“The East Village, it’s not even so much a geographic place. It’s a spiritual place,” the director Phil Hartman said last Thursday in a conversation at the Sag Harbor Cinema about his film “No Picnic,” a 1986 black-and-white feature set in the East Village.
Standing up in front of the screen, dressed in a purple dashiki and a baseball hat as he spoke with the cinema’s artistic director, Giulia D’Agnolo Vallan, Hartman, who wrote and directed “No Picnic,” reminded the crowd that the community that they had just seen on screen, the artists and drifters of 1980s downtown Manhattan are part of the DNA of the city. “The artistic energy, the countercultural energy is going to live on forever.”
The first person to ever graduate from Princeton with a film degree, Hartman was obsessed with movies from a young age. When he graduated from college, he became the “house weirdo” at Warner Brothers, writing several films for them but never having one produced. In 1983, he started the Great Jones Cafe, and in 1985 he decided to write, direct, and produce his own feature film. Shot by Peter Hutton, a well-known experimental filmmaker, it won best cinematography at Sundance in 1986.
An attempt to capture a version of New York City that Hartman felt was disappearing, the film follows Macabee Cohn, a down-and-out jukebox repairman who wanders the lively yet grimy streets of the 1980s East Village in search of a mysterious woman wearing stripes.
“This was a movie made by the neighborhood, for the neighborhood, and the set was completely porous.” Hartman said at the question-and-answer period.
Several scenes include footage that Hutton and Hartman shot while wandering the city.
Many of the actors are neighborhood icons he wanted in the film, like a man called Santa Claus, who had a big white beard and walked around with toys in his pocket. Other more notable figures who have roles include Steve Buscemi, Richard Hell, and Luis Guzman. “No Picnic” also shows the music scene, the punk rockers and counter-culturalists who frequented CBGB.
What Hartman didn’t realize was that the film also captured a pre-digital New York City.
“Never in a million years would it have occurred to us that one day someone would look at those jukeboxes and think, what the hell is that?” he said.
After his accolades at Sundance, the film had a special showing at the Museum of Modern Art, but it didn’t have a distributor until 1990, when it had a six-week run at Anthropology Film Archives.
By then, Two Boots Pizza, which Hartman also founded, had taken off, and Hartman decided to focus instead on that business and his family.
“I spent a lot of years feeling like I had not made a good enough film,” he said.
During Covid, he digitized the film. Almost immediately, he found a distributor, setting off a resurgence of attention. In January, there was a screening at MoMA and the film has now run for 12 weeks at Film Forum, as well as at movie theaters across the country.
Hartman has noticed that over the past several weeks the audience at Film Forum has become younger, and many of the people he speaks with express a longing for a pre-digital New York City. He doesn’t think bare-bones nostalgia is the right response, though.
“When people see this movie and want to go back to the good old days, which I call the bad old days, I think: Go out and make your own good new old days.”
