Classic Television Showbiz's Late Late Show: Riot on Sunset Strip (1967)

Maryjane (1968)

Kliph Nesteroff: You penned two scripts with Dick Gautier?

Peter Marshall: I did. Dick and I did Bye Bye Birdie together in Vegas. We became very close friends. We were together every day and then he stopped talking to me at one point and I could never figure out why. We weren't friends anymore, which is sad because I loved him and he is really a talented man. 

Dick Gautier: Yeah, Pete and I were really close. We haven't seen each other in years.

Kliph Nesteroff: Did something happen?

Dick Gautier: Yeah... actually it did. And I don't even remember what it was. But somebody pissed somebody off. Who knows. After a while you just don't even remember what it was about.

Peter Marshall: We were struggling before Hollywood Squares, trying to make a buck and we started writing. 

Dick Gautier: We said, "Let's not just sit around. Let's write something." We were in Acapulco.

Peter Marshall: We wrote a couple of TV things and then a friend of ours said, "Hey, I'm doing a movie on marijuana. Would you write the script?" So we gave him an outline. He said, "That's perfect. We're shooting in ten days." Didn't even have a script!

Dick Gautier: They said, "Here's what we want. We want a movie about marijuana." We said, "Okay." We started researching marijuana. We weren't smokers, but we started researching and discovered that the worst thing about it was that it was illegal. 

Peter Marshall: We locked ourselves in an office and wrote this thing called Maryjane. 

Dick Gautier: So we set a beginning, before the titles, where you see it being harvested and grown and cut into packages and sent to America. Then when the movie starts we follow the five packages.

One goes to a housewife in Encino, another goes to a bank president, another here and another there. They didn't like it. They said, "No this is too literate and too boring." So they had Fabian under contract. They wanted him to play a high school teacher who starts selling it to kids. 

Peter Marshall: Fabian was in it and he said to the director, Maury Dexter, "Hey, can I change this?" He said, "Sure!" We said, "No, hold it! You can't change that! That's the storyline!" "Ah, don't worry about it." I never went back to the shoot. Today you can't do that. Can't change a line without the writers permission, but in those days you could do anything. They destroyed you. The script had been real good, but they turned it into a terrible picture. 

Dick Gautier: They almost dictated the thing to us.  It was awful. We wrote it in eleven days. 

Peter Marshall: It was a big hit. It did very, very well and it's a terrible movie. 

Dick Gautier: A piece of shit.

Carl Gottlieb: It was AIP. Nicholson and Arkoff and a director named Maury Dexter who was like a complete B-movie guy. He could shoot a movie in twelve days and he did. In Maryjane I played a high school teacher. That was fun. That was shot on the old Allied Artists lot on Commonwealth.

I was commuting from San Francisco. I had a couple days work. In order to make the commute - I would get wired. In those days there were things called "Black Beauties." They were ten times as strong as dexadrine.

I'd take those, drive from San Francisco, make a five AM call, work the day, sleep, work half a day, then go back to San Francisco and perform with The Committee the next night. Alan Myerson told me twenty years later he went to a triple bill on Market Street in San Francisco of Reefer Madness, Maryjane and some other silly dope movie. 

I'm in a scene with the high school faculty and the sheriff. We're discussing the marijuana problem at the school. Someone says, "You can't tell when these kids are high or not!" I say, "You can tell. They act crazy and their eyes are funny." Twenty years later at this triple bill, Alan is sitting there and its my close-up and he yells, "He's high himself!"And I was. I was loaded when I shot that scene.

Dick Gautier: The only scene in Maryjane that I like I happen to be in. When he's thrown into jail - I am a hippie. I come in with a beard and all kinds of shit. I don't know if you remember it.

Kliph Nesteroff: No, I don't remember that. I'll have to watch it again.

Dick Gautier: No. Don't.

Skidoo (1968): Groucho Marx and Jackie Gleason on LSD!

