DIRECTOR'S CAREER GOES UP IN SMOKE

'Everywhere I Go, People Give Me Suitcases Filled With Pot'

Toronto film director Ron Mann isn't exactly a household name -- small
surprise, given a career built on documentary films about such
fringe-culture obsessions as comic books and dance crazes. Tilling the
soil of underground culture isn't exactly the fast track to multiplex
and mainstream recognition.

So Mann could probably be forgiven for his wide-eyed incredulity at
the long list of interview requests his answering machine has been
collecting over the past couple of weeks. Court TV. The Today Show.
Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher. David Letterman.

The sudden mainstream interest in Mann's decidedly fringey career is
easily explained, given the subject of his current film, Grass, a
lovingly-compiled history of the marijuana decriminalization effort in
the United States, from the turn of the century to present day. And
the film, an amalgamation of anti-marijuana propaganda films,
historical footage and TV out-takes, with a voice-over narrative
supplied by Woody Harrelson, the actor and hemp activist, has bestowed
on its creator more than a crush of sudden media interest. Mann has
been installed in the uneasy role of folk hero.

"Everywhere I go, people give me suitcases filled with pot. It's kind
of hard to turn down, actually," he says, hunching his shoulders
sheepishly. "That film is like a party everywhere it goes."

In a way, it seems only fitting Mann's introduction to the world at
large -- the world outside his decidedly fringe interests -- comes
from a plant that has become one of the alternative culture's most
mainstream-friendly elements. Mann, a plump, endearingly disheveled
man in his forties who stumbles quizzically into long pauses while he
speaks, his hands buried in his shock of white hair, is fond of
quoting the numbers:

"I've been taking a count. In the past six months, I've met three
people who have never smoked pot. Sixty million people in the United
States smoke regularly," Mann says (on his first reference, it's 60
million; then 70 million; and finally, 72 million, almost as though
Mann is becoming more convinced of what he's saying the more often he
says it). "These people are not criminals. And yet, we seem so
determined to treat them that way, and it's just not right." In a way,
Mann seems to be riding marijuana's own crossover appeal to a success
of his own.

So is the film Mann's way of agitating for one of his own pet causes?
A little, he says. Maybe. But he's not carrying a torch for a
pot-loving Sixties generation -- hardly, in fact.

"Hell, I was scared of those people," Mann laughs, his voice rising in
mock-hysteria. "I was normal. Yippie smoke-ins? No, thanks. I didn't
want to get involved with that, or got to jail, or go climb a tree or
something," he says.

"This is a political film with a political message, and the message is
a pretty simple one: in a free society, people should be free to
express themselves."

But in taking up the cause, Mann has found no shortage of allies
probably just as interested in marijuana as they are in the more lofty
goals of liberty and free expression. At its U.S. premier, at the
South by Southwest music festival in Austin, throngs of rock and roll
fans greeted Mann with generous offers of free pot. When the film was
shown at Film Forum in New York on May 31, Mann says, the crowd rose
to a standing ovation. "I remember one guy telling me that people
should be screaming in the streets to get these laws changed," Mann
says proudly.

Mann's most important ally, though, has been Woody Harrelson, a
long-time environmental activist and a vocal member of the lobby to
legalize industrial hemp. The film, through Mann's director friend
Alex Koss (Sid and Nancy), found its way to Harrelson's brother, Brett
"and Brett said 'I just gotta show this to Woody.' " When Woody
Harrelson saw it, Mann said, he phoned right away and volunteered to
narrate -- free of charge. "And that was pretty courageous of him. A
lot of people in Hollywood are so closeted about it. He was really
taking a chance, because he knew a lot of people would say to him 'Oh,
you just want to legalize hemp so you can smoke pot.' But he just said
to me that he wanted to do what was right."

Harrelson's righteous stand on the issue is constantly echoed in
Mann's own sermons on the subject. The director waxes romantic on weed
with such passion -- Mann's speeches on the drug are punctuated with
long rambles on repression and the power of the people -- it's not
hard to be convinced Mann might have abandoned the objective eye of a
documentary filmmaker when he made Grass. And if there was ever any
doubt, he then does the favour of confirming it.

"I admit it," he says. "It's agit-prop. Definitely.
[Decriminalization] is exactly what I want. How can I get that across
to people? Well, for one thing, that's Woody Harrelson up there.
Nobody's going to listen to the freaky decriminalization guy, the guy
with a huge beard and dreadlocks, but they're going to listen [to],
and show up for, Woody Harrelson."

When they do show up -- and plenty have so far, as the film posts
solid U.S. numbers since its early June debut -- what they'll see is a
film that serves as a guide through a century of marijuana
prohibition. Decade by decade, Mann bookends each era with comic-book
style graphics that highlight the cumulative costs of the war on
marijuana (which he says has cost billions of dollars).

The guide throughout, though is unmistakably Mann. There are heroes
and villains -- with the villains in this case being the architects of
marijuana prohibition: The first U.S. anti-drug commissioner, Harvey
J. Anslinger; Richard Nixon, who helped foster his crime-busting image
by escalating the war on drugs in the Seventies; and of course, Nancy
Reagan, she of the "Just Say No" 1980s. And the heroes? That's easy,
in Mann's eyes: the legions of happy, flower-wielding pot-smokers,
singing and dancing, having a good time, not hurting anyone.

While the government is armed with propaganda and weapons, Mann's
armies are glassy-eyed and harmless -- the strongest argument he has
for legalization.

"It's like the Berlin Wall. Eventually it's gonna come down. And
people are going to say, eventually, 'Wow, why was that illegal,
anyway?' It's such a powerful symbol -- but that's all it is. And we
need to get over it."