By Tad Roebuck

August 29, 2002

Forget The Anna Nicole Show. If you indulge in only one bit of reality-based entertainment about a discarded, semi-coherent, drug-addled model dwelling in the bowels of her faded glory, then see Edie Sedgwick in Ciao! Manhattan.

Indeed, Anna Nicole Smith and her ilk owe no small spiritual debt to the doomed star of this thinly-fictionalized 1972 film. Known simply as Edie, she - along with other "superstars" - apprenticed in the art of celebrity for its own sake at Andy Warhol's Factory. It was a novel concept back in the '60s, one that now governs much of what is called pop culture today.

While the main character of the film is named Susan, she might as well be called Edie, as this is essentially her story cloaked in the artifice of dramatic trappings. And while the film is called Ciao! Manhattan, it is a phrase that Edie was apparently not able to say with conviction, as she spends the film haunted by the life she lived and the love she left there.

We first come across Edie as Susan on the side of the road, hitchhiking topless. (This is the ex-model's fashion statement for just about the entire film.) A drifter named Butch takes Susan home, where she lives under a giant tent in a swimming pool. Butch is quickly recruited to be a caretaker of sorts, joining Geoffrey, a preening assistant who is keen to dump Susan into someone else's hands.

Butch, Geoffrey, and everyone else revolving around Susan are essentially human cartoon characters. Geoffrey's sole function is to offer comic relief while providing Susan's back-story; Butch's sole function is to draw Susan's story out of her when Geoffrey is not there (Typical line: "So, you was a model back in New York?").

Susan doesn't need much prompting to tell her story, however. Apropos of nothing, she often launches into soliloquies about the prodigious amount of drugs she's taken, her career, her lost love Paul America, or the bullshit scene that was Warhol's Factory.

As an heiress from California, the life Edie led in Manhattan was not the one she was groomed for. "She just came from a world that collided with another world," explains David Weisman, who, with John Palmer, began making the film that would become Ciao! Manhattan during The Factory's heyday in the mid-'60s. "It was very much the zeitgeist of '64-'65, the cotillion society was going out and slumming with the druggies and the hustlers of Times Square. You had these various worlds colliding, and with the stage Andy created at The Factory, it all just was a daily happening." At stage center, sharing the spotlight with Warhol, was Edie Sedgwick. "This was a moment in time when Edie was...It's hard to explain what she was," says Weisman. "She just was the center of attention."

Ciao! Manhattan began as a black-and-white film originally starring Susan Bottomly, the woman who came to be known around The Factory as International Velvet. She was still a minor at the time, however, and when her parents refused to consent to the filming, Edie stepped into the role. "It kind of evolved as the events took place," recalls Weisman. "Right from the beginning, there was never a clear notion of what the film was supposed to be about. If I had to say what it was, I would say it's an experiment of a splinter group from the Factory."

"We certainly had certain skills, talents and abilities, but among those was not script. We really were discovering how to make a movie. I, at the time, was the only one who actually had any pretense of having any knowledge of how a movie got made outside of The Factory, because I was a protégé of Otto Preminger's. And because I had all these so-called connections - or purported connections - to the 'real world,' I was the one who supposedly knew how all this was going to work. Of course, I was clueless. It was like the blind leading the blind."

Besides the inevitable problems that occur when "blind" people make movies, production on Ciao! Manhattan was stalled when Edie's drug abuse forced her into a number of lengthy hospital stays. Nearly five years would pass before she was able to return to work on the film, by which time her scenes were being shot in California, in color, and under the supervision of one of her doctors. "He felt that it was good for her to accomplish something, to finish something," says Weisman. "We were living all together to make sure one of us was with Edie at all times. Because once we made the commitment to do this under Dr. Wells' supervision, we just didn't want any mishaps. Because she was heavy into mishaps."

Mishaps?

"For example, Edie would go off hitchhiking… and get drunk and whacked out and have people pick her up and get into sex trips and so forth. One day she found herself under arrest, nude in Sausalito Airport, high on acid.

"One time she came down from Santa Barbara, and I picked her up at the North Hollywood Greyhound station. And on the ride down on the bus, she had taken her entire week's meds. So there she is standing on the top of the stairs on the bus… and I open my arms, and she falls on me! Passes out with a big grin and whump! Then, you know, it was a hundred miles an hour to the nearest hospital… Those are the type of 'mishaps.'"

The popular imagination is generally enamored with stars that burn brightly, then burn out at a young age. If you're old enough, you can probably recite a list of Who's Who in the Pantheon of Fallen Idols: Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, John Belushi, etc. Ciao! Manhattan wrapped just weeks before Edie died at age 28, yet she never quite made it into that Pantheon, quite possibly because of this film.

