It is a New York story from a more affordable New York: three best friends from the East Village, film geeks of aptly slender means, dream of making a movie. The two men spend the better part of two decades tending bar or delivering weed around the neighborhood. The woman, who is married to the taller guy, leads a local rock-and-soul band.
How many of us have had just this dream: to make a movie with your best friends and neighbors, in your own home, with a little money from a guy your girlfriend knows?
Cut to a fifth-floor walk-up on Avenue A, where the woman and her tall husband have lived since 2018. It is an East Village time capsule. The stairways are a mustardy yellow, the stove doesn’t work and there’s a copy of “The Power Broker” on the bookshelf. Until recently, the door to the building did not lock.
The landlord, the couple said, asked $3,375 a month before they negotiated him down.
Over a sweltering month in 2024, the apartment and several other parts of the building became the set for a movie written and directed by — and starring — the friends. That movie, the very indie “Bunny,” made with a budget of $2.6 million, opened in five cities and on streaming platforms last Friday.
A throwback to the low-fi downtown movies of the 1980s and ’90s, before downtown moved to Brooklyn, the movie follows a calamitous day in the building. People get high, get dead, get arrested, touch mezuzas, walk dogs and barely escape serious legal trouble through an unlikely rabbinical intervention. The New York Times called it “irrepressibly lively and likable.”
It is a movie in which the title character introduces himself in voice-over as “a gigolo, like Richard Gere, but not that fancy” and muses later, as he’s schlepping a suitcase containing a dead body, “I should’ve studied harder.” There’s a close-up of a cockroach on its back, and another of a mouse in a glue trap. Also, a cameo from Richard Price.
There is a plot, but it is almost an afterthought. What matters is the building and the characters in it.
New York has long used movies to tell stories about itself, different stories in different eras: “Taxi Driver” in the ’70s or “Wall Street” in the ’80s. “Bunny” looks affectionately at an East Village that is all but gone, through characters just old enough to remember it, and just young enough not to have moved on with their lives.
On a recent afternoon, the apartment — which the couple reinhabited after filming — showed a few changes from its cinematic close-up. A space heater blew warm air from the couch, and “The Power Broker” propped up a table lamp. The resident couple — Mo Stark, 48, who plays Bunny, and Liza Colby, 41, who plays his wife, Bobbie — asked visitors to remove their shoes before entering.
Unseen in the movie are the new Trader Joe’s, Target and Whole Foods just around the corner.
“This is the best home I’ve ever lived in,” Mr. Stark said, after naming all the ways the place was not up to code. Besides, he said, he could not afford to leave.
All three of the film’s creators are the children of artists or writers, and they have been friends for about 20 years. Ben Jacobson, 41, who directed “Bunny” and plays the lead couple’s best friend, was the main crier at their wedding. A nude portrait of Ms. Colby’s mother, a musician — “from a hippie commune she was living on,” Ms. Colby said — hangs in the living room, as it does in the movie.
“We really wanted to show how we were living currently, and had been living, and all the people that surround us,” Mr. Jacobson said. “And to show that this neighborhood still has flavor; it still has a lot of personality.”
He added: “And the building is the third lead of the film.”
One downstairs neighbor, Linda Rong Mei Chen, who speaks almost no English, plays the landlady; she worked with an interpreter during filming. Another neighbor became the model for Mr. Price’s character, who repeatedly needs Bunny’s help to get in and out of the building. At one point during filming, that actual neighbor decided to blast heavy metal out of his open doorway. Anyone who has lived in the East Village will relate.
“It was like meta, meta, meta,” said Mr. Price, whose daughter also appears in the movie, and whose son-in-law helped write and produce it. “The whole real-life building was passing by the artificial building in the hallways, saying, ‘Excuse me, excuse me, trying to get through here.’”
The building, a tenement built in 1900, was essential both financially and aesthetically, Mr. Stark said. The stairways are narrow and noisy, the ceilings low and claustrophobic. “You couldn’t recreate Linda’s apartment,” he said. “Like, you open a drawer and it’s just orange peels. There’s a can of tuna in the bathroom sink. You know, it’s perfect.”
The building’s wiring could not handle the electrical load of the shoot, so the filmmakers had to bring in generators and air-conditioners. A few tenants temporarily gave up their apartments.
“Most people, I will say, since the place isn’t the nicest building in the world, if you did offer them a little money or an opportunity to be not here, they’re like, ‘OK,’” said Mr. Stark.
But Mr. Jacobson said he had no interest in dwelling on the neighborhood’s sketchier past, and no nostalgia for the days of shooting galleries and abandoned buildings.
“We’re not, like, ‘Oh, we need the rats and the gunshots and the violence and putting your hand in the door to get the drugs,’” he said. “No one needs that. And it’s not like we long for that to come back. It’s just, with some of that comes a little bit of flavor.”
Since making the movie, the two men have been able to quit their bartending jobs. (Ms. Colby’s band, the Liza Colby Sound, had a gig at Lucinda’s, down the street from the apartment, this week.) They now have managers and are developing a series for FX. And they’re shopping around a second movie, called “The Doorman,” to take place uptown this time.
“We’ve been hustling, day by day, week by week, to just bring in some money,” Mr. Jacobson said.
The sweet smell of success? Actually, another New York story.
Without his bartending shifts, Mr. Jacobson said, “I’ve never been more poor in my life.”
John Leland is a reporter covering life in New York City for The Times.
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