Saturday, March 09, 2024

Behind the Cheech and Chong Last Movie Premiere at SXSW

 Today, The Hollywood Reporter ran a piece on Cheech and Chong's Last Movie, a documentary on Cheech and Chong premiering this week at the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas.

Here are some highlights:

  • Director David Bushell, whose producing credits include Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Dallas Buyers Club, initially approached Marin and Chong with an idea for a narrative feature. When that reunion film didn’t pan out, Bushell has a realization: “No one had made the definitive documentary.”
  • Bushell counts 9,000 high-res images collected for the doc. He remembers, “We found stuff in someone’s storage locker that was [an interview] from the late 70s on 16-millimeter film all in garbage bags.” There are other revealing longform interviews with Playboy in the ’80s and one with a pre-Fox News but equally mustached Geraldo Rivera.
  • Production filmed Marin and Chong driving through the desert in a vintage car two hours outside of Los Angeles near Joshua Tree National Park.  Idea was “to poke them with a fork, together, and get something that is funny, or get something that’s emotional, or gets something that’s real.”
  • Cheech and Tommy discuss their break-ups in great detail. “The most important thing for me, that I got out of this process, is that everybody got to say their piece, and nobody died.”
  • Tommy didn't want an advanced screening of the doc because he knew he would want to make changes.
From the staff:  Looking forward to seeing it.  Also highly recommend watching a/k/a Tommy Chong which touches on many these topics.

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