Showing Edie at the tail-end of her slow burn, Ciao! Manhattan does nothing to mythologize her, and nothing to romanticize her derailment from the fast lane. For every glimpse we catch of Edie's "poor little rich girl" persona, we also find a petulant, demanding, self-absorbed ghost who, by all indications, put herself where she is. If we had a similar look into the last days of, say, Jim Morrison, one wonders if he would be remembered today as a tragic rock poet.

Regardless of what Ciao! Manhattan has added to or detracted from Edie Sedgwick's legacy, Weisman says he has heard from "dozens and dozens and dozens and dozens" of young people who are fascinated by the star of his film. "There in fact has, inexplicably, sprung up a generation - born after she died - that is instantly aware of Edie Sedgwick," he observes. "It's almost like she's imprinted on them."

In other words, Edie has managed to remain a center of attention, even three decades after her death.

Watching Edie recount her life in Ciao! Manhattan, it's tempting to think that she somehow knew there wasn't much time left for her. Certainly that is apparent to anyone watching her struggle to remain upright in the few scenes where she is not on her back. That Edie insisted on finishing the film, even while in such a state, it is also tempting to think she had the presence of mind to hold herself out as an example of what not to do.

In other hands, a film like Ciao! Manhattan might have made such an example out of Edie, and become an earnest, finger-wagging lesson about the evils of excess. "The joke was that she'd outlive us all," says Weisman. "I mean, when you're in your 20s, you think you're going to live forever. There was no life experience or any perspective or moralistic platform from which to make a judgment or to have an opinion. I learned after the fact that I was not a moralistic person or an immoralistic (sic) person, but an amoral person. I didn't know that those three distinctions could be made while living through the experience. I found that out after the fact. When Edie died, of course, that changed everything."

A new ending was shot to acknowledge Edie's death, and Ciao! Manhattan premiered in Amsterdam a year later in 1972.

Early in the film, Edie, as Susan, announces that she is assembling a portfolio of her work as a model. This is actually a good way to approach Ciao! Manhattan, as if one is flipping through a randomly assembled collection of stills, film footage, and recollections from Edie Sedgwick's career.

In an attempt to impose some sort of narrative structure on this disparate collection of material, the filmmakers introduce Mr. Verdecchio and his assistant, who, with no apparent motivation, use video surveillance to monitor Susan's activity from 1965 on. They even occasionally insert themselves into the action they are observing, a twist that makes flashbacks seem to be actually occurring in the present time of some parallel universe. Got that? Me neither. (If you want to dabble in truly eerie omniscient characters and bent perceptions of the time-space continuum, go see Mulholland Drive instead.)

"There certainly has been a very mixed reaction to it," says Weisman. "I've generally found that people think it's absolutely deplorable, exploitative, disgusting, or a transcendental experience, or they just don't understand what it's about. It falls into those three categories."

The New York Times opted for the first category.

"They basically accused it of exploitation," Weisman remembers. "I just sat there on the curb for about 45 minutes and just stared into oblivion, realizing that I was a very naïve person. And that for five years had not realized that John and I had been exploiting Edie, because we had been under the impression that it was quite the opposite. So that was the first time I came into touch with that notion; I actually was astounded by it. I understand it now. I understood it very quickly, but it was not something that occurred to me… She was very much conscious of what she was doing. This is why the exploiting thing was really a hard pill to swallow, because Edie was as much the director and the perpetrator of this as anyone, a total participant in all of this."

On its surface, Ciao! Manhattan is a period piece that just doesn't translate, with slang that will distract, and fashions that will make you cringe in the same way you might during a rerun of Room 222. This is especially the case in the segments involving Verdecchio. An all-seeing technocrat is considerably less menacing when his scenes are scored with primitive electronic music, and his hippie assistant spouts stale techno-talk about things like "vidicom units" installed in "discothèques".

At its best, however, Ciao! Manhattan is a snapshot of the post-Woodstock, pre-punk era, and a document of one life that was swept up and shelled out by the massive cultural revolution of the '60s. Edie Sedgwick is an original icon of the underground, and the experience of seeing her body play host to both a coquettish model and a Dead Woman Walking is not easily forgotten.

Recently restored, Ciao! Manhattan! debuts on DVD in October, 30 years after its initial release. Bonus material will include footage culled from over 30 hours of newly-discovered archival film, and commentary from former Factory workers. With cameos by other "superstars" like Viva, Brigid Berlin and Paul America, this film has always been required viewing for those with more than a passing interest in Andy Warhol's Factory.

On the other hand, if you enjoy guilty pleasures like yelling "Low rent!" at your screen, then maybe you should just stick with Anna Nicole.