This was such a hard to find and hard to see film until the internet age came along. Otto Preminger's embarrassment and shame continues to be locked in the vaults but we can enjoy as much or as little of it as we want on various video sharing sites. The classic scene featured here has Jackie Gleason trip out on LSD. I'm not about to recap the history of this notorious stinker, as it has been recounted elsewhere many times. However, I do want to recount the story of Groucho Marx dropping acid in real life in order to prepare for his role in this film as the turtlenecked, LSD kingpin named God (we see Gleason experience terrified visions of the Marx character in this clip). In his memoir Confessions of a Raving Unconfined Nut (1993, Simon and Schuster), underground publisher and counterculture icon Paul Krassner recalled the experience of providing Groucho with the LSD and having to act as his "guide" for the duration of his trip.

Krassner tells the story:

"... I was hanging around with friends from the Hog Farm, who were extras in the movie. Skidoo was proacid propaganda thinly disguised as a comedy adventure ... One of the characters in Skidoo was a Mafia chieftain named God. Screenwriter Bill Cannon had suggested Groucho Marx for the part ... [Groucho] was concerned about the script of Skidoo because it pretty much advocated LSD which he had never tried, but he was curious. Moreover, he felt a certain responsibility to his young audience not to steer them wrong, so could I possibly get him some pure stuff and would I care to accompany him on a trip. I did not play hard to get. We arranged to ingest those little white tablets one afternoon at the home of an actress in Beverly Hills ...


... We had a period of silence and a period of listening to music. I was accustomed to playing rock and roll while tripping, but the record collection at this house consisted entirely of Classical music and Broadway show albums. First we listened to the Bach Cantata No. 7. 'I'm supposed to be Jewish,' Groucho said, 'But I was seeing the most beautiful visions of Gothic cathedrals. Do you think Bach knew he was doing that?'

... Later, we were listening to the score of a musical comedy, Fanny. There was one song called 'Welcome Home,' where the lyrics go something like, 'Welcome home, says the clock,' and the chair says, 'Welcome home,' and so do various other pieces of furniture. Groucho started acting out each line, as though he were actually being greeted by the clock, the chair, and the rest of the furniture. He was like a child, charmed by his own ability to respond to the music that way.


... At one point in our conversation, Groucho somehow got into a negative space. He was equally cynical about institutions, such as marriage - 'legal quicksand' - and individuals, such as Lyndon Johnson - 'that potato-head.'

... Groucho was holding on to his cigar for a long time, but he never smoked it, he only sniffed it occasionally. 'Everybody has their own Laurel and Hardy,' he mused. 'A miniature Laurel and Hardy, one on each shoulder. Your little Oliver Hardy bawls you out - he says, 'Well this is a fine mess you've gotten us into.' And your little Stan Laurel gets all weepy - 'Oh, Ollie. I couldn't help it. I'm sorry, I did the best I could ...'

... Later, when Groucho started chuckling to himself, I hesitated to interrupt his reverie, but I had to ask, 'What struck you funny?' 'I was thinking about this movie, Skidoo,' he said. 'I mean some of it is just plain ridiculous. This kid puts his stationery, which is soaked in LSD, into the water supply of the prison, and suddenly everybody gets completely reformed. There's a prisoner who says, 'Oh, gosh, now I don't have to be a rapist anymore!' ... But I'm getting a big kick out of playing somebody named God like a dirty old man. You wanna know why ... it's because - do you realize that irreverence and reverence are the same thing?'


... He recalled Otto Preminger telling him about his own response to taking LSD and then he mimicked Preminger's accent: "I saw tings, bot I did not zee myself.' Groucho was looking in a mirror on the dining room wall, and he said, 'Well, I can see myself but I still don't understand what the hell I'm doing here ...'

... A week later, Groucho told me that the Hog Farm had turned him on with marijuana on the set of Skidoo. When Skidoo was released, Tim Leary saw it, and he cheerfully admitted, 'I was fooled by Otto Preminger. He's much hipper than me ...'

... In 1971, during an inerview with Flash magazine, Groucho Marx said, I think the only hope this country has is Nixon's assassination ...' It would later be revealed ... that an FBI file on Groucho Marx had indeed been started, and he was labeled a 'national security risk.' I phoned Groucho to tell him the good news. 'I deny everything,' he said, 'because I lie about everything.' He paused, then added, 'And everything I deny is a lie.'