This post is my entry at William Speruzzi’s Ambitious Failure Blogathon at This Savage Art.

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If satire is what closes on Saturday night, how much courage did the creators of the stage musical Reefer Madness need to go ahead with their off-Broadway debut on September 15, 2001?

It must have felt a bit like the final moments of The Wild Bunch to attempt a take-no-prisoners satire, complete with orgies, murder, a little light cannibalism, and a Vegas-style Jesus Christ, within four days and a few miles of the disaster “that changed everything” — and it couldn’t have helped that pundits across the nation were busy declaring the end of irony, and good riddance to it. Jerry Falwell might have been declaring that gays, pagans and the ACLU shared responsibility for 9/11 with Osama and Mohamed Atta, but to read many writers you’d have thought the tragedy was God’s judgment for the success of Seinfeld. The musical Reefer Madness had run for a year in a half in Los Angeles, but it didn’t last long beyond Saturday night in New York.

With that background, it shouldn’t be any surprise that the 2005 Showtime film of the play, Reefer Madness: The Movie Musical refers far more starkly to the War on Terrorism than the War on Drugs. Made by the original team behind the stage productions, writer-composers Kevin Murphy and Dan Studney along with director Andy Fickman, the film takes aims at some big targets including red-baiting and political intolerance, racial hysteria, and, of course, sexual panic (both homo- and hetero-). All in all, just about all of the favorite social evils of most social liberals are ridiculed….with the odd exception of U.S. drug laws. For that, you’ll have to go back to Traffic.

Still, it’s definitely ambitious in terms of its political targets, and also ambitious in the sense that doing a traditional break-out-in-song style musical always risks ridicule — and doing one on a modest budget is a challenge on every level. As for it being a “failure,” as a made-for-cable film it’s hard to judge Reefer Madness commercially, but it seems to have met with a mixed critical reaction, though it also clearly has its share of fans on IMDb. It’s probably safe to say that if it had the festival reaction had been stronger (it premiered at Sundance) a limited U.S. theatrical release might have been planned. The made-for-cable label can be a face-saving fall-back position for a film deemed to have limited appeal — it sounds a whole lot better than “direct-to-DVD.”

As far as it’s artistic success or failure, it seems to me that as social satire it’s not very potent and as comedy it’s less than consistently brilliant, at least as written. So, then why does it make me laugh and why have I enjoyed watching certain scenes over and over?

In case you’re too young, too upright, or too smart to know what Reefer Madness refers to, a bit of background is necessary. The stage musical and film are spoof adaptations of an insipid 1936 quasi-educational exploitation film, originally titled Tell Your Children. The film was later brought back by some low-rent movie hucksters — gotta love those guys — changing the title and adding a few moments of such sensational material as a brief shot of a woman putting on a stocking. It eventually fell into the public domain and was revived for a third time for its camp value and became popular among 1970s potheads. The circle was complete — which is not to say anyone should actually bother to watch it.

Not only is the original film relentlessly bad — unfortunately, I’ve only seen it stone-cold sober — it’s as poorly researched as it’s written and shot. Characters puff and take casual drags on “reefer sticks” like they were Chesterfields. Once under the influence, they play wild, semi-classical piano (it’s supposed to be jazz), become insanely violent and generally behave as if pot were some especially demonic form of crack cocaine or crystal meth mixed with espresso (for the pianistic acumen) and a dash of very bad LSD. It’s a badly told lie of a film.

The film and stage musical follows the structure of the original film more closely than you might think. Reefer Madness: The Movie Musical is presented with a black and white framing device in which a lecturer (Alan Cumming), berates — in song, naturally — a PTA-like organization on the vast dangers posed by the weed with roots in hell. The film switches to color for his tale of the corruption of ridiculously naive Jimmy Harper (Christian Campbell) and his double-plus innocent girlfriend, Mary Lane (Kristin Bell…aka cynical TV teen detective Veronica Mars). As the story-proper begins, they are both in the throes of mad puppy love and about halfway through reading Romeo and Juliet; they expect a happy ending presently.

Of course, the sweet status quo awaits its ruination by way of cannabis. The vile plant is represented by a quartet of reprobates led by Steven Weber as Jack Stone, a 1930s gangster stereotype complete with pencil mustache. He’s violent and mean as all get-out, but smart enough to lay off the Mary Jane. His accomplices/victims include his moll, Mae (Ana Gasteyer), whose basic decency is perpetually overridden by her flair for melodramatic poses and need for “the stuff”; Sally, a Jean Harlow-esque sexpot (Ana Spanger); and Ralph, the cackling, fast-piano-loving, munchies-ridden embodiment of the evils of cannabis. Appropriately enough, Ralph is played, pretty brilliantly, by John Kassir, best known as the voice of the Cryptkeeper.

Lured by the promise of a dance lesson from the evil gangster, it’s not long before Jimmy is turned into a jabbering maniac by mooter and the lure of indiscriminate sex. With Jimmy leaving his beloved alone in church to sing about filling her “lonely pew,” it’s not long before lovelorn Mary starts to investigate. However, she’s no Veronica Mars and things are going to go very, very badly.

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Reefer Madness worst flaws are in terms of content, but it’s got some stylistic problems as well. Director Andy Fickman is no Bob Fosse or Vincente Minnelli, and the occasional silent cutaways between the main story and the looming lecturer and his audience are downright clumsy. On the positive side, the musical numbers zip along perkily without too much of the hyperactive cutting that is the bane of modern film musicals. There are some very nicely composed moments and lots of good visual gags, and Fickman is definitely doing something right with his actors — at least in terms of having the good sense to cast them.

Truly, Reefer Madness has one of the best casts of any recent film musical — this is a case where a low budget can be a blessing. Freed from the constraint having to include box office draws, the actors seems to have been recruited mostly because they were actually up to their particular duties.

