The last blog post was about LaLa Land and the chase for glowing, radiant film stardom. What happens when you become a star - even a sort of mid-level, hyped underground star like Edie Sedgwick - and that star crashes and burns?
I first came across Edie when borrowing my older sister's paperback copy of Edie: An American Biography, by George Plimpton and Jean Stein, in high school. This oral biography (my favorite type of biography, organized as interview passages with dozens of people) was all too glamorous for a teenage, Minnesotan Catholic school student.
Edie, a socialite/heiress/actress/model, met Andy Warhol at the right time to become mutual muses (at least for a year or two). Appearing in many shorts by Warhol, Edie was a wanna-be actress waiting for a real Hollywood role to push her out of the underground NYC milieu and into legitimacy; sadly that never happened.
During her 1966-67 heyday of semi-fame, drug exploration, and partying, filmmakers John Palmer and David Weisman created a semi-biographical film around her experiences. Shot in steely black and white, Ciao Manhattan is an oddball but captivating, sometimes fascinating, tedious, shrill, and hypnotic film all rolled into one.
Set up as a Sunset Boulevard-ish story of a faded star looking back and confiding in a captive audience, this time in the form of a southern hick hippie teenager (the irritating Wesley Hayes) who stumbles on Edie (renamed "Susan" in the film, even though it is pretty much straight biography) living in the bottom of an empty swimming pool on a dilapidated California ranch home. She lounges incessantly in a mess of pillows, clothes strewn, magazines, and blow-up photos of her glamorous NYC past.
The "present-day" (1970-71) version of the story is filmed in color, while the "flashbacks" show Palmer and Weisman's previously shot, and superior, black and white footage. Trying to bookend her past of debauchery, failed affairs, heavy drugs, and mental illness, a truly zonked out Edie comes off as a haunted, fragile mess.
The movie is not stellar when it comes to plot and coherence, but is fantastic when it comes to documenting the days of Warhol's Factory, and the cavalier, fashionable escapades of a poor little rich girl. An indoor pool party of drugged out Factory kooks, a night time convertible ride through Manhattan with fellow Warhol actor, the hunky Paul America, it all plays out like proto-music videos. The bubbling Moog synth score by Gino Piserchio adds to the otherworldly vibe.
Plentiful audio clips of Edie rambling become the disembodied narration of her onscreen misadventures. Like the final audio recordings of a late career Judy Garland before she overdosed (two years before Edie), the narration comes of bitter and sad (more the latter for Edie). In Ciao Manhattan, Edie sounds more like a bewildered child, along for the ride, with a bubble of high hopes being popped repeatedly - glittering and tragic.
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