Live Nude Girls Unite!

In this documentary, a group of strippers attempt to unionize against their employers at a peep-show theater in San Francisco. The friend that accompanied me to the screening disliked the fact that it was shot with a Super-8 type camera, but I didn't mind. The poor quality seemed appropriately intimate; like a home movie. This documentary displayed not only the plight of the girls to fight for basic employee benefits, but also the struggle of the narrator (Julia Query) in admitting to her mother that she delivers peep shows for money. The well-educated and extremely clever Julia is the daughter of a renowned New York doctor who has devoted a solid chunk of her life to aiding prostitutes. My major complaint with the movie was that it was very short. At 75 minutes, it was shorter than most animated features. Otherwise, it was an interesting and provocative look into the mentality of strippers and THEIR feelings about their occupation. It's something that people spend little time considering, and it was nice to see something un-cliché for once. Live Nude Girls Unite goes highly recommended.

Believe it or not, `Live Nude Girls Unite!' is a true, funny and heartfelt mother-daughter story! I saw the film at it's world premiere in San Francisco in the spring of 2000, and I still find myself thinking about it occasionally. It follows a group of dancers at a San Francisco strip club, `The Lusty Lady', as they work and fight to become the world's first unionized sex workers. This is interesting given that The Lusty Lady (TLL), is `women owned and operated', and the customers use coin machines to pay to view the dancers behind glass, so there's no tipping for physical contact between dancers and customers. Under these conditions, you'd think the dancers should have few complaints and no compelling reasons to organize. (Typically dancers pay the clubs a high fee to perform, relying on customer tips for their actual wages, especially tips in exchange for sex). I mean if you've decided to be an exotic dancer, you could be exposed to much worse conditions, right?

Central to the documentary is the story of Julia, a stand-up comedian and one-half of the producing/directing team making the film. Julia has decided to take the opportunity to capture on film her mother's reaction to the news that Julia is an exotic dancer at TLL. Beyond the concern or even horror such a revelation would bring any parent, Julia's mother has seen the worst the sex industry has to offer. She's a physician and advocate for the rights of street prostitutes!

Quite contrary to other user comments, I found the film VERY INTERESTING and applaud the incredible will it took Julia to confront her mother on film, as this event is CRUCIAL TO THE STORY. That moment has the potential to devolve into a Jerry Springer shouting match, but there is a trust and shared intelligence between this mother and her daughter, and they will persevere.

Keep in mind that one of the film makers is a professional comedian, and this is a hilarious film. (One of the funniest moments in the film is some footage borrowed from a popular television news magazine of Julia's mother entertaining and informing a national media figure on her crusade). I highly recommend this documentary.

This film relates the efforts of "exotic dancers" at a San Francisco establishment called The Lusty Lady to organize a labor union and improve their working conditions.

The narrator and central character is Julia Query, a feminist, Jewish, lesbian, stand-up comic, who turned to stripping to make ends meet. The film relates the conditions the strippers worked under, how they decided to organize the union and negotiated their first contract. The club apparently engaged in arbitrary and discriminatory practices, for example, classifying the dancers by race, hair color and other physical attributes.

Negotiating the first contract took many months and the film shows the agony of making decisions on what was and was not negotiable.

On the one hand the dancers do have legitimate grievances, on the other the work they do is sleazy and some would say antisocial and not to be encouraged. While their working conditions are not ideal, they are not coal miners or migrant workers. Compared to some other jobs, strippers have it pretty easy.

Another plot line of the film is Julia's relationship with her mother. Her mother is a physician in New York, who as it happens, works with prostitutes. Julia has not told her mother what she does for a living. When Julia is asked to speak at a conference on the "sex industry" she discovers her mother will also be at the conference and she can no longer put off revealing her occupation to her mother. Needless to say, her mother is not at all pleased and the two become estranged for some months.

The film has moments of humor and drama. The production values are amateurish, in some scenes the color is off (although that could have been due to the poor quality of the print). The film contain adult language and nudity.

I can only assume that the current low rating of this film, despite generally positive comments, is a result of a bunch of idiotic guys renting this thinking it'll be some nice T&A and then being p***ed off because not only are they being asked to THINK, but they're also being asked to show sex industry workers some RESPECT. Looking at the gender breakdown of the votes only further supports this theory. This fact only goes to show why the actions taken by the women of the Lusty Lady are SO important. My fiancee is a stripper, not because she finds it to be fun work, but because it's a decent paying job for a freelance artist between jobs. The funny thing is, people want to believe that those girls are there because they have some sexual compulsion to; hence girls are often asked, "So what do you do for a living?" Any guy reading this who has ever asked a stripper this question, please go jump off the nearest bridge. We don't need morons like you in the gene pool.

Anyway, this mentality, that strippers aren't workers (and try dancing in 8 inch platform heels for 8 hours and tell me it's not hard work), but are sex crazed exhibitionists, fuels the concept that they can be mistreated in the workplace. This movie shows how these women stood up to a negative cultural perception of them to take control of their workplace and fight for the same rights afforded to other workers. It's an inspiring story, and I'd like to think that if more people saw it, and were presented with stories like this more often, maybe we could finally change the public perception of these women.

The title might suggest this movie is exploitative or pornographic or something, but actually it is a generally light hearted look at a serious topic. The movie spends some time on the background of the 'star' of the film, whose mother is a famous NY doctor, but is mainly concerned with the serious topic of work conditions of sex workers. The idea is that just because a person works in the sex industry(here a peep show, but her mom deals with prostitutes), s/he still deserves to have their rights as a worker and person upheld. The movie works as much as a labor documentary (good in this era of decreasing unionization) as anything else. It has some work related scenes of an explicit nature, but overall it is not explicitly sexual at all.

btw I do think the scene where she tells her mother what that she works in the sex industry works. The movie is in part an autobiography and the scene is powerful on its own and as an important event in her life.