By Hector Gonzalez
Staff Write

March 25, 2015 -- When filmmaker Michael W. Barnard set out in 1999 to document the history of the Pico area of Santa Monica, he wanted to provide audiences with a window into the changing face of a neighborhood where he’d lived on and off for years.
 
Little did Barnard know then that his film, “90404: Changing,” which took him seven years to complete, would resonate as deeply now as it did when it premiered in Los Angeles in 2006 -- perhaps even more so, he said.

“Basically, I wanted this film to get people to start thinking about who gets to decide the form of their community,” said Barnard. “As it happens, that issue has come more and more to the forefront in Santa Monica in the ensuing years. And so the film, I think, has grown in relevance as time has gone by.”

Now, with the City deep into the process of updating its zoning and land-use standards for the next two decades, “90404: Changing” is generating renewed interest among residents.

Barnard is predicting a large turnout for a special screening of his movie on Thursday at the Martin Luther King Jr. Auditorium of the Santa Monica Main Library, 601 Santa Monica Boulevard, at 6:30 p.m.

“There’s going to be a lot of people coming to this,” he said.

Sponsored by the Santa Monica Conservancy, the screening comes at a time of increasing anxiety among Pico residents over the arrival of the Expo light rail line next year and its potential to change the face of neighborhood yet again.

“I think they (Santa Monica Conservancy officials) felt it was a good way to get people thinking about development, community, and the form of our city, and who gets to decide these things and how,” said Barnard.

Some Pico area residents believe their neighborhood is at new crossroads.

Recently, leaders of the Pico Neighborhood Association presented a proposal to create the Pico Neighborhood District, which would set uniform development standards to “ensure that the scale and design of new or rehabilitated development” doesn’t diminish the neighborhood’s unique makeup, according to the proposal.

“We’re concerned that, without zoning protections, with the light rail coming we’ll see more families displaced,” Pico Neighborhood Association Co-Chair Maria Loya said when the group presented the proposal earlier this month. “We’ve seen what’s happened in the past and we know what’s coming.”

As the most culturally diverse neighborhood in Santa Monica, the 90404 zip code area has seen a number of demographic changes over the years, as Barnard documents in his film.

“This film shows how at one point there was somewhere around 30,000 African Americans who lived in this neighborhood, and that is not very well known,” Barnard said.

“Two things changed that -- World War II and Douglass Aircraft, which brought in a lot of people from all over the country to work and raised the rents.”

The building of the Santa Monica (10) Freeway “right through the heart of that neighborhood dislocated a lot of people who were never able to return,” he said.

“It really broke the community in a certain way,” he added.

Part history, part documentary and part fantasy, the film explores the physical and spiritual sides of the Pico neighborhood, Barnard said. When he first started out on the project, Barnard said he envisioned creating a hybrid film -- a documentary with a fictional plot line.

“I wrote a script in which I imagined a Mexican-American woman who is making a documentary about the neighborhood she lived in. I wanted to use her as the story’s protagonist,” said Barnard.

While working with a local puppeteer on a fantasy scene involving giant puppets, Barnard learned that his fictional protagonist actually existed.

Artist Paulina Sahagun, who was teaching at UCLA at the time, had really grown up in the Pico area. In the film, she plays the role of a documentary producer, interviewing a number of current and former Pico residents.

After Thursday’s screening, Barnard and Sahagun will answer audience questions about their film.

“The film is a documentary and a drama – it’s not a straight documentary. Paulina in the film is doing real interviews with real people, but then there’s also sequences of Paulina’s life that are more spiritual.”

Barnard said he never set out to make a “strident anti-development film.”

“The film goes much deeper. It’s not like that at all. It’s much more spiritual,” Barnard said. “Obviously, there has be development, buildings have to be rebuilt as more people move in.

“But why not development that’s conscientious and community oriented, that’s not just for the money but for the people who live there?”