STARRING
MARY JANE In this excerpt from Mary Jane: The Complete Marijuana Handbook for Women, Cheri Sicard examines the proliferation of pot-friendly roles for woman in movies and on TV.
Hooray for Hollyweed: Marijuana in the Movies For decades, marijuana has been both celebrated and vilified in film. Early movies like the infamous Reefer Madness (1936), and its legion of sensationalistic clones, spoke to the evils of marijuana. They are now viewed as kitschy, laughable relics of a bygone era, but in their day they fueled hysteria and helped push forward and cement the prohibitionist agenda. Fortunately, many of us have evolved to a place where marijuana use is simply seen as a natural, everyday part of life, and thankfully its portrayal in some more enlightened movies reflects that. In many films, just as in real life, it is women, and their use of marijuana, who are the catalysts for pushing the scene and the “normalization” of cannabis use forward. Paul Mazursky, who passed away in 2014 at the age of 84, began the whole women and weed movie trend back in 1968 with his screenplay of I Love You, Alice B. Toklas, in which Leigh Taylor-Young’s pot brownies created quite a transformation in Peter Sellers’ repressed lawyer character. Even though most early movies kept marijuana use strictly in the domain of men, Mazursky had his female leads, Natalie Wood and Dyan Cannon, smoking ganja when he wrote and directed Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (1969), a film considered groundbreaking at the time for its exploration of partner swapping and sexual taboos. Later, his acclaimed An Unmarried Woman (1978) includes a scene in which a 15-year-old girl informs her mother’s new boyfriend, “I smoke pot sometimes.”
december 2015
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