High on Humboldt

Don’t get lost in the haze.

Even though the original movie poster for “Humboldt County” showed the main character standing on a massive, slow-burning joint (thanks to the MPAA, he is now standing on a big, white log that might be a joint). And even though promotional rolling papers were handed out at early screenings. And the movie tagline is: “Where the Grass is Greener.”

Debutante filmmakers Danny Jacobs and Darren Grodsky want to make one point very clear.

“Everybody assumes this is a Cheech and Chong pot comedy because that’s all that’s been made about the subject in the past three decades,” says Jacobs. “But, first of all, it’s a drama. And, second of all, it’s not really about pot. It happens to take place in a setting where marijuana is a big factor. But for us, it’s always been about this particular family and these characters.”

Opening in limited release next weekend at Rialto Cinemas in Santa Rosa and theaters from San Francisco to Garberville to Austin, Texas, “Humboldt County” is a classic fish-out-of-water tale.

Uptight and down on his luck, med student Peter Hadley (played by stage actor Jeremy Strong) lands a one-night stand with a free-spirit singer (Fairuza Balk) who takes him from Los Angeles to the Lost Coast, where she abandons him with her off-the-grid, pot-growing family. He’s never gotten high, not even for medicinal purposes. They do nothing but get high. And tend to the garden.

Toss in the feds, gorgeously stunning scenery, recurring outhouse scenes and the occasional stoner epiphany and you have a slow-paced, character-driven indie film that takes on the world-famous Humboldt aesthetic more than any movie to date.

Venerable director-actor Peter Bogdanovich plays Peter’s overbearing father. Career character actor Brad Dourif is the family patriarch who dabbles in physics. “Six-Feet Under” matriarch Frances Conroy can’t be in a scene without a joint. When it comes to deconstructing the party foul known as “bogarting,” that’s left to 11-year-old actress Madison Davenport.

In many ways, Peter’s North Coast escape echoes the journey of the filmmakers who created him.

Childhood friends since the age of 6, Danny and Darren grew up in St. Louis as Big D (Grodsky) and Little D (Jacobs). Both eventually studied acting (they play bumbling stoner sidekicks Bob and Steve in the movie) and after going their separate ways for college, wound up in Los Angeles working in the film industry and penning a script together.

Getting nowhere on that first screenplay (“something about two brothers, a musical comedy romp in small-town America,” says Grodsky), they decided the problem was with the locale. So they fled “gorgeous, but soulless L.A.” for Humboldt County, where Grodsky had an aunt and uncle he’d been visiting since he was a kid.

Holing up in a Shelter Cove seaside inn in December of 2002, they became so enchanted with the local scenery and characters that they bagged the original script for a dope-smoking plot inspired less by “Up in Smoke” and “Dazed and Confused” than their favorite ’70s films like “Five Easy Pieces,” “Harold and Maude” and “The Graduate.”

When the script was finished, they sent it around to agents and eventually wound up in a “super incredibly surreal” meeting with Bogdanovich, who, they discovered, lives in suites in various Beverly Hills hotels.

“He’s sitting there eating a shrimp salad, wearing his traditional ascot, in front of these huge windows overlooking Hollywood,” Jacobs remembers. “At some point, he gets up and he’s wearing pajama pants and slippers.”

After the “Last Picture Show” director signed on, “We told him early on that if he had ideas, to tell us,” says Jacobs.

“Because we didn’t have any ideas ourselves,” Grodsky adds.

“Yeah,” Jacobs jokes, “we don’t know what we should do, could you direct the film for us?”

Bogdanovich stayed in front of the camera when they returned to film in Humboldt County in 2006. But a few wary locals had opinions to offer.

“There is a part of the local population that was and always will be a little hesitant of outsiders,” Jacobs says. “Especially outsiders who are coming and trying to tell a story in their back yard. They would make comments like, ‘I hope this doesn’t screw everything up for us.’”

On a shoe-string budget that only allowed for two to three takes of each shot, they filmed in 18 days, making the most of locales in Eureka, Arcata, Trinidad, Moonstone Beach and the Logger Bar in Blue Lake. When they couldn’t afford a helicopter to signify the arrival of the feds, they improvised by shooting a Coast Guard helicopter giving a demonstration for a local Boy Scout troop.

While Jacobs admits, “The biggest thing we had to overcome was our lack of talent,” they had a backup plan.

“Knowing this was our first film and knowing we lacked talent as directors, we just felt like if we actually have brilliant actors, we really believed in the script, and we felt like the combination of that would help us overcome our general ineptitude,” says Grodsky.

By the time “Humboldt County” debuted in March at the South by Southwest festival in Austin (where it was picked up by Magnolia Pictures), they had managed to pack in more pot-smoking per scene than any other theatrical release in ages. But, without giving away too much of the plot, they also stumbled upon a post-’60s back-country generational rift worthy of any sociology master’s thesis.

“When we looked at people we met and knew up there, a lot of the older people like my aunt and uncle moved to Humboldt because they’d lived in the world for 30 years and they had these lofty ideals and this goal of moving into the woods and going off the grid,” says Grodsky. “But then their kids didn’t have the same choice. They were born off the grid and they don’t have the same values necessarily, they didn’t experience the world at all, and so because they don’t share the hippie dream, many of them just want to make a lot of money.”

“They either want to get out of the woods and on the grid or have as many toys as they can possibly have while living off the grid,” Grodsky adds. “We thought that was an interesting reversal: hippie parents who have greedy kids.”

Staff Writer John Beck writes a pop culture blog at pop.pressdemocrat.com. He can be reached at 521-5300 or john.beck@pressdemocrat.com.