and interviews with the cast and crew of the film.