GRASS

Ron Mann's new film takes a crafty look at the highs and lows of marijuana's
loopy history

WE'VE COME a long way, baby - just not all the way.

When it comes to marijuana, I mean.

It's now socially, if not legally, acceptable to admit that maybe once you
actually smoked the stuff ... although maybe it's hard to remember when ...
and it was entirely accidental, at that.

Inhaling's still out of the question. But this is okay, dope-wise.
Not-inhaling got Bill Clinton elected. Not-inhaling ups marijuana's status.

It means that while it's still bad, it's only as bad as Toronto's air.

See how more understanding we've come to be with The Weed Formerly Known As
Evil?

By weed I also mean pot, grass, tea, jive, the herb, cannabis sativa,
doobie-doo, la corde-de-pendu (as the French once called hemp) or the stuff
my neighbour Danny is growing just behind his composter. (Sorry, Danny, pal,
but I did tell you to bring my lawnmower back.)

The weed has gone baby boomer-ville, claimed and cleaned up by New Agers,
wholesome naturalists and even some leftie politicians. It's probably only
this far from being legalized, for medical use only, which its supporters
and opponents agree will eventually turn all of Canada into something like
downtown Amsterdam.

Viewed in this context, Ron Mann's instincts are absolutely right-on to
remind us of marijuana's rebel past in Grass, his new documentary that has
its world-premiere screenings Wednesday and Friday at the Toronto
International Film Festival.

Grass is another of Mann's run-for-daylight, finish-in-the-last-minute
documentaries - like Twist, the Toronto film festival entry that made him a
star back in 1991.

Even at that, Grass arrives at the festival about two years later than the
Toronto filmmaker had intended, due to budget cutbacks and government grants
that never came through.

"Those who have remained pure will see the degradation you've been missing,"
goes the film's publicity pitch. "Those who have succumbed to temptation
will learn how a nice person like you became a dangerous criminal."

Grass uses grainy 1930s and '40s government agency-crafted anti-dope warning
films - Mann collected some 400 hours of them - but the documentary also
focuses on pot's "up" period and its peppy, breakthrough days in the 1960s,
when Richard Nixon tried to cut the grass, thus giving the freaks something
to live for.

We're talking good/bad old days. In one delicious scene from a 1966 clip
used in a far-from-finished video print of Grass I watched this week, an
anonymous male "subject" undergoing some serious medical marijuana-testing
is asked how he feels.

"Fannnnntastic," he says.

The starched nurse notes it on her clipboard. Hmm, fantastic.

Given a list of further questions to read, he ticks off his reactions to the
mystery stuff he's been smoking.

No, he doesn't feel defiant. No, he doesn't feel business-like.

Friendly? he reads.

"Extremely," he smiles as happily as anyone has ever smiled.

Mann - who is still editing Grass - isn't entirely sure marijuana is being
welcomed with much more official tolerance these days.

He quotes U.S. statistics in pointing out that "over $18 billion dollars
have been spent in the past year putting non-violent offenders in prison.

"In 1998, 600,000 people were imprisoned in America for marijuana use."

Mann, 41, is straddling the fence a bit with Grass - mostly for economic
reasons.

He doesn't want to make the film seem too cheekily irreverent or too
pro-pot, lest it be banned from playing south of the border.

That has happened before, he points out. In 1949, the National Film Board's
Drug Addict was kept out of the U.S. Director Terri Nash's If You Love This
Planet, a 1982 NFB product about a potential nuclear holocaust, was
suppressed in the States, although it went on to win a 1983 Academy Award.

Says Mann: "I'm trying to distance myself, but I definitely feel there's a
movement now to broaden the discussion about marijuana.

"It started in the '90s with rap music. And then there's the issue behind
the medical use of pot in Canada, as well as in the United States, and the
environmental issue involved in the growing of hemp.

"But my film is not about rope or the medical use of marijuana. It's about
getting high, about the recreational use of marijuana.

