The Venice coffeehouse scene built on a failed desert island utopia project

Evidence

A chunk of the movie was shot in Venice (Los Angeles), the rest mainly filmed in Mexico—where Rice had gone on a fruitless pilgrimage to the island “utopia” that Venice coffee-shop entrepreneur Eric “Big Daddy” Nord had planned and, for lack of water, abandoned—or on the road. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 376

Categorization

• XREF: Evokes the pattern in One Square Inch of Silence and The Soundscape where a utopian natural site fails and its failure becomes infrastructure for a coastal countercultural scene.