Ciao! Manhattan - Film Production

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.