THE FEDS VERSUS THE HEADS

Ontario bureaucrats tried to ban Ron Mann's pot documentary, but they just
ended up making him madder

What a strange week it has been for Toronto documentary filmmaker Ron Mann.
His new film, Grass, an irreverent but revealing history of American
marijuana policy, was drawing strong numbers and great reviews in the
United States.

Mann showed it last week (narrated free of charge by hemp activist Woody
Harrelson) at New York's Film Forum theatre to a standing ovation. He had
just heard some bizarre news from Lion's Gate films. His documentary, which
had been shown at festivals from Singapore to South America -- "in places
where you'd probably get your arms cut off for being a pot head" -- had
been banned in Ontario. "I told the New York Forum audience what had just
happened and they were appalled."

The Ontario Review Board's decision, however, wasn't about marijuana, but
about animal abuse. From the more than 400 hours of archival footage that
Mann surveyed, he used one 20-second clip of rhesus monkeys and chimps high
on pot, shot 30 years ago by U.S. government medical researchers. The
animals wore restraints, which was the stumbling block. By Monday, the
Ontario Review Board had altered its decision on appeal, deciding sensibly
that the footage came from a proper lab report of historical significance.
Grass will still open as planned next Friday in Toronto and Vancouver.

"It made me wonder about King Kong. Didn't he take quite a lot of abuse on
film? And they show that a lot. I started thinking about that whole
see-no-evil, hear-no-evil thing. Of course, if I were paranoid . . .," says
Mann.

The episode had some strange echoes for him. On the same day he showed his
second feature film, Poetry In Motion,at the Film Forum in 1982, he learned
that Canadian director Terre Nash's Academy Award-winning film If You Love
This Planet (a record of a lecture by antinuclear activist Dr. Helen
Caldicott) might be banned in the United States. The film was eventually
distributed there, though the Justice Department required U.S. distributors
to label the film "political propaganda."

"I thought Grass might get banned in the United States," says Mann. "You
know -- another excuse to Blame Canada. But I never imagined it would
happen here."

The film is his most directly political. "It's an issue about personal
freedom, and something that I got angry about," he says.

In the mid-eighties, a friend at New York University was arrested for
possession and was jailed for two days. "His parents didn't know where he
was. His mother was hospitalized, and it traumatized him. That's what
really was in the back of my mind to make this movie."

Friends, says Mann, looked surprised when he first said he was considering
making a pot movie:. "They'd say, 'Is that still illegal?' We have this
attitude that it's a non-issue, that we're over it. But the truth is, [U.S.
President Bill] Clinton has only accelerated the drug war that was
reinvigorated by [Ronald] Reagan and [George] Bush. The war against
marijuana is bigger than ever. There were 600,000 Americans arrested last
year for marijuana charges. There's been $200-billion spent on fighting
marijuana, and it's just insanity."

The subject of marijuana is a natural for a filmmaker interested in the
history of the counterculture. Mann recalls the first song that politicized
him was Phil Ochs's Outside of a Small Circle of Friends, and the lyrics:
"Smoking marijuana is more fun than drinking beer/ But a friend of us got
bust and they gave us 20 years."

"Here was a recreational drug of choice enjoyed by a lot of people in my
generation and they were considered criminals."

Born at the back end of the baby boom in 1958, he grew up in Toronto. As he
once said: "My family is Jewish, but I don't belong to anything. I don't
have any roots. I'm uprooted. My spirituality was drugs, hitchhiking,
[Jack] Kerouac, John Cage and certain lyrics of Frank Zappa."

In his teens, Mann worked on the Yonge Street strip at Sam the Record Man.
(His associate producer, Pages bookstore owner Marc Glassman, worked at the
rival A&A.) Mann was excited by the underground histories of jazz and rock
music, and remembers kids coming in and asking him for "good music to get
high to." He'd take them right past the Pink Floyd albums up into the jazz
section. "They usually didn't come back."

By the eighties, when he first found there was an "anti-sixties backlash,
where everything I grew up with was being dismissed and rewritten somehow,
I wanted to say it shouldn't be all swept away."

Mann, who started making short movies in early childhood, met the man he
describes as his second father, Emile "Dee" de Antonio, in the early
eighties. Antonio created a series of alternative views of American
history, including Point of Order (on McCarthyism) and Rush to Judgement
(the Warren Commission investigation into the assassination of John F.
Kennedy).

"In a sense," Mann says, "I guess I'd like to do for the sixties what Dee
did for the fifties and the whole Cold War environment." Mann deliberately
avoided using the talking-head interviews that are so popular with
television. He tells the story entirely through archival footage, the art
work of underground cartoonist Paul Mavrides, and a soundtrack that
includes original music by Mark Mothersbaugh (Devo, Rugrats) and an
anthology of dope music through the century.

Mann's five feature films chart out a significant part of American bohemian
and underground culture in the past few decades. Along the way, he has won
dozens of international awards.

One of Mann's strengths as a documentarian is his sense of the
dramatic. The drama of Grass, he says, was "the Feds versus the heads."

And in any drama, there has to be a protagonist. The star of Grass is Harry
J. Anslinger, the first U.S. drug czar, an evangelist who took
anti-marijuana laws -- essentially designed to control Mexican immigrants
- -- and built a scare campaign. An obscure figure, who wanted the attention
J. Edgar Hoover had, Anslinger dominated U.S. drug policy from the twenties
to the fifties.

The film's second star is Richard Nixon, who threw out a major report that
recommended decriminalizing marijuana. Nixon provides some of the most
entertainingly weird footage in the film.

"You can't beat Richard Nixon. I had forgotten what an absolute superstar
he is on film," says Mann. "Every time he's on, he says the most amazingly
outrageous things."

Mann insists his movie isn't intended as an exercise in nostalgia for baby
boomers: "I made this movie for college kids because they don't know this
story, but it's an immediate political issue for them. Personally, I think
it should be a prerequisite on college campuses, for freshman week. What's
happened in the last week just reminds me that this movie really isn't
about pot, it's about exercising your personal freedom." Grass opens next
Friday in Toronto and Montreal, and elsewhere in Canada this summer.