Manhattanset out to capture Warhols New York underground and instead became a symbol of its demise.
Save this article to read it later.
Find this story in your accountsSaved for Latersection.
Reasons to Love New York
New Yorkcelebrates the citys timeless, peerless connection to movies.
It involves no earthquakes, tsunamis, or meteor strikes.
Shot at first in black-and-white,Ciao!
Theres an apocryphal tale aboutCiao!
Manhattanthat equally applies to any attempts to piece together the story of its making.
Manhattan,sat on the floor and cut the existing footage into thousands of tiny frames.
Assembling the origins ofCiao!
Manhattan.Its so sad, Betsey Johnson said of the film.
(She designed the alien costumes for the party scene in which a naked Ginsberg briefly appears.)
It just got really messed up.
Maybe now its a cult movie, but its lousy.
Its not the real deal.
Robert Margouleff, son of the furrier investor and one of the movies early collaborators, also findsCiao!
Manhattansad for reasons involving Sedgwicks luridly documented ruin, rather than the films inauthenticity as a historical document.
Every time I watch it, he said, I have two weeks of bad luck.
Certain aspects of the finished film, however, are very authentic.
The newspaper was not a prop.
Sedgwick died after consuming a combination of alcohol and barbiturates in 1971, shortly before the movie was finished.
Perhaps predictably, given her tragic turn, Sedgwick has proved a persistently revivable pop-cultural icon.
Manhattans, ongoing relevance.
To me, she said, the other true story of a film likeCiao!
Weisman cinephile, polyglot, cultural omnivore, and avid connector somehow becomes involved.
I only got loaded once, said Margouleff.
That was in 1958, when I was 17 years old, and I came down in 2012.)
But Bottomlys society father forbids her from getting involved.
Sedgwick takes Bottomlys place.
Her life, instead of Bottomlys, provides the faint container for the film.
The movie will be a sort of documentary about the underground lifestyle via one of its most glamorous icons.
Unfortunately, Sedgwick is already starting to disintegrate, and not at all glamorously.
She needs an assistant to help her in the bathroom.
She has run through her massive inheritance and has nowhere to live.
Margouleff calls her father, Duke Sedgwick, a blue-blooded patriarch, for help.
Duke says (according to Margouleff), Son, youre a man.
Im not going to take care of her anymore.
The line between scripted and verite dissolves.
Chaos is the reigning aesthetic.
Weisman describes the production as an incompetent crew, a cast of thousands … all off looking for drugs.
(Co-cinematographer and co-director John Palmer risks his life straddling the cars hood to get the shot.)
Sedgwick skips precariously along a high stone wall at the Cloisters, a fur coat swinging from one hand.
(Edies been awake for about three days in that shot, said Weisman.)
The final day of shootingtakes place at a New Jersey Palisades mansion.
The LSD was flowing mightily, said Margouleff, and Allen was running around in the nude.
Margouleff, however, is losing patience and hemorrhaging money.
His office in the Diamond District is filled with sand for a beach scene thats never used.
The footage gets cut into tiny pieces.
The money runs out.
Wein moves on to other projects.
Margouleff shifts his creative energy toward synthesizers.
Weisman and Palmer are in a jam.
How to make a semi-biographical movie without its star?
This requires a lot of acting from Margouleffs father, Jean.
Somebody tracks down Paul America in jail.
After they return to New York, they discover the footage to be unusably out of focus.
They drive back to Michigan to reshoot.
Americas defense attorney, as well as the lawyer prosecuting his case, is given a bit role.
In 1970, Sedgwick resurfaces.
Shes in a psychiatric ward in Santa Barbara.
Meanwhile, Weisman shows the existing footage at a university.
Weisman and Palmer begin shooting again, switching to color film.
The black-and-white footage will become Susans memories, to which shell flash back from her colorful West Coast present.
The tone also changes less documentary realism, more, in Margouleffs estimation, a cartoon.
And so the story becomes a warped redemption tale.
Her mother employs a taciturn working-class surfer jot down named Geoffrey as Susans butler, babysitter, and nurse.
While she spends her days sprawled topless on a mattress, Geoffrey organizes her medications on a silver tray.
He washes Susans underwear in a cauldron over a poolside campfire.
One day, Susan escapes.
In some versions of Weismans telling, Sedgwick is credited as the films driving force.
He insisted, and others confirm, Edie was so firmly committed to finishing this movie.
Sedgwick was the one who decided to drop her drink on the floor and dance on broken glass.
Sedgwick went off-script and free-associated about how her brother and father tried to seduce her.
(Her stories about her childhood suggest these mentions were rooted in real-life experiences.)
She was always either slurringly drunk and high or playing at being drunk and high.
She was so smart, Weisman said.
Was she acting, or was this how she was?
The answer is both, and very clearly so.
By the aughts, Weisman seemed to have an inkling of how his involvement was aging poorly.
He had started to distance himself, if not from the film, then from his role in it.
Why we did that is because the film really directed itself, he said.
So we didnt want to take the credit away from the higher power.
The shooting wraps.Sedgwick marries Post.
Four months later, Sedgwick dies.
Susan enjoys a brief happy ending and marries a man with a beard.
Snow begins to fall.
In the wedding footage, Sedgwick wears a high-necked white dress.
A common question voicedon the directors commentary that accompaniesCiao!
Manhattans 30th anniversary DVD is I wonder if he/she is still alive?
or I wonder what happened to him/her?
What happened to Charlie Bacis (a.k.a.
Dr. Roberts) after he changed his name to Bhavananda and became a mucky-muck in the Hare Krishna community?
The answer tends to be No one knows.
The last anyone heard from Paul America was sometime in the 70s.
He called Margouleff for money; he was living penniless on a commune.
He had fallen out of a tree, broken both his legs, and lost his teeth.
Margouleff is one of the few people involved withCiao!
Manhattanwho survived and thrived.
He went on to produce and sound-engineer records by Stevie Wonder, Quincy Jones, and Devo.
Weisman survived and thrived too.
Manhattan,he began to acquire, via charismatic high-seas pursuits, the rights to intellectual properties and archives.
He collaborated, or tried to collaborate, with many people.
In 2004, he tried to collaborate with me.
Our movie never advanced beyond the conceptual phase.
(Factory Girl,the Sedgwick biopic, starred Sienna Miller and was released in 2006.)
Mostly our collaboration involved his talking and my listening.
(Those were the breasts that nursed Uma, I recall Weisman saying.)
Tarantino came to his house.
On one point of fact, most people align:Ciao!
(Weismans lawyer successfully argued that Sedgwicks posthumous fame was entirely owed to her role inCiao!
Manhattan; thus Weisman owned all of her publicity images, even ones not associated with the film.)
When I met Weisman, his magnetism remained unweathered, save by a little bitterness.
Both Weisman and Margouleff spoke of Sedgwick as a valuable cultural artifact; her reputation needed protecting, restoring.
Weismans pull toward Sedgwick was more complicated.
She provided him a point of access to fame, money, beauty, breeding.
Shes the object of his adoration and envy but also his disdain.
Manhattan, said Painter, is that David also hated women.
Thank you for subscribing and supporting our journalism.
