Events
STONY AWARDS 2002: HOT-DIGGITY-DOGG!
Mon, Jun 10, 2002 12:00 am
Steve Bloom
CLICK HERE for a list of possible 2003 Stony contenders.
"HIGH TIMES -- y'all real for making this awards show," Snoop Dogg exclaimed during the acceptance for Best Soundtrack [The Wash] to kick off the Stonys on Sunday, March 3 at B.B. King's Blues Club & Grill in New York. "Fa shizzle my nizzle. I'll be back next year doin' the same thing."
Fa shizzle my nizzle? Like Cab Calloway six decades before him, Snoop Dogg speaks in jive. He has a whole hip language to himself.
Snoop Dogg came to the Stonys dressed to kill, in a Persian lamb-lined black suede overcoat with matching hat. He carried a silver-encrusted drinking chalice and a weed-stuffed cane wherever he went. He was accompanied by a posse of 30, mostly bodyguards. Ice-T was in the house as well as O.G. pimp for real Bishop Magic Juan, in a lime-green eye-turning floor-length coat.
Snoop Dogg was nominated for Stoner of the Year. He appeared in four films in 2001. In each one he smoked a blunt and more. He lit up the screen in The Wash, DJ Pooh's remake of Car Wash, in John Singleton's vaguely antipot Baby Boy, in Ernest Dickerson's blaxploitation spoof Bones, and as a wheelchair-bound street dealer in Antoine Fuqua's Training Day. His Stoner of the Year competition was Marlon Wayans (Scary Movie 2), former Stony winner Jason Mewes (Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back) and Owen Wilson (Zoolander). George Clinton of P-Funk fame was on hand to present the award.
When we inquired about Snoop Dogg attending our show, we were told that he doesn't fly after 9/11. That was not the news we wanted to hear. But lo and behold, he and his crew loaded themselves onto a luxury bus on February 28 and drove three days to New York, from Los Angeles. This year, we learned people will go to great lengths to attend the Stonys.
[cont.]
2002 Stony Awards [cont.]
For the 3rd annual Stony Awards, we changed venues, moving uptown from the East Village's Anthology Film Archives theater to B.B. King's in Times Square. Capacity leaped from 200 to 1,000, though we planned for 500 seated attendees. A music club, B.B.'s allowed us to schedule an after party featuring our venerable Cannabis Cup Band. We advertised special guests, but until showtime it was unclear exactly who was going to join our reggae all-stars. Would Snoop break out a little "Gin & Juice"? Might George Clinton grace us with a rendition of "Atomic Dog"?
Clinton isn't a film star, but when the opportunity presented itself to bring him as a special guest presenter, we couldn't resist. We told him he'd be presenting the Stoner of the Year award. Clinton, in town for a series of "Tripfest" shows organized by P-Funk offshoot, WEFUNK, arrived in a tour bus and created quite a stir as he and his band members parked in front of the club on 42nd Street and made their grand entrance.
Clinton immediately was brought back to Snoop's dressing room, where he inhaled one or more of Snoop's chocolate-flavored honey blunts. It sent off shock waves in Dr. Funkenstein's chemically sensitive system. He promptly collapsed on the couch in our production office as the show went on. When it was time to present the Stoner of the Year award, he said he was too high to read the nominations. We did it for him. After the video clips, he opened the enveloped and barked over and over gruffly, "Snoop Dogg! Snoop Dogg!"
Snoop Dogg made his second visit to the stage. He hugged Clinton, then asked Bishop Magic Juan to "blaze up one of them blunts." He inhaled slowly and proclaimed in a cloud of smoke, "All the real players in the house--Ice-T, Bishop Magic Juan, Supafly, George Clinton. Can anybody say ‘Smoke that shit'?" The crowd enthusiastically responded and Snoop called again and again as the crowd responded.
"We fucked up right now. Drinkin', smokin'," Snoop said. "We lovin' the ceremonies. Y'all keep having this kind of shit and we'll keep showin' up. Church!"
