Turner Classic Marijuana Movies

TCM is airing marijuana propaganda films in the early morning on Saturday/Sunday, July 16/17. Along with the well-known Reefer Madness (1936) is another film from that year, Marihuana. It stars fresh-faced Harley Wood as Burma, a teenager who feels neglected because her mother dotes on her older sister. ("All I hear is Elaine, Elaine, Elaine," she yells in a Jan Brady moment.)

Burma goes bad when she gets turned on to weed after the stereotypical older gangster guy invites her and her friends to a party at his beach house. "We tried Tony's giggle water, let's try his giggle weed," they figure, and the party gets racy, with the girls disrobing and skinny dipping in the ocean, squealing all the way. They pay dearly for their fun when one of the girls drowns and Burma gets knocked up.

To earn money so that he can marry her, Burma's boyfriend smuggles dope for the nasty Nick and is killed by the police. Nick helps Burma with her problems while plying her with champagne and turning her into a marijuana peddler who also pushes "C" and "H." Interspersed with headlines like "Wave of Brutal Crime Laid to Marijuana Smoking," the now-corrupt Burma is shown gleefully adorning herself with furs and jewelry. At one point she takes a woman's engagement ring in exchange for a package of heroin, and then concocts a scheme to kidnap her sister's child for ransom. In a plot twist, her past comes crashing down on her in an almost poetic way, a bit unlike the campy, heavy-handed Reefer Madness or She Shoulda Said No—the 1949 film starring Lila Leeds, the actress who'd been arrested for marijuana with Robert Mitchum.

According to IMDB, the script for Marihuana was written by Hildegarde Stadie, who, "despite her wholesome appearance, led a colorful, bizarre and unpredictable life. She was the niece of a patent medicine peddler, and as a little girl, she traveled with him all over the United States, selling their cure-all, Tiger Fat. Part of the presentation involved a pre-teen Hildegarde, appearing fully nude, with a python draped around her shoulders. Though she did not draw upon this particular anecdote, her experience with her uncle greatly influenced her script for Narcotic (1933)."

Harley Wood as Burma in Marihuana

Stadie and her "notorious exploitation filmmaker" husband Dwain Esper distributed "Reefer Madness" and they made films that "remain so bizarre and prurient that it is hard to imagine a husband and wife with two children producing them." Stadie was 98 when she died in 1993.

Wood went on become a songwriter as Jill Jackson Miller with her husband Sy Miller, penning songs like "Keep in Touch With Your Heavenly Father" and the popular "Let There Be Peace on Earth (and Let It Begin With Me").

Also showing on TCM are two short films, "The Terrible Truth" (1951), wherein "a juvenile court judge investigates the tragedy of marijuana addiction," and "Keep Off the Grass" (1969), an educational film in which "the dangers of marijuana are outlined."

June Eckstine: Lady With a Pot Pipe?

When I was last in my hometown of Pittsburgh, on my way to meet the fabulous Theresa Nightingale of Pittsburgh NORML, I happened upon a State Historical Marker commemorating the birthplace of jazz great Billy Eckstine. Looking him up, I may have found another Tokin' Woman, or just a woman who was repeatedly harassed over marijuana: his first wife June.  

Billy Eckstine won a talent contest by imitating Cab Calloway (he of "Reefer Man" fame), and became a popular and accomplished singer. In 1944 he formed his own big band, which "became the finishing school for adventurous young musicians who would shape the future of jazz." (Wikipedia) Included in this group were Dizzy Gillespie, Dexter Gordon, Miles Davis, Art Blakey, Charley Parker and Tokin' Woman Sarah Vaughan. Davis claimed in his autobiography that Eckstine supplied the band with cocaine.

Eckstine was a snappy dresser who later had a clothing line, and a bevy of female admirers dubbed "Billysoxers." He and June were married in 1942. She sang with the band and was described as "glamorous" and "sultry." The couple were frequently photographed together for lifestyle pieces.

