Key West: Bohemia in the Tropics
About The Documentary
When most people think of the tiny island of Key West, Florida, they probably think of Ernest Hemingway or Jimmy Buffett; or conjure images of a laid-back tropical paradise with great fishing and a wild party scene where anything goes. But few outsiders know that Key West the tourist town was created in the 1930s as a way to save the island city after it had gone bankrupt during the Great Depression. And those images that people carry around in their minds of America’s most famous tropical bohemian outpost were first put there by artists and writers paid by the federal government to concoct a colorful history for the island and depict an exotic landscape that would lure tourists and provide Key West with a viable economy.
This half-hour documentary gives a light-hearted but probing account of this largely unknown story. The half-hour film opens during the darkest days of the Great Depression and goes on to explore how the image of Key West created by the government in the 1930s became its destiny—when the city, once the richest in the nation, was forced to turn itself over to federal bureaucrats and accept a future forever tied to tourism.