Studio 214 began life as the Sunshine State Liberation Front, a radically orthodox, neo-leftist, insurgent cell loosely affiliated with the Southern American Freedom Militia, and the Proletarian Mothers Against the Global Capitalist Conspiracy, both of which, curiously, are subsidiaries of Wompco Industries (slogan "no one does polystyrene like Wompco"). Though records indicate the cell officially
forming in 1987, they didn't begin their activity until much later, mostly because until then each member believed that the others were "just kidding" . This behavior might have continued on their part indefinitely until one faithful day in 1993, when the group convened to celebrate the anniversary of Che Guevara's assassination, or his birthday (they weren't sure which). Three bottles of pinot gringo and one game of truth or dare later, the SSLF started their reign of terror, as they imagined it, with the bombing of a new water purification facility in Homestead. They used a bomb made three years earlier which had since been buried and forgotten in the trunk of a rust colored station wagon named "Gertrude". The group officially claimed responsibility for the bombing two days later, to which the authorities replied "what the hell did you do that for?" No explanation for the bombing was ever given. The SSLF continued their insurgent activity until late 1997. The group had recently failed in a kidnapping attempt of the Governor's daughter, who they were going to use as leverage to force resolution in the state legislature of a bill giving the legislature the option to create an exploratory committee charged with putting together an independent investigators office to analyze state and local governmental bureaucracy. The kidnapping would have been successful except for the minor detail of kidnapping the wrong person. Instead of nabbing the governor's daughter, they had taken the governor's housemaid's cousin. Seeing that this situation too closely resembled the plot of Kurosawa's " High and Low", and fearing the ghost of Toshiro Mifune would come to them in full samurai armor and armed with a katana (did I mention alcohol was involved?), the group returned the young girl to her parents. The next morning, a manifesto was sent to local news station across Florida announcing the end of hostilities from the Sunshine State Liberation Front forever. Some affiliates actually mentioned it in the news. What actually happened was a restructuring of the group into a motion picture production studio, meant to create propaganda films for the global socialist movement. At least that was the plan until they actually ran out of beer one night, and sobered up long enough to decide they wanted to make some money for a change. They soon got to work on their first feature "the low road". The movie is about a struggling local musician who was down on his luck and charged with retrieving money stolen from his former manager by a rival attempting to ruin the manager's chances at buying a hotly contested new property on Miami Beach. Reviewers and movie critics "praised" the movie as "convoluted" and "without the merest shred of decency or creativity". At least, that is what they would have said had the movie actually been finished. Due to budgetary and time constraints, however (namely that they didn't have one and had ran out of the other), the project was temporarily shelved and a new film was conceived. One that would take into account the production company's lack of funding, which they were eventually able to secure some of, thanks to the generosity of friends and family.
