Ciao! Manhattan (1973) on Netflix
NR19731h 24mDocumentaryDrama
Susan Superstar was a Manhattan celebrity and one of Andy Warhol's Superstars. Now in a drug-fueled decline, she recounts her Factory years and the parties that carried her there.
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- Netflix3.0/5
- IMDb5.6/101,283 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes64%
Trailer
Plot summary
Susan Superstar was a Manhattan celebrity and one of Andy Warhol's Superstars. Scripted scenes sit beside documentary material: audio recordings of Susan describing her time in the Factory and the excess of her party years, so the fiction and her own account of that world run alongside each other. The characters include Mummy, Geoffrey, Paul and Diana, a Vogue editor. The project was assembled over several years from footage shot in New York and, later, in California, and it became a semi-biographical portrait of a celebrity's ascent and decline in New York's countercultural and celebrity circles. New scenes show Susan looking back at her past while struggling with drugs.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Ciao! Manhattan (1973)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Filming on Ciao! Manhattan halted in October 1968, with Paul America awaiting trial on narcotics charges in Michigan and Edie Sedgwick in a New York state psychiatric hospital. Roughly 110,000 feet of 35 mm color film had been shot, fewer than 10,000 feet were left, and the script was rewritten so scenes could be filmed at the jail and the hospital.
- Warhol superstar Susan Bottomly, known as International Velvet and seen in Chelsea Girls, was originally cast as the lead, Susan, but she was only 17 and her father refused to sign the required release forms, so she had to withdraw from Ciao! Manhattan.
SPOILER
Ciao! Manhattan cost over $350,000 and entered post-production in 1971; that same year its star, Edie Sedgwick, died of acute barbiturate intoxication.- The film's soundtrack had never been released in any form until Light in the Attic Records issued it for Record Store Day on April 22, 2017; the first vinyl pressing was limited to 3,000 copies.
- As costs mounted, the project's financiers, the parents of producer Robert Margouleff, lost confidence in the film. Faced with an incomplete production, John Palmer and David Weisman reworked the screenplay in 1970 and used the existing footage as flashbacks for the character Susan Superstar.
- Edie Sedgwick was cast in the lead role at the suggestion of filmmaker Chuck Wein, even though the filmmakers worried about her declining health and growing drug use.
