New 4K Restoration
Featuring very early parts for Steve Buscemi and Luis Guzmán (not to mention a prominent turn from Richard Hell), Philip Hartman’s No Picnic is an invaluable artifact of New York’s pre-gentrification East Village. No Picnic premiered at the 1986 Sundance Film Festival, where Peter Hutton won the Best Cinematography prize for his gorgeously grainy black-and-white photography, then the film promptly vanished and was forgotten.
This shaggy picaresque follows down-and-out jukebox operator Macabee Cohn (played with deadpan melancholy by David Brisbin) who wanders the borough’s cheap tenements, dive bars, and derelict streets in search of a mysterious woman in a striped dress.
Hartman co-owned the NoHo landmark the Great Jones Cafe, often credited with introducing Cajun cooking to downtown NYC, and a magnet for indie film and music communities for decades. He rolled his gumbo money into the production of No Picnic and subsequently started the beloved Two Boots Pizzeria on Avenue A to scare up enough money for post-production expenses. This 4K restoration unearths a brilliant, eccentric relic of a gritty NYC now long gone.