According to the book Mr. B: The Music and Life of Billy Eckstine by Cary Ginell, both Billy and June had run-ins with the law over marijuana in 1947, just after the band had an altercation with a racist audience member (for which Frank Sinatra wrote Eckstine a note of congratulations). Billy was at a party with a Honolulu-born dancer named Louise Luise at the apartment of "Chicago playboy" Jimmy Holmes when the place was raided. Holmes had 183 "reefer cigarettes" and Eckstine was caught with a .45-caliber revolver. The headlines read, "Maestro-Crooner Arrested with Pretty Sweetheart in 'Weed' Den." Eckstine's lawyer claimed his client had found the gun in a wastebasket and that he was unaware of the marijuana. His charges were quickly dropped.

June "was the target of the more salacious accusation of sodomy" at a "weed party" in Ardmore, Pennsylvania later that year, Ginell's book claims, putting her age at 25 at the time. An 18-year-old girl from Bryn Mawr reportedly said June "persuaded her to ingest marijuana and then raped her." June vehemently denied both accusations, claiming she'd been framed. A grand jury cleared her of the charges and the case never went to trial, but not before headlines screamed that June had been arrested for "dope and unnatural acts."

In March of that same year, Tokin' Woman Anita O'Day was arrested for pot after two undercover policeman came to her home during a party at which Gillespie was playing from the branches of a tree in their front yard. 

June was photographed smoking one of Billy's pipes shortly after they divorced in 1952 (above), and targeted soon afterwards for a second marijuana arrest:"Singer June Eckstine, the attractive 27-year-old former wife of crooner Billy Eckstine, was arrested in her plush Hollywood apartment with three white friends and booked on a charge of possession of narcotics," said  a Jet magazine item on July 29, 1954. Charges were later dismissed against June for insufficient evidence, but Roberta Kahl, described as "a 34-year-old blonde model" who had a joint in her purse on June's bedside table, was held for trial.

June had a small speaking role in the  movie "Carmen Jones" with Dorothy Dandridge and Harry Belafonte in 1954. She later became a successful realtor in Los Angeles, finding homes for the likes of Lou Rawls, Muhammad Ali, and Sammy Davis, Jr. and dating people like John Garfield.

When G. Gordon Liddy Raided "Eminent Hipster" Donald Fagen Looking for Marijuana

If I lived closer to LA, I would for sure make it to the Hollywood Bowl on Saturday night for Steely Dan performing with the LA Philharmonic for a program arranged by Vince Mendoza (hear some of Mendoza's work with Joni Mitchell on her stunning, modern versions of "Both Sides Now" and "A Case of You").

I picked up the book Eminent Hipsters by Donald Fagen recently, and along with lots of fascinating observations about the early New York jazz scene and esoteric items like a tribute to the Boswell Sisters and an interview with Ennio Morricone, it contains some interesting admissions about drugs.

Of his time at Bard College, Fagen wrote about a roommate who had "an endless supply of marijuana and nightly visits from an assortment of willowy girlfriends." A single tequila-filled night had him swear off the hard stuff and soon he was off to the 1967 "Human Be-In" in Central Park. He describes his classmates as "concerned with inner space....most of us were just incredibly self involved...primed to leave the repressive fifties behind and make the leap into the groovy, unbounded, sexualized Day Glo future."

They were also "smoking enormous quantities of weed, which had just begun to be co-opted by the middle class." Fagan says he "smoked a fair amount myself until a series of anxiety attacks scared me off in the winter of 1967." He thought the attacks might have been triggered by "the DMT my friends and I smoked during the big blizzard of that year."

"Dimethyltryptamine was the hallucinogen that Timothy Leary called the 'businessman's trip' because of its intensity and brief duration," he wrote. "You'd go from zero to a peak acid-strength high in a nanosecond. The snow that was billowing across the campus was revealed as an army of tiny angels, and you wondered why you hadn't noticed that the college buildings huffed and puffed as if they were in a Betty Boop cartoon from the thirties. Fifteen minutes later, everything looked normal except for a warm, lingering glow."

He then describes as a "mystic note" how he'd had his "introduction to Oblivion" during the summer of 1965 on then-legal LSD, guided by Huxley's The Doors of Perception and The Psychedelic Experience (Leary/Alpert/Metzner). "Let's just say that Dr. Leary's method was a resounding success," he wrote. "I understood for the first time that all was as it should be, that the future was blazing with promise and that, despite all the jeers, Garden State might be a swell name for New Jersey after all."