Church?
[cont.]
2002 Stony Awards [cont.]
Snoop's appearance brought a bevy of press to the show, mostly from urban magazines like King and Black Gold News. We also had a reporter from Entertainment Weekly, Scott Brown--who a week later confessed in print that he smoked pot for the first time at the Stonys during his one-on-one interview with Snoop Dogg.
"One time for the sake of the interview," Snoop coaxed.
"When I note a ticklish sensation at the back of my throat, Snoop is solicitous," Brown wrote. "‘That's the Marvin Gaye. You be singing a few notes before the night is over.'"
Marvin Gaye? (Actually, Marvin Gaye was a big pot-smoker. But it's news to us that there's a strain named after him, like Jack Herer.)
Snoop put on quite a show for the assembled scribes and photogs at a press conference an hour prior to the Stonys. He arrived late, sat on stage smoking and drinking, professing that "weed is legal already" (see sidebar). This delayed the show, allowing Brown to jab in his article, "Needless to say, the ceremony doesn't begin on time, or close to on time, or anywhere in the same galaxy as on time." We weren't on stoner time, we were on Snoop Dogg time. Set your watches at 4:20 and wait for the fun to begin.
Doors opened at 7:30 and the show began by 8:45--45 minutes late. Jim Breuer, Saturday Night Live alum and stoner costar of 1997's Half Baked, raced out on stage. With bits about half-baked flight controllers, the evolution of his famous SNL "Goat Boy" character and a chance encounter with a highly buzzed Jack Nicholson (Jack to the heavy-lidded Breuer: "You look exactly the way I feel!"), Breuer was the perfect Stony host.
After Snoop Dogg accepted the Best Soundtrack for The Wash (soundtrack producer Dr. Dre was the actual winner), IFC representatives Joseph White and David Mueller collected the first-ever Stony for Best Foreign Film, awarded to Lukas Moodyson's Together, a Swedish movie set in a household commune in the '70s.
The next award, Best Documentary, has proved to be a Stony favorite. That's probably because most documentary filmmakers are automatically on the cutting edge with whatever subject they decide to focus on. This year's nominees included two Grateful Dead-oriented features (Gillian Grisman's Grateful Dawg and Brent Meeske's The End of the Road), one about Jamaica (Stephanie Black's Life & Debt) and another an IMAX concert film for stoners (All Access). The Stony went to Grateful Dawg, Grisman's affectionate portrait of her father, David, and his musical relationship with Jerry Garcia. Elegant and hip, Grisman accepted the award in a beautiful black outfit.
[cont.]
2002 Stony Awards [cont.]
"On behalf of my father and Jerry, I thank HIGH TIMES for recognizing films like mine in the left-of-center vicinity," she commented. Grisman thanked Sony Pictures Classics and recommended people buy the Grateful Dawg DVD.
In the first two years, Stonys were given out for Lifetime Achievement (Dennis Hopper, Tommy Chong, Cheech Marin and D.A. Pennebaker). This year we created a new award: the Thomas King Forçade Award for Film Achievement, named for HIGH TIMEs' founder. The recipient was Francis Ford Coppola for Apocalypse Now, the No. 2 Stoner Movie of All Time, which was rereleased in 2001 with nearly a full hour worth of added footage. Michael Kennedy, HIGH TIMEs' longtime lawyer and a friend of Forcade's, made the presentation:
"If he was alive today, Thomas King Forçade would laugh his ass off because he can't believe that a magazine that he started on the finances of drug-smuggling could last in this society this length of time.... He decided to distance himself from all of us when he blew his brains out. We cremated him and we all met at the World Trade Center at Windows on the World. We rolled up some of his ashes and some of the smoke and smoked him away!" After watching Steve Hager's six-minute tribute to Apocalypse Now, Kennedy concluded, "No more Vietnams, no more wars at all," and left the stage. Coppola was out of the country.
