ON CIAO! MANHATTAN
Introduction to the film delivered 27 January 2024, Metrograph

In 1964, after learning that Edie Sedgwick’s older brother had hung himself at the age of 26, a friend of the socialite took her to a movie. It was the 1930 German film The Blue Angel. Starting off as a comedy about a rigid professor who marries a cabaret singer, the movie darkens in tone as enmeshment in the world of the cabaret destroys him. At the end of the film, penniless, disgraced, and cuckolded by his wife, he’s serving as a clown in the troupe, and, no longer able to hold it together, begins to flub his lines. He’s supposed to call out, “Cock-a-doodle-doo!” but can’t remember it, can’t bring himself to do it, can’t do anything but stare desperately into a camera that never takes its gaze off his mottled face. Annoyed and looking for a laugh, his co-star breaks an egg over his head. He starts to scream, “Cock-a-doodle-doo! Cock-a-doodle-doo!” He ends up carted away in a straitjacket, and dies clutching the desk in the school where he once taught. Unfortunately, this film did not cheer Edie up the way her friend had hoped it would.

“It was a brutal movie; it is almost unforgivable to use a camera like that,” he said. “When the professor broke, it was so relentless the way the camera held on him. Next to me, Edie said, ‘Please, God, end this scene,’ but the camera just stayed there and hung on this man: insane, broken completely, sprung out of his head, crowing at the top of his voice while they threw bottles and things from the audience. I didn’t dare look at Edie. There was nothing I could do. Maybe I should have held her hand and said, ‘It’s only a movie.’” I think about this anecdote every time I watch Ciao! Manhattan.

Edie Sedgwick was a beautiful, troubled rich girl who moved to New York at 21 to pursue vague artistic ambitions. She fell in with Andy Warhol’s set after meeting him at a party, where he was entranced by her star power and proximity to wealth, and she was entranced by the eccentricity of his world and his proximity to fame. Her charisma and natural dominance rocketed her to the forefront of the social scene around Warhol’s studio, the Factory, and Andy started making movies starring her, starting with Poor Little Rich Girl in April 1965. Pretty soon, she was thought of as the queen of the underground film world, but her father and the more folksy, heterosexual wing of the downtown art world ~ essentially, Dylan’s crew ~ disapproved. Under this pressure, cracks started forming in her relationship with Andy just four months into knowing him, and their collaboration ended in December 1965, nine months after it began.

Set loose from Warhol’s world, Edie halfheartedly pursued modeling and the theatre, but she was fussy, undisciplined, and no longer in the spotlight, so those opportunities soon dried up. Meanwhile, she was getting more and more involved with drugs. By 1967, she’d accidentally set two apartments on fire, lost her inheritance, and, when she wasn’t in a psych ward, couldn’t function without a live-in nurse. She was 24 years old.

Enter Ciao! Manhattan. The film — the only full-length she’d star in — had many lives before it became an Edie Sedgwick vehicle. “Directed” by hapless bohemians and “funded” with one of their daddy’s money, the film had no plot, no vision, and no reason to exist except as a means to supply interesting situations and drugs to the “cast,” who were members of the downtown New York scene. They shot an orgy in a pool. They shot a party at a castle. They shot Edie and Paul America speeding over the George Washington Bridge in daddy’s Cadillac, which Paul later stole. They cast daddy in the film when the money started running out. Ciao! was originally going to be a soft-core porno, an art film about women on an odyssey scored by a classical musician, a spy thriller about surveillance of the New York avant garde, a story about a burnout trying to build a UFO, a portrait of a high-rolling Warhol superstar, and a depiction of the entire late-1960s NYC counterculture. You can’t say it isn’t any of those things, but the aforementioned father and bankroller of the film, a man named Jean Margouleff, said it best when he said, “[Ciao! Manhattan] had no storyline. Nobody really knew what they wanted.”

The consensus on what Ciao! Manhattan would become — a grueling depiction of the downfall of Edie Sedgwick — fell into place over time, after the cast splintered, filming ground to a halt, and everyone gave up on the movie ever getting finished. Everyone, that is, except Edie Sedgwick. Convinced that the film would pull her out of her downward spiral and make her a Hollywood star, Edie told the directors in 1970 that of course she was up for shooting again. They’d have to convince the Santa Barbara psych ward she was in to let her out and come up with a frame story in which to place the New York footage, but, if they could do that, she was in. What they came up with was the idea that Edie’s character, Susan, was a fallen New York socialite dragged home to California to rot at the bottom of an empty swimming pool, taken care of by two dopey men who both want to fuck her but are skeeved out by her condition, while she driftily, dreamily, drunkenly recounts stories of her old life. Thinking of the setting, I can’t help but recall the title of Warhol superstar Mary Woronov’s memoir about her Factory days: Swimming Underground. But strong-willed Mary made it up for air. Delicate Edie did not.

Shooting the California footage, whose garish color and cartoonish tone sharply contrasts with the elegant black-and-white and the documentary intent of the New York footage, was a nightmare. The shrieking and stumbling you see Edie doing onscreen, she was also doing behind the scenes, while the fumbling steps toward sex you see 19-year-old Wesley Hayes making toward Edie onscreen, were actually being made by Edie toward him behind the scenes. “I tried to maintain my respect for her. But sometimes things became just too gross,” Wesley said. Edie had always been demanding — her sisters said it, her friends said it — but, by the early 1970s, she’d lost the coquettishness that made that quality palatable. Once a pretty, charming blueblood speeding through the center of the universe, she’d managed to shed the traces of her upbringing and become coarse, boorish. She used to be everybody’s favorite in New York City. Three years later, she’s screaming for attention on a listless afternoon just west of nowhere, recently installed fake tits protruding at her own insistence, as she wanted to show them off. My favorite review of this film on IMDb says, “the experience of watching this movie resembles seeing a once-dewy ingenue dancing a jig for coal miners to buy a ten-dollar rock of crack.” A friend of mine recently told me, during a conversation in which he recommended a film about Columbine, that he couldn’t finish Ciao! Manhattan. “It is almost unforgivable to use a camera like that.”

I want you to know that you are going into a bit of a trainwreck. This is a film about degradation — of the ’60s dream, of a filmmaking process, of the Warhol scene and its favorite girl. It’s a film about cynicism, right from the opening scene, in which the lyrics “In Malibu, people really know how to live,” drift over a scene shot by a New York milieu that viciously hated LA. If becoming one with a Warhol film requires focus and reverence from the viewer, becoming one with this film requires distraction and confusion, a state that the “plot” will certainly assist you in attaining. Between the start of the Ciao! Manhattan shoot in 1967 and its wrap in 1971, the flavor of the times had changed: the momentum ground to a halt, the nihilism morphed in form. All of that is present in this fractured and torturous film.

Also present, for the last time, is Edie Sedgwick. For all her monstrosity in the color footage, in the black-and-white, you see her as she was: her vitality, her fluttering sensitivity, the rapture she lived by and evoked in others. About halfway through her first Warhol film, she tells a friend about the dream she’d had the night before. In it, she’s walking down a white marble staircase under a bright blue sky. She expresses unease about this dream. “Why didn’t it occur to me to walk up?” she asks. “All I could think of was to walk down. It never once occurred to me to turn around and walk the other way.” Her friend tells her not to worry about it.

I hope you enjoy the film.

An onstage conversation with Alexandra Auder and Whitney Mallett took place after the screening. Ciao! Manhattan can be viewed from home here.