I Have Fun Everywhere I Go

by Mike Edison

  It was a no-lose situation for High Times. The deal was structured so that we had no capital investment in the picture. Most of the money—a million-dollar budget—had already been raised, and now with High Times’s name on it, there would be a fresh buzz about the project to get the next round of financing. All we had to do was provide our name, marketing support, and some consulting in our area of expertise, and we’d get a cut on the back end. Bloom and I would share an executive producer credit.

  Vic and his team had put together a first-rate cast and crew. Michael Green, the director of photography, had worked on every Woody Allen film since Radio Days, as well as on a slew of other features, TV, and commercials. Paul Bernard, the assistant director (and also one of the film’s producers), was at the top of his profession and had just finished a string of gigs including Mars Attacks!, Three Kings, Any Given Sunday, and The Patriot, all enormous jobs. That they could get people of this caliber to work on a High Times film was a testament to the power of our brand. Everyone worked for minimum pay because they loved the project.

  The cast was a combination of unknowns, well-respected hardly knowns, and a few ringers, including Stony superstar Tommy Chong, and Jason Mewes, famous for his role as pothead deluxe Jay in the Jay and Silent Bob films. Frank Gorshin, who played the Riddler on the Batman TV series, was in. Dan Lauria, who is probably most famous for his role as the dad on the TV show The Wonder Years but has done a shitload of television and theater, played the mob boss. He is an extraordinary actor. When he gave his Big Speech at the film’s climax, an overwrought soliloquy on the meaning of “family,” half the crew cried openly. Sylvia Miles, who had received Academy Award nominations for her supporting parts in Midnight Cowboy and Farewell, My Lovely, burned a hole in the screen as a crazy old lady who taunted her criminal children into a life of crime so they could buy pot for her glaucoma.

  The lead roles—Frank, the Mafia hit man, and Jade, the sexy young punk rocker—were played by Frank Adonis and Theo Kogan.

  When the casting began, Alison asked me if I had ever heard of a band called the Lunachicks. Heard of them? I was one of them! Theo was their bombshell singer, and the rest of the girls were on to play her band. Theo had been in a few films (she was Cool Tattoo Girl in Zoolander, and Prostitute in Bring Out the Dead), but this was her first starring role.

  Frank Adonis was a veteran. You can see him lurking in the background in Scorsese’s tough-guy epics Goodfellas, Casino, and Raging Bull. He was in Wall Street, King of New York, and Bad Lieutenant, and was exceptional in The Eyes of Laura Mars as Sal Volpe, the role that brought him to Scorsese’s attention.

  The rest of the cast—fifty-eight speaking parts—was filled out by an ensemble of up-and-comers and local luminaries. It was an enormous talent roster. Vic had written an incredibly ambitious screenplay that was not going to be easy to execute in a shooting schedule of thirty days.

  Making Bloom a “producer” may not have been the best idea, but we were counting on him to use his connections as High Times music editor to help pull together a killer sound track for the film. Obviously the music was going to be a crucial element to marketing this movie, and he was making Big Promises.

  But it went right to his head, and he began showing up every day during filming, swaggering behind the cameras and asking everyone— actors, crew, whomever—if they wanted to smoke. These people were working, and there was no way they were going to toke up in the middle of shooting a feature film. It was no wonder people made fun of High Times. The only surprising thing was that Bloom still didn’t get it.

  “I wanted Bloom barred from the set,” Victor told me later. “He was disruptive. He didn’t know when to speak or when not to interfere. As he was watching scenes, he was rewriting things—and he wanted us to refilm them! People were complaining. There was a conscious effort to lie to him about locations.”

  Was it Jim Morrison who said that the logical extension of living in America was to become God? I posit that a logical extension of living in New York City is to be in a movie. I scored big with my role as Stabbing Victim.

  We shot my scene after midnight on Bleecker Street, a block from CBGB. We had a spring-loaded knife that was going to be stuck in my thigh by one of the Bad Guys as I came around the corner. I was playing a witless tourist who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. I’d hit the ground, and the cops, including Vic, who played the lead detective, would have to stop chasing the thugs to keep me from dying.