"I started thinking about the film years ago, when I started thinking about
how, in the 1990s, people were taking marijuana for granted. It was
something that we'd dealt with."

But then came "this new outbreak of temperance - right-wing Christian types
trying to impose their ways on everyone else."

Maybe in the near future, pot-smoking will seem to have had all the
innocence of shopping at the Gap or watching Ally McBeal. But Grass doesn't
play up the innocence angle, just as it doesn't buy into the many lurid
attempts from one level of law enforcement after another to connect pot use
to heroin and other "more serious" drugs.

(The weirdest twist on this phenomenon came recently from Trainspotting's
author, Irvine Welsh, who said: "I drifted into heroin because as a kid
growing up everybody told me, 'Don't smoke marijuana, it will kill you.'")

Grass concentrates on pot's effects, its ability to make everything and
everyone near it get a little loopy.

And it's not only that 1960s, Day-Glo kind of loopy seen in Grass's scenes
of hippies playing like painted puppies in a 1967 San Francisco Be-In.

There's also the are-you-for-real kind of loopy you feel watching Grass's
craftily edited clips from anti-marijuana propaganda pics made in the 1930s
and '40s.

Mann has the mind of a film historian, with part of his business coming from
film archival work, and Grass is saturated with images from movies on both
sides of "the issue."

In this regard, Mann can be described as being mild-mannered-with-attitude -
the attitude being honed through his love of such documentary-activists as
Les Blank (In Heaven There Is No Beer) and Emile de Antonio (In The Year Of
The Pig).

In a sense, Grass plays off the buzz created by the 1970 re-release of
Reefer Madness, the achingly awful 1936 anti-pot flick that called marijuana
"the real Public Enemy No. One."

With its shadowy, reefer-puffing debauchery, the film pushed all the right
paranoia buttons for a conservative 1930s American audience already
terrified of communism and other enemies-from-within.

What could be more "within" than inhaled smoke? The re-release of Reefer
Madness pushed very different buttons for its new audiences, who made it a
cult classic.

"You'd have to scrape the resin off the screen after a weekend," said one
distributor.

The pot-savvy new generation of viewers sat transfixed as Reefer Madness
described, in utter seriousness, marijuana's effects, starting with "sudden,
violent, uncontrollable laughter; then come dangerous hallucinations, space
expands, time slows down - almost stands still."

David Lynch's Eraserhead, Chris Carpenter's The X-Files and the New Gothic
start right here. And so does Grass.

"America's drug policy had propaganda using exaggeration and silence," says
Mann, underlining the aesthetic twin peaks of much modern filmmaking.

"Drug laws have just become a tool for repressing undesirables. Drug
prohibition itself is a costly failure. It has caused more problems than it
has solved.

"I don't see Grass as an advocacy film, but it definitely crosses the line.
It is, after all, narrated by an activist."

He means Woody Harrelson, a.k.a. "Mr. Hemp" - a reference to the actor's
affection for pot's slightly more respectable step-sister.

Harrelson has been busted for planting four symbolic hemp seeds to protest
Kentucky law. For one Academy Awards ceremony, he cheerily wore a hemp tux
designed by Giorgio Armani, whose prices are generally all that's high about
his clothes line.

Actually, signing Harrelson was a bit of a saga on its own. Mann's original
choice for the job was tough-guy Robert Mitchum, who once spent 59 days in a
Los Angeles slammer after a 1948 pot bust.

But Mitchum's death in 1997 forced the filmmaker to look for another
narrator with appropriate credentials.

Recalls Mann: "At one point we thought of Bob Denver," who was busted last
year for pot possession.

"He was Gilligan on Gilligan's Island. We could have had 'Free Gilligan'
buttons. But everyone we talked to brought us back to Woody Harrelson."

So Mann sent him a tape of what he'd put together for Grass.

"He said it was 'awesome.'"