Kevin Murphy: And I was like, “Wow. That’s interesting.” It’s got all the ingredients of a musical because the stakes are sky high. It’s life and death, there’s a romance center of it, and there’s an interesting motivation. And having characters sing. When you smoke marijuana, your emotion is so heightened that it can only be expressed in the musical idiom.
Dan Studney: We wrote the first song on the way back from San Francisco before we got away. We thought a musical of singing, dancing potheads would be funny. Then in our research, we found that there was something more interesting going on with Reefer Madness and why marijuana was criminalized in the first place, and that had to do with punching down at minorities and racism and all this stuff. And we were like, “Oh, this is really about politics, actually.”
Dan Studney and Kevin Murphy spent four months writing the show with what Murphy calls a “feverish blast of creative energy.” After that, they started eyeing an L.A. production, and were on the hunt for the perfect team. Enter Andy Fickman.
Andy Fickman (director): I had been head of development for Gene Wilder, and then I was head of development for Bette Midler, and then I was at Middle Fork Productions with Verna Harrah. I met with Kevin and Dan and they told me that they had turned Reefer Madness into a musical. They gave me a cassette with Dan singing all of the songs and I fell in love. They had only brought it to me as a producer, but what I really wanted to do was direct it. We had a meeting so I could wine and dine them. I was a member of a cigar club called The Jockey Club in Beverly Hills. I made a hardcore play for, “Let me direct this and become your partner.” And foolishly—with enough cigar smoke in the air—they said yes.
Christian Campbell (“Jimmy Harper”): Dan Studney was an extras wrangler on Party Of Five. And so he was hanging with Neve [Campbell] on set, talking about the show Reefer Madness he was doing. And he said, “The role of Jimmy is this all-American boy. We’ve got to find a singer.” And my sister was like, “My brother looks all-American. And yeah, he can sing.” So they brought me in.
John Kassir (“Ralph Wiley”): I came off winning Star Search and being in some sitcoms. And Andy was running development for Bette Midler. He called me one day, and said, “Hey I’ve got these guys. They wrote Reefer Madness the musical.” And I thought, “That sounds like fun. But I’ve got a crapload on my plate.” He sent me the music and it was Dan and Kevin singing. The part of Ralph was barely written at that point. They wanted to flesh it out with the actor they would bring on. Andy goes, “This is going to be an amazing, fun time.” And I’m like, “You know what? I’m on board.”
In 1998, the show opened up at the Hudson Theater in L.A., where it won five Ovation Awards. It played for 150 performances, breaking a record for the city’s longest-running show of its size. It also gained the notice of industry types, including the likes of Warren Beatty and Fran Drescher, eager to adapt it for film or television. However, the decision was to instead bring the show to Off-Broadway first. The team even found a new female lead: an NYU student named Kristen Bell. The Off-Broadway show was set to open on September 15, 2001. It closed a month later, overshadowed by 9/11.
Dan Studney: We were in tech on 9/11. It was like, “Oh crap. This is a show about political misinformation.” And in the wake of 9/11, patriotism was coming out in spades. And in “Tell ‘Em the Truth,” we had George Washington and Uncle Sam singing about propaganda. It was like, “Wow. Our timing is really terrible to have something that is critical of America.”
Kevin Murphy: We actually had the National Guard deployed along 13th Street and our theater, the Variety Arts, was right below 13th Street. Our audience had to get past the National Guard each night.
Christian Campbell: The city was reeling. In a way, I fell in love with New York even more, going through 9/11 with it. At that time, we were sort of in an in-between stage. I didn’t know what it was going to become, but I didn’t think it was over. It was too good of a show to be over.
Andy Fickman: After 9/11, when we came back to L.A., we didn’t know what to do with the show. But we took what became their screenplay version and we decided to do a reading at the Coronet Theatre. We had Christian Campbell, Kristen Bell, Bob Torti, and John Kassir. We put together an all-star reading.
