The Burt Reynolds & Friends Museum, which since 2003 has occupied the old First Union Bank building in downtown Jupiter, Florida, will have to move. On June 6, the town council declared the property "surplus" -- a first step toward its eventual sale.

Jupiter needs to sell the property, which it owns, to help it fund a $3 million pledge to bring The Scripps Research Institute to town. Jupiter evidently sees a better future with hundreds of biomedical researchers and scientists in town, rather than with a 1970s Hollywood heartthrob who once posed nude for a centerfold in Cosmopolitan.

Jupiter is perhaps the wealthiest community on the often-wealthy East Coast of Florida, and Burt Reynolds -- star of films such as Smokey and the Bandit, Deliverance, and Boogie Nights -- is the town's most famous resident. But Burt apparently isn't putting up the $3 million to buy the property. And the town didn't feel as if it owed much to the celebrity, whose other just-a-hair-shy-of-successful tourist businesses in Jupiter were the Burt Reynolds Ranch and the Burt Reynolds Dinner Theater.

The museum, whose signature exhibit is a canoe used in Deliverance, will remain open until the property is sold. The museum's director and president, Mike Daniel, believes that it will then relocate locally, possibly to the now-empty grounds of the former Burt Reynolds Ranch.

[06/20/2006]