Ciao! Manhattan
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Ciao! Manhattan is a movie from 1972 about, and starring Edie Sedgwick, one of Andy Warhol's "Superstars". It tells the dramatized story of Edie Sedgwick's struggle in life, the lure of addiction and the quest for stardom in keeping with the times.
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[edit] Film Overview
Written and directed by John Palmer and David Weisman, Ciao! Manhattan is the semi-autobiographical tale of 1960s counter-culture icon Edie Sedgwick. Ciao! Manhattan follows young Susan Superstar (Edie Sedgwick) through her tumultuous party years in Manhattan as one of Andy Warhol’s “Superstars”. Through actual audio recordings of Sedgwick’s account of her time in Warhol’s “Factory” in New York, paired with clips from the original unfinished script started in 1967, Ciao! Manhattan captures on film the complete deterioration of Sedgwick’s fictional alter-ego. The striking similarities between Sedgwick and Superstar’s life-story, especially when recounted by Sedgwick in the midst of obvious drug induced interviews, makes this film's candid depiction of excess and celebrity especially haunting. The film is dedicated to Edie and ends with the actual headlines announcing Sedgwick’s (not Susan Superstar’s) untimely death, tying the two entities, the fictional and the genuine, intrinsically together.
[edit] 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 Wein, Bob Margouleff, Gino Piserchio, with supplemental roles and tasks fulfilled by various other hangers-on. The film, originally following the excessively hip lives of Mid-town scenesters; Sedgwick and fellow Warhol Film star Paul America, as they lived life in the fast lane (literally speeding down the West Side highway on massive amount of amphetamines). 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 investment and Palmer and Weisman were left with the fragments of a beautifully shot but unpresentable piece of cinema. 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 of 1970 they resumed shooting in a mansion in Arcadia, California; for a month they shot Susan recounting Sedgwick's past through the dazed euphoria of perpetual substance abuse. The shooting lasted only a month and in 1971 Ciao! Manhattan finally went into post-production. The excitement of the film's near completion was short lived however due to Sedgwick’s untimely death. What some believe to be a suicide and others attribute it to years of excessive drug addiction was reported as a barbiturate/alcohol overdose. Despite this tragic end, Ciao! Manhattan premiered in Amsterdam in 1972 to great acclaim due no doubt to Sedgwick’s striking presence and representation of a culture that she helped to define. Today Sedwick’s charisma still intrigues the masses and is endlessly strived for. Actress Sienna Miller is scheduled to play Sedgwick in the upcoming film Factory Girl by George Hickenlooper, for release at the end of 2006.
[edit] Critical Synopsis
One in hundreds of narratives recounting the youth counter-culture of the 1960’s, Ciao! Manhattan’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 (Wesley Hayes)], Susan’s story is told in the full color of the 1970’s. Her psychedelic pad and tie-dye dress are Butch’s 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 over 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 counter-culture that Edie herself created. 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 dialog of tragic events of her past often seem too real to believe that they were 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.
[edit] Bibliography
- Stien, Jean. Edie: American Girl. 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. Brooklyn, NY. Plexifilm. 2002.
- Wilson, Andrew. Poor Little It Girl. The Independent. London: February 5, 2006.