Dan Studney: There was this tall gentleman at the reading leaning against the back wall. I was like “Who’s this guy? He looks like he doesn’t want to be here. Why is he here?” Turns out that was Robert Greenblatt, and that was his first day on the job at Showtime.
Andy Fickman: Bob Greenblatt had seen Reefer Madness in L.A. in 1999 and been a big fan. And Bob said, “I’d like to make Reefer Madness my first greenlight movie.” That was one of the greatest things to ever hear.
Kevin Murphy: He said, “My goal at Showtime is that I want to send a signal to the creative community that this is where you bring your crazy, weird, insane projects that nobody else will touch. Let’s do this down and dirty. Let’s use your original cast and figure it out.” Then internally they were like, “Well, wouldn’t it be nice to have like one star?”
Alan Cumming (“The Lecturer,” “The Goat Man,” “Franklin Delano Roosevelt,” “Jazz Man”): I was in Australia making a film and I was sent the script. I remember reading it by the side of the “Boy” Charlton Pool in Sydney, thinking, “Oh, I’ve got to do this.” I was aware of it a little bit because I knew Neve Campbell. I worked with Neve and she told me about it. But I wasn’t really aware of the details of the piece or the music or anything. I was just aware that there was a show based on the propaganda film. I thought it was hilarious, and I signed on straight away.
Amy Spanger (“Sally DeBanis”): I got an audition. They wanted me to sing a musical theater rock song and I sang “Take Me Or Leave Me,” because I had played Maureen in Rent. I didn’t hear the end of that from Andy Fickman. He made fun of me relentlessly. But I guess it was good enough, because I got the gig.
Ana Gasteyer (“Mae Coleman”): It’s all the things I love. It was a fun, observational parody. It was genre. The music was great. There’s not a lot of roles that let you be both funny and musical at the same time. It hit both notes.
Steven Weber (“Jack Stone”): I did not have much of an awareness of it by the time they were working on the musical. It was offered to me, which of course was lovely. And I leapt at it, because I always liked to sing. I also love old films. So it did give me an opportunity to pursue that ’30s tough guy aspect personified by James Cagney, [Humphrey] Bogart. But also, to a degree, the lesser actors of that era from some of the B-movies. It allowed me to wear a mustache that is so out of fashion, that was only worn by pimps from the 1930s.
Ana Gasteyer: That’s half the fun of playing a period musical. You’re living in another time, where these musicals were the genre. And then there’s the glamour of the era. Obviously the movie lives in a different place, then takes the absurdism all the way to the farthest edge, axe-murdering and going crazy on reefer. You see every side of it.
Alan Cumming: The actual lecturer part was easy to [find material to] draw inspiration. You could look at those films of that era. But for the other stuff—which was frankly what excited me more—getting to play such a range of people, sometimes I was not him at all. But often I was a version of him inside another character. But when it got to, like, a Goat Man in that saucy sequence, I left the lecturer behind.
Christian Campbell: I toned it down a little bit. On stage, you need to amplify things. So it was adjusting the approach to the comedy and the physicality of it. It needed to be tempered and become more fine-tuned, as opposed to broad strokes.
John Kassir: Nobody knew who was going to get to go [for the film version] because they were trying to stunt cast it. At one point, I think they were like, “Let’s try to get Paul Reubens to play Ralph.” But Dan, Kevin, and Andy knew they wanted me to be in it, because they felt that it was important to have an actor whose character had been written to possess the tone of the show, and that was Ralph.
Andy Fickman: Showtime had just shot the pilot for what was going to become The L Word in Vancouver. So Kevin and Dan and I flew to Vancouver to meet with the head of production. He gave us a tour and he took us to the sets. And obviously Reefer Madness is set in America in the 1930s. Walking through these sets—which were really cool—looked like present-day West Hollywood. They said, “We built these sets. We don’t know if it’s going to series. But if you think you can film your 1930s musical on this modern-day set, you can probably have a greenlight.” And I said, “Oh my god, this is perfect. This is exactly what I imagined it would be. Of course we can use this.”