  There are three things I have learned from professional wrestling: sell, sell, and sell, and when it was time to do the bit, I was determined to make it look like the Crime of the Century. I was in the moment, as Marlon Brando might have said, and when I took the knife in my leg, I hit the sidewalk hard.

  Alison called cut. “That was great, Mike. Let’s do it again. I want to see a little more of your face when you hit the ground.”

  I did it again, this time falling with my face cheated toward the camera, contorted in pain. That was no act; the sidewalk came up fast and took a bite out of me.

  “Great, Mike. Let’s go one more time.”

  We ended up doing it six times from different angles, until my entire side was bruised purple from taking the bump. I earned a nice round of applause from the crew, many of whom had been advocating the use of a fake rubber sidewalk.

  The next shot was a bloody close-up. Up until now there was no “juice.” By way of special effects, I was to hold the blood bag in my hands, and when the knife went into my leg, I would grab the wound, pop the bag, and the blood would start flying. Since there was no duplicate wardrobe to change into, we had only one shot to get it right. In went the knife, I hit the pavement one more time, and the claret was tapped. It was a good mess.

  Even though I got stabbed in the thigh, thanks to a tricky angle, on-screen it looked like I took the knife in the balls. Which would cause some considerable groaning from audiences and some worried looks from potential paramours who would require personal assurance that my equipment had been left in perfect working order.

  By the time we finished my stunt, it was 4:00 a.m. and I was raw-boned and covered in gore. I had a great time filming the part, a real dream come true, but now all I wanted was to go home and drink a cold beer in a hot shower. I hailed a cab and told him where I lived. The driver took a look at my hands and leg, saturated with stage blood. “Look, buddy.” He recoiled. “I think I oughta take you to the hospital.” I still had a little left in me. “No,” I gasped, still deep inside the character of Stabbing Victim. “Must . . . go . . . home . . . must . . . feed . . . cats.” Much accustomed to nutcases climbing into his hack, he just shrugged and took me home. I tipped him well.

  Back at the ranch, the rancor smoldered unabated. There was actually a contingent, led by Hager, who sometimes seemed to be rooting against the success of the film, presumably so he could say “told you so” and use our failure to leverage his own mishmash of a project. I think he felt that if we succeeded, he would never have a chance at making his own movie, when in reality, if this film did what it was supposed to, it would open the doors to all sorts of projects.

  At some point during the production Vic made a not so subtle appeal to Hager’s ego and put him in the film, which succeeded in getting him on board. But after he saw that it was only going to be a walk-on cameo, he went back to hating the movie. It didn’t help that I was the one who was shepherding the project along from the inside.

  Vic seethed. “Ski says not to deal with you because you won’t be here for too much longer; you are making too much money. And Hager has a problem with you bringing the magazine into the future— it’s like he is accusing you of some scientific experiment, like cloning humans.”

  I was stoic. I wanted to see this film happen, but Vic was getting sick of dealing with the High Times merry-go-round.

  “I have a hard time understanding any of these guys. When I first brought in the script, I heard a big complaint that we don’t represent the ‘ston
er community.’ How could we make a movie without the ‘hey dude’ dudes? So we wrote them in. And then I get accused of stereotyping pot smokers! What annoys them one day pleases them the next, and vice versa. We have meetings and we talk all day without anything being discussed. It’s like being in Groundhog Day. The same shit happens over and over and over again.”

  Meanwhile, production moved along, but it was becoming clear that Alison was the wrong director for this film. She was great with lions and tigers, but not so much with people. And she knew virtually nothing about pot. She didn’t speak the lingua franca of the daily doper—she couldn’t roll a fatty, navigate a hookah, or pick the Allman Brothers out of a police lineup. She didn’t know Cheech from Chong, let alone the difference between indica and sativa.

