With a career-spanning documentary screening at the Sydney Underground Film Festival, we spoke with director David L. Bushell about lionising the godfathers of stoner comedy.
Long before Jay met Silent Bob, decades before Seth Rogen ripped his first bong, there was Cheech & Chong. Meeting in Vancouver in 1969, Chinese-Canadian Tommy Chong and Mexican-American Cheech Marin (north of the 49th to dodge the draft) made a creative connection that carried them through a career that encompassed sold out live tours, best-selling albums, and a string of hit movies beginning with 1978’s Up In Smoke. And they did it all by making jokes about marijuana.
In our current moment, when a legal THC prescription is a couple of clicks away, it’s hard to grasp how controversial that was at the time – and how little respected. Cheech & Chong came boiling out of the anti-war counterculture of the time, a couple of boldly unapologetic POC comedians who built their brand on defiant antiauthoritarianism and cheerful hedonism, which made them abhorrent to the mainstream. But their comedy was lowbrow and scatalogical, which put them out of the running when it came to critical praise. It’s only in recent decades, long after their heyday, that the pair have been subject to reappraisal.
Which means it’s about time for a retrospective documentary that tells their tale. Produced and directed by David L. Bushell, Cheech and Chong’s Last Movie puts the now-venerable pair in their natural environment: in a car, on the road, going nowhere in particular. With their improvised repartee as a framing device, the film delves into the entire span of their work together, charting their rise to stardom and the differing creative drives that eventually ended their partnership. We caught up with Bushell to find out how it all went down.
Travis Johnson: Why don’t we start at the start and you can tell me how this came together for you? Where did this project originate?
David L. Bushell: I was called years ago, many years ago, to to produce a reunion film, a normal Cheech and Chong comedy. That didn’t happen, but through that process I met (Tommy’s daughter) Robbi Chong. And we tried to keep the train on the tracks when Tommy went to prison.
TJ: So this is way back in 2003 when, just to clarify, Tommy went to prison for selling bongs online.
DLB: Well, his son was selling bongs online and during the Ashcroft era they had a sting operation called Operation Pipe Dreams. They were busting all the head shops and you know, that’s like a separate movie unto itself. And Tommy spent nine months in federal prison because they basically told them you take the hit or we’re gonna come after your son and and your wife. So, it was around that time.
And who wouldn’t want to produce a Cheech & Chong film? But for a number of reasons the film got derailed, and Robbi and I stayed close. We’re trying to get them to keep the movie on the tracks and that’s not happening, and the guys are kind of ageing out perhaps, and I said, “Let’s do a a documentary.” I have a producing background and wanted to direct something, so we just kind of suited up asked the guys and they were into it.
TJ: The framing device, with the two of them driving together, is very interesting. It’s that classic Cheech & Chong set up, but it also blurs the lines between fact and fiction a bit.
DLB: I always knew I wanted to try and do something a little bit more expansive and dynamic.
In the conventional documentary genre I feel like there’s so many great stories that aren’t greatly told, and the aspiration was to try and make it theatrical. So I was like, well, if we can tell this wildly empathetic story and feel like we got caught in a 20 minute Cheech & Chong movie while learning this, you know, that could be really interesting.
TJ: Was there ever a point where you considered a more conventional approach?
DLB: When we were raising the money and all that stuff, people wanted convention. They wanted us to
cut to Snoop Dogg and Adam Sandler talking about how great they are and everything, and I was like, “No, no, no! We’ve got this really rich story that a lot of people don’t know!” I wanted to kind of lift the veil on the perception of their characters, because there’s so much more than that. But also, there’s this third act engine. When I learned about the unresolved conflict [between Marin and Chong]
I had hoped that would they would go for it, and they did so.
TJ: I find that really interesting because, I wasn’t aware of that conflict. But from a critical point of view, you’ve made it a little metatextual. I was watching it wondering how much of this is real and how much of this is scripted narrative to support the framing device.
DLB: Yeah, so there were no scripts. My approach was basically… you got firecrackers in Australia?
TJ: Yeah, yeah, we we got them.
DLB: It was like lighting a pack of firecrackers and running. I had done the portrait interviews of them previously individually, so I knew the stories. They both wrote a book, so there was a lot of information out there and I was just needed to hold it in. We shot it towards the end of the process, out in the desert, in the Joshua Tree area and it was hot as balls, man. But I knew that I wanted to do the desert and go out there and hope for the best and, you know, I guess we’re on the phone, so it didn’t go that bad.
TJ: They’re clearly guys who have their grievances with each other, but they’re kind of out of fucks to give.
It’s not that they’re too tired to fight me more, it’s just: what’s the point of the fight? They’ve known each other for so long.
DLB: Well, they told me early on, you know: “We’re not friends. We’re brothers.” So, I look at it as they love and fight like brothers. The fact of the matter is that they love each and ultimately, for me, the movie is a love story.
Cheech And Chong’s Last Movie is screening at the Sydney Underground Film Festival on Saturday, September 13. Hit this link for tickets.
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