The first Other Venice Film Festival, a weekend event at the Electric Lodge, is designed to call attention to the presence of filmmaking activity in the community. Charlie Chaplin introduced his beloved Tramp character in his second two-reeler for Mack Sennett in "Kid Auto Races at Venice" (1914), and Venice has been a favorite location for movies ever since, most notably Orson Welles' "Touch of Evil" (1958).

But Other Venice's main point will be to celebrate the work of filmmakers who are residents.

The festival opens with Michael Pressman's "Frankie and Johnny Are Married," a bittersweet, wryly amusing "dramatic fiction" about the producer-director's true-life tribulations while trying to stage the play "Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune." Pressman had decided that after a decade of marriage, he and his wife, actress Lisa Chess, should work together.

To play opposite Chess' waitress in the Terence McNally drama, they cast as the short-order cook an actor friend, who proves temperamental and insecure and who considers it beneath him to actually learn lines.

Financial disaster looms, and misery descends upon the couple. Pressman, however, makes a bold decision to try to save the day. Chess, her husband and Alan Rosenberg as the cook are terrific, as is Jillian Armenante as the play's overconfident producer. The film is studded with cameos by familiar names and faces.