Behind The Scenes: Up in Smoke (Adler/Chong, 1978) With Cheech Marin And Tommy Chong

I met Cheech in Canada, 1968. He said, come down to the club and see what we're doing. So he came down with his girlfriend. It was right downtown, man, it was the worst part of town. It was a strip joint. Big bikers and all these rowdy single guys. They had this kind of, I don't know, this weirdest thing going. I thought it would be sexier if they took off their street clothes on stage in the form of, say, a skit. I told him I was this great improv actor and he hired me as a writer. It was kind of an ideal situation for a young guy. You get to hang out with naked chicks and smoke dope and do comedy. I don't know, let me see the girls. Okay, let me see the dope. Okay. But to give you an idea of the club, we've got all these hardcore bikers in that wanting to see naked women. And so I had a classical guitarist come out and then a mime artist would come out picking flowers. Just when the bikers in the audience are getting ready to attack or kill somebody, I would come out through a door with my shirt off, my hair messed up as if I woke up, with a rolled up newspaper. And I'd walk over and say to Dave, what kind of song is this? And I'd start beating him to death. The thing that really developed when we got into L.A. was the Pedro character making him a Chicano lowrider because they didn't have too many Chicano lowriders in Vancouver and even less in Calgary. We went through all the stages that people do in this town. People trying to manage you and they couldn't manage us and so on until we met Lou Adler. After that, we did it. The way that I met Cheech and Chong, I was at the Troubadour on a Monday night, which was their Hoot Nanny night. In order to get on stage, you had to show up early in the morning to stand in line waiting for the box office to open at six. We'd sit there and we'd write material and we'd eat sunflower seeds and watch all the hippies go back and forth and talk to the other nuts in the line. You could tell how long we were there because people would walk by and you could hear them crunch, crunch, crunch on the sunflower seeds. So finally, we started building a following there. And so we heard that Lou was there and so Cheech called him up and Lou said, come on in. So we go down there, we meet Lou at his office and he was kind of the hip looking guy and he told us he grew up in East L.A. One particular routine that Cheech does, someone that I went to school with, so I related to their material in that way. He said, what do you want to do? And I said, well, let's, we want to make a record, you know, we want to do a comedy album. If we could come up with a way to help somebody visualize the routines that they were doing. We figured, hey, this is a funny audio joke. Okay, so we started making audio jokes, you know. Our first hit was a little comedy thing called Dave's Not Here. The bit was supposed to be, I was supposed to knock on the door and then come in and it was about an employment office. So we're in this little studio. Tommy says, why don't you like get into the character, put on a coat and a hat and go out there. When he went outside, I'm trying to get this little tape recorder working and I didn't know it was on or not. Anyway, when he knocked, I didn't look at the needle, I looked at the door and I said, who is it? It's not supposed to say, who is it? It's come in and we start the bit. And he goes, it's me, man. I got to stop, let me in. And so I just, I was stunned. I was looking at the tape recorder thinking, is that on? You know, did it record or what? And so then he knocked again and I saw the needle jump. So I said, oh, it's working. So I'll start the bit over again. So he goes, who is it? He goes, it's me, man. I got to stop, let me in. Well, that's funny. He's getting mad. And so I just waited again and then he knocked again. Bam, bam, bam. I said, who is it? My dumb stoner voice. And so the routine proceeded with him just with me. Who? What? Who? He says, I'm Dave, man. And he started banging the door, banging the door. I'm Dave, now let me in. It's hot out here. What are you doing? And everybody on the lot is walking around. And they're saying, who is this guy with the long hair and the long coat and the hat with the bag? What is he knocking on the door saying he's Dave? So I opened the door and I thought he was going to hit me. And so he says, you got to hear this. And so we played it back and we just rolled on the ground. It was so hilariously funny. And every time we played it, we laughed, laughed ourselves sick. The optimum way of presenting the material of Cheech and Chong was film. You know, the thing about making your first movie, it is like making love for the first time. You never forget it. It's like, you can't believe that you're doing it. I'm finally in. We're making a movie. Let that sucker up, man. Go to the moon. It was a low budget, low budget movie. We shot it in less than a month. And sort of like guerrilla moviemaking. You know, we just captured that rock and roll feeling, anti-establishment, youth got to get out of the house. And it's owed to the genius of simplicity. They get in, they come around, they