Ciao! Manhattan is the semi-biographical tale of 1960s counterculture icon Edie Sedgwick. The film follows young Susan Superstar (Sedgwick) through her tumultuous party years in Manhattan as one of Warhol’s Superstars. Through actual audio recordings of Sedgwick’s account of her time in Warhol’s Factory in New York City, paired with clips from the original unfinished script started in 1967, Ciao! captures the complete deterioration of Sedgwick’s fictional alter-ego. The striking similarities between Sedgwick and Susan’s life story, especially when recounted by Sedgwick in the midst of drug-induced audio interviews, make the film’s candid depiction of excess and celebrity especially haunting. The film is dedicated to the memory of Sedgwick and ends with the headlines announcing Sedgwick’s (not Susan Superstar’s) death, thus inseparably associating the fictional and the genuine figure.
The quote above is from Wikipedia. If you aren’t familiar with Edie or the story behind the film, the entire article is well worth your time. It is a fascinating microcosm of the hippie era, 1967-74, an era marked by liberation, drugs, rebellion, drugs, cultural revolution, and of course more drugs. If you watched the news in the late 60s and early 70s, there was a pretty good chance you’d see a story about a celebrity suicide or overdose: Brian Jones, Brian Epstein, Lenny Bruce, Frankie Lymon, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Judy Garland … and Edie Sedgwick.
From the comments section:
It appears she did full frontal for the film but it was cut. The still did end up in a book about her.
You can borrow it on archive.org in case anyone’s interested. It’s on page 395.
Video –
If you thought boob jobs were bad these days…She was cute earlier in her pixie cut trust fund kid era, are these her only nudes?
I vaguely recall they showed pictures of her original breasts in the film. I heard she insisted on doing all that nudity because she was proud of her new boobs.
It also appears she did full frontal for the film but it was cut. The still did end up in a book about her. You can borrow it on archive.org in case anyone’s interested. It’s on page 395.
It’s hard to enjoy any of it as she was clearly blitzed out of her mind and can barely string a sentence together. The film even ends with the actual headline of her death.
Here is the referenced picture. The B&W is the original.