Philip Hartman’s No Picnic is a priceless artifact of New York’s pre-gentrification East Village, with appearances by Steve Buscemi, Richard Hell, Luis Guzmán, and other fixtures of the Downtown music and art scenes. The winds of change were in the air during the film’s production in the summer of 1985—this was the year that also saw Martin Scorsese’s After Hours—as Hartman raced to capture his neighborhood in all its squalid glory. Hartman’s neo-noir comedy follows down-and-out jukebox operator Macabee Cohn, played with deadpan melancholy by David Brisbin, who wanders the cheap tenements, dive bars, and derelict streets of the Lower East Side in search of a mysterious woman in a striped dress. No Picnic was showered with praise (Manohla Dargis called it “the genuine article” in the Village Voice), Peter Hutton won a Sundance prize for his gorgeously evocative black-and-white cinematography, and a theatrical run at Anthology Film Archives broke box-office records. Now, 40 years later, it has its world 2K scan premiere in this special joint presentation of To Save and Project and Modern Mondays. Hartman, who is joined by members of the cast and crew in a post-screening conversation, recalls, “Peter Hutton and I moved fast with a nimble crew—including Emmy-award winning director Mike Spiller as assistant cameraman and animator Lewis Klahr as boom operator—using an old VW bus as our production van. We tried to grab images, from Adam Purple’s Garden to the ‘86 Club’ to the St. Mark's Cinema, that seemed to be vanishing before our eyes. Now, 40 years later, much of the neighborhood has changed and most of the people are gone, but No Picnic lives on.” Also presented—for the first time ever—are excerpts from two other Hartman-Hutton collaborations: the 16mm feature film Eerie, shot on the Erie Canal in 1995 and starring Will Arnett and Felicity Huffman, which represents Hutton’s first experiments with color photography; and the credit sequence for Hartman’s unmade Man with a Shattered World, which Hutton shot in 1989 at the Caribbean Day Parade in Brooklyn, marking this his earliest attempt at 35mm handheld camerawork. Hartman, who had previously been a studio screenwriter, would later open the NYC culinary institution Two Boots with No Picnic producer Doris Kornish.
No Picnic. 1986. USA. Written and directed by Philip Hartman. Produced by Doris Kornish. Cinematography by Peter Hutton. With David Brisbin, Myoshin, Luis Guzmán, Steve Buscemi. World premiere of new 2K scan by Negativeland. DCP courtesy The Film Desk. 88 min.