Ciao! Manhattan

Overview

Written and directed by John Palmer and David Weisman, Ciao! Manhattan is the semi-biographical tale of 1960s counterculture icon Edie Sedgwick. The film follows young Susan Superstar (Sedgwick) through her tumultuous party years in Manhattan as one of Warhols Superstars. Through actual audio recordings of Sedgwicks account of her time in Warhols Factory in New York City, paired with clips from the original unfinished script started in 1967, Ciao! captures the complete deterioration of Sedgwicks fictional alter-ego. The striking similarities between Sedgwick and Susans life story, especially when recounted by Sedgwick in the midst of drug-induced audio interviews, make the films candid depiction of excess and celebrity especially haunting. The film is dedicated to the memory of Sedgwick and ends with the actual headlines announcing Sedgwicks (not Susan Superstars) death, thus inseparably associating the fictional and the genuine figure.

Production

Production of Ciao! Manhattan began on 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 Midtown 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 pushed 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 films backers, Bob Margouleffs parents, lost faith in their sons project, and Palmer and Weisman were left with the fragments of an unpresentable film. To salvage these fragments, Palmer and Weisman decided to reshape the script to include the previously shot footage as flashback sequences to tell Sedgwicks tragic story through the persona 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 films near completion was short-lived due to Sedgwicks 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 Sedgwicks onscreen 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.

30th Anniversary DVD release

In the years since its original release, Ciao! Manhattan has become a cult classic, due in large part to the film being Edie Sedgwicks last starring vehicle. On July 19, 2002, exactly thirty years after its world premiere in Amsterdam, Ciao! opened at New Yorks 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.