Jones and others in the committee are so confident that "Striptease" will win converts to their cause that they have built a political campaign strategy around it.
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"This movie is not about art imitating life," says Paul Tudor Jones, a commodities trader and a founder of the committee. 5 Election Day, allowing additional millions to see it.įor the Save Our Everglades Committee, this is manna from heaven. To compound the sugar industry's bad luck, video stores could have the film before the Nov. The Rojos order evil deeds from aboard their yacht, helpfully named Big Sugar for any in the audience who do not understand who wears the black hat. It does not hurt the environmentalists' cause that the most evil characters in the movie are the sugar-baron Rojos - thinly veiled, malevolent caricatures of the politically powerful Fanjul family of Palm Beach, friends to the Clintons and the Doles and certainly not regarded as lawbreakers. Not surprisingly, the committee immediately embraced "Striptease" - based on Miami Herald columnist Carl Hiaasen's novel. The environmentalists argue that pollution from the sugar cane seeps into the Everglades and Florida Bay, slowly strangling both.
The money would be used to buy sugar cane fields around Lake Okeechobee, among the richest in the world, and let them return to a more natural state. Its Big-Sugar-as-villain message comes at a time when an environmental group called the Save Our Everglades Committee is hard at work on a campaign to change the Florida Constitution to impose a special tax on Florida sugar - a penny a pound. The darkly comic movie could create a public-relations headache for Florida sugar farmers and their allies in the same way that "Norma Rae," starring Sally Field, did in 1979 for anti-union textile companies exploiting female workers. If that reaction is typical, "Striptease" could provide more than summertime entertainment. "You have a lot of ignorant people when it comes to the realization of what's going on." "It will hurt us," says John Hamilton, the theater manager and a lifelong resident of sugar country. Parts of the movie were filmed in the nearby Florida sugar cane fields owned by the United States Sugar Corp., which gladly made them available.īut talk about biting the hand of friendship: As the moviegoers see, the bad guy in the film is Florida's sugar industry - Big Sugar - as personified by the rich, murderous Rojo family.īy satisfying the congressman's debaucheries, the Rojos own his vote for continuing federal subsidies to the sugar industry.Ĭould this be too close to real life for the comfort of Florida's sugar farmers? On screen is the movie "Striptease," starring Demi Moore as the stripper and Burt Reynolds as the corrupt congressman lusting for her.
"Oh, God, that's tooooo much," one woman says to her companion. Inside the Clewiston (Fla.) Theater on the Sugarland Highway in a place nicknamed America's Sweetest Town, moviegoers groan in unison at the sight of the ostentatious yacht called Big Sugar. And environmentalists think it may be a way to help save the Everglades. AND YOU THOUGHT the movie "Striptease" was about Demi Moore taking off her clothes? Folks in Florida think it's an indictment of the sugar industry.