GRASS, THE MOVIE

"Grass," the new pro-pot movie from veteran documentarian Ron Mann, is
like a good birthday gift - the presentation is something to
appreciate, but the real treat is what's inside.

The wrapping paper of Mann's gift is an amusing but straight history
of our country's marijuana policies from the 1920s to today. But after
removing that wrapping, you'll find a scathing, meticulously
researched indictment of America's war on drugs. According to drug
historian Harry G. Levine, a professor at Queens College, "It's
impeccable, meticulous scholarship and a brilliant recitation of history."

The film, which opens on May 31 after four years of production, traces
the rise, partial eclipse and re-flowering of our government's
marijuana prohibition. It's filled with clips of maniacal, "Reefer
Madness"-type propaganda, which progress from the psychosis portrayed
in the 1930s to mellow girls dancing in their poke-your-eye-out 1950s
bras, to Nixon looking sweaty and furtive. No matter the decade, the
clips feature Neanderthal cops in cheap suits, typically sycophantic
reporters and poor misguided kids just wanting to have fun. A
surprisingly restrained Woody Harrelson narrates.

Spliced in at opportune moments are juicy tidbits from marijuana lore:
a spiffy Cab Calloway doing "Reefer Man" back in 1932 and the
Quicksilver Messenger Service band's [Have Another Hit of] "Fresh Air"
(which, ignoramus that I am, I never thought was a pot song). The
animation of Paul Mavrides, co-creator of the Fabulous Furry Freak
Brothers, is featured throughout.

A slick gift to the decriminalization/legalization movement, the film
lacks a certain element of surprise. Though I enjoyed scenes like the
one of John Lennon playing slide guitar at a protest, with Yoko
banging vacantly away on a bongo, there were just a few too many
hackneyed, junk visuals I guess you had to be sitting with the folks
lighting up in the back of the theater to enjoy (the May 24 screening
I attended in New York benefited NORML).

That may not matter to the audience the distributor hopes to attract
when it opens nationwide this summer: kids looking for an alternative
to the zero-tolerance policies that expel them from school and will
soon deny them access to federal loans if they get caught with drugs.
As U.S. distributor Richard Abramowitz, president of Unapix Films,
joked with me, "I'm hoping for a certain repeat business cause they'll
be stoned. They'll forget they've seen it, and then I'll get their
$8.50 again." Appraised of the joke, Ron Mann quipped, "If people go
to the movie and get high, it'll do great for the concession stands."

For all the laughter and smiles at Grass's opening screening, the
film's creators are dead serious critics of the war on drugs. Nearly
700,000 Americans were arrested in 1998 on pot charges, 88 percent of
them for simple possession, says NORML founder/director Keith Stroup.
In a statement accompanying the film's soundtrack, Mann says, "...
marijuana smokers do not form some kind of fringe and perverse
movement, despite what mainstream media would like us all to believe."
He told me, simply, "I did this movie to help stop putting marijuana
smokers in jail."

One way to do that, Mann feels, is to delineate how today's propaganda
and laws stem from seventy-year-old government anti-drug campaigns.
Harry J. Anslinger, the nation's first drug czar, seized on marijuana
as his cause celebre in 1930, hoping to replicate J. Edgar Hoover's
empire-building with regulating booze during the 1920s. Anslinger
tried to get the states to sign on to his anti-drug measures, but only
nine did. After WWII, however, Anslinger gained flat-out control of
all movie scripts that mentioned drugs (a power about which today's
drug czar, Barry McCaffrey, can only dream). Anslinger used this power
to paint marijuana as a direct stepping stone to violence, heroin,
suicide and even insanity. When the early 60s rolled around by which
time Anslinger had aged into a parody of a bald-headed, hard-ass Fed
he was able to convince the U.N. to sanction pot worldwide.

Grass also shows how the villians in drug war propaganda changed over
time. Mexicans, the original media campaign's target, apparently
weren't plentiful enough around the country to raise much alarm. So,
eventually, (black) jazz musicians were dragooned to fill the breach.
Then, after 1949, the Communist Scourge in Red China surged to the
fore as supposed major suppliers. The film has Anslinger speaking
wistfully of Nationalist China's thousand drug-trafficking executions
a year, and his regret that now the Communists don't even "hurt anyone."