Larry Clark's Bully dominated the next two categories, Best Psychedelic Scene and Best Actress. Danny Franzese accepted both awards. Animator Bill Plympton, whose latest feature, Mutant Aliens, was released in April, presented the award for Best Psychedelic Scene to Franzese, who along with Michael Pitt and Kelli Garner ingests blotter acid in the movie. Bijou Phillips won the Best Actress Stony for her role as the promiscuous Ali. Phillips couldn't attend the show, but was overjoyed about winning the Stony.
Writer and producer Richard Stratton presented the next award for Best Actor. This strong category included Ethan Hawke (Tape), Benjamin Bratt (Pinero), Tariq Trotter (Brooklyn Babylon), Johnny Depp (Blow) and Minus Roache (Pandaemonium). For his role as an unrepentant stoner in Tape, Hawke was named Best Actor. He roared up to the stage in what EW called "Hopalong Cassidy button-down" -- basically a cowboy shirt.
[cont.]
2002 Stony Awards [cont.]
"This is the first award I ever won in my life," he said as he surveyed he room. "Somehow having it be a Stony validates my whole youth." Hawke thanked director Richard Linklater ("he has to be a Stony favorite") and Lions Gate. "Where's that bong? Let's light it up."
After Snoop Dogg won the Stoner of the Year award, we came down the home stretch with the final four awards. For the second year in a row, the Best Pot Scene went to Scary Movie--this time Scary Movie 2. Marlon Wayans' Shorty character has become a stoner classic. In Scary 2, he's rolled up by a monster pot plant and smoked. The production is brilliant and the concept genuinely funny. Unfortunately, for the second year in a row Wayans was not able to attend the show.
Despite winning the coveted Best Stoner Movie award, How High also was not represented at the show. Jesse Dylan's campus comedy led a strong category that included Kevin Smith's Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, DJ Pooh's The Wash, Richard Linklater's Waking Life and Richard Kelly's Donnie Darko. How High's "African-American Animal House meets Cheech & Chong" -- with Redman as Cheech and Method Man as Chong -- earned the Stony.
Best Original Song in a Movie was a new category as well. Throughout the show, we played videos of the four nominated songs in their entirety. HIGH TIMES Records president Mike Esterson presented the award to the Roots for "Lion Heart" from Brooklyn Babylon. Accepting for the band, the film's director, Marc Levin, recalled working with Snoop Dogg on White Boyz and simply concluded, "One love."
[cont.]
2002 Stony Awards [cont.]
The last award for Best Movie is a dramatic award. Last year's winner was Traffic. This year the Stony went to Blow. Incredibly, the film's director, Ted Demme, died of a heart attack in January. He was just 37.
Demme rose to fame as the creator of Yo! MTV Raps. His films Life, Beautiful Girls and The Ref didn't really prepare us for the depth of Blow. An epic story about a drug smuggler, Blow recalls GoodFellas in scope and narrative intensity. It grows sentimental in its last third, but the film's solid foundation holds firmly as Johnny Depp's George Jung descends into schizophrenia.
We dedicated The 2002 Stonys to the memory of Ted Demme.
The fun wasn't over. Not by a long shot. The Cannabis Cup Band were in the wings, and George Clinton was ready to join them. Snoop Dogg, we were informed, would not be performing. He was having too good of a time just being his bad self.
Too bad he split, because Clinton broke out "Atomic Dog" and "US Customs Coast Guard Dope Dog" with the CCB. Rita Marley and now George Clinton are the biggest stars to ever jam with the Cannabis Cup Band.
Clinton was followed by reggae star Yami Bolo, who appeared in Life & Debt, and A-Fura, a Brooklyn rapper who appears on THC: The Hip-Hop Collection on HIGH TIMES Records.
The show went until past midnight. "Get Up, Stand Up" signaled that the band was finishing up. At 12:30 AM, the 3rd Annual Stony Awards and After Party were over.