As a senior in May of '69, Fagen had his house raided at four in the morning by a police team lead by soon-to-be Watergate burglar G. Gordon Liddy, looking for traces of marijuana. Fagen's landlord had told police he'd sold him pot, a charge Fagen denies. Some 50 students along with former student Walter Becker and his wife Dorothy were jailed, and the men had their heads shaved. Charges were dismissed, but the incident caused him to boycott his college graduation ceremony in protest, and inspired the song "My Old School":

It was still September 
When your daddy was quite surprised
To find you with the working girls
In the county jail
I was smoking with the boys upstairs when I
Heard about the whole affair...

The last time I saw The Dan at Shoreline Amphitheatre, Becker gave a great, long intro to their song "Hey, Nineteen" with the lyric:

Cuervo Gold
Fine Columbian
Make tonight a wonderful place

Any night with Steely Dan is a wonderful place. They come with full regalia: three killer back-up singers, a horn section, a second keyboard, and a guitarist somehow able to recreate all the amazing solos from various artists on their albums.

Also Highly Recommended: the 1999 documentary about the making of the Steely Dan album Aja. 

And, as this is Bloomsday, and while I'm in a literary frame of mind, see a fascinating analysis of Joyce's Ulysses by José Francisco Batiste Moreno: "Leopold Bloom's Tea Pot"

When Will Women Have Fun with Weed on TV?

In my disjointed, sometimes-behind-the-times way of watching TV (via Netflix and Amazon Prime), I find myself at the moment binge watching two shows at once: Bored to Death, the HBO series (2009-2011) with Jason Schwartzman playing author/amateur detective Jonathan Ames (2009-2011); and the new second season of the Netflix original series Grace and Frankie, with Jane Fonda as uptight Grace opposite Lily Tomlin as hippie mama Frankie, an odd coupla gals who are paired up when their longtime husbands leave them for each other.

In last year’s Grace and Frankie series premiere, the ladies share a peyote ceremony on thebeach that starts to break open Grace’s buttoned-up world (much like the joint Fonda shared with Tomlin and Dolly Parton in 9-5 did). Playing this Grace (unlike the better one in Peace, Love and Misunderstanding), Fonda slips back into her old intolerant ways, but in the second season, she starts to examine them after spending time with phattie-puffing Frankie. As episode five (“The Test”) ended, Grace donates clothes to a thrift store and considers mentoring young businesswomen, like the one who puts on her Chanel jacket.

Grace travels to meet her long-lost love, but is unable to communicate with him (and that’s really sad because he was played by Sam Elliot, who seemed to prefer his rottweiler). Apparently, women are only supposed to be happy when we’re doing something for others. I feared the show would go all moral on us when Grace chastised Frankie for smoking pot while studying for her DMV exam; I won’t ruin it, but suffice to say it has an unexpectedly positive outcome. Looks like Frankie will be hooking up with her "yam man" (Ernie Hudson from "Ghostbusters"); meanwhile she's painting powerful vagina portraits. 

In Bored to Death, Schwartzman plays Ames as a whiny, white-wine-sipping Jewish writer in New York who gets lost in a Raymond Carver novel after his girlfriend (Olivia Thirlby) leaves him (because he drinks and smokes pot too much). Jonathan hangs out with ritzy magazine publisher George (Ted Danson), who is always looking to score weed or women. Zach Galifianakis as Ray is the manchild of the show, a comic book artist whose character “Super Ray” gains his powers when his huge penis touches the third rail of the subway.

Ray does see some success, which won him an elfin kiss from Kate Micucci of Garfunkel and Oates, but generally he struggles with money, and with staying on the good side of his girlfriend Leah (Heather Burns). Jonathan falls for Stella, a pot-loving girl, played by (comedienne Jenny Slate), of whom he says, “She’s sexy, Jewish, and she has a great vaporizer.” The real Jonathan Ames, also an author obsessed with detective novels, has said he prefers pot to alcohol (because it’s more gentle).

The plot in these Bromances generally is: Men party and have adventures, and women stay home, have no fun, and nag at them. Women are mostly thrill killers, as when Mary Kay Place as Kathryn emasculates George by insisting he pee in a cup for a drug test, and then robbing him of his voice (in the form of his thumb-sucking column). It was reminiscent to me of the powerful female critic that Michael Keaton tirades against in Birdman. The exceptions here are Stella and Olympia Dukakis as Belinda, who snorts her prescription drugs with Ray. He draws a Vagina Woman as a ball buster, while Frankie's vagina painting is, shall we say, more realistic. 