go around. You see where there's an empty lot, they come in and park. Tommy Chong 101. I think he came up with that LA car culture. They go everywhere in cars. We just went through LA. We went through, you know, Tijuana, the whole thing. I remember doing this setup. There was this guy doing clams. I said, hey man, I'm going to try one of these. You know, everybody's like, yeah. Clams on the street in Tijuana. I don't know. And this like really scrungy comes walking up. She comes up to me and just puts her arm around me. And she takes the clam without word. She takes the clam out of my hand and goes, and then gives it back to me. And even the clam guy goes, I'll get you another one. Stacey was very disciplined. He got who he wanted this guy to be. Tom Skerritt, he got that strawberry character down. That scary Vietnam vet. Zane Busby, who plays the girl that they pick up. During lunch, Zane was telling us this story. It's a real story about her girlfriend. And every time they'd make love, she'd make a lot of noise. We're just rolling on the ground laughing. So Tommy says, that's what we're filming after lunch. You know, and she'd start going like a motorboat, you know. And we had guys, you know, kind of with a two by fours rocking the van. It was up in smoke. We learned that we couldn't get high. We were supposed to be driving. And the walkie talkie, they go, okay, we're rolling. And we just sat there and we're smoking and talking. And the poor cameraman, you know, they're waiting there and waiting and waiting. Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing. Then about 15 minutes went by. Finally goes, are you guys okay? Where are you? He said, oh, oh, sorry. That is Heavy Metal 101. That riff was written by our friend Gabriel DeLorme. Gabriel DeLorme was part of our group in Vancouver. That's all he had. And so then I said, oh, okay. So I took it and wrote the lyrics. Mama talking to me, trying to tell me how to live. But I don't listen to her because my head is like a sieve. Being comedians, you know, we weren't stuck in a genre. You know, we're like, okay, who are we going to make fun of next? And the punk thing was just coming into its own. And we said, wow, we don't even know any tunes yet, man. What do you mean, man? We have to do rehearsals, man. Besides, it's just punk rock, man. You don't have to know how to play. All you just got to do is be a punk. It may have been the first time that the punk groups, if you will, were filmed. We captured the essence, not only of the day, but an essential youth quality and us against them quality. Whoever it was against the establishment. But to think beyond just putting the film out to what would happen 20 years from or five years from. I don't think we even thought about it. You know, it's a pleasant surprise that it just continues. It's a piece of history. And it's there. It will always be there. And, you know, you can't mess with it. You know, we captured a whole period of time. And it's a very important piece of American history. You know, very, very important. Those times will never happen again. That was our time. I like you boys. You're good boys. I can tell by looking at you. Now, when you get in that courtroom, you're going to face a real ball breaker of a judge. So I got a little surprise for you. One of these here red birds with a black cup of coffee will set you free. I mean, you go in that courtroom with Tiger. Yeah. Can I hold him, man? Hold him for $5 a piece. Ordinarily, they go for $10, but I'm going to give him to you for $5. Five bucks, man. That's a rip off. You can get it for 50 cents on the street. You're not on the street. Man, I haven't seen these since 71, man. Yeah, but five bucks, man. It was at a Dead concert, man. We were there for 24 hours. That's $5 a piece. I dropped six of them. I almost died. All right. Come on. Move it. Move it out. How's it going, Tiger? Sit down. Not you. Get up. Give me the money. I don't have the money, man. I asked the guy. I know you got $15 on you. No, I don't have no money. I accidentally took him, man. What do you mean you accidentally took him? Well, when that dude came in, he scared me. And I just dropped him, man. Jesus. Hey, Paco and Stoner next. Arnold, get Whirlwinkle out of there. All right. See you later, asshole. Last date. Am I doing it? No, man. Are you serious, man? All right. I thought you took him, man. I'll take anybody. I don't know what's in this ----. Hey, watch out. You made me swallow one, man. You took one of them pills? You hit my hand, man. I don't even know what's in them pills, man. What'd you take that for? Jesus, Leslie. You smell like a bushel of buttholes. It's just your breath going back in your face. I don't get two swallows to get cane up your ass. Yeah. Hey, you want to smell your mama? I'll see you later. It won't be water, but fire next time. Show that goddamn cow being captured, baby. How you doing? Hey, man. Hey, man, are you okay? Hey. Anthony, Stoner. Pedro, DePacas. This is Toyota Kawasaki here at the Mexican-United States border, where a huge task force is preparing a surprise welcome for a vehicle constructed entirely of high-grade marijuana. I quit school early. You know, as soon