Church.
CLICK HERE for a list of possible 2003 Stony contenders.
"HIGH TIMES -- y'all real for making this awards show," Snoop Dogg exclaimed during the acceptance for Best Soundtrack [The Wash] to kick off the Stonys on Sunday, March 3 at B.B. King's Blues Club & Grill in New York. "Fa shizzle my nizzle. I'll be back next year doin' the same thing."
Fa shizzle my nizzle? Like Cab Calloway six decades before him, Snoop Dogg speaks in jive. He has a whole hip language to himself.
Snoop Dogg came to the Stonys dressed to kill, in a Persian lamb-lined black suede overcoat with matching hat. He carried a silver-encrusted drinking chalice and a weed-stuffed cane wherever he went. He was accompanied by a posse of 30, mostly bodyguards. Ice-T was in the house as well as O.G. pimp for real Bishop Magic Juan, in a lime-green eye-turning floor-length coat.
Snoop Dogg was nominated for Stoner of the Year. He appeared in four films in 2001. In each one he smoked a blunt and more. He lit up the screen in The Wash, DJ Pooh's remake of Car Wash, in John Singleton's vaguely antipot Baby Boy, in Ernest Dickerson's blaxploitation spoof Bones, and as a wheelchair-bound street dealer in Antoine Fuqua's Training Day. His Stoner of the Year competition was Marlon Wayans (Scary Movie 2), former Stony winner Jason Mewes (Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back) and Owen Wilson (Zoolander). George Clinton of P-Funk fame was on hand to present the award.
When we inquired about Snoop Dogg attending our show, we were told that he doesn't fly after 9/11. That was not the news we wanted to hear. But lo and behold, he and his crew loaded themselves onto a luxury bus on February 28 and drove three days to New York, from Los Angeles. This year, we learned people will go to great lengths to attend the Stonys.
[cont.]
2002 Stony Awards [cont.]
For the 3rd annual Stony Awards, we changed venues, moving uptown from the East Village's Anthology Film Archives theater to B.B. King's in Times Square. Capacity leaped from 200 to 1,000, though we planned for 500 seated attendees. A music club, B.B.'s allowed us to schedule an after party featuring our venerable Cannabis Cup Band. We advertised special guests, but until showtime it was unclear exactly who was going to join our reggae all-stars. Would Snoop break out a little "Gin & Juice"? Might George Clinton grace us with a rendition of "Atomic Dog"?
Clinton isn't a film star, but when the opportunity presented itself to bring him as a special guest presenter, we couldn't resist. We told him he'd be presenting the Stoner of the Year award. Clinton, in town for a series of "Tripfest" shows organized by P-Funk offshoot, WEFUNK, arrived in a tour bus and created quite a stir as he and his band members parked in front of the club on 42nd Street and made their grand entrance.
Clinton immediately was brought back to Snoop's dressing room, where he inhaled one or more of Snoop's chocolate-flavored honey blunts. It sent off shock waves in Dr. Funkenstein's chemically sensitive system. He promptly collapsed on the couch in our production office as the show went on. When it was time to present the Stoner of the Year award, he said he was too high to read the nominations. We did it for him. After the video clips, he opened the enveloped and barked over and over gruffly, "Snoop Dogg! Snoop Dogg!"
Snoop Dogg made his second visit to the stage. He hugged Clinton, then asked Bishop Magic Juan to "blaze up one of them blunts." He inhaled slowly and proclaimed in a cloud of smoke, "All the real players in the house--Ice-T, Bishop Magic Juan, Supafly, George Clinton. Can anybody say ‘Smoke that shit'?" The crowd enthusiastically responded and Snoop called again and again as the crowd responded.
"We fucked up right now. Drinkin', smokin'," Snoop said. "We lovin' the ceremonies. Y'all keep having this kind of shit and we'll keep showin' up. Church!"