Kevin Murphy: There’s a swimming pool in The L Word. Well, let’s put a lid on it and let’s make that the victory garden.
Dan Studney: The zombies in Reefer Madness are literally popping up from a lesbian swimming pool. And they had a café that we turned into the Five And Dime. It was all production designed within an inch of its life.
With that, it was time to start production. The $6 million budget would prove challenging for their ambitious plans. So Andy Fickman figured out a strategy of how to get more money.
Andy Fickman: There’s always a theory in filmmaking. What do you show first to the studio? Do you do something really hard and show them that you can do it and show the crew you can do it? Or do you do something that’s easy during the first couple of days to guarantee that you can do it? Our approach was, “Nope! Let’s do the Five and Dime.”
Dan Studney: The first week is when all of the executives fly in and there’s the excitement of starting a new movie.
Andy Fickman: We had Neve Campbell and Steven Weber doing this great dance. We’d have Christian Campbell and the amazing Kristen Bell and Alan Cumming and all of our phenomenal dancers.
Steven Weber: The dance was the hardest thing. I’m a crap dancer. I’m sure Neve Campbell was incredibly frustrated by my clumsiness. At one point, we had to change the dance. I think I was supposed to throw her in the air and twirl her in midair and catch her. But it proved too much for my flimsy upper body.
Kevin Murphy: We made the “Down At The Ol’ Five And Dime” dance number the most extravagant thing it could possibly be. To make that happen, we basically starved the hell out of the resources for “Tell ‘Em the Truth.”
Andy Fickman: I always had this dream where I wanted this Elvis Presley, Jailhouse Rock-type number. I wanted tap-dancing prisoners. And we got to the point where we had reached the limit on the budget.
Dan Studney: I think the budget Showtime had agreed to in the beginning was $6 million. Even in 2004 money, that isn’t a lot to shoot a musical.
Kevin Murphy: So Andy went, “Well, I’m just so sorry that we’re not going to be able to give you the same excitement for the finale. We spent a little too much money, and we don’t have enough for tap dancing.” And Bob’s like, “Well, I do like tap dancing.”
Dan Studney: I think we doubled the budget. We had one camera crew for the Five And Dime [scene]. By the second week, we had three.
Andy Fickman: It was such a team effort. You seldom have a project where both off-camera and on-camera, everybody was working 24/7 to bring it to life. It started that way in L.A. with, “Hey, my uncle has a barn and we can put on a show there.” By the time we were filming the movie, we were still in that model.
Christian Campbell: We were all having such a blast. It felt like summer camp for a lot of us. Friendships and the bonds with a lot of the local actors we were working with. I’ve lived in Vancouver and have family in Vancouver. I’m from Canada. So there was a semi-feeling of going back to my home base in some way.
Amy Spanger: I had never done a film before. I was aware that I was around genius, famous, funny people. I was in the right room. It was super fun.
Alan Cumming: What excites me about being an actor is playing lots of different people who are different than myself. The lecturer is very different than myself. [So is] getting to be the Jazz Guy, the Goat Man, FDR. So many fun, crazy characters to play. That’s really up my street. I love being eclectic and I love variety.
John Kassir: We had so much fun. We had so much fun creating every moment of that movie as we moved along. Being in Vancouver, the crew was probably stoned half the time.
Dan Studney: You couldn’t walk through the set without anybody who wanted to ingratiate themselves with the authors and producers going, “Hey man! Good to meet you.” And you pull your hand away, and there’d be five joints.
Andy Fickman: At one point in “The Orgy” scene, we built this magnificent hookah that was so big. It had to be transferred across Vancouver to get to the set. And we got a call that the police had pulled it over. Vancouver at the time was a very marijuana-friendly community, but this was such a big hookah. I think it got impounded and we had to go get it out of there.
