You can't put your arm around a memory. In "No Picnic," newly restored and opening Friday at Film Forum, nostalgia for the old East Village is rampant—even though the film premiered in 1986. It follows Mac (David Brisbin), who used to be in a post-punk band, and used to be in a relationship; now, he meanders through his old haunts working as a jukebox repairman, and searches for a woman—known only as "Stripe," after her distinctive dress—he's only seen in a photograph.
In the years before the Tompkins Square Riot, gentrification is imminent; Mac's building is on a rent strike. Writer-director Philip Hartman made a concerted effort to shoot at locations that were at the time soon to pass into history, such as the Garden of Eden, the guerilla green space on Forsyth Street which was bulldozed by NYCHA shortly after filming.
Hartman cofounded the Great Jones Cafe, the famed Cajun spot just off the Bowery. Not long after, he and "No Picnic" producer Doris Kornish, to whom he was then married, went on to establish the Two Boots pizza empire, as well as the film institutions—Two Boots' video rental store, and the Pioneer Theater—that once surrounded the flagship on Avenue A, making history well into this century. In the early 2000s, for instance, midnight showings at the Pioneer helped turn "Donnie Darko" into a cult classic. (Hartman recalled director Richard Kelly showing up to one screening: "He got up in front of the crowd that night, and started weeping. He said, 'This theater saved my career.' He was drunk.")
At the time of "No Picnic," Brisbin, perhaps best known to elder millennial audiences as the grown-up cast member of Nickelodeon's "Hey Dude," was associated with the avant-garde theater group Mabou Mines, like several other members of the cast. But, more to the point, they were "Jonesers," in Hartman's word. Filling the film with Great Jones Cafe regulars and memorable downtown figures, now mostly forgotten, and shooting in his and other establishments, from Billy's Topless to La Bamba, all now long gone, Hartman made "No Picnic" into a document of a time and place that is more legendary than memorialized, though he's more than happy to tell stories about it.
In something of a 4DX experience, "No Picnic" opens in the shadow of more displacement: Two Boots' rent at Avenue A is going up, and after the movie opens, Hartman will have to figure out whether to stay or go, though he avers that there will always be a Two Boots in the East Village. Having unleashed vitriol at real-estate speculators in "No Picnic," he now reserves his ire for third-party delivery apps and the ghost-kitchen concern Wonder, a direct competitor that now owns GrubHub. But our conversation tended mostly to happier things—his memories of the East Village and the characters who populated it.
"'No Picnic' won cinematography at Sundance, and meanwhile, Two Boots opened and the pizza thing blew up," Hartman told Hell Gate. "Now, 40 years later, I've made two feature films, but I've sold 60 million slices of pizza."