Church?
[cont.]
2002 Stony Awards [cont.]
Snoop's appearance brought a bevy of press to the show, mostly from urban magazines like King and Black Gold News. We also had a reporter from Entertainment Weekly, Scott Brown--who a week later confessed in print that he smoked pot for the first time at the Stonys during his one-on-one interview with Snoop Dogg.
"One time for the sake of the interview," Snoop coaxed.
"When I note a ticklish sensation at the back of my throat, Snoop is solicitous," Brown wrote. "‘That's the Marvin Gaye. You be singing a few notes before the night is over.'"
Marvin Gaye? (Actually, Marvin Gaye was a big pot-smoker. But it's news to us that there's a strain named after him, like Jack Herer.)
Snoop put on quite a show for the assembled scribes and photogs at a press conference an hour prior to the Stonys. He arrived late, sat on stage smoking and drinking, professing that "weed is legal already" (see sidebar). This delayed the show, allowing Brown to jab in his article, "Needless to say, the ceremony doesn't begin on time, or close to on time, or anywhere in the same galaxy as on time." We weren't on stoner time, we were on Snoop Dogg time. Set your watches at 4:20 and wait for the fun to begin.
Doors opened at 7:30 and the show began by 8:45--45 minutes late. Jim Breuer, Saturday Night Live alum and stoner costar of 1997's Half Baked, raced out on stage. With bits about half-baked flight controllers, the evolution of his famous SNL "Goat Boy" character and a chance encounter with a highly buzzed Jack Nicholson (Jack to the heavy-lidded Breuer: "You look exactly the way I feel!"), Breuer was the perfect Stony host.
After Snoop Dogg accepted the Best Soundtrack for The Wash (soundtrack producer Dr. Dre was the actual winner), IFC representatives Joseph White and David Mueller collected the first-ever Stony for Best Foreign Film, awarded to Lukas Moodyson's Together, a Swedish movie set in a household commune in the '70s.
The next award, Best Documentary, has proved to be a Stony favorite. That's probably because most documentary filmmakers are automatically on the cutting edge with whatever subject they decide to focus on. This year's nominees included two Grateful Dead-oriented features (Gillian Grisman's Grateful Dawg and Brent Meeske's The End of the Road), one about Jamaica (Stephanie Black's Life & Debt) and another an IMAX concert film for stoners (All Access). The Stony went to Grateful Dawg, Grisman's affectionate portrait of her father, David, and his musical relationship with Jerry Garcia. Elegant and hip, Grisman accepted the award in a beautiful black outfit.
[cont.]
2002 Stony Awards [cont.]
"On behalf of my father and Jerry, I thank HIGH TIMES for recognizing films like mine in the left-of-center vicinity," she commented. Grisman thanked Sony Pictures Classics and recommended people buy the Grateful Dawg DVD.
In the first two years, Stonys were given out for Lifetime Achievement (Dennis Hopper, Tommy Chong, Cheech Marin and D.A. Pennebaker). This year we created a new award: the Thomas King Forçade Award for Film Achievement, named for HIGH TIMEs' founder. The recipient was Francis Ford Coppola for Apocalypse Now, the No. 2 Stoner Movie of All Time, which was rereleased in 2001 with nearly a full hour worth of added footage. Michael Kennedy, HIGH TIMEs' longtime lawyer and a friend of Forcade's, made the presentation:
"If he was alive today, Thomas King Forçade would laugh his ass off because he can't believe that a magazine that he started on the finances of drug-smuggling could last in this society this length of time.... He decided to distance himself from all of us when he blew his brains out. We cremated him and we all met at the World Trade Center at Windows on the World. We rolled up some of his ashes and some of the smoke and smoked him away!" After watching Steve Hager's six-minute tribute to Apocalypse Now, Kennedy concluded, "No more Vietnams, no more wars at all," and left the stage. Coppola was out of the country.
