Check out the first photo. Wow. One cop brings in four drug users all by himself, and this is way before tasers and SWAT teams were invented.
Plastic Exploding: She Shoulda Said No! (aka Wild Weed) (1949)
On Sept. 1st 1948, police raided the home of actress Lila Leeds and arrested four people, including Leeds herself and film actor Robert Mitchum, both of whom were charged with possession of marijuana, then a felony in the state of California, after which followed an agreeably scandalous and highly publicized trial.
But Leeds' career, such as it was, ended with her arrest. Job offers simply stopped, except for an offer from producer Richard Kay to appear in a film called Wild Weed, written to capitalize on her recent arrest. The film's publicity made much of her desire to inform others her age of the dangers of illicit drug use, but as she confessed to a magazine in the fifties, she took the job because it was the only offer available, and she was broke. Leeds played Ann Lester, a chorus girl in a nightclub who is working to put her younger brother Bob (David Holt) through college. Through friend and fellow chorine Rita (Mary Ellen Popel), she meets Markey (Alan Baxter), who proves to be a peddler of marijuana.
Sure, punch a horse, you’re America’s tough guy; dance with Mary Jane, you’re in real trouble, buster.
Weird. I dunno if TIME hates Firefox or what the issue is, but for me all the photos were right-shifted and cropped off. I got to see half of Robert Mitchum a bunch of times, and a cow’s ass.
50 days?!?!? Wow.
Also, Robert Mitchum looks like a badass in those photos. I want that hairdo.
as someone born in 1974, my introduction to Mitchum was when he hosted SNL in the 80s. I was in grade school or maybe junior high, I’d never heard of him. His monologue was delivered confidently and with ease, instantly owning the stage. I was on board. as he wrapped up the monologue, he said something to the effect of wanting to do SNL since it was a type of acting he hadn’t done.
“In fact,” here his eyes rose straight into the camera “after tonight, there won’t be anything I haven’t done.” fucking A. It was many, many years later that I understood that this included his bust and incarceration.
here in Atlanta, Seventh Letter crew (REVOK, SEVER, HENSE et. al.) put up a mural in his honor which ran for years on the Krog St tunnel:
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