  What she did know was that if she got behind a film written by the screenwriter of Summer of Sam and tagged with the High Times brand, she had a shot at making a splash with her first feature. Alison came to the table with a good bit of the financing for the film. Given her experience filming in the jungles of Africa—and Vic’s vision of presenting New York City as some sort of wildlife preserve for untamed artists, punk rockers, and hippies—she got the job, with the caveat that Vic would be in the backseat helping her drive. Which was a plan architected for disaster.

  No director wants to be told what to do, and it wasn’t long before she was feuding with Vic. She needed his input but didn’t want the cast or crew to know that he was the “man behind the curtain,” so she insisted on creating a complicated series of codes and signals that they would use whenever she needed his help, or when Vic needed to contribute. It was a huge distraction, and she had a hard time bringing to the screen the energy required to pull off a High Times cops-and-robbers doper flick. The chemistry between the principal characters, Frank and Theo, never boiled as much as it fizzled.

  Frank is deceptively subtle—you can’t see him act—which is why, or so I have been told, Scorsese keeps coming back to him. As a Mafia hit man, he is a stone-cold killer who buries his emotions. Theo, on the other hand, is a beautiful, exuberant rock ’n’ roller who needed to work into her role the same zest she brings to her band. But as a less-experienced screen actress, she fell into Frank’s rhythms, and Frank, used to painting with a more ethereal palette, didn’t deliver the big performance that an upbeat pot comedy demanded. Many of their scenes together fell flat.

  Jason Mewes, too, needed a good kick in the ass. As a pot dealer, he came off a bit too creepy, sniffling and rubbing his nose like he had drug problems more worrisome than the wacky tabacky, but for some reason Alison didn’t twig to it. Jason has great charisma, and it was a coup to get him, but he didn’t shine anywhere near the way he was supposed to.

  Still, there was a lot to like about this film, and if Alison had concentrated on making a good movie rather than a great movie (she reminded me more than once that Orson Welles’s first picture was Citizen Kane), I think the end result would have been more even. There were a lot of miscues and mistakes just from overreaching.

  But the good parts are terrific. The mob guys were particularly endearing. It was a great group of crusty old men mostly sitting around the social club grunting at one another, and the whole film seems to perk up whenever they are on-screen. The Big Finish, at the pot rally, packs a good punch, when the various threads of the plot come together, centered around Frank’s reunion with his drag queen son, whom he has finally forgiven for his transgressions. It is an unapologetically happy ending: the gangsters have traded their guns for ganja, and all is right with the world. Cue the music, bada-bing badda-boom, and everyone leaves the theater ready to bust some corn.

  I was on the set every day as a “consultant.” As part of my job I rolled more than four hundred joints—trumpet-shaped spliffs, New York pinners, bombers that looked like snakes that swallowed dogs, seven-paper monstrosities, and an armory’s worth of basic, prêt-à-fumer doobies. That was probably the best job I ever had.

  I helped Alison plow the depths of stoner nuance as best I could, and I rounded up an arsenal of handblown glass pipes and bongs. I was even able to find a working Buzzbee.

  But my biggest contribution was the ChroniCaster: a fully functional bong-guitar to be wielded by Tommy Chong.

  Originally the Potluck script had called for Jimi Hendrix’s guitar to be given away at a raffle at the pot rally, but that seemed a bit too on the nose, and anyway, the Hendrix family was sure to have something to say about it. I suggested we make a High Times guitar. We had already created one for a contest—a bright green number with a rhinestone pot leaf below the bridge, luthiered by a madman named Joe Naylor, who runs a company called Reverend Musical Instruments out of Eastpointe, Michigan, near Detroit. I called him up, and when he heard that Tommy Chong could be wailing on his next creation in the High Times movie, he faxed me his idea for a “bong-guitar,” which was to the first High Times guitar what the space shuttle is to a slingshot: an engineering masterpiece. Much more ambitious than my original idea of retrofitting a pipe onto an existing design, this would be made of Lucite, front and back, and the body would be like the chamber in a bong. The bowl of the pipe rested on top of the body, and smoke was drawn through surgical tubing, magically filling up the clear guitar. But the best thing about it was that it was actually going to be a bitchin’ guitar—the design called for a pair of screaming P-90 pickups, locking tuners, and a rosewood neck. It would be the ultimate rock ’n’ roll prop, on a par with Iron Maiden’s giant monster mascot, Eddie, or with Pink Floyd’s inflatable pig.

