“You want to do the simplest story line,” Marin says. In linking together the different comedy bits the pair found funny they looked for simplicity again. “The acting was easy – we knew no technique,” says Marin, 71, with a laugh. They employed the same let’s-try-it-and-see-what-happens approach that they’d adopted for their recording career, which by then had earned them one Grammy and a host of best-selling albums. The transition from comedy clubs and recording studios to film sets wasn’t difficult. “So we started working on a movie, and Lou Adler got on board (as director), and next thing you know we’re shooting ‘Up In Smoke.'”

“So I told Cheech, I said, ‘Listen, we gotta do a movie,'” says Chong, 79. We’d miss summer here, we’d miss summer there, and for three years in a row we never had any summer. I just thought, I don’t wanna go back to Australia! Because every time we’d go we’d miss summer.

“Because we were getting ready to do, what, our fourth or fifth tour of Australia. “I gotta thank Australia,” Chong says of the land down under where summer is the colder season of the year. They simply wanted to spend a summer in an appropriately warm hemisphere. Looking back at “Up In Smoke,” the film debut of Cheech & Chong, you could assume it was all part of the comedy duo’s master plan: Conquer the comedy clubs, capture their counterculture humor on a run of best-selling comedy albums, and then set their sights on Hollywood with a movie that with its release in 1978 launched the new genre of stoner comedies.īut to hear Tommy Chong tell it, when he and Cheech Marin come on the line to talk about the special 40th anniversary editions of “Up In Smoke,” the idea was much more in character with the laid-back personas he and Marin had established on stage and off.

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