You guys worked with a lot of burgeoning talent before they made it big. Paul Reubens, I think he was in Nice Dreams…?
Cheech Marin: He was in Next Movie, too.
Tommy Chong: We used him in Next Movie first, and then he was in Nice Dreams. Yeah, we kicked off a few careers. Michael Winslow, Paul Reubens…
Cheech Marin: Edie McClurg…
Tommy Chong: Although Edie had been in that Carrie movie.
Cheech Marin: Did she?
Tommy Chong: She was in [the salon] in Carrie.
Cheech Marin: Wow… And Cassandra Peterson.
Tommy Chong: Rita [Wilson], Tom Hanks’s wife. She was in Next Movie.
Cheech Marin: Sandra Bernhard.
Tommy Chong: That was her first role.
Were you friends with all these people at the time or were they auditioning for you?
Tommy Chong: [Thinks] I went down to the Groundlings and discovered… Because we’re improv actors and we wanted to have improv people with us. Lou Adler and Robert Altman’s people helped us with Up in Smoke. After Up in Smoke we did our casting with the Groundlings.
When you say “Robert Altman’s people,” was Altman directly involved?
Tommy Chong: Altman was a little old then, and he was not well. Lou Lombardo was the producer…
Cheech Marin: He was gonna direct Up in Smoke, Altman. But then he did Quintet instead.
Tommy Chong: Yeah.
What was Lou Adler like as a comedic director?
Tommy Chong: He was excellent. Actually, what he did, he was like a traffic cop, kinda. He allowed us to do what we did. He directed the movie the same way he would direct our records, which was, he allowed us all the freedom in the world to do whatever we thought was funny, and then he would, with the editors, they would try to sort it out. He just really gave us a lot of freedom, which we need in order to be funny. We were never held to… Like, a lot of movies that have scripts, even though you come up with something, a funnier idea, the writers and the producers and everything else they want you to stick right to the written word. But with Cheech & Chong we need to be able to change our mind on a dime because if we come up with a better idea… Up in Smoke, I can think of about a handful, over a half a dozen jokes that weren’t in the script that ended up on the screen that we thought [of] during our break, or waiting for the lighting to change, Cheech and I would talk about something. Like the peeing in the closet scene, where he peed in a hamper. That wasn’t in the script. We talked about it and put it in there.
Cheech Marin: “Fuck me Alex” wasn’t in the script.
Tommy Chong: Yeah, that wasn’t in the script. Oh, there were so many moments. […] The Ajax lady wasn’t in the script.
Cheech Marin: Oh, no.
I’ve talked to a lot of actors, and they say that the key to acting drunk is trying to act sober. What’s the key to acting high on camera?
Cheech Marin: Memory.
Tommy Chong: Or being high.
Cheech Marin: [Laughs] Which we never were when we were shooting. It was part of our being. We knew how to do that.
Tommy Chong: We had been on stage ten years before, and our stage persona, we were all over the place. You know, when you’re on stage you have to project to the back of the room and you have to do it in such a way that everybody can see you. We were very visual, and that’s what made it work in the movies. We were more visual, I think, than we were verbal.
William Bibbiani is the editor of CraveOnline’s Film Channel, co-host of The B-Movies Podcast, co-star of The Trailer Hitch, and the writer of The Test of Time. Follow him on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.
