Phil Hartman was born in Brooklyn and raised on Long Island, and he graduated magna cum laude from Princeton University, where he founded the P.U.Film Society, served as the film critic for the daily paper, and received The Daily Princetonian Award as the university's outstanding contributor.
Phil Hartman has sold or optioned six screenplays, including Bleeding Heat, a punk rock detective story, The Beheader, an Ivy League revenge fantasy, and They Were Ten, an adaptation of a best-selling German novel. He was frustrated by the studio's inability or unwillingness to put his offbeat scripts into production, so he wrote and directed his first feature film, the Sundance-award winning No Picnic (1986),which starred Luis Guzmán, David Brisbin, and featured a cameo by Steve Buscemi as "Dead Pimp." His second feature, Eerie, shot entirely on the Erie Canal, starred Felicity Huffman and Will Arnett.
In his parallel life, Phil Hartman (with Rich Kresberg) created the Great Jones Café in 1983, which started NYC's Cajun cooking craze, and Two Boots in 1987, with partners Doris Kornish and John Touhey. Two Boots now has 16 locations, including NYC's Grand Central Station & Citi Field, Baltimore, Nashville, and Los Angeles, and is, as Time Out New York put it, "a genuine NYC cultural institution."
Phil Hartman is also the founder of the HOWL! Festival, which honors the cultural history of the East Village; throws the annual Two Boots Mardi Gras Ball, a benefit for the Lower East Side Girls Club; founded the East Village Softball Association; and has raised three amazing children on NYC's Lower East Side.
Phil Hartman plans on shooting his new script, A Day At The Beach, in 2015.
