From Charlie Chaplin and Mack Sennett to Clint Eastwood, movie makers have used Venice as a backdrop to tell all sorts of stories. Venice has beaches, piers, musclemen, eclectic street life, canals and cottages, bikers, hippies, public art, unusual buildings, and snarled streets. The city even boasts dynamic skateboarders, as in Z-Boys and Lords of Dogtown. What more could a director need?

Jeffrey Stanton maintains a list (always a work-in-progress) of movies filmed in Venice, starting with a 1910 Mary Pickford film and ending in 2005. This is part of a huge Venice History site, and he's written books on the city. An alphabetical list created by J.J. Fortuenti--again, part of much larger site called VirtualVenice--is here. And imdb (Internet Movie DataBase) lists Venice as a location for 263 shoots.

This hub will highlight some of the films intimately connected with Venice.

When Orson Welles envisioned his 1958 classic noir film, Touch of Evil, he used Venice. The city is disguised as a Mexican border town, but some of the old architecture with its arches is very recognizable. Tim Dirks of Filmsite.org calls Touch of Evil's long opening scene--which follows a car through four blocks of the city--"an audacious, incredible, breathtaking, three-minute, uninterrupted crane tracking shot."

Touch of Evil featured stars like Charlton Heston, Joseph Cotten, Janet Leigh (pre-Psycho), and Dennis Weaver, and had cameos by Mercedes McCambridge in drag, Zsa Zsa Gabor, and Marlene Dietrich. The film, as released in 1958, was hacked up, to the disgust of Welles. In 1998, though, it was re-edited with restored scenes to conform to Welles' original vision. THAT's the version you want to get!

Bill Cosby, Raquel Welch, and Harvey Keitel were all over Venice the movie Mother, Jugs, and Speed. Johnny Depp's Blow gets moving on the beach in Venice, and the kids from Grease (John Travolta, Olivia Newton-John, Stockard Channing, et al) danced and sang at Venice High (aka Rydell)--also used in American History X.

Richard Gere's breakout role came in 1980, when he took over for John Travolta in American Gigolo. The film takes place all over the West side of Los Angeles, even using the UCLA campus at times, but much of it was shot in Venice.

When Michael Douglas left his car in a traffic jam and took off to go see his ex-wife in Falling Down, he was heading toward Venice. The film's final sequences were shot on the Venice Pier.

Sandra Bullock had two movies in Venice Her big hit Speed starts out in Venice; she lived in Venice in The Net. Likewise, Richard Dreyfuss lived in Venice in The Buddy System and chased a bad guy there The Big Fix; Venice was also in Dreyfuss' Down and Out in Beverly Hills.

Other stars who lived in Venice--at least cinematically (some live there in reality) are Jeff Bridges in The Big Lebowski, Romy and Michelle (in Romy and Michelle's High School Reunion), Cameron Diaz in Charlie's Angels, Bridget Fonda in Point of No Return, Demi Moor in Seventh Sign, and Michelle Pfieffer (before arrest) in White Oleander.

Besides the beach and boardwalk, Venice sports canals designed and built by Abbot Kinney. They make great venues for car chases, as the directors of Cobra, Bulllitt, and Hollywood Homicide discovered. The canals of Venice also show up in Harold Lloyd's 1918 Why Pick on Me?, American Pie, Charlie's Angels (the movie), Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds, Double Indemnity, Gunga Din (1939),High Sierra (1941), and Spawn of the Slithis.

For more information on the history of Venice and its canals, see my other hub: Venice California History