Larry Clark's Bully dominated the next two categories, Best Psychedelic Scene and Best Actress. Danny Franzese accepted both awards. Animator Bill Plympton, whose latest feature, Mutant Aliens, was released in April, presented the award for Best Psychedelic Scene to Franzese, who along with Michael Pitt and Kelli Garner ingests blotter acid in the movie. Bijou Phillips won the Best Actress Stony for her role as the promiscuous Ali. Phillips couldn't attend the show, but was overjoyed about winning the Stony.
Writer and producer Richard Stratton presented the next award for Best Actor. This strong category included Ethan Hawke (Tape), Benjamin Bratt (Pinero), Tariq Trotter (Brooklyn Babylon), Johnny Depp (Blow) and Minus Roache (Pandaemonium). For his role as an unrepentant stoner in Tape, Hawke was named Best Actor. He roared up to the stage in what EW called "Hopalong Cassidy button-down" -- basically a cowboy shirt.
[cont.]
2002 Stony Awards [cont.]
"This is the first award I ever won in my life," he said as he surveyed he room. "Somehow having it be a Stony validates my whole youth." Hawke thanked director Richard Linklater ("he has to be a Stony favorite") and Lions Gate. "Where's that bong? Let's light it up."
After Snoop Dogg won the Stoner of the Year award, we came down the home stretch with the final four awards. For the second year in a row, the Best Pot Scene went to Scary Movie--this time Scary Movie 2. Marlon Wayans' Shorty character has become a stoner classic. In Scary 2, he's rolled up by a monster pot plant and smoked. The production is brilliant and the concept genuinely funny. Unfortunately, for the second year in a row Wayans was not able to attend the show.
Despite winning the coveted Best Stoner Movie award, How High also was not represented at the show. Jesse Dylan's campus comedy led a strong category that included Kevin Smith's Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, DJ Pooh's The Wash, Richard Linklater's Waking Life and Richard Kelly's Donnie Darko. How High's "African-American Animal House meets Cheech & Chong" -- with Redman as Cheech and Method Man as Chong -- earned the Stony.
Best Original Song in a Movie was a new category as well. Throughout the show, we played videos of the four nominated songs in their entirety. HIGH TIMES Records president Mike Esterson presented the award to the Roots for "Lion Heart" from Brooklyn Babylon. Accepting for the band, the film's director, Marc Levin, recalled working with Snoop Dogg on White Boyz and simply concluded, "One love."
[cont.]
2002 Stony Awards [cont.]
The last award for Best Movie is a dramatic award. Last year's winner was Traffic. This year the Stony went to Blow. Incredibly, the film's director, Ted Demme, died of a heart attack in January. He was just 37.
Demme rose to fame as the creator of Yo! MTV Raps. His films Life, Beautiful Girls and The Ref didn't really prepare us for the depth of Blow. An epic story about a drug smuggler, Blow recalls GoodFellas in scope and narrative intensity. It grows sentimental in its last third, but the film's solid foundation holds firmly as Johnny Depp's George Jung descends into schizophrenia.
We dedicated The 2002 Stonys to the memory of Ted Demme.
The fun wasn't over. Not by a long shot. The Cannabis Cup Band were in the wings, and George Clinton was ready to join them. Snoop Dogg, we were informed, would not be performing. He was having too good of a time just being his bad self.
Too bad he split, because Clinton broke out "Atomic Dog" and "US Customs Coast Guard Dope Dog" with the CCB. Rita Marley and now George Clinton are the biggest stars to ever jam with the Cannabis Cup Band.
Clinton was followed by reggae star Yami Bolo, who appeared in Life & Debt, and A-Fura, a Brooklyn rapper who appears on THC: The Hip-Hop Collection on HIGH TIMES Records.
The show went until past midnight. "Get Up, Stand Up" signaled that the band was finishing up. At 12:30 AM, the 3rd Annual Stony Awards and After Party were over.
Church.