Christian Campbell: “The Orgy” is always great fun because we were all having such a ridiculous time. When we all first got on set, it was all like, “Okay. Clothes off.” The first 20 minutes was just everyone laughing and being goofy. And then after that, it was just having a great time being as stupid as humanly possible.
Amy Spanger: We had sex workers in that shot with us. At one point, I was riding on several strippers.
Andy Fickman: [Choreographer] Mary Ann Kellogg, Kevin, and I all knew we needed dancers who were very comfortable with their sexuality. In Vancouver there was a very famous strip club—or as they call it, a “peeler bar”—called Brandi’s. Mary Ann Kellogg and I went and started watching dancers. We talked to them and said, “You want to come do a movie?”
Amy Spanger: I didn’t eat all day because I didn’t want my belly hanging over my bikini bottoms. Then at one point we shot the big dance break and I remember Ana Gasteyer was like, “Why don’t you put your head between your legs?” Because she saw I had turned kind of white and it looked like I was going to faint.
Christian Campbell: I was in the gym a lot working out, because I knew I had to be really naked. I was taking very good care of my body during that movie.
Andy Fickman: We wanted that Busby Berkeley sense of opulence for “The Orgy.” We spent a lot of time going, “What do the costumes look like? What does the marijuana leaf look like? How do we play it? Once Jimmy experiences the trip, this is how we’re going to show the world how he changes.”
Christian Campbell: For “Mary Jane/Mary Lane,” we had far more intricate plans for choreography and how we were going to shoot it. But basically because of rain and other problems, we suddenly were limited as to what we could do. We had to, last minute on set, come up with all of that choreography that you see.
Kevin Murphy: The thing we knew was gold was Christian Campbell and Kristen Bell had enormous, firecracker-like chemistry together. You can just have them stand there and sing, and they’re going to be adorable.
Christian Campbell: With Kristen, we both have that bubbly, completely over-the-top “on Ritalin” kind of energy. It’s easy to work together. We don’t take ourselves too seriously.
Andy Fickman: In New York when we were rehearsing “Little Mary Sunshine” [a sexually explicit, S&M number in which Kristen Bell’s character violates John Kassir’s character], Kristen Bell’s mom was there for rehearsals. So I’m having to feel her mother’s eyes give me that withering stare of, “What have you done to my daughter?” And of course, we made it worse when we did it on film. “Well, now we’re going to make a memory that you can enjoy for the rest of your life.”
John Kassir: I said for the movie, “Andy, I have these ideas!” One of them was to have an S&M brand on my ass. Then when you turn it around, it says MS, for Mary Sunshine. Of course, Andy took that to the nth degree. The next thing I know, I’m wearing assless chaps. And we let Kristen Bell cut loose, going from this innocent girl to this vixen in leather.
Not only were there a number of sexually explicit scenes in the film, but there was also lots of gore and blood. The horror is campy, but there is a lot of it.
Andy Fickman: I carried a picture of Sissy Spacek in Carrie, and showed everyone who wanted to know what level of blood I was looking for, this is the level of blood I am looking for.
Steven Weber: My death scene had to be carefully choreographed, because we were using, as it were, a live hoe. We obviously utilized stunt performers. But there’s a bit of it where what you see on the screen is me, getting out of the way of the brutally swung hoe by Ana.
Dan Studney: John Kassir was always cracking people up. If you look really carefully, there’s a brief shot of Steven Weber looking at John kissing Sally’s severed head, and you can see a smile starting to form.
John Kassir: My whole goal was to see if I could get [Steven] to lose it. Wiping the head on the carpet. That was all just improvised stuff trying to crack up Steven Weber.
Steven Weber: I’m sure he succeeded in making me laugh. He’s one of the most inventive and hilarious human beings on the planet.