as I smoked a joint, I said, oh, okay, I know everything I need to know. And from then on, I was on my way. He saw the writing on the wall. I was in college, my first year in college, and I came home one night to my apartment, and all my buddies, my roommates were having a party, and my roommate handed me this cigarette. He knew I didn't smoke. I said, what is this? This is a joint, man. Look, it's marijuana. And all my life, I heard, you smoke this, you're going to be insane and be stealing out of your mother's purse to buy heroin. Okay, well, might as well. And I got high. And what else had they been lying about? How ignorant was society then? Dangerously ignorant. Look, the first time that I ever attempted to get a joint, when I was 13, 14 years old, it cost 50 cents, but if you got caught, it was 15 years. So it was more than just taboo with society. It was really illegal. It was illegal. It was hush-hush kind of, but everybody was doing it. And so we were the guys that say, well, everybody's doing it, so let's make a movie about it. We were products of our age. We came out in the early 70s, and we reflected what was happening in the streets that everybody was involved in, but nobody was officially talking about. You got any narcotics or marijuana in here? Not anymore. And we were these two guys that were officially talking about it in our kind of offhanded way. What kind of joint is this, man? Oh, it's a heavy-duty joint, man. It looks like a toothpick, man. Oh, man, it's just, it is a toothpick. The thing is growing up poor is that you have to make your own entertainment. You can't go somewhere to be entertained. You have to make your own entertainment in your own neighborhood, in your own house, if you're lucky enough to have a house. We grew up poor. We grew up in the ghetto. And so we could take that experience of how you survive. And the only way you survive poverty or anything, life is with humor. You know, that's what protects you. What's your name? Isn't it on there on the license, man? What's your name? Hey, what's your name, man? The dude wants to know your name, man. His name is Ralph, man. We always considered ourselves comedic actors. We weren't comedians like stand-up. Hey, a funny thing happened to me on the way to the club. No, all our contemporaries, Richard Pryor, Lily Tomlin, George Carlin, all those guys, their records consisted of their live acts. We went into a studio and created these little scenarios and different characters, and they're all different. So it was like very atmospheric. It was almost like radio theater. Yeah. And that's how we made our albums. Just a minute, I'll put the seat back. Okay, pull it up, man. A little more. We're almost into the next phase, man. Hold it, hold it, right. No, back up now. Fregón. How many used to say that Cheech and Chong was who we were when our wives weren't around? That's pretty much true. Oh, we can get a character. Yeah. When, boy, when are you gonna get your act together? Like, I got a character from a kid in Vancouver that used to work our lights. He was like this hippie man, met him in an alley. He was like, you know, the joker in the king's court, you know? Like, no one would say things that he would say. You girls need a ride? No. You sure? Yeah. I'm going that way. And we were standing outside that club, and this lowrider came by, what did he say? He says, hey, you guys know where Reseda Boulevard is? Yeah, you're on it. Yeah, see, I told you, man. We're like, and then Tommy turns around and says, let's do that bit that we've been doing in the car. You be that guy. OK, and I'll be this other guy. That's when it came together. Because we've been doing that bit for the week, and everybody, yeah, OK, great. I started doing it with those two characters, the whole club stopped. Everybody came, and they were like, wow. OK, that's it. Those are two of the guys. Yeah, we hit a nerve. We hit a nerve. It was just destined to happen. It had to happen. I found Cheech and Chong, Tommy and Cheech, at the Troubadour on a hootenanny night, which is where people sign up. Most of them are just starting out. I went in, and Tommy and Cheech were on their knees, going around in circles, smelling each other's butts. I think that's what attracted him. Which was their dog act. They play two dogs. And I said, I'd like to record these guys. That was the beginning. But Lou had this incredible taste of what we were doing. I went to school in East LA, Boyle Heights, so I knew who Cheech was doing. Hey, how many fingers you see? Well, I think Let's Make a Movie came, at least in my mind, it came right away. We were a stage act first that had to figure out how to convert our stage act into a record. And now we had to figure out how to convert the record into a movie. It was really going back to our acting roots. The request lines are now open. If you can imagine, I go into a studio and say, I'd like to make a comedy film about marijuana with a Chinaman and a Mexican. Not a lot of, hey, yeah, let's make that movie. It took seven years to make that movie, To Make Up and Smoke. Because we had no idea how to write a movie. We just started writing on this bit and that bit. We always had Tommy