David Fear
Contact David Fear on X View all posts by David Fear April 18, 2026
David Brisbin in 'No Picnic.' Film Forum Once upon a time in the Lower East Side… a writer-director frustrated with the Hollywood waiting game started shooting a scrappy indie film in his neighborhood. The story revolved around a seen-it-all narrator who talked like he stepped out of a dimestore paperback (“That summer in the city started like every other — right after winter”) and had a fondness for the good ol’ days. Back then, the character’s band 3-Legged Dog was all the rage, and he walked those city streets like a conquering hero. Now, he’s just another manic-depressive schnook trying not to get kicked out of his pad, restocking jukeboxes in bars and hanging out with local characters like his upstairs neighbor, an ex-pat who he calls the Brooklyn Canuck: “Her heart was still in Canada, but her voice belonged in jail.”
The LES was past its No Wave glory days, but its hipster bona fides were still evident when you went into the dank clubs and dingy bars and corner bodegas. Still, all those For Lease signs showing up at the director’s old haunts pointed to where the ‘hood was going. Or, in the word’s of the antihero he’d dreamed up: “Around here, the more things change… the more they change.” So the guy grabbed some actors and an avant-garde filmmaker who was also a crack cinematographer, and made a movie that captured the place he called home before it disappeared. It ended up winning a prize at Sundance, back in the days before the film festival was overrun by red-carpetbaggers. A few years later, the Anthology Film Archives gave it a decent theatrical run. Then the guy started a pizza joint and the film faded into obscurity.
A wise man once said that every film is a documentary of its own making, and Philip Hartman’s No Picnic doubles as a chronicle not just of a lost paradise but a forgotten era — of downtown NYC, of genuinely independent moviemaking, of an alternate version of the “Greed Is Good” go-go ’80s. Watching this gorgeously grainy black-and-white hang-out movie from 1987, fresh off an amazing restoration from the good people at the Film Desk and a premiere at the Museum of Modern Art’s “To Save and Project” mini-fest, is to step back into a moment before gentrification terraformed Alphabet City and priced out the bohemians.
