A loving look at Venice

Brad Bemis’ engaging documentary “Venice: Lost and Found” takes an affectionate but balanced and clear-eyed look at the past and present of Southern California’s most colorful beach community through the eyes of many residents, several of them celebrities.

This all-too-brief -- only 58 minutes -- yet fairly comprehensive overview opens gracefully with interspersed stills, many of them postcards, of the community old and new, giving way to moving film, thus establishing a sense of continuity in an area that in fact has an ongoing history of wrenching change.

Venice today faces two seemingly contradictory challenges: a high degree of drug- and gang-related street crime, especially but not exclusively in the heavily black and Latino Oakwood neighborhood, coupled with the relentless gentrification that continues to displace the elderly population.

Bemis takes a cautiously upbeat tone in regard to Venice’s future, content to give voice to a full spectrum of predictions. It’s hard not to agree with a longtime resident, director Tony Bill, who wryly observes that Los Angeles seems to be tilting toward the sea, with Venice the narrow end of a funnel, leading to a community even more congested than now. Indeed, Bemis might well consider expanding his film at some point to feature length to address the challenges in preserving Venice’s bohemian character and diversity.

In 1904 entrepreneur Abbot Kinney began a swift transformation of a stretch of beachside swampland into his “Venice of America.” He envisioned it as a cultural community as well as a scaled-down Beaux Arts emulation of the Italian original, complete with canals, which were soon lined with Craftsman-style cottages.

What Kinney actually created was a picturesque, if charmingly kitschy, beach resort of such popularity he had to switch gears to emphasize the carnival over the cultural. Local historian Elayne Alexander considers Kinney’s death in 1920 the community’s greatest calamity, for it meant the city’s annexation by Los Angeles, followed in the 1930s by the filling in of many of the canals and the pulling of leases held by Kinney’s heirs.

Alexander undeniably has a point, but the decline of Venice, marked by the demolition of its enchanting fantasy of an amusement-zone pier in 1946 (an unforgivable loss to all of us old enough to remember it) did allow it to flourish as a low-rent, multicultural community for beats, hippies and artists -- and also for a substantial drug culture.

When artist Billy Al Bengston set up shop on a $30-a-month budget, he says, “I think I was the only non-drug-dealing artist in the area.” Fellow longtime resident Dennis Hopper provides a witty and invaluable survey of Venice as a fertile artists’ colony. He points out that 40 years ago, when Andy Warhol came to town for his seminal exhibition at the Ferus Gallery on La Cienega Boulevard, it was in Venice that Warhol made his first movie, “Tarzan and Jane Regained

It was also in Venice that Charlie Chaplin first tried out his Tramp character before the camera, with his 1914 “Kid Auto Race,” which will be screened with “Venice: Lost and Found.” Also in Venice, modern dancer Isadora Duncan took inspiration from the crashing waves; and Ray Manzarek ran into his old UCLA buddy Jim Morrison, who sang “Moonlight Drive” for him, giving birth to the Doors then and there. (Bemis might have also have noted that Duke Ellington performed the West Coast premiere of his “Far East Suite” in the band shell back in the ‘60s.)

Bemis takes notice of the surfer culture, with references to the skateboarders who followed, and makes a nod to the bodybuilders -- though with no mention of the legendary original Gold’s Gym or the revived Muscle Beach -- and surveys the Ocean Front Walk’s homeless as well as its street merchants and performers.

No one captures the enduring spirit of Venice better than Harry Perry, who, having traveled over much of the world, asks where else he could play a guitar while roller-skating and collect money for it. “Venice: Lost and Found” leaves us wanting more.

*

‘Venice: Lost and Found’:

MPAA rating: Unrated.

Times guidelines: Some drug-taking references; otherwise suitable family fare.

A Brad Bemis presentation. Producer-director Brad Bemis. Executive producer Angela Galletta. Writer-researcher Evan Bartelheim. Cinematographer Matt Stell. Additional camera Sam Boyer, Eric Soto, Todd Roberts, Takeshi Kimi. Editor Robert J. Levy. Segment director Garies Davies. Running time: 58 minutes.

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