and Cheech's humor and the characters within the story. But, I mean, wherever we could get anything in that was from an album. Come on, ice cream. Which made it not only funny, but somewhat familiar to the audience that they were building. Hey, I really like your car, man. Did you do this yourself? Yeah, I customized it myself, man. Ah, looks fantastic, man. The movie originally was supposed to be Cheech and Chong's Greatest Hits. Yeah, there was no coherent story. Until one day I came to work and I said, hey, I wrote a song. What do you think of this? And I sang up and spoke to them. And Cheech said right away, he says, that's the title of the movie. And so we said, let's do Pedro and Man. Those are the two stars. The Avengers of Pedro and Man, if anything. They are such good comedians that is overlooked sometimes. That it could have been about anything. We were like a runaway train, man. We did that movie in less than a month. And boom, it's in the camp. It was tough making the film. It wasn't as much fun as it looked. It was work. I was a first time director. It's their first film. I think we went through three cinematographers. It was mostly shot in Masters. We didn't even know about close-ups. They didn't have close-ups on stage. We didn't need them to make a laugh. I love a manly chest. Yeah, so do I. I mean, I'm a girl. Our movie is like our live act. We'd go into a club and we'd scope out the audience and decide where we're going to go. Hey man, am I driving okay? And then create. I think we're parked, man. It was a process of always writing. We were making up scenes as we went along. We'd have lunch. We were talking about experience. Let's shoot that after lunch. And that's what we did. I didn't know your name was Alex, man. Luckily, we had a crew that could handle that quick change. Well, Lou knew and we knew Robert Altman. So what we did, we hooked up with Robert Altman's crew. So we were with real movie makers that knew what they were doing. And all we had to do was provide the stuff for them to shoot. As far as me being stoned part, I think that's just added to the comedy and who the character was. It's to get a laugh. You know, if you do something and you get a laugh, you do a little bit more, you get a bigger laugh. Put it down, man. Get rid of it, man. Not that way, man. Throw it out. There's a lot of people that don't believe that we weren't stoned through the whole making of the movie. Choke it up, man. And we weren't. No. Smoking lettuce. Nobody can act that good. Oh, yeah? I wasn't interested in a good review or a bad review. If they didn't find it funny, whoever they were, I didn't care. The thing is that we got a lot of those reviews with some of those kind of... And then we got this glowing review from Pauline Kael in The New Yorker. Yeah. In The New Yorker. So... We only looked at those. We knew that we were funny to the audience that we were going after. The Chicanos, you know, like George Lopez, man. When he saw up in smoke, he saw God. Yeah. Somebody looks like me. You know, a lot thinner. But that style. It was a style. The jokes and some of the things that we put in were because of who we were exposed to. So Yesca was... I heard it all my life. Yesca is a Chicano name for weed. We showed sections of L.A. that we inhabited. We got in the car, we went down the road and here's the people we encountered. And everybody related to that. This is what I see every day, but I don't see them on screen. Any questions? It was made of the time of that time. Whether it resonates now, it's up to the people that view it. What do you guys want? They're smart enough to know what they did and what it's brought or what. However you're looking at it. It was the culture. It is the culture. And now the culture is above board. You don't have to go to jail for 20 years for a pot. Well, who's laughing now? You don't understand. I am stoned. So go with it. I mean, we created that style. You know, we created the humor with the records. We're sampled as much as James Brown was in the early days of rap. Maybe more. Method Man and Snoop and those. They always are talking about Cheech and Chong and what their inspiration was. Here's the telling aspect of this whole career of Cheech and Chong. We are the number one tattooed artists on people's bodies of anybody. And at first, it weirds you out, man. You know, it's like that's a commitment. There's a picture of somebody sent me the other day that a guy has on his ass. It's Cheech crack Chong, you know, you can't even see it. Their audience has no boundaries. We had them eating right out of their hands. We're going to be big, man. Really big. I feel good, man. I wish we could have something to celebrate, man. Me and Tommy and Lou, we're in the kill zone here. Age-wise, it's like walking through a minefield. We could blow up today. It's a pleasure to talk about anything 40 years later. He's bawling. My wife told me the other day, she says, your life insurance is up. What do you think? Should we renew it for five years or 10 years? I said, why renew it at all? I'm not going to get any benefit out of this. Good luck. I'd love to live 40 more years, but I don't know if that's in the cards, you know?