EVERYBODY Must Get Stoned

 Last night I watched a video about "15 worst Stoners in Hollywood Golden Age". There were some surprises!

Veronica Lake? Ava Gardner? PETER LORRE?? Get the fuck outa here! I know marijuana wasn't invented by hippies in the 60's. It's as old as the earth, which is 6,000 or 600 million or so years, depending upon what books you read. According to the video, Debbie Reynolds and Tuesday Weld were also potheads. The weed seemed to be a blessing and a curse to these big-time stars as it enhanced their creativity but in time doomed their productivity. Oh wow, man!

The two that surprised me the least were Jack Kerouac and Dennis Hopper. I tried to read Kerouac's "On the Road" at least once, and I couldn't ride with it. Oh, yeah, he was fucked up. No doubt. And I have seen "Easy Rider" several times. GREAT soundtrack! They were not pretending to smoke weed constantly. It was part of the budget. And in the New Orleans cemetery scene where Peter Fonda is tripping on acid, Peter Fonda is tripping on acid. He was seeing and talking to his late mother who had been a suicide. That wasn't in this video, it's just an aside from other things I've read or seen. Fonda didn't even make the cut for this video. But Orson Wells did. 

Orson Wells? I knew he was a big, fat, brilliant boozer- as was Richard Burton- but both were outed as dedicated potheads as well. The studios were well aware of their habit and did not approve, but for a time these people were given a pass on their puff puff pass because of their very productive successes. Really this was true of all 15 of the subjects. The studio heads were all; "We don't like this but keep up the good work". They were enablers. John Huston- the great director was yet another brilliant stoner. Who knew? Black folks were represented by Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday. Well, those weren't too surprising because- WAIT A MINUTE! I'm not getting racial here! Put the pitchforks and torches away! Holiday and Armstrong were not too surprising to me because they were MUSICIANS and if you know any musicians, well, you know how those people are...

The most surprising stoner to me was the legendary Mexican actress, Harry Anita. Oh, you never heard of her? She was great as the prostitute in "High Noon" as Gary Cooper's side piece, Helen Ramirez. 

Yes, I know what you're thinking; "You damn Ferrerman- you're talking about Katy Jurado!! The sultry Mexican actress with the big, beautiful, sleepy eyes!"

Yes, I am! And I know that. The fucking AI video didn't and they literally got "Harry Anita" out of "Katy Jurado" and went with that in print (identifying her) and in AI narration, telling her story. You might have thought that AI was just bad at hands, but it's pretty darn bad at names and pronunciations. Throughout the video the voiceover puts the EMPHASIS on the wrong syllABles. This is very annoying. It really takes away from the presentation of anything to hear people's names mangled and syntax reinvented. I mean- they got Tallulah Bankhead right! They could have really fucked that up and done a "Hedley Lamar" on it. BTW, it's "Heddy". 

Perhaps our only hope with AI is for some brilliant stoner to come along and straighten out the hands and narration thing. We can overlook their weed habit if it gets results.