Over the last 50 years, I’ve watched our media fare grow increasingly violent to the point that most content today seems little more than a vehicle to transport viewers from one shockingly realistic terror event to another, and our real history as humans is being blotted out and replaced with a far more violent history, and this process just drives us deeper and deeper into a heart of darkness. And that’s why we are becoming more and more violent. That and all the synthetic drugs people are taking.
I had a video camera for WHEE! but didn’t use it until the wrap party at the end, when Ken Babbs came to hang with the Temple Dragons. The next day we visited Kesey in his video studio. Kesey really inspired me to get deep into video editing, the tools of which were just slipping into the consumer market for the first time. You could get into digital editing for ten grand.
In one annual report, I pitched a video travel guide to Jamaica starring my sidekick Chef Ra. I was not invited to that summit, but when she got back from whatever 5-star resort she’d spent ten days at, Cruella said, “good news and bad news. Good news is we are funding your Chef Ra film idea, bad news, my son-in-law is directing, you aren’t going, and you’re not getting any credit.”
He made a rambling, 30-minute collage that took some boring political tangent, and was saved by Chef Ra writing the script for his voice-over. Ra was able to interject some real humor and spirituality into the film.
It hurt being left out of the first High Times film project since D.O.A. about the Sex Pistols first tour. The company could have scored a major underground hit with that but refused to pay the pittance required to get the music rights. They even stiffed the researcher who put a deal together. After Tom died, the company was about making and taking money, but not spending it.
But a year or two later, when Mike Esterson put together a Chef Ra tour of Negril, I tagged along and made a film called “Bumbaclots in Negril.” It was a guide masking as a biker flick. I was really just toying around trying to learn the craft but my zero-budget, 10-minute film blew away the one made earlier for a hundred grand or so.
When I first ventured seriously into reality-TV, it was to make a spoof on Survivor. Instead of competing against each other, the contestants were told to bond and pick the winner of the Cannabis Cup over five days confined to a small houseboat in Amsterdam.
The real drama began when one of the contestants overdosed and had to get off the boat. He soon announced he was done smoking pot for life because he couldn’t handle it.
Another contestant called him out. He had signed a contract to judge weed and failed to deliver. He never should have entered the contest in the first place.
I thought the show was a fantastic success because it illustrated the dangers of having a cavalier attitude toward cannabis and not respecting the plant’s powers.
The sad part about the whole thing was the kid who had the meltdown was the most talented of the group and I was hoping to keep my Castaways as regular pot stars on the network I was trying to build. He was creating wonderful animation sequences for the next Cup when he suddenly ghosted me in a paranoid fog. So that blew up what could have been a great collaboration.
The next attempt was my High Times Reality TV Show. That unwieldy title was not my idea. (I plan to recut the project into a feature doc at some point because it’s so hard to find the episodes online and only the pilot got released, and not the material shot in Amsterdam about Doc entering Ookie Kabuki and beating out DNA Seeds in a smoke-off judged by Robert Connell Clarke).
The pilot involved staging the first Miss High Times Pageant in Jamaica. Instead of a competition, the girls were supposed to bond and have a spiritual experience. This worked beyond my wildest imagination, and the girls ended up bonded for life.
I was doing my best to chart a course for meaningful content that ran contrary to the tsunami of competition, greed and violence dominating the mass media. And it was working. So one wonders why there was so much friction, fog and clogs coming from Cruella, the real power at High Times?
As if the work I was doing wasn’t meaningful and the rap around the office became, “why can’t he just concentrate on the magazine?” That was Cruella talking. She was so hostile to my videotaping everything she ordered me to stop shooting video at one summit.
“I can’t do that,” I said. “It’s part of my process. I used to tape record all my interviews since I was in college. I found it much easier to edit the interviews in video format, so it helps speed up the process of turning the interviews into type. I have been shooting everything I do for years now. This is valuable.”
“My son-in-law has been in California making videos for years and never made a dime!” snorted Cruella who refused to believe I could do anything worthwhile in the medium.
The next year, the son-in-law was nominated for an Oscar for a low-budget film he produced. Cruella sent out the email, she and the lawyer who stole High Times, “were bursting with pride.”
I never had the nerve to confront her with her earlier statement about how worthless shooting video was. I just knew any refusal to buckle under to her every whim was asking for major trouble and she would soon be toying with me like a cat with a bird in its claws, but I was a magic bird who could disappear and reappear in a different place with a whole new project that needed to be stopped. Cruella was playing whack-a-mole for decades and I was always the mole.