Ciao! Manhattan

Ciao! Manhattan
Ciao! Manhattan movie poster
Directed by	John Palmer David Weisman
Produced by	John Palmer David Weisman
Written by	John Palmer David Weisman
Starring	Edie Sedgwick Wesley Hayes Isabel Jewell Paul America Baby Jane Holzer Pat Hartley Jean Margouleff Viva Brigid Berlin Roger Vadim
Music by	Gino Piserchio
Cinematography	John Palmer Kjell Rostad
Editing by	Robert Farren
Distributed by	Maron Films (1973) Plexifilm (2002)
Release date(s)	February 1972
Running time	84 min.
Country	USA
Language	English

Ciao! Manhattan is a 1972 American avant garde film starring Edie Sedgwick, one of Andy Warhol's Superstars. Although not a documentary, the film centers around a character very closely based on Sedgwick, and deals with the pain of addiction and the lure of fame.

Film overview

Written and directed by John Palmer and David Weisman, Ciao! Manhattan is the semi-biographical tale of 1960s counterculture icon Edie Sedgwick.^[1] Ciao! follows young Susan Superstar (Sedgwick) through her tumultuous party years in Manhattan as one of Warhol's Superstars. Through actual audio recordings of Sedgwick's account of her time in Warhol's Factory in New York City, 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.^[2] The film is dedicated to the memory of Sedgwick and ends with the actual headlines announcing Sedgwick's (not Susan Superstar's) death, thus inseparably associating the fictional and the genuine figure.

Film production

Production of Ciao! Manhattan began on Easter Sunday, March 26, 1967, as a project of Factory regulars John Palmer, David Weisman, Genevieve Charbin, Chuck Wein, Bob Margouleff, Gino Piserchio, with supplemental roles and tasks fulfilled by various other hangers-on. The film originally followed the excessively hip lives of Mid-town scenesters Sedgwick and fellow Warhol Superstar Paul America, as they lived life in the fast lane (literally speeding down the West Side Highway on massive amounts of amphetamine).

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 personae of Susan Superstar.

In December 1970, they resumed filming on the dilapidated "Lucky" Baldwin estate in Arcadia, California; 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 death from acute barbiturate intoxication.

Ciao! Manhattan was finally completed on May 25, 1972 and had its premiere in Amsterdam in July 1972 to critical acclaim, due in part to Sedgwick's presence and representation of a culture that she helped to define. The successful screenings continued in London, Germany, France, San Diego, Denver and Tempe, Arizona, but then the film essentially disappeared for nearly a decade until interest in Edie Sedgwick was sparked again by the best-selling book Edie: An American Biography by George Plimpton and Jean Stein in 1982.

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 California (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 with the name Edie just hidden by the corner of a magazine. These segments, coupled with film's overall near-biographical plot based upon Edie, semi-blends the identities of Susan and Sedgwick together.

30th Anniversary DVD release

30th anniversary DVD cover for Ciao! Manhattan

In the years since its original release, Ciao! Manhattan has become a cult classic, due in large part to the film being Edie Sedgwick's last starring vehicle.^[3] On July 19, 2002, exactly thirty years after its world premiere in Amsterdam, Ciao! opened at New York's Cinema Village. In October 2002, Plexifilm released a special edition DVD with additional 35mm outtake footage, rare pictures and interviews with the cast and crew of the film.^[4]

Bibliography

• Stein, Jean and George Plimpton. Edie: An American Biography. New York, NY. Grove Press. 1994
• Van Der Post, Lucia. Why everyone wants to be Edie. Mail on Sunday. London: July 31, 2005.
• Weisman, David. Girl on Fire (DVD insert). Brooklyn, NY. Plexifilm. 2002.
• Wilson, Andrew. Edie Sedgwick: the It Girl who was Inspiration to Dylan and Warhol. The Independent. London: February 5, 2006.

References

1. ^ Killen, Andreas. 1973 Nervous Breakdown - Watergate, Warhol, and the Birth of Post-Sixties America
2. ^ Mazzocco, Robert. Doom at the Movies - Dancing on the Titanic The New York Review of Books, February 7, 1974
3. ^ The God Phone interview
4. ^ Ciao! Manhattan @ Plexifilm.com

External links

• Ciao! Manhattan at the Internet Movie Database
• Ciao! Manhattan at AllRovi
• Ciao! Manhattan at Rotten Tomatoes
• Morley, Sheridan. Ciao! Manhattan Review. The Times. May 25, 1973.
• Weisman & Palmer Dig Amsterdam As Preem For Their 'Manhattan' . Variety. August 23, 1972.
• Malcolm, Derek. Ciao! Manhattan Review. The Guardian. May 24, 1973.
• Nettles, John G. Her Fog, Her Amphetamines, and Her Pearls. Popmatters. March 18, 2003.