Andy Fickman: Once you start splattering blood all over the place, you can’t get rid of it. So we literally were like, “Alright. Are we all agreed that we’ve shot everything where there’s no blood? They’re going to have to rebuild this house for The L Word for sure, because we’ve bloodied everything.”
After a rapid 36-day shoot, production was wrapped. The film wound up having its big premiere with everyone getting high (in terms of altitude, at least), at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2005. Opening at the prestigious festival was a rarity for a TV movie.
Dan Studney: We weren’t 1000% percent sure that it wouldn’t be seen in theaters. Obviously, Bob wanted it to be on Showtime. So he was careful to keep it out of competition at Sundance and just make it a premiere.
Ana Gasteyer: Because it had been developed for television, there was probably a proprietary “Let’s keep it on Showtime.” And it was early streaming days, so it wasn’t like everybody had Showtime.
Kevin Murphy: But it was not lost on us that Bob was really, really, really putting it out there to make sure that the movie was something that would stand the test of time.
Andy Fickman: You’re hearing this laughter, this roar, which last time we heard that, that’s what it was like in L.A., when people were stomping their feet.
Alan Cumming: I remember Neve and I did a photo for High Times. And I thought, “Oh wow. There’s not that many films about weed. And there’s so few contemporary movie stars who are going to pose with a joint in their mouths. People are going to be passionate about this.”
Ana Gasteyer: It still kind of lives quietly on the side. I don’t think my kids have seen it or anything like that. I think people watch it around Halloween. But it deserves to find an audience above and beyond.
Christian Campbell: It’s a dense show in terms of all the moments that the actors can find in it, but also in terms of the script, the dialogue. There’s lots of smart stuff in there. It reveals itself when you come back more and more to it.
John Kassir: I do a lot of horror conventions, and I always have people showing up and bringing their copy of Reefer Madness on DVD. I actually have a Ralph doll that was made for me by a fan that sits in my office.
Dan Studney: I started to see online that shadowcasts were popping up, like what they do with The Rocky Horror Picture Show. I keep a close eye on the show and go to as many productions as I’m able to.
Andy Fickman: We got nominated for a bunch of Emmy Awards, and the same night, we were asked to be at the Deauville Film Festival in France. So Kevin and Dan were representing our show, and I was going to Deauville. The night that Dan and Kevin won the Emmy Award for the song “Mary Jane/Mary Lane,” we were also winning the Deauville Audience Award.
Kevin Murphy: For me, those friendships and relationships that we made during those four months in Vancouver, those are relationships that have stayed solid and together for all the years since, and probably the rest of our lives. That’s why I’m so grateful to Alan and Kristen for lending their celebrity and helping get the show back on the stage in L.A. [last year] where it belongs.
Andy Fickman: We won High Times‘ prestigious Stony Award not once, but twice. Each award is a large, working bong. At the bottom of the bong is an inscription, but at first glance it’s just a beautiful bong. At my office at Disney, my two awards from the Stonys were on my windowsill. Once, the President of Disney came up and said, “Andy, we’ve gotten reports that you have marijuana paraphernalia in your window.” And I lift them up and go, “They’re Stony Awards!” And he goes, “Well, congratulations. Fair enough.”
In the years that followed, the message of Reefer Madness has remained just as poignant as ever.
Christian Campbell: It resonates today, sadly, because it’s a timeless message. It’s about propaganda and misinformation. It’s about governments and groups of religion punching down at vulnerable people. It’s clearly very relevant today.
Alan Cumming: The last line I say in the film is, “When danger’s near, exploit their fear,” and I think that’s why the film still resonates. We sadly still live in a society where fear is used as a weapon to keep us in our place. In this case, it was about marijuana, but actually it’s about lots of things. Immigrants, trans people. There are all sorts of things that we were taught to be afraid of, which is a smokescreen for the real damage that is going on, which is usually making rich people richer and poor people poorer. Particularly now in [Donald] Trump’s America, I think that’s why the show is having a bit of a resurgence.
