Head to the theater to see Sacha Baron Cohen's new movie, The Dictator and keep your eyes open for your favorite earth-friendly brands, including Bloomington, Indiana's Twisted Limb Paperworks.
The movie is about an oppressive dictator from the fictional country of Wadiya and his misadventures in New York City. While trying to protect his country from democracy, he falls in love with the manager of an organic grocery cooperative. Much of the film's humor derives from the egalitarian principles of the coop standing in sharp contrast to those of the dictator.
People either love or hate Sacha Baron's Cohen's button-pushing over-the-top comedy, but his movie is yet one more example of environmental values and products becoming a part of mainstream culture. With plenty of scenes taking place in the coop, the film provides significant screen time for a lot of environmentally friendly products while eliciting hefty laughs from political satire, offensive jokes and crude pranks. Some of these green products belong to Twisted Limb Paperworks, a company that has been producing handmade 100% recycled paper in Bloomington, IN since 1998.
Sheryl Woodhouse-Keese, owner of Twisted Limb Paperworks met the movie's set designer at a green products media expo in New York City in April 2011. She knew very little about the upcoming film, not even its name, only that it was a comedy with Sacha Baron Cohen, Anna Faris, and Ben Kingsley, and that eco-friendly product displays were needed to fill one of the movie's most used sets. Within a week of returning to Bloomington, she was mailing a floor display of her colorful recycled papers, cards, and invitations topped with a large sign bearing the Twisted Limb logo to the Paramount Pictures set crew.
Depending upon how the filming and editing were done a product might not have shown up at all on screen, or at best, only fleetingly. In reality, the Twisted Limb Paperworks display shows up four times in the movie with the camera paused on the logo a couple of times and customers looking through the papers and cards another.
Woodhouse Keese admits that while she did think most of the movie was quite funny, there were a few things that were a bit too base and unnecessary in her mind. "However," she says, "It was really hard to have an objective opinion about the quality of the movie when I was just so excited to see our display and logo up there on the screen."