Ciao! Manhattan (1973)

The film started shooting in 1967. By the time it wrapped in 1972, its star was dead.

CIAO! MANHATTAN began as a loose, Warhol-adjacent project - originally meant to star Susan Bottomly, better known as International Velvet. When that fell through, Edie Sedgwick stepped in.

What followed were years of delays, missing actors, drugs, and money problems, the production slowly reshaping itself around its star's disintegration.

The finished film became an accidental elegy for the entire Warhol underground. It mixes staged scenes with real audio recordings of Sedgwick talking about fame, addiction, and the Factory. That combination gives it something few movies have: the queasy feeling of fiction decaying into autobiography. You're watching a real person fall apart as the camera keeps rolling.

A five-year wreck of a shoot that resulted in one of the most haunting portraits of 1960s New York ever put on film.