Why grass is green.Marijuana is more prominent,accepted-and profitable-than ever in movies.What's it doing there?

The test screenings for his movie the 40 year-old virgin were killing.But the jokes that were really landing were that ones featuring pot.Sophomoricm,Cheech and Chong-y cheap yuks about weed.But funny ones.He called his old friend Garry Shandling to ask whether he sould leave them in.They went with the only responsible choice,comedy comes first.




The film opened,and nobody made a big deal about the pot.Nor did Apatow get called out when the lead character in his next big hit,Knocked up,was an inveterate stoner.And on Aug.8 in the U.S. pineapple express,which he produced,arrived,it's named after a particularly potent and fictional strain of Cannabis sativa.Time was ,pot movie were like Grateful Dead concerts or parent-teacher conference,you had to be wasted to enjoy them.And the genre had two tones,either apoplectic or apologist.But this year is bringing us a bumper crop of movies and TV shows-pineapple express,the wackness,Humboldt county and the showtime TV network's weed's among them-with THC in their DNA.Not stoner stories so much as plots that happen to involve pot,they ask 37 years after the war on drugs was declared,whether there's a place in the culture for treatments of pot that neither criminalize nor celebrate it.





Marijuana is growing onscreen while use of the drug,which has been widespread for nigh on years,is flattening.About 6% of Americans smoked it regularly in 2002,and about 6% of them lit up in 2006.And no,it's not the same 15 million stoners.Many users tend to pick it up in their teens,then drop it in their 20s.And 50% of them don't use any other drugs.Selling it is still illegal,but the pot dealer is no longer the panic-inducing bogeyman he used to be.In movieland,he's become a stock character,about as threatening as the hot woman's quirky roommate.But funnier.I'm always a proponent for the comedy involved in people who are under the influence,says Apatow.I just think it's fun watching anyone acting like an idiot.Alcohol,the comic intoxicant of choice for generations of filmmarkers,is now too strongly associated in people's minds wtih spousal battery and drunk driving to be truly hilarious.