FILM BANNED FOR SHOWING POT-SMOKING CHIMPS

Marijuana Film's Ontarian Creator Won't Cut Grass

Ontario's film censors have ruled it's okay for humans to be seen getting
stoned on pot, but not laboratory monkeys.

They've issued a province-wide ban on theatre screenings of Grass, Toronto
filmmaker Ron Mann's acclaimed marijuana documentary, demanding the removal
of a 20-second scene showing dope-smoking rhesus monkeys and chimpanzees.

The film's distributor, Lions Gate Films, will appeal the Ontario Film
Review Board ruling tomorrow, but Mann, an award-winning documentarian, has
vowed not to cut the offending scene, obtained from 30-year-old archival
footage done by U.S. government medical researchers.

Grass, narrated by Woody Harrelson, had its world premiere at last
September's Toronto International Film Festival, which is exempt from
censorship.

The film had been scheduled to begin its theatre run June 16 at the Bloor
Cinema, after a preview June 10 at the Paramount. But all release plans in
Ontario are on hold.

"The censor board shouldn't have lit up while watching," Mann, 41, fumed
yesterday. "I thought the film would get banned in the United States, not
in Canada."

Grass is screening to rave reviews in New York (the New York Times calls it
"punchy and enjoyable"), San Francisco and Seattle and will open in 17 more
U.S. cities on June 16 despite its depiction of the history of pot in
America, and its mocking of the response of police and government.

The three Ontario censors who ordered the ban here say the monkey scene
constitutes animal abuse. In their written report, the censors, identified
only as "Roberta, Janet and Peter," complain that the monkeys are
"restrained in lab setting appear(ing) very frightened and uncomfortable,"
though they do not seem physically agitated.

The censors said the scene, filmed in 1970, violates the Ontario Theatres
Act by depicting "a scene where an animal has been abused in the making of
the film."

The censors had no objection to the film's many other scenes showing humans
smoking pot, nor by scenes showing stoned mice toppling off tables and
drugged fish swimming sideways. "I'm not really sure what the objection
actually is," Mann said. "I don't think anyone is going to go home and try
these experiments on their pets."

Lions Gate spokesperson John Bain said his company was appalled by the
ruling, which could delay Grass' debut elsewhere in Canada.

"If you put an infinite number of monkeys in a room with an infinite number
of typewriters, they'd eventually come up with a similar ruling," Bain said.

Review board censors will rescreen Grass tomorrow. Mann has won prizes for
such pop-culture histories as Comic Book Confidential and Twist, but this
isn't the first time he's run afoul of Ontario censors.

In 1979, censors objected to a scene in his film Poetry In Motion, in which
a poet praised female breasts - even though no naked breasts were shown. He
appealed and won.

Mann notes that Grass is about the suppression of personal freedoms, so "I
wonder if there's a subtext or a hidden agenda to what the board is doing
here."

Does he think the board aims to suppress the film's pro-marijuana message?
"If I smoked enough enough pot and was paranoid enough, I would probably
think that was true. But I just don't know."