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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 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. Hartman 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."
Hartman, who had previously been a studio screenwriter, would later open the NYC culinary institution Two Boots with No Picnic producer Doris Kornish. (Philip Hartman, USA, 1986, 86 min.)
Followed by a conversation with director Philip Hartman
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800 Mifflin St, Philadelphia, PA 19148-16ND, United States
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