Can She Bake a Cherry Pie?

New York’s Upper West Side comes to life in actor-director Henry Jaglom’s (A Safe Place, NYFF9) freewheeling fourth feature. Karen Black embodies Zee, a middle-aged woman abandoned by her husband. Wandering the streets of Manhattan and endlessly muttering to herself, she serendipitously meets Eli (Jaglom regular Michael Emil) at a coffee shop. A topsy-turvy romance ensues as they go to concerts and movies, fight and make love, and traverse city streets filled with real-life pedestrians—the filmmakers preferring to capture New York as it is over hiring extras and staging scenes. Frances Fisher and Michael Margotta round out the cast, with notable cameos from Larry David and Jaglom’s friend and business partner Orson Welles, who plays a charming movie magician. An endearing and dryly comedic portrait of the randomness of urban life, Can She Bake a Cherry Pie? is humbly suffused with a sweet and tender spirit, but it’s also a captivating, invaluable document of a time and a place. A Hope Runs High Films release. 

This restoration was completed from a 4K, 16-bit scan of the 35mm interpositive by Vinegar Syndrome in Bridgeport, Connecticut, via an ARRISCAN XT. Scanning Technician: Brandon Upson. Frame-by-frame manual digital restoration and color grading was completed by Marcus Johnson of Emulsional Recovery. This restoration was a collaboration between Hope Runs High and Cinématographe, supervised by Taylor Purdee of Hope Runs High and Justin LaLiberty of Cinématographe. Film materials made available through the generous cooperation of the Academy Film Archive.