Homegrown truths: Ron Mann's Grass lights a torch for reefer sanity

TAKE ONE, Dec-Feb, 1999 by Steve Gravestock

Some filmmakers stumble on their subjects! others get them handed to them.

For Ron Mann, his latest film Grass was something else entirely--fate. "Back in 1979, I made my first film--a short called The Only Game in Town. Later on it won an award from the Academy of Canadian Cinema, and it went out to theatres played in front of Cheech and Chong's Up In Smoke," laughs Mann. "So in a lot of ways this was a film I was destined to do."

A seven-year labour of love and dedication, Mann's fifth feature-length documentary, Grass, is an appealing (and often appalling) expose about America's war on drugs: marijuana division. "My real aim was to do an Atomic Cafe on drugs," explains Mann, "to make the film as entertaining as those obscure antidrug movies the government produced. The same hysterical reaction to the Cold War would be similar to the hysterical reaction to the drug war." Narrated by notorious hemp spokesperson Woody Harrelson, the film begins at the turn of the century, when Mexican migrant workers introduced marijuana to the border states and were immediately persecuted for it. Not because anyone was especially upset about the weed itself, but because the Mexicans made an easy political target for politicians and the yellow press.

Stylistically, the film is perhaps the most layered of all Mann's films--with more stock footage than he has ever used before and almost no interviews. He wanted to get away from the television style of documentary, which oscillates relentlessly between interview and clip. A barrage of different techniques, the film features animated graphics (which divide it into very specific sections, and play on the drug-war metaphor to hilarious effect); priceless archival footage, ranging from the aforementioned anti-dope flicks to obscure 1960s television shows; and public service announcements about the demon weed. Harrelson's laconic narration suggests a pro-pot Gary Cooper. And if you heard Guido Luciani's lush orchestral score alone you'd be more likely to associate it with a Pink Floyd album than a documentary. (In some way, the assembled participants and the subject made odd bedfellows. Luciani's instructions to the orchestra--that this wasn't the kind of grass you'd find on your lawn--prompted the reply, "Well, maybe not on your lawn.") There's also a campy, propulsive vintage soundtrack.

"Film needs a voice and the voice of our film is rationality," says Mann. "We have a narrator, Woody Harrelson, who is really just telling the facts. We also have a kind of irreverent use of music which provides a kind of meta-commentary all the way through. It also just triggers people--it puts them there." Much of the first half of Grass is devoted to the exploits of one Harry J. Anslinger, America's first antidrug czar, and one of the most shadowy and compelling characters you're ever likely to encounter on-screen. A lifelong bureaucrat and media genius/whore, whose career echoes those of J. Edgar Hoover and Estes Kefauver (the Midwestern senator who was one of the principal proponents of comic-book censorship), Anslinger paved the way for the Federal Bureau of Narcotics and the Drug Enforcement Agency. His main tool was a full-scale media campaign about the evils of pot, despite the fact that there were far more dangerous narcotics out there (most notably heroin).

As Mann illustrates, it was a precisely targeted onslaught. "The reason the antimarijuana campaign really took off was because it was called the `Assassin of Youth,'" says Mann. "And if I was reading in the newspaper that there was this new drug that caused murder and death and insanity and they were selling it in schoolyards, I'd be concerned too." As a result of this campaign, Anslinger was able to bully the states into turning drug enforcement over to the federal government--and accrue a great deal of political clout along the way. "You look at Anslinger's archives, and he supplied heroin to Roy Cohn. He's a very powerful figure, in part, because he had some very powerful partners; powerful and dangerous--the drug industry and pharmaceutical industry, for example--who would lobby on his behalf. He would also have temperance organizations and the police backing him."

Of course, not all of Anslinger's publicity efforts worked as well. Says Mann: "Anslinger tried to round up, for publicity purposes, a massive jazz musician bust. But his team members came back and said, `We can't do it. We can't infiltrate.'" Despite his overwhelming power, Anslinger is almost a completely unknown entity outside of pot activism circles. Mann first heard about him when he found a book called Reefer Madness in the early 1980s. "It had an introduction by William Burroughs, who said that he [Anslinger] was responsible for the beginning of fascism in America. I found that history fascinating. He was a J. Edgar Hoover type and I really wanted to tell his story. My view is a little different from that book. I think Anslinger was just misguided; he's really someone who believes that he's protecting people, as temperance people do. Unfortunately, it gives them justification to go to great lengths, to do just about anything.