Movies - Up in Smoke

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	Movies - Up in Smoke

Up in Smoke, directed by Lou Adler, was Cheech and Chong's first feature-length film, released in 1978 by Paramount. It stars Cheech Marin, Tommy Chong, Edie Adams, Strother Martin and Stacy Keach. Grossing $41,590,893, it was the 12th highest-grossing film of 1978.

Plot

Tommy Chong plays Anthony Stoner, a jobless hippy who is kicked out of home by his father and manages to coerce Pedro (Cheech) into picking him up off the side of a highway by posing as a woman with large breasts. They both share a large spliff and are arrested when they are discovered stoned by a police officer. After their trial, they are released and in an attempt to procure some marijuana they visit Strawberry, Pedro's Vietnam veteran cousin. Narrowly escaping a drug bust on Strawberry's house, they are soon deported to Tijuana in Mexico by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services together with Pedro's illegal immigrant relatives who just want a free ride to a wedding.

In order to get back to America, they arrange to pick up transportation from Pedro's uncle's upholstery shop, but arrive at the wrong address (which is really a marijuana marketing plant) and end up unknowingly implicated in a plot to smuggle a van constructed completely out of spray-on marijuana from Mexico to Los Angeles with the inept police narcotics unit hot on their heels.

Along the way, Cheech and Chong pick up two women who convince them to perform with their band, Alice Bowie, at a Battle Of The Bands while still narrowly avoiding the police and in one case, even getting pulled over; luckily for them, the officer got high off the smoke coming from the back of their van.

The movie concludes with Cheech and Chong winning the Roxy Battle Of The Bands and the reward of a recording contract with a performance of their song Earache My Eye.

Trivia

While rolling down his car window to talk to the cop, Pedro says some dialogue from the Laurel and Hardy
movie Saps at Sea: "Weigh the anchor! How much did it weigh? I don't know, I forgot. You forgot?"

The car that Chong drives at the beginning of the movie is actually owned by Jack Nicholson
. Lou Adler later screened the film privately for Nicholson who had just been in a car accident and had a dislocated shoulder. It proved to be a painful experience for Nicholson, for his shoulder hurt him ever time he laughed—which was often.

The girls that Cheech tries to pick up before he first picks up Chong are actually the daughters of one of the associate producers.

The license plate on Cheech Marin's character's car- MUF DVR, was his real license plate at the time.

Some of the Mexico scenes are really filmed in L.A..

Near the end of the movie, Pedro says "We're gonna be bigger than Ruben & The Jets." This is both a reference to the real band (whose leader, Ruben Guevara, plays a trumpet player in the film) and the album by Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention, Cruising with Ruben & the Jets.

The payphone that Pedro (Marin) is talking into in Mexico was a prop. The fake phone was supposed to be stuck onto the wall with double sided tape, but it kept falling down. Because of this, he had to speak with his hand on the prop to keep it from falling.

The dog that ate the burrito after it was thrown onto the ground was not a trained dog, but a local stray. He simply walked into frame, took the burrito, and walked away. Both Marin and Chong ad-libbed around this, and it was left in the film.

The snorting by "The Ajax Lady" was accomplished by a tube hidden in her hand that led to a vaccuum cleaner.

Srother Martin and Edie Adams (who played Arnold and Tempest Stoner, Anthony "Man" Stoner's parents) were allowed to ad-lib their dialogue in the scene where they talk to their son about getting a job.

Harry Dean Stanton
had a small role as a jail guard who tries to sell acid to Cheech and Chong while they're in jail, but the scene was later cut.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Up in Smoke ]

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