Scenes like that abound among the rash of funny clips Mann uncovered.
The nipitts of old propaganda flicks, both staged and real, are
deliciously awkward. In one, a girl simply jumps out the window; in
another, a sex-crazed dope fiend tries to wrestle his date out of her
sweater. A long sequence follows hop-heads who steal a case of soda,
break open the bottles and bloody their mouths without noticing,
before one ends up on heroin. There's even rampant skinny-dipping. My
favorite, added just for a laugh, was a terrified Richard Nixon
attempting to bowl.

On the other hand, some of the gags belabour the obvious. A
chain-smoking cop talking about the horrors of addiction gets the same
fish-in-a-barrel laughs from the crowd as does Ronald Reagan decrying
pot-induced memory loss. Gerald Ford falls down the airplane's steps
yet again, and a smirking Chevy Chase asks Saturday Night Live viewers
to send reefer to his ostensible home address. How fey.

Yet many of the historical scenes are quite powerful. Footage shot in
Vietnam shows the extent of pot use on the front lines. As one grunt
says, you get stoned, and then you don't care about the war anymore.
Hard to conceive of current soldiers misbehaving like this on-camera,
but these guys were already seeing action in Vietnam; what punishment
could be worse? Back home was another matter. One vet got a fifty-year
sentence for selling, to use a forgotten phrase, a "lid" less than
an ounce. Displaying his many medals, his bereaved mother termed the
sentence, "severe."

The Summer of Love gets it's due, one sloppy, good-time kiss
representing. The folks crammed in rows at Woodstock, passing one
joint among so many, look aching to stretch out their legs. Future
Congressman Sonny Bono, vacuous in a gold shirt, drones on against
weed, and a kid fried to the gills in some official study volunteers
for another session, anytime, anywhere. Although in a medical setting,
he's one of the few genuinely giddy users; someone remarked later that
Mann had too few scenes of sheer euphoria. A lot of heads seem
terribly self-conscious before a camera, just smiling sagely.

One clever device is the various "Official Truths" Mann uses to
characterize the government's message about marijuana over the years.
Starting with insanity, murder and the like, the supposed effects of
getting stoned became much less severe over time. As pot use exploded
during the 60s, and more and more middle-class kids got locked up,
attitudes about marijuana changed (the film even features a group of
middle-aged suburbanites saying, oh just one more hit.) By the disco
era, the language is reduced to "Smoke pot and bad things will happen."

But the pendulum swings both ways. Our current non-inhaler fearful,
perhaps, of the wild misconception that his administration is soft on
drugs has brought the hammer down as never before. The film states
that from 1980 to 1998, marijuana prohibition cost taxpayers a
whopping $215 billion. And with some 650,000 marijuana arrests
annually during his administration, Clinton has overseen more arrests
than any other president by far, says Kevin Zeese, president of Common
Sense for Drug Policy.

Because it's a historical document (rather than a Michael Moore-ish
display of guerrilla journalism) Grass might come off as a rather dry
picture to some. However, Guido Luciani's original score of fine funk,
with a bit of techno overlay, certainly helps move things along, but
Paul Mavrides' animation is weak overall. It includes a 1950s mushroom
cloud, Yellow Submarine-y cartoons for the Sixties and, in the
Seventies, something akin to Pac Man and Pong. Lamest, perhaps, is
when Oregon becomes the first state to decriminalize personal use, and
the word "grass" charges happily through a green light. Embracing the
visuals' unoriginality, Mann told me he and Mavrides sought to
"graphically represent different historical periods." And they do, all
too baldly.

The bottom line question, of course, is whether Grass will become
another "Atomic Cafe" or "Roger and Me" a documentary with the
potential to shift public thinking a few degrees. Ethan Nadelman,
chief honcho at reformist outfit The Lindesmith Center, told the crowd
at the screening that "Marijuana is a pivotal cultural issue, a battle
for the heart and soul of the nation." Later, Nadelman said, "This is
the first movie on the drug war that has a chance to make a real
difference. It's high-quality, entertaining to watch and entirely accurate."

Or maybe it will just motivate pot smokers to take some long-overdue
political action. As Keith Stroup of NORML said at the screening,
"There's something very validating about this movie. It says to
marijuana smokers, 'I'm OK. You're OK. Now let's talk to our elected
representatives.'"

Grass opens at New York's Film Forum on May 31st and at San
Francisco's Castro Theater on June 2nd. There will be a rolling
release in cities nationwide this Summer, followed by college towns
this Fall. Daniel Forbes writes on social policy and the media from
New York.