I had just finished watching Bong Load Girls when I talked with its director/star, Rob Rotten.
“I love you, man,” I said.
“I pitched it to everyone who’d return my call,” Rotten said. “And they all said it would suck. Because of this, it is a spiteful movie.”
Rotten financed the film himself and made it in just under three years. For that reason it could be called Bloodshot Eyes Wide Shut. It is available now on VOD and you can order the special DVD on, you guessed it, 4/20.
I always thought “420” was some city’s police code for marijuana. It is not.
From About.com:
According to Steven Hager, editor of High Times, the term 420 originated at San Rafael High School, in 1971, among a group of about a dozen pot-smoking wiseacres who called themselves the Waldos, who are now pushing 50. The term was shorthand for the time of day the group would meet, at the campus statue of Louis Pasteur, to smoke pot. Intent on developing their own discreet language, they made 420 code for a time to get high, and its use spread among members of an entire generation.
Rotten started filming the movie in 2006 around the northern California towns of Petaluma and Novato, but had to stop. “I was way in the red on this one,” he said, not referring to his eyes. “I stopped in the middle and gave up.
“I had nightmares about it,” he said. “I thought The Langoliers were chasing me.” (He might have just been high.)
But he soon realized that there needed to be a millennial stoner answer to all the coke-fueled porn of the 70s and 80s and, his attitude thus adjusted, took his time.
Bong Load Girls is, like every stoner you know, all over the place but accessible. First there’s a scene with Ruby Knox frolicking in the high grass (see? grass), then there’s a scene with Jeannie Marie Sullivan swallowing Tony Tedeschi’s bongwater (“It was an evil moment,” Rotten said), and then Scarlett Pain gets stoned and masturbates herself to exhaustion, to the exclusion of Rotten, who tries to wake her up. It was like someone had smuggled a camera into my prom.
So was there a lot of smoke floating around the set?
“All of the performers were cool,” Rotten said, “but I had to take most of the stills myself because the photographer wanted to wear a gas mask.”
By comparison with everyone else in the movie, Jamie Elle looks like the Narc. But she receives her comeuppance from neighborhood dirtbag Johnny Thrust who is wearing a Rasta wig. I feel Thrust should win an award for this performance. Maybe the Congressional Medal of Freedom.
Since Rotten paid for this movie himself (he’s a union electrician by day, a member of IBEW Local 06 San Francisco, and thus, he says, “one of the only pornographers with a real job”), he will reap the rewards every time viewers download the movie, minus a handling fee.
Does that make the three years worth it?
“The good thing about being the boss on this one is that I don’t have to convince somebody that there shouldn’t be 50 cocks on the boxcover,” he said.
UPDATE: Rotten just got the DVD artwork back and was disheartened to be informed that there is a spelling error. “It says ‘Staring Ruby Knox’ instead of Starring,” he said. “I shouldn’t let stoners proof my shit.”
I think Rotten might be able to capitalize on the bloodshot angle, though, and pothead porn fans will debate for hours what the Staring means. “Does that mean she’s staring at me?” one might say, and start crying about how his foster dad never loved him, and then fall asleep and piss himself.
- Watch Bong Load Girls here
- View the Bong Load Girls gallery here
Previously on Porn Valley Observed: The Texas Vibrator Massacre; Clean Living with Gram
See also: Punx Productions, Download the Bong Load Girls trailer
Weed is fucking stupid..only idiots like it.