The 1979 student film that Madonna tried to delete from history: “Nobody wants their skeletons to come out of the closet”
In 2006, a Philadelphia-area manufacturing executive named Stephen Lewicki filed a lawsuit against Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and several other major retailers for selling an unlicensed DVD version of a student film he’d directed nearly 30 years earlier, but don’t feel too sorry for him, though – this was just a bit of poetic justice coming around.
The film in question, an hour-long exploitation B-movie called A Certain Sacrifice, was shot in New York City between 1979 and 1980 on a budget of less than $20,000, using a Super-8 camera and mostly unpaid actors.
While the plot involved some common ingredients of indie schlock films of its era, including careless depictions of sexual assault and sex slavery, some bloodthirsty vengeance, and, of course, a dash of Satanism, it wasn’t terrible enough to be memorable – the project would surely have been lost to the dustbin of trash cinema history if not for the casting of one upstart actress in a leading role.
As he was starting work on the film, the then 25-year-old Lewicki, a grad student in philosophy at New York’s esteemed Columbia University, put an ad out in Backstage magazine, looking for a “strong, dominant woman to work for no pay” on an “avant-garde” film. As a sign of the desperation experienced by actors trying to get a screen credit, then or now, Lewicki got 300 replies, most of which included the standard 8×10 headshot and CV.
One response stood out from the others, however. It was from a local dancer and aspiring actress fresh off the bus from Michigan. Her name was Madonna Ciccone.
“There are a million actresses in New York with 8×10 glossies,” Lewicki told the Morning Call newspaper in 1986, “Madonna sent a little snapshot. She didn’t send me a resume. She sent me a three-page letter.”
It should surprise no one that Madonna, even at age 19, was unique in her pursuit of a potentially career-boosting opportunity, nor is it surprising that, even when it became apparent that this film was going to be terrible, she did her best to give her character, the vengeful Bruna, some level of humanity and dignity.
“From the moment I met her, I knew she was a star. She fit the role perfectly and had a riveting personality. She has the charisma that makes a star a star.”
Stephen Lewicki
Despite the dark subject matter of A Certain Sacrifice, the actual filming experience, which covered various shoots over two years, apparently wasn’t much of a bother to Madonna, who supposedly got along well enough with the director and her castmates, understanding that this was just one of many avenues she was pursuing on a quest to “make it.”
Any expectations Madonna might have had about the film when she finished her work on it in 1980 were almost certainly forgotten about entirely by 1983, when her music career was suddenly taking off behind the release of the singles ‘Holiday’ and ‘Lucky Star.’ By that point, Lewicki still hadn’t completed editing A Certain Sacrifice, and it’s unclear if he still had any intention of doing so. Once his star actor was suddenly the biggest pop star in America, however, Lewicki coincidentally managed to get his old film project back up and running again, finally completing it in 1984, right around the time ‘Like a Virgin’ was topping the charts.
What happened next was predictable enough. Lewicki’s B-movie, which might have been lucky to get a few midnight screenings at arthouse theatres a few years earlier, was now a legitimate pop culture commodity. Not only was it the pre-fame acting debut of a rising superstar, but it was also presumed to be something risque and semi-pornographic, dramatically increasing the intrigue and controversy around it.
In 1985, Lewicki announced that he’d signed a distribution deal to release A Certain Sacrifice on VHS home video, selling for the insanely opportunistic price of $59.95, which translates to about $185 USD in 2026 money. This was just weeks after several men’s magazines had published nude photos that Madonna had posed for with art photographers during her early days in New York, not long before working on Lewicki’s film. This exploitation of the singer’s past had caused her no small amount of backlash and grief, but it also helped create a backlash to the backlash; a defence of the Material Girl against men now looking to cash in on her success.
Lewicki tried to distance himself from the idea that he was scraping the gutter like the magazine publishers, calling his movie “a new wave, lower East Side, post-punk” film.
“There’s some nudity in it, and Madonna is nude briefly,” Lewicki admitted, denying the notion that A Certain Sacrifice was pornographic. “If anything, it’s anti-porn. I think this porn rumour got started because people who haven’t seen it heard she has three sex slaves. That excited their imaginations, and they’ve been assuming all sorts of things about it.”
Madonna had seen Lewicki’s finished cut of the film when he showed it to her in 1984, and it wasn’t the nudity that bothered her. As she later explained during a legal attempt to block the film’s release a year later, “The storyline is dreadful, the visual imagery is hard to follow, and the acting uneven,” adding that her own performance was “second-rate”.
The self-criticism was strategic, as Madonna’s legal case hinged on the idea that any use of her name to promote the movie would equate to a type of character assassination. Before taking her challenge to the courts, she had previously offered to buy the film outright from Lewicki for the sake, presumably, of permanently destroying all traces of it. Her offers didn’t come close to what Lewicki expected he could make by releasing the film, though, and after the court failed to side with Madonna, A Certain Sacrifice was out in the world, earning a small fortune for Lewicki compared to what he’d spent on it.
Lewicki’s argument for releasing the film had a semi-ethical thread to it. Making an independent film, sometimes, is like playing the stock market. You never know if the actors, or setting, or subject matter of your movie might generate more interest from audiences in the future than in the present, and if you’ve made the personal investment to produce it, you have the right to benefit from those changing tides later, in theory.
That being said, no one who was involved in A Certain Sacrifice, from Lewicki to Madonna to the video distributors to the people who bought it, looked at this as a noble pursuit. When the video resurfaced again in 1990 at a lower price, Madonna’s spokesman was very clear about things: “She did the film years ago in New York,” he said. “They’re just cashing in because she’s famous.”
While Madonna generally avoided speaking about the film, she did discuss the nude photo controversy that preceded it and how she dealt with the aftermath.
“Nobody wants their skeletons to come out of the closet,” she told Rolling Stone in 1986. “The thing that annoyed me most wasn’t so much that they were nude photographs but that I felt really out of control for the first time in what I thought to be several years of careful planning and knowing what was going to happen.”
Madonna eventually used her performance at Live Aid in 1985 as a way to shake off all the stress and worry that the photos and the Lewicki film had caused her.
“I’ll be damned if I’m gonna let that make me feel down,” she said. “I’m gonna get out there and get this dark cloud out from over my head.”
