In late 1995, I started editing my first feature, Eerie, with Felicity Huffman in the lead role, opposite a 23-year-old Will Arnett making his film debut. The director was Phil Hartman, whose previous feature, No Picnic, premiered at Sundance in 1987. Phil’s director of photography, the acclaimed Peter Hutton, won an award for excellence in cinematography for capturing the Lower East Side locations in beautiful 16mm black and white, and helped make the film an underground NYC classic.

Eerie was a film with a different vision. It’s the story of a woman searching for her soon-to-be ex-husband, a film director who’s gone missing while scouting locations – also shot by Peter Hutton, but this time in 16mm color, mostly on and around the Erie Canal.

These were early days for me. I edited on a Steenbeck in Phil’s office, cutting and splicing workprint as we settled into a comfortable collaborative groove—a model for the many creative partnerships I would enjoy in years to come. Eventually, after fits and starts and a reshoot or two, we finished the film. The June 1997 premiere was fittingly right near the Erie Canal, in Rochester, followed by a screening on the Lower East Side. It was there that the single existing print of Eerie also went missing, much like the character in the film.

Years passed; the fortunes of the lead actors rose and fell; Peter Hutton, perhaps best known for his silent black-and-white art films, died of cancer in 2016; and – through it all – Phil and I remained friends. In 2025, a restoration of No Picnic was picked up for distribution, and a screening at the Museum of Modern Art — “An Evening with Philip Hartman”—was arranged. Given that Peter Hutton’s “eye” was such an important part of Phil’s work, Phil asked me to edit a credit sequence for another collaboration with Peter Hutton, the never-completed Man with a Shattered World, shot at the Caribbean Day Parade in Brooklyn on Labor Day 1989. Best of all, I also got to edit a teaser for the long-lost Eerie for the event.

So that’s how Eerie – and my work on my very first feature – made it to MoMA 30 years later. “Eerie” indeed.