"HOMEGROWN" IN HOLLYWOOD

Reefer Madness vs. the Studio System

When it comes to controversy, Hollywood usually runs scared. I've known
that for almost as long as I've been going to the movies. That began in the
late 1940s, around the time of the blacklist and the Hollywood Ten. My
father, who was a Communist, a lawyer and didn't like stool pigeons,
explained that if you were a screenwriter like Dalton Trumbo or a director
like Jules Dassin and you tackled sensitive subjects like anti-Semitism,
homosexuality or political corruption, you usually didn't last very long in
the movie industry.

Not that much has changed in the past half century. I found that out first
hand when I went to Hollywood in 1980 and tried to sell the idea of a
picture about marijuana growers and dealers in Northern California. Cheech
and Chong's zany comedy "Up in Smoke" had come out in 1978, and though I
found it very funny, I envisioned a more serious take on the subject, and
characters who weren't complete buffoons. After all, I knew potheads who
were judges, lawyers, doctors, and school superintendents and they seemed
perfectly capable of keeping their heads out of the smoke when they needed
to.

I'd also spent a couple of years poking around the pot scene in Sonoma,
Mendocino and Humboldt Counties, and I'd written about it for newspapers
and magazines, including The Examiner's California Living. What I saw, and
mostly tried to convey to readers was a story of hypocrisy. Main Street
businesses and Main Street merchants - bankers, real estate agents, car
dealers - were feeding on an illegal, underground economy at the same time
they insisted that there was no big-time marijuana in their neck of the
woods. They were law-abiding citizens. If it did exist, they'd be the first
to root it out.

What I found in Hollywood was a slice from the same hypocrisy pie. At
Warner Brothers, at Columbia and in the comfortable mansions of maverick
producers - some of them former '60s radicals who had made pictures about
the counterculture - I met genuine potheads - grown men and women who not
only loved to smoke dope and to get high, but who thought that pot was a
sacrament. At least to these folks, the dope dealer might as well have been
a messenger from God. Almost every night, these screenwriters, directors,
actors and producers would roll a joint or two - or three - and get stoned.
The next day, they'd be back at work making movies. Without naming names,
some of them were nominated for Academy Awards, and others won awards for
best actor and best director. Marijuana was an essential part of their
lives - along with gourmet food and fine wine - but they weren't going to
risk their reputations by making a movie about it. Moreover, they insisted
that no one would finance a marijuana movie.

It was the 1980s, and few Hollywood filmmakers wanted to tangle with Nancy
Reagan and her "Just Say No" anti-drug campaign. Even if my movie could be
made, there would no end of protest from the Motion Picture Association of
America (MPAA), the industry's own self-policing agency, and from every
church group in the country. It just wasn't worth it - or so I was told. I
was about to give up and go back home to Sonoma County. Then I met Stephen
Gyllenhaal, a young director who didn't smoke dope, hadn't cut his eye
teeth in the drug culture of the '60s and '70s, and wouldn't have been able
to tell the difference between Mexican weed and California sinsemilla if I
had blown the smoke in his face. Since then, Gyllenhaal has directed "Paris
Trout," "Losing Isaiah," "Waterland," and "A Dangerous Woman," but in the
early 1980s he was looking for a script that would help him climb to the
top. By the time I met Gyllenhaal, I'd been around the block a few times. I
realized that if I wanted to make a marijuana picture I'd have to think the
way Hollywood thinks, and not like a crusading journalist who wanted to out
everybody who smoked a joint or laundered a pot dollar. So I came up with a
45-second high concept sales pitch. The movie, I explained, would be a
remake of John Huston's 1948 classic "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,"
which stars Humphrey Bogart as Fred C. Dobbs, the desperate American
drifter, and Alfonso Bedoya as the stereotype of the Mexican bandit in the
big hat who spits out the immortal lines: "Badges? We don't need no
stinkin' badges."

In my picture, there would be marijuana fever, not gold fever, hippie
farmers, not gringo prospectors. There would be pot thieves disguised as
cops. At the end, the marijuana would be confiscated and burned by the
sheriff, and the wind would blow the smoke back to the mountains where the
marijuana had been cultivated. There would be something for everybody, and
everyone would be satisfied - even the Motion Picture Association of
America - because the picture would not show the marijuana growers getting
away with their crime. Granted, they wouldn't go to jail, but they wouldn't
get rich either, and getting rich through crime is ostensibly something
Hollywood tries not to celebrate, though there have been some notable
exceptions, especially Coppola's "Godfather" trilogy.

As everyone connected with the movie business knows, directors usually
don't buy ideas. They buy screenplays and treatments of possible stories,
but Gyllenhaal bought my idea - probably because it was so tidy - for a
small piece of change, and the promise that I'd receive story credit. With
the help of Nick Kazan, the son of the legendary director Elia Kazan - who
was ostracized by the Hollywood Left for naming names in the '50s - we came
up with a polished screenplay. But the project went nowhere fast.

Then in 1996, California voters approved medical marijuana, and marijuana
buyers clubs opened their doors for business all over the Bay Area.
Suddenly, the world of marijuana once again seemed like an intriguing for a
movie. We found financial backers, assembled a cast and shot the picture
quickly, quietly and without violating any drug laws.

