Ciao! Manhattan
Encyclopedia
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.
, Ciao! Manhattan is the semi-biographical tale of 1960s counterculture icon
Edie Sedgwick. 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. 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.
, 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.
(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.
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. 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.
Edie Sedgwick
Edith Minturn "Edie" Sedgwick was an American actress, socialite, model and heiress. She is best known for being one of Andy Warhol's superstars. Sedgwick became known as "The Girl of the Year" in 1965 after starring in several of Warhol's short films in the 1960s...
, one of Andy Warhol's Superstars
Warhol superstar
Warhol superstars were a clique of New York City personalities promoted by Andy Warhol during the 1960s and early 1970s. These personalities appeared in Warhol's artworks and accompanied him in his social life...
. 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 WeismanDavid Weisman
David Weisman is a film producer, author, and graphic artist who is most noted for his films Ciao! Manhattan and Kiss of the Spider Woman...
, Ciao! Manhattan is the semi-biographical tale of 1960s counterculture icon
Counterculture
Counterculture 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. Counterculture can also be described as a group whose behavior...
Edie Sedgwick. Ciao! follows young Susan Superstar (Sedgwick) through her tumultuous party years in Manhattan
Manhattan
Manhattan is the oldest and the most densely populated of the five boroughs of New York City. Located primarily on the island of Manhattan at the mouth of the Hudson River, the boundaries of the borough are identical to those of New York County, an original county of the state of New York...
as one of Warhol's Superstars. Through actual audio recordings of Sedgwick's account of her time in Warhol's Factory
The Factory
The 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 City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
, 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) 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 WeismanDavid Weisman
David Weisman is a film producer, author, and graphic artist who is most noted for his films Ciao! Manhattan and Kiss of the Spider Woman...
, Genevieve Charbin, Chuck Wein
Chuck Wein
Chuck 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 Piserchio
Gino Piserchio
Eugene "Gino" Piserchio was an American actor, composer and musician. Piserchio appeared in two Andy Warhol films including Beauty No. 2, opposite Warhol Superstar Edie Sedgwick....
, 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
Paul America
Paul Johnson , better known as Paul America, was a member of Andy Warhol's Warhol Superstars group who starred in one Warhol-directed film, My Hustler...
, as they lived life in the fast lane (literally speeding down the West Side Highway
West Side Highway
The 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. It replaced the West Side Elevated Highway, built between 1929 and 1951, which was shut down in 1973 due to neglect and lack of...
on massive amounts of amphetamine
Amphetamine
Amphetamine or amfetamine is a psychostimulant drug of the phenethylamine class which produces increased wakefulness and focus in association with decreased fatigue and appetite.Brand names of medications that contain, or metabolize into, amphetamine include Adderall, Dexedrine, Dextrostat,...
).
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
Personas
In marketing and user-centered design, personas are fictional characters created to represent the different user types within a targeted demographic, attitude and/or behavior set that might use a site, brand or product in a similar way. Personas are a tool or method of market segmentation...
of Susan Superstar.
In December 1970, they resumed filming on the dilapidated "Lucky" Baldwin estate in Arcadia, California
Arcadia, California
Arcadia is an affluent city in Los Angeles County, California, United States, and located approximately northeast of downtown Los Angeles in the San Gabriel Valley and at the base of the San Gabriel Mountains....
; 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
Amsterdam
Amsterdam is the largest city and the capital of the Netherlands. The current position of Amsterdam as capital city of the Kingdom of the Netherlands is governed by the constitution of August 24, 1815 and its successors. Amsterdam has a population of 783,364 within city limits, an urban population...
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
George Plimpton
George Ames Plimpton was an American journalist, writer, editor, and actor. He is widely known for his sports writing and for helping to found The Paris Review.-Early life:...
and Jean Stein
Jean Stein
-Biography:Jean Stein grew up in Los Angeles, the daughter of Dr. Jules Stein and his wife, Doris. She authored of two books and a pioneer of the narrative form of oral history. She is presently at work on a cultural and political history of Los Angeles, to be published by Farrar, Straus and...
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 CaliforniaCalifornia
California is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third-largest by land area...
(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
Cult film
A cult film, also commonly referred to as a cult classic, is a film that has acquired a highly devoted but specific group of fans. Often, cult movies have failed to achieve fame outside 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, Plexifilm
Plexifilm
Plexifilm is an independent DVD label and film production company co-founded by Gary Hustwit and Sean Anderson in 2001...
released a special edition
Special edition
The 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...
DVD
DVD
A DVD is an optical disc storage media format, invented and developed by Philips, Sony, Toshiba, and Panasonic in 1995. DVDs offer higher storage capacity than Compact Discs while having the same dimensions....
with additional 35mm outtake footage, rare pictures and interviews with the cast and crew of the film.
External links
- Morley, SheridanSheridan MorleySheridan Morley was an English author, biographer, critic, director, actor and broadcaster. He was the eldest son of actor Robert Morley and grandson of actress Dame Gladys Cooper, and wrote biographies of both...
. Ciao! Manhattan Review. The TimesThe TimesThe Times is a British daily national newspaper, first published in London in 1785 under the title The Daily Universal Register . The Times and its sister paper The Sunday Times are published by Times Newspapers Limited, a subsidiary since 1981 of News International...
. May 25, 1973. - Weisman & Palmer Dig Amsterdam As Preem For Their 'Manhattan' . VarietyVariety (magazine)Variety is an American weekly entertainment-trade magazine founded in New York City, New York, in 1905 by Sime Silverman. With the rise of the importance of the motion-picture industry, Daily Variety, a daily edition based in Los Angeles, California, was founded by Silverman in 1933. In 1998, the...
. August 23, 1972. - Malcolm, DerekDerek MalcolmDerek Malcolm is a British film critic and historian.Malcolm was educated at Eton College and Oxford University. He worked for several decades as a film critic for The Guardian, having previously been an amateur jockey and the paper's first horse racing correspondent. In 1977, he was a member of...
. Ciao! Manhattan Review. The GuardianThe GuardianThe Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...
. May 24, 1973. - Nettles, John G. Her Fog, Her Amphetamines, and Her Pearls. PopmattersPopMattersPopMatters is an international webzine of cultural criticism that covers many aspects of popular culture. PopMatters publishes reviews, interviews, and detailed essays on most cultural products and expressions in areas such as music, television, films, books, video games, comics, sports, theater,...
. March 18, 2003.