The guys all have nemeses (George has Oliver Platt, Jonathan has John Hodgman) that they literally fight in a boxing ring in one episode. (Ames, turns out, was once a totally ripped boxer.) They’re also needy with each other. Ray whines about feeling like he’s inside a falconer’s hood because he’s been hurt when Jonathan calls him after being locked into a bondage hood. This leads to the great line, “But I’m in an actual hood.” (You gotta love the inventive plots, and their nods to the form, as when Jonathan ends up hanging, Harold Lloyd-style, from the arms of a clock.) Pretty much every time an emotion or issue comes up, an adventure blots it out. That’s how guys like it, you know. George and Ray have a moment when they draw each other after sharing a doob; that this causes them to miss Jonathan being violently robbed turns the plot right back to the adventure.

Jonathan calls George a father figure, but George isn’t much of a father to his daughter. This situation has lead to the show’s first crisis point, after he enlists Jonathan in taking his daughter out, and she drinks and smokes pot proffered by him and his own alter ego (also named Jonathan Ames). This plot is a little like the fascinating male character study Fight Club featuring my favorite actor Edward Norton, who also played a dual character (one of whom is a pot farmer) in Leaves of Grass. Norton played one of Keaton’s alter egos in Birdman, an actor who couldn’t get it up except when on stage. Instead of doing thoughtful work like that or his Leap of Faith, Norton is now heard voicing a character in Seth Rogen’s new Sausage Party.

Not getting my girl-fun fix from either show, I’ve now started watching Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries, the Australian series (also on Netflix). Miss Fisher (Essie Davis) solves murders wearing posh flapper gear complete with cloche hat and heels, all while taking in orphans and a different lover each show, plus romancing dishy Police Detective Inspector Jack Robinson (Nathan Page). 

Unlike the helpless female Jonathan rescues in his book “Blonde in the Woods,” Miss Fisher is decidedly brunette. She’s cool when hashish fudge turns up on the show, and wisely admonishes her young ward to stay away from it at a costume party (pictured). She doesn't indulge herself in the episode, but since she's having so much fun anyway, I forgive her.  

Shirley's Valentine to Pot: "Dough" Makes Dough

5/1/2016 - I caught the movie Dough last night at a theatre where the workers were wearing cute promotional aprons provided (apparently) by the distributor. This obliging gal let me take her picture. 

The film stars British actor Jonathan Pryce as Nat, a kosher Jewish baker in London who hires Ayyash (Jerome Holder), a young Muslim refugee from Darfur, to revitalize his business just as it is fighting a takeover by crummy capitalist Sam Cotton. Ayyash has a side business selling weed for the violent thug Ian Hart, and when he dumps his stash into a mixing bowl to hide it at the bakery one day, the dough magically becomes, well, Dough, with lines out the door for the suddenly popular business.

The film is introduced by 75-year-old Pauline Collins (Shirley Valentine) as the widow who owns the bakeshop, and has "the best bridge club meeting ever" after she and the other ladies enjoy some brownies with the special ingredient. Other old folks suddenly start dancing, and more, with the benefit of Ayyash's recipe for fun. Nat's staid family gets a needed night of the giggles following grandpa's dagga dessert, and Nat himself is able to express his feelings about his dead wife after he downs a plate of pot brownies provided by Ayyash.

But all this beneficence comes to a halt after Cotton discovers the secret to Nat and Ayyash's success, and Hart shows up to make more mischief. The film has a predictably moralistic end, with the business apparently going forward without its most important ingredient.

Dough is reminiscent of the 2000 British film Saving Grace, in which a widow (Brenda Blethyn) and her caretaker (Craig Ferguson) grow weed to save her home, and inadvertently turn on the denizens their Cornwall village. That movie, while delightful, also had an (admittedly, by Ferguson) contrived ending, and its spin off TV series Doc Martin, starring Martin Clunes as the town doctor who puffed pot in the movie, was cleaned up to erase that charming aspect of his character.

