Editing Ciao! Manhattan (section)

== Production ==
{{unreferenced-section|date=July 2024}}
[[Warhol superstars|Warhol superstar]] [[Susan Bottomly]] who had starred in ''[[Chelsea Girls]]'' (1966) was originally intended to star in the film.<ref name=":0">{{Cite web |title=Ciao! Manhattan |url=https://warholstars.org/ciaomanhattan.html |access-date=2024-12-15 |website=warholstars.org}}</ref> [[David Weisman]], who co-wrote and co-directed the film recalled:<blockquote>Edie Sedgwick was never intended to be the lead in this film ... It was going to be a beautiful young lady who had just appeared at [[the Factory]] by the name of Susan Bottomly [International Velvet] and she was just this startling young ingenue whose father was the District Attorney of Boston and had convicted the [[Boston Strangler]]... we had to.. get releases from everybody and so Susan Bottomly was 17 and we needed her father's permission so at the last minute he refused and she was out but in the script her name, the character name, was Susan.<ref name=":0" /></blockquote>Production of ''Ciao! Manhattan'' began on March 26, 1967 as a project of Factory regulars John Palmer, [[David Weisman]], Genevieve Charbin, [[Chuck Wein]], [[Robert Margouleff|Bob Margouleff]], [[Gino Piserchio]], with supplemental roles and tasks fulfilled by various other hangers-on. The film originally followed the excessively hip lives of Midtown 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]]).{{cn|date=July 2024}}

The project was riddled with budget problems and an unfinished, nonsensical script of debauchery, drug use and paranoia.<ref name=":1">{{Cite book |last=Steven Watson |url= |title=Factory Made |date=2003-10-21 |publisher=Pantheon |others= |isbn=978-0-679-42372-0 |pages=328-331, 431}}</ref>  Unreliable actors and rampant drug abuse behind the camera pushed 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 an unpresentable film. To salvage these fragments, Palmer and Weisman decided to reshape the script to include the previously shot footage as flashback sequences to tell Sedgwick's tragic story through the persona of Susan Superstar.

In the Fall of 1970, they resumed filming on the [["Lucky" Baldwin]] estate in [[Arcadia, California]].For a month, they shot Susan recounting her past through the dazed euphoria of perpetual substance abuse. In 1971, the film went into post-production and later that year Sedgwick died from acute [[barbiturate]] intoxication.

''Ciao! Manhattan'' was completed on May 25, 1972, and had its premiere in Amsterdam in July 1972 to critical acclaim,{{cn|date=July 2024}} due in part to Sedgwick's onscreen 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 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.{{cn|date=July 2024}}