Let’s start with the narrator. Alan Cumming first broke out as the Emcee in Sam Mendes’ Studio 54 restaging of Cabaret, and this character is a close relative of that all-singing, all-dancing symbol of impending doom. It’s no surprise, then, that Cumming dominates his scenes, wringing uncomfortable humor out of material that could be merely uncomfortable.

As the female lead, Kristin Bell shows she can handle outrageous self-parody without sacrificing her character’s integrity, while also dancing nicely and singing like a real Broadway diva. I already knew she was great from her TV work (not just Veronica Mars, but also a brief, chilling stint on Deadwood), but now I’m starting to fear she will devour show business.

As the main villain, Steven Weber has, through his work on Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, already won my personal “I didn’t know the sunuvabitch could act” award for the year. He’s now less of a surprise but more fun to watch than you’d expect, delivering an energetic, strangely thoughtful, parody of standard issue Warner Brothers wise guys. Ana Gasteyer, who can really belt out a number, also manages to make us care about the absurd goings on, adding real emotion to her character’s abject bathos. I have to admit I’ve never given her much thought before, and now I know how blind I was.

As for the two three lesser knowns, Amy Spanger is a terrific physical comedienne as the reefer-addled platinum blond, even as the songs ask her to behave in a near-pornographic fashion at times. She shows a lot more respect for her character than the writers manage. And John Kassir treads the thin line between the annoying and the funny as his mega-ultra-uber zany character and miraculously stays on the correct side. I usually find these sort of characters (think Airplane’s Stephen Stucker) annoying and unfunny, but I like this cackling Tex Avery cartoon maniac and eventual mildly gruesome ultimate-munchies cannibal. Pretty impressive.

I haven’t discussed the lead, Christian Campbell — who’s played the role of Jimmy in every incarnation of the show and is currently a regular on All My Children. He’s just fine and manages his own share of really funny moments but, in a role that’s careens from being thankless in a chirpy-yet-bland way to being just plain insane, he doesn’t quite have the layers of the other performers.

It’s easy to talk about what’s good about Reefer Madness, but harder to figure out what isn’t, why it could have been funnier or more salient. One problem is that it’s not quite as clever as it thinks it is — certainly several of the lines that the creators point to with pride on the commentary track are not going to make Tom Lehrer jealous.

There’s blood on my hands, and mud on my name.

My id threw a party and everyone came.

My innocence ravished, my virtue devoured,

I can’t count the strangers with whom I have showered!

As music, the songs are actually much better, or at least catchier, than most contemporary show tunes — there are several I’m currently trying to dislodge from my brain. But they are also a bit too anachronistic and too clearly from the rock musical tradition. I’m probably too much a stickler, but I find metallic electric guitar licks and Burt Bacharach-style chord changes distracting in a swing-era story.

But that’s a small problem. The larger problem is harder to figure. The film seeks to attack those who try to scare the public into submission. It points a finger at William Randolph Hearst, who — much more than poor Charlie Kane — was a supporter of something that very much resembles American-style fascism as well as being an enemy of the hemp plant. Gabriel Over the White House, a film that Hearst bankrolled in 1933, essentially advocates that newly elected FDR dissolve congress should it resist his reforms too strongly. Hearst initially supported FDR. He apparently just hoped he’d be more of a National Socialist than a Democrat.

Obviously, we liberals think there’s a connection to be made between the Hearst newspapers of the past and certain media outlets and voices today, but Reefer Madness tempts us to make the comparison, then drops it — or perhaps picks it up again in a way I don’t fully understand. Alan Cumming’s lecturer makes clear his disdain for the “reckless lunatic” who sits in the White House. He’s speaking of Roosevelt the liberal icon, while mirroring modern liberal-to-moderate opinion of the current U.S. President.

So, what are supposed to make of it when Cumming turns up towards the end of the story as the beloved “Supreme Court packing Bolshevik” himself? Are we supposed to think that political guises are actually fairly arbitrary and that perhaps the differences between Hearst, the would-be fascist kingmaker, and FDR, savior of American democracy, aren’t so great after all? They both were members of the ruling class and Roosevelt did imprison thousands of innocent Japanese Americans.

And then there’s this line from the President:

A little orphan girl once told me that the sun would come out tomorrow. Her adopted father was a powerful billionaire so I suppressed the urge to laugh in her face, but now, by gum, I think she may have been on to something!

Is this a throw-away in-joke or a biting attack from the left on the most liberal President of the past hundred years? I don’t feel the film is trying to be so radical or so bitterly consistent in its politics. It feels like more of a theatrical convenience — and it really is perversely stirring moment when Cumming leaps out of his wheelchair to some martial strains. No longer the benign leader, or ever the cheerfully cynical crony to Daddy Warbucks, he is once again the sinister, authoritarian lecturer and quite thrilled about it.

So where does this leave us? Of the theoretically “good” characters, the lecturer is, of course, a near-Satanic hypocrite, Jimmy and Mary are lovable idiots, FDR is suspect, even Jesus Christ Himself (played very nicely by Robert Torti) is on the unctuous side. Only the lone audience member brave enough to speak up to the lecturer, Mr. Kuchinsky (Steven E. Miller) speaks any truth — and he is quickly brought to heal over his fear of being red-baited, his lack of schooling, and the fact that he doesn’t know the definition of “matriculate.”

So, what do we have left? Is our democracy a joke? Are we all fools, helpless before vicious plutocrats and charlatans? Well, there are definitely days when I feel that way, but I fear that the reason so many of the jokes in Reefer Madness feel too easy or too forced is that coauthors Murphy and Studney, competent entertainers though they are, haven’t completely thought this through themselves.