  When I explained to Vic and the producers that we had a custom-made bong-guitar coming, they were floored. There was only one problem. By the time Joe and I had worked out the nuances of the ChroniCaster, the film was already in production, and now the script would have to be rewritten to accommodate the new gimmick. Even though there were a few days before we had to shoot the guitar, there were scenes that had dialogue to establish the Quest for the Chroni-Caster, and we were shooting them that day. Not only would we be fucked if we shot a scene with characters talking about a guitar that didn’t show up—as far as everyone was concerned, it was still in the dream stage—the dialogue to set up the ChroniCaster had to be written in half an hour. It didn’t help that no one knew what the thing would actually look like. All I had was the drawing Joe had faxed over, which was more like the lunatic sketches of a dime-bag da Vinci than the blueprint for anything that could conceivably be built by anyone lacking access to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. It inspired little confidence.

  I told everyone not to worry, I had everything under control. “I’m not like the others; you can trust me.” They bought it. But meanwhile I was praying that the guitar would show up when it was supposed to. I mean, Joe seemed like a reliable guy, but what the fuck did I know? People who get excited about building bong-guitars are a breed apart.

  Vic immediately sat me down on the set with him (in those big director’s chairs you always dream about), and we started writing new lines for the principal stoners, who were going to be bugging out about the guitar, for the camera, in just a few moments.

  STONER NO. 1: Dude, that’s no ordinary guitar.

  STONER NO. 2: It’s more like a bong with strings!

  STONER NO. 1: You can play it . . .

  STONER NO. 2: You can smoke it . . .

  TOGETHER: You can play smokin’ it! It’s the ChroniCaster!

  It wasn’t Paddy Chayefsky, but I understand that William Faulkner had a similar experience during his Hollywood days. Ten minutes after we had written those lines, they were coming out of the actors’ mouths. It was scary, an oddly Zeus-like feeling. I learned more about filmmaking that day than I did in two years at NYU.

  Joe Naylor, it turned out, was something of a wizard. The Chroni-Caster showed up on time, a jaw-dropping, one-of-a-kind pimp-my-guitar masterpiece. Never underestimate the impact of a fully functional, hot-wired bong-guitar.

  Unfortunately, the Whoa! Factor of the ChroniCaste
r died hard when Tommy Chong refused to play it live for the cameras. He’s a very good guitar player, but he didn’t want to take chances on flubbing the part, and he insisted that it be overdubbed.

  The impact of the ChroniCaster came from the fact that it wasn’t a trick—some mad genius had built this contraption for the movie and it actually worked. Tommy needed to sell it. It still looked pretty cool, filling up with smoke while Tommy posed with it, but with the sound obviously added later, it just didn’t deliver the “Holy Shit” moment it should have. Weeks later we screened a Potluck video teaser in front of a stoned test audience of a couple hundred people, featuring a demonstration of the ChroniCaster. I showed it front and back, so everyone could see how it worked, and then smoked from it while I fumbled through a few riffs. There was an audible, gushing, spontaneous exclamation of “Cool!” when the guitar filled up with smoke, and afterward I was swarmed with people offering me fat Baggies of the stankiest buds if they could just try it themselves.

  Tommy later told Vic that he thought the film was going to be some slapped-together piece of shit, and if he knew that Vic had written Summer of Sam, he would have prepared differently. Fuck. If Tommy Chong—a guy whose fame peaked when he drove an ice-cream truck made of weed—didn’t take High Times seriously, we probably didn’t have much of a chance with Hollywood at Large.

  Somehow I was still around when it was Stony time again the next year. Even if the paranoia and hedging of bets by High Times was undermining Potluck, I was still living my dream of producing a drug film.