No Picnic: Phil Hartman’s Long-Lost East Village

By Michael Jacobsohn

Some films arrive right on time. Phil Hartman’s No Picnic took 40 years. It premiered at Sundance in 1986, winning a cinematography prize for Peter Hutton’s luminous black-and-white images of the pre-gentrification East Village. Then, improbably, it vanished. Its distributor disbanded and Hartman started the Two Boots pizzeria empire and raised three kids. The film’s only print sat in a closet.

Then, during COVID, Hartman digitized the film. A distributor saw it, Film Forum offered a single week, and the film refused to leave, holding over for an astonishing 12 weeks. Now it’s touring the country: San Francisco, Nashville, Chicago, playing to audiences who never lived on Avenue A.

It’s a genuine Cinderella story and a reassuring one. Hartman jokes it was marketing genius to sit on something for 40 years and build up the demand.

Hartman’s No Picnic is quirky in the most disarming way: it takes the deadpan machinery of hard-boiled noir (the world-weary voiceover, the lone man on a quest, the mysterious woman glimpsed and lost) and bolts it onto the soft-boiled life of a jukebox repairman. Macabee Cohen, a washed-up musician played with hangdog melancholy by David Brisbin, tools around the East Village in a wheezing VW bus, servicing dive-bar jukeboxes and chasing a woman in a striped dress he can’t quite catch. It’s Raymond Chandler filtered through Avenue A, a picaresque with no real plot and all the better for it. The comedy comes from the mismatch between grand narration and shabby stakes.

The texture is what lingers. Peter Hutton’s cinematography, which won at Sundance, turns rent-strike banners, cigarette machines, and derelict tenements into something elegiac. The neighborhood is the real protagonist, caught mid-erasure: real estate speculation creeping in, art “invading” the bars, the old bohemia sensing its own eviction. Hartman stocks the frame with downtown fixtures (Richard Hell, Judith Malina) and future stars in embryo (Buscemi, Guzmán), scored to a wild jukebox of Mingus, Fela, and the Raunch Hands.

A Conversation with Phil Hartman

Recently, I had a conversation with Hartman at his Two Boots Pizza in the West Village. This conversation has been condensed and edited for length and clarity.

You made No Picnic in 1985. What pulled you toward filming the neighborhood itself?
I was living in the East Village and I loved it. But you could feel change was imminent, and we had this incredible passion to capture things before they disappeared ─ like Adam Purple’s garden, that beautiful circular garden on the Lower East Side. They bulldozed it three or four months after we filmed.

The film is packed with faces. Real people, not just actors.
Many indie films have a tiny cast, but we actually had about 130 people, because there were so many amazing folks we wanted to capture, like Princess Pamela, who ran a soul-food place on 10th and First. There was a man everybody called Santa Claus, big white beard, walked around with his pockets full of toys for the kids. Bleecker Bob from Bleecker Bob’s record shop is in there. A few of them became famous: Steve Buscemi, Luis Guzmán. A lot of them never appeared in another movie.

Where did the cast and crew come from?
Mostly from the Great Jones Café, a Cajun juke joint that a friend and I opened on the Bowery. It became a magnet for the film, music, and theater crowd. The film was filled with friends, family, ex-girlfriends, professionals, neighborhood characters. And everybody got paid, which was unheard of for a small indie film.

And Two Boots grew out of finishing the movie?
We ran out of money for post. A stranger walked into the Jones and said he wanted to open a restaurant. My partner, Doris Kornish, and I said we’d give him six months if he helped us finish. He did. That restaurant was Two Boots. The six months turned into 39 years.

Your roots on the Lower East Side go back generations.
My grandparents lived on Henry Street, right behind where we later raised our three kids on East Broadway, in an old exterminator’s warehouse under a synagogue. My daughter is a block away now, raising her own daughter. Five generations below East Broadway.

Why do you think the film is resonating now, 40 years later?
For old-timers it’s the neighborhood of their youth. But the young people are digging that it’s not just pre-gentrified, it’s pre-digitized. Jukeboxes, phones on walls, bathtubs in kitchens, empty lots and rubble. It looks post-war to them. I see No Picnic in a continuum of black-and-white love letters to New York: Little Fugitive, Pull My Daisy, and The Plot Against Harry. I love this city. I’m just so happy we caught this time and place before it was gone.

No Picnic looks back at a New York that is gone. Watching the film today brings the past and present close together because people are still worried about losing the same kind of neighborhood. The restored film arrives at a time when many New Yorkers are struggling with rising rents and the cost of living. Hartman’s line, “the more things change, the more they change,” now feels less like nostalgia and more like a warning.

Hartman wanted to capture this world before it disappeared. Forty years later, we can be thankful that he did. He saved a piece of New York that might otherwise have been forgotten.

Learn more about No Picnic from its distributor, The Film Desk: thefilmdesk.com

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Michael Jacobsohn is an independent New York City filmmaker. Last year he completed “The Cornelia Street Café in Exile,” a full-length documentary on the greatly missed, Cornelia Street Cafe. He curates and hosts a bi-monthly screening of short films by New York Metropolitan filmmakers, at New Plaza Cinema. The next show will be on Saturday, August 22 at 6 p.m.