Cisco Pike Was a Friend of Mine

"By 1958, Venice had so faded from founder Abbot Kinney's dreams of glory that Orson Welles chose it to stand in for a decrepit Mexican border town in 'Touch of Evil.' The decay intensified during the next decade, with more than 500 buildings demolished in the early 1960s alone. 'Cisco Pike' depicts the neighborhood less than a year after the first of several arson fires ravaged the Pacific Ocean Park pier (bankrupt since 1967); the script describes 'a community of the young and poor. The now generation, now wasted on reds and wine, sits beside pensioners on the boardwalk benches.'
"Cisco makes his home on Ocean Front Walk south of Ozone, near the pier's ruins, a constant reminder of what was shattered in only a few short years. What had survived through 1970 was Olivia's, the Southern food and UCLA film student hangout immortalized by the Doors' song 'Soul Kitchen,' and it's here that Cisco meets Buffalo for a plate of biscuits and chicken, or maybe to get one last look at the neighborhood."

In the Los Angeles Times' Sunday magazine, West, Sean Howe revives Cisco Pike, the 1972 movie now released for the first time on DVD.