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Cult pot film turned movie musical has timely warning, say writers, stars
STEVE MERTL | Canadian Press | Saturday, April 24, 2004

VANCOUVER (CP) - In the post-9-11 era when irony is supposed to be dead, there's a rich vein of it running through Reefer Madness.

It's a made-for-cable movie adapted from a subversive musical stage play based on a salacious 1936 exploitation flick - later a counterculture cult classic - about the dangers of the evil weed.

The play originally debuted in 1999 in a 99-seat Los Angeles theatre, followed by a successful off-Broadway run in 2001.

But authors Kevin Murphy and Dan Studney believe its humorous run at fear-pedlars has become even more relevant as the United States draws in on itself after the terror attacks.

"Right now there's a real sense of people using power and the bully pulpit and being the guy behind the podium to tell us what we think," says Murphy.

"In the wake of 9-11, there's been a lot of that from the Bush administration in particular."

So couched in a cautionary tale about the murderous side effects of pot is a warning to analyse the motives of people in authority.

"It became, for me, about a guy who stands behind a podium and says 'Your children are in trouble' and drags out Jesus and the flag and tells you what to think," says Studney, who with Murphy is in Vancouver to help oversee the six-week shoot for Showtime, a U.S. pay-TV channel.

Movie X-Man Alan Cumming, who won a Tony as the emcee in the Broadway revival of Cabaret, stars as The Lecturer, preaching to a 1930s smalltown U.S.A. audience about the corrupting power of marijuana.

Showing a film depicting the depravities awaiting children who succumb to its lure, he whips the crowd into a lather of intolerance that goes beyond marijuana, says Murphy.

"They sing: 'Once the reefer's been destroyed, we'll start on Darwin and Sigmund Freud, and the sex depicted on celluloid and communists and queens.

"America, America, the end will justify the means.' "

Much of the movie's cast comes from the stage version but adds star power with Cumming, Steven Weber (Wings, the D. A.), Ana Gasteyer (Saturday Night Live) and Canadian Neve Campbell (Party of Five, Robert Altman's The Company) in key roles.

Campbell's younger brother Christian reprises his stage portrayal of Jimmy, the impressionable teen who ends up on death row when his life goes to pot.

The original Reefer Madness, a touchstone for Baby Boomers, was subversive in its own way.

It was based on a 1936 film produced by a well-intentioned church group and entitled Tell Your Children. It also had a straightlaced narrator warning parents about marijuana, says Murphy.

Then Dwain Esper, a notorious producer of exploitation films, got a hold of it.

He recut the film and inserted titillating sequences of stoned, half-clothed girls cavorting as boys played demon jazz to illustrate the effects of pot - for educational purposes of course. He renamed it Reefer Madness.

After a run in exploitation grindhouses and school gyms, it sat dormant for decades.

Marijuana advocates rediscovered it in 1971 and put it on the college film circuit, where it was often viewed through a haze of pot smoke.

Murphy and Studney, longtime college "theatre rats" and now veteran Hollywood writers, were driving up the California coast one day in 1998.

"We were listening to a Frank Zappa song about Catholic girls smoking reefer behind the rectory. Dan was like, 'what about Reefer Madness as a musical?' " Murphy recalls.

"There was just silence in the car. It was like, why not?"

The show debuted the following year in LA to huge success and several awards before moving to New York for a well-received run.

Murphy and Studney then reworked it into a screenplay and invited movie and TV producers to a reading by the original stage cast and the show's pit orchestra.

One of the guests was Robert Greenblatt, who was on his second day as Showtime's entertainment president.

He greenlighted what will be the channel's first full-length musical when it airs sometime next year.

"We're all about trying to do things that nobody else would do," says Greenblatt, who says it's like the Rocky Horror Picture Show crossed with Grease.

"This just struck me as something that you couldn't find anywhere else. That's what made it just seem right for us."

Greenblatt brought in Apollo Screen, a German production company, to help finance the project. He won't reveal the budget but says it's generous for a TV production, especially a musical, enhanced by the cost advantages of shooting in Vancouver.

Filming for Showtime solves several problems, says Murphy: no handwringing over a restricted theatrical movie rating and no dumbing it down for network television.

For Campbell, the draw was her brother's participation and a "genius" script co-written by her friend Studney.

"I really think this piece is amazing and fun and entertaining," says the Guelph, Ont., native. "It's one of the best things I've seen in the last 10 years, I would say."