I spent nearly a week in Santa Cruz, where the outdoor scenes were filmed
and learned a lot about how movies are made. Some of the dialogue was
changed even as we were filming. What was written down on paper was
sometimes stilted, while the improvised dialogue usually sounded a lot more
realistic and relaxed. Almost everyone in the cast approached me, and asked
whether I had made up the story and characters, or whether the movie was
based on real people and real incidents. That was a tough one to answer.
Whenever possible, I shrugged my shoulders ambiguously and left them to
wonder about the truth of the movie we were making.

I developed an appreciation for the art of acting, especially by "Sling
Blade's" Billy Bob Thornton, who plays an intense pot dealer named Jack. On
camera, Thornton was a totally different person than he was off. He walked
and talked with a swagger, and sometimes exuded a more menacing
personality. And when he wasn't acting, he'd also keep us entertained with
hilarious imitations of stars he had worked with, including Burt Reynolds.
When I was invited to be in the last scenes, I jumped at the opportunity.
If you watch the final minutes of the picture closely, you'll see me. I
don't have any speaking lines, but I wear sunglasses and a Miami
Hurricane's cap, and think I do a good job as a very stoned spectator.

This month, 18 years after I first went to Hollywood to pitch the idea for
it, "Homegrown" is finally coming to movie screens, courtesy of
Columbia/Tri-Star Pictures. My original idea is still there, and so are a
few of the big scenes I had in mind, and when the credits roll my name is
up there in big letters, along with Billy Bob Thornton's, and such big box
office stars as Ted Danson, Jamie Lee Curtis, John Lithgow and Jon Bon
Jovi, all of whom make cameo appearances as marijuana growers and dealers.

There are also major differences from my original approach. There's a
"Girl," of course; in a Hollywood picture there has to be a "Girl." In
"Homegrown," her name is Lucy. She's a feisty, feminist drug dealer, and
she's played by Kelly Lynch, who co-starred in "Drugstore Cowboy." The
picture has sex and betrayal, and a marijuana kingpin named Malcolm, who is
killed off in the opening scenes of the picture. And then there are Mafia
guys with names like Gianni who seem to have wandered onto the set of
"Homegrown" from an old gangster picture. There's recycled cliches from
half a dozen movies, including Antonioni's "The Passenger," in which Jack
Nicholson takes on the identity of a dead man. There are scenes of a
marijuana plantation the imitation plants cost $1,500 each - and actors
smoking something that looks like marijuana, scenes that don't make the
MPAA happy, but that the teenage sons and daughters of '60s hippies will no
doubt think are cool. (Some of the imitation plants were "liberated" from
the set. Abbie Hoffman lives.)

What I've learned from my 18-year love/hate relationship with the project
probably won't shock anyone, though it still makes me shake my head.
Hollywood people can be greedy, as greedy as pot farmers and dealers.
Hollywood can be crass, commercial and cowardly, too. Getting the MPAA to
approve the trailer for the picture was pure hell. Apparently you can show
all the violence you want, but wave a joint around and the industry's
self-appointed censors go ballistic.

Along with everyone else who worked on the picture, I'm supposed to get a
percentage of the box office receipts, but somehow I doubt I'll ever see
the money, whether the picture is successful or not. My students at Sonoma
State University will be impressed, but then anyone remotely associated
with Hollywood impresses them. Most of them smoke pot - or so they tell me
privately - and they'll probably conclude that a movie that shows pot
smoking somehow or other condones behavior that the college authorities,
their parents, and folks with badges disapprove of.

In a way then, I suppose that "Homegrown" has a subversive message. What
the picture has taught me is that to make a movie that deals with a
controversial subject like marijuana, you have to fight for it every inch
of the way. In case you've still forgotten, marijuana is still illegal;
doctors don't prescribe it for fear of prosecution by the federal
government and many of the marijuana buyers' clubs have been closed down
for violating the law.

"Homegrown" is an exception. Indeed, Hollywood rarely makes movies about
illegal activities unless it makes it absolutely clear that it disapproves
of them. Prohibition, and speakeasies and bootleggers didn't make it to the
screen in a big way until the Volstead Act had been repealed. Only in the
1930s did it become fashionable to romanticize gangsters, and even then
there had to be a final scene in which the tough guy with the machine gun,
often played by Paul Muni or George Raft, confessed his crimes and asked
for forgiveness.

"Homegrown" neither condemns nor condones marijuana. It's ambiguous on the
subject. I suppose that's progress of a sort for Hollywood, and maybe worth
the price of admission. If you were a card-carrying member of the
counterculture and grew a plant or two in your backyard, you might want to
check it out for the sake of nostalgia. Then, again, if you love
black-and-white classics, you might want to rent "The Treasure of the
Sierra Madre" once again, and watch Bogart go insane with gold fever, and
listen to Alfonso Bedoya as he tilts his hat and cries out, "Badges." My
father, the lawyer and the Communist, who grew and smoked his own marijuana
after he retired from the bar, would probably say I sold out. Maybe so,
dad. But if you want to make a Hollywood movie, you play by Hollywood's
rules or you don't play at all. Despite all the difficulties, I'd do it all
over again. In fact, I'm already working on my next picture. Just maybe
it'll be out, 18 years from now.

Jonah Raskin teaches film at Sonoma State University, where he is the chair
of the Communication Studies Department. He is the author of For the Hell
of It: The Life and Times of Abbie Hoffman.

)1998 San Francisco Examiner Page MAG 20