1) High Times Cannabis Cup, a comedy feature following Steve Hager, Chef Ra, Coke La Rock, and the rest of the Temple Dragon Crew driving a psychedelic bus around Amsterdam as they gather strains for the annual competition while practicing improvisational ritual theater 24-7, manifesting creative energy and 420 Ceremonies. A teenage scientist arrives with a lab-grown strain called Chocolate Cherry. Script has a green light from Lion’s Gate with a $2 million budget.
2) The Story of Tom Forcade by Steven Hager, John Holmstrom and Albert Goldman, a book ready to be released.
3) Ookie Kabuki, a Borat-style comedy starring an egotistical bipolar weed grower entering a strain in the Seed Cup who arrogantly challenges all the biggest names to a smoke-off to prove his strain is best. Nobody knows he’s just an actor, except the High Times staff, who are greatly agitated and feel the integrity of the event is in peril. The shoot goes off spectacularly well considering the immense hostility this innocent comedy provoked.
4) Kesey and Mountain Girl are so pleased by WHEE2! that they ask me to move it to Mountain Girl’s farm.
5) Soil or Hydro: Arjan versus Soma, the great debate. Two of the most famous and successful growers in Amsterdam discuss the benefits of their approach. Finished film, ready and scheduled to be released. Instead, release was dropped, and $60k spent to make a completely different video starring Nico, who was not well-known. Cruella dumps a finished film with stars that cost nothing (all footage came out of my archives). It had already been approved by Mary McEvoy and she invested $800 in a polish edit. But suddenly, it’s pulled and a new, expensive project put in its place.
6) Documentary film on Tom Forcade. Shown at the Cup featuring Tom, known as the Smuggler’s Cup. Finished and ready to release, but never released. Much of the footage ends up in “Origins of High Times,” a decade later.
These are but a few of the many projects I put immense energy into that failed to launch even though they were in the can. And the killing was always done at the 11th hour, which was extra torture, teasing me into thinking I might be able to put out some content.
No wonder I felt suffocated. Cruella was trying to get me to cough up my shares and quit. But I had a family and two kids, and had been made unemployable by my CIA investigations.
You can’t imagine the hostile work environment I was in for years after I got thrown under the bus, kneecapped, and locked in a basement. Cruella was always the real power at High Times. Michael was but a puppet on a string. She was everything Michael desired, sophisticated, sensuous, glamorous, mile-long legs. He was putty in Contessa’s hands and Michael her greatest creation.
The same dynamic that almost drove Lady Diana and Meagan crazy was based on hostile work environment. It’s a pressure cooker and it crushed my mental health and ability to eat and sleep. I was doing my best work, but like Chef Ra benched by Smitty, never got off the bench again.
And then something truly spectacular happened. Michael died and NORML made an award in his name and gave it to…..Bernadine Dohrn, leader of the most notorious terrorist network in America, the American version of Bader-Meinhof Gang, who conspired with North Vietnam, Cuba and Russia.
The Patti Hearst kidnapping was a Weather Underground op.
“It wasn’t unanimous,” Dan Viets later told me. Dan might be my cousin. He’s the most righteous dude on the NORML board.
Maybe Michael forced that on Keith as a dying request, maybe Cruella made it happen.
It was such a bold move considering I’d already done a documentary exposing the Weather Underground as a CIA op while Michael was alive, and this bizarre award to a terrorist bomber, and LSD orgy leader, who never lifted a finger to legalize cannabis, at a cannabis event and treating a terrorist like a heroine was truly bizarre and so revealing.
And nobody called foul, except me.