The writing also attracted Cumming, well known for his stage work in Britain before coming to Broadway and Hollywood.

"I was reading a lot of scripts and this one just seemed really witty and clever," says Cumming, who accepted the role without ever seeing the stage version.

"I haven't read something this biting and satirical in quite a while."

Translating the musical's dance numbers to the postage-stamp-sized movie sets was a challenge for choreographer Mary Ann Kellogg.

She also had to allow for Weber, who plays pot pusher Jack in a key dance encounter with Neve Campbell as the den-mothering Poppy, whose Five and Dime soda shop is a haven for the town's teens.

Weber, unlike the ballet-honed Campbell, is no dancer.

"But he's very musical, he's very physical," says Kellogg. "He has a very keen sense of movement and drama."

"He did an amazing job," agrees Campbell. "I know he was really nervous about the dance piece but he did a really great job learning it."

With it's blend of drugs, sex, cannibalism and devil jazz music, Reefer Madness aims to be entertaining rather than preachy, so less likely to ignite an Establishment backlash.

"Cloaked as it is in humour and satire I don't think it's that big an issue," says Greenblatt.

"This movie's relatively harmless. You could look at it at face value and say it's all about the dangers of drug use. You could interpret it either way."

 

Herb Ninja

Red Eyes on Showtime Over 'Reefer Madness'

12-20-2004 | Cynthia Littleton | BackStage

Los Angeles (THR) -- Here's a prediction for 2005: Showtime is going to make some noise with its musical remake of an agitprop cinema classic, "Reefer Madness."

The Showtime movie is based on the "Reefer Madness" stage musical that was first mounted in Hollywood in 1999 and off-Broadway in 2001. The original team from the stage production -- director Andy Fickman, lyricist Kevin Murphy and composer Dan Studney -- have reprised their roles for the movie and serve as its executive producers.

The contemporary "Reefer Madness" is wonderfully satiric, beautifully shot and unabashedly silly -- as ridiculously over the top as the original 1936 flick was in attempting to warn parents that marijuana was more addictive than heroin or cocaine. The new-model "Reefer Madness" does not even take its mission as satire too seriously, yet there are subtle bits of social commentary circa 2004 sprinkled throughout.

"This is ultimately a movie about questioning authority," Fickman says. "You could take the word 'reefer' out and put a lot of other contemporary issues in there, and it would work. It works especially well for the times we live in."

Murphy, who penned the lyrics and co-wrote the book with music maestro Studney, sees it as a cautionary tale about the dangers of those who resort to extreme scare tactics to promote a particular political or social agenda. ("Once that reefer has been destroyed/we'll start on Darwin and Sigmund Freud," is one of Murphy's lyrical zingers from the closing number.)

The original "Reefer" presented marijuana as "a threat to the American way of life" by stoking white America's fears of a changing society, Murphy says, noting how the original stresses that most of the demon weed comes from Mexico and is favored by jazz musicians and other degenerate types.

But all that said, the creative brain trust behind the musical "Reefer Madness" strove for laughs more than anything else. It's hard to do anything but laugh at a movie that serves up a Busby Berkeley-style dance number with men in pot leaf-emblazoned G-strings gyrating around a giant hookah.

The show-stopper of the piece is a dream sequence in which Jesus appears before our wayward hero Jimmy -- an all-American teenager, played by Christian Campbell, who turns into a raving nut after his first toke -- in an effort to set Jimmy back on the right path. ("I'm the face on the shroud of Turin/do I have to test your urine?" the son of God implores as Jimmy breaks into his church's collection box.)

Steven Weber wears his pencil-thin mustache well in the role of the gun-toting dealer who lures unsuspecting kids from the malt shop back to the crash pad of his hopelessly addicted girlfriend, Mae, played with gusto by Ana Gasteyer. And Alan Cumming steals every scene he's in as the deadpan federal agent who comes to town to screen "Reefer Madness" for parents at the local high school.

"Reefer Madness" is set to debut next month at the Sundance Film Festival and is expected to bow on Showtime in April. Fickman and Murphy credit Showtime entertainment chief Robert Greenblatt as the "angel" who allowed them to move beyond the limits of a stage and put their wildest visions on film.

"The show we produced was always too big for our stages," Fickman says.

Adds Murphy, "And Bob just had the blind faith that we always did that it would make a really good, really funny movie."

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Ron Paul for the Long Haul