Collins says the film is about "acceptance, and breaking bread together" and to some extent it is, but its ending disappoints. Now that we're moving towards marijuana legalization, can we dispense with depictions of violent criminals who have control of the marijuana business, and the cops who put the kibosh on all the fun? Cotton might have found enlightenment after he ate the magic muffins and done something for the good of the neighborhood. Or the injustice of the marijuana laws, and the violence they bring, might have been addressed. The marijuana/muslim connection is also skirted, with Ayyash making sure he didn't taste his own goodies.

Next time, filmmakers, we'd like a tastier ending.

UPDATE 3/18: Pauline Collins is back in the 2017 British film The Time of their Lives (now on Netflix), as a pensioner housewife who ends up smoking a joint for her arthritis with none other than Franco Nero, who was the dreamy Sir Lancelot in Camelot. Both actors were 76 years old when they played the scene.

"I don't smoke," Collins objects when Nero pulls out a joint. "I don't either, but I make an exception for drugs," he replies. The two giggle and bond, leaving Joan Collins, who is splendid playing a faded movie star, upstairs drinking. Ah, if only life were like the movies.

Rita Coolidge, Doobie Lady

Singer Rita Coolidge, known for her 1977 hit "Higher and Higher," has just, at the age of 70, published an autobiography called Delta Lady.

In it, Coolidge recounts her adventures touring as a musician in the swinging 1970s, when she dated Leon Russell, Graham Nash and Steven Stills, and married Kris Kristofferson.  

She also had adventures with marijuana, starting as an art student at Florida State. "We always had a lot of weed," she writes, "which we’d decided was vital to the creative process, thanks to this guy who came through Tallahassee every year, like Johnny Appleseed, to plant pot and would tell a couple of people on campus – in the art department, of course – where it was planted."

Later she noticed that in LA, "the drug menu was shifting from pot and LSD, which put people in a sharing mood" to cocaine, after which, "People just lost their moral base. It made criminals and liars and thieves out of people who previously loved and trusted one another."

After she and Kristofferson hooked up, Rita writes about them going to Disneyland with Willie Nelson and his wife Connie after, "As it happened, I had just baked a really nice batch of marijuana brownies...."

Of Kristofferson, she wrote, "He was a heavy drinker and loved to smoke pot." Indeed, Kristofferson was probably the original hippie outlaw country musician.  

 

Also revealed in the book is the fact that she co-wrote the piano coda to "Layla," but was uncredited when her co-writer Jim Gordon took the song to Eric Clapton. 

In 1983, Coolidge was picked to sing the theme song "All Time High" for the James Bond movie Octopussy. Coolidge recalls that Barbara Broccoli, daughter of producer Cubby Broccoli and herself the assistant director of Octopussy, was a fan of Coolidge and made a point of playing her records around her father until "one day [he said], "Who is that? That's the voice I want for the movie." The chorus of "All Time High" features a lyric similar to that of Coolidge's #2 hit "(Your Love Has Lifted Me) Higher and Higher" whose lyric "When you wrap your loving arms around me I can stand up and face the world again" is echoed by the "All Time High" lyric "We'll take on the world and wait." 

The New Americana, High on Legal Marijuana

Coached by Tokin' Woman Miley Cyrus, ex-medical student Moushumi survived a knockout round on NBC's The Voice this week by belting out Halsey's song "New Americana" with the lyric:

We are The New Americana
High on Legal Marijuana...

The wildly popular song is from Halsey's debut studio album, Badlands, released last year via Astralwerks, Universal's electronic and dance label. The artist formerly known as Ashley Frangipane cultivated her huge following with parodies of Taylor Swift songs posted on YouTube, and by uploading her song "Ghost" to Cloud. 

Halsey, who has used the term "tri-bi" (biracial, bisexual and bipolar) to identify herself, sings she was "raised on Biggie and Nirvana," and she's been compared to Lourdes and Luna del Rey.

In the song's dystopian video, Halsey smokes joints at the appropriate lyric (shown), and is soon hauled away by gun-toting thugs who try to (literally) burn her at the stake. Pot-puffing hippies look on passively, then save her with the help of a well-timed smoke bomb. It's a pretty bold statement from one so young. Did she connect that the witch burnings kept both women and herbal medicine suppressed in the West for centuries?

Here's something really radical: the city of Coalinga in conservative Fresno County, California is taking steps to convert a prison into a medical marijuana facility. Now, that's the New Americana.