Because Not All DISASTER MOVIES CONTAIN EXPLOSIONS

Ciao! Manhattan set out to capture Warhol’s New York underground and instead became a symbol of its demise.

- HEIDI JULAVITS

’CIAO! MANHATTAN,’ made between 1967 and 1972 by current or newly expelled members of Andy Warhol’s Factory, featuring cameos by Warhol Superstars and countercultural icons like Allen Ginsberg, and funded, in turn, by a furrier and a rumored marijuana entrepreneur, is, by objective measures, a disaster movie. It involves no earthquakes, tsunamis, or meteor strikes. But the film and the making of it—the distinction is spurious—involve disappearances, hospitalizations, incarcerations, and death. It wouldn’t exist at all had it not been charismatically bullied into being by its co-director David Weisman, a man described by one collaborator as a “full-on pirate.”

Shot at first in black-and-white, Ciao! Manhattan was conceived as a quasi-cinéma-vérité portrait of the ’60s underground lifestyle seen through Edie Sedgwick, one of the Factory’s most mesmerizing collaborators (or commodities), but later moved to California to become about the bleak aftermath of drug abuse and fleeting “downtown” celebrity, shot in color.

There’s an apocryphal tale about Ciao! Manhattan that equally applies to any attempts to piece together the story of its making. One night, Genevieve Charbin, a filmmaker who had a bit part in Warhol’s My Hustler (1965) and who co-wrote, sort of, the original script that eventually became Ciao! Manhattan, sat on the floor and cut the existing footage into thousands of tiny frames. Assembling the origins of