We got out of the deal with Adler as I said, but it took two years. So in 1980, we went right to work.
Being movie stars took us to a whole new level. We were recognized a thousand times more than we were from records and stage. Exposure from live stage work pales in comparison to the worldwide reach of movies. Before, when we made records, hardly anyone knew who did what. We were just voices coming out of the speakers. Still, to this day people ask us who did which voices. With movies, there we were on the big screen. I was Pedro, and Chong was Man. Quickly, we even stopped calling them Pedro and Man and just called them Cheech and Chong.
The reaction to Up in Smoke was interesting in that I started getting a lot of attention as an actor. I got more than a few offers to act separate from Tommy. I turned them all down, because I had no thought of separating the act. We were just getting started. Tommy heard about some of the offers, and though he never said anything, I could tell that he was affected.
In order to make him feel more secure I threw him a big party at La Fonda, LA’s most historic Mexican restaurant. We were celebrating his official designation as a movie director, a role our new contract gave him. I invited both our families and the key members of the crew. I bought him a director’s chair, a megaphone, and a jacket with leather patches on the elbows to make him look like a “classic” director. We were ready to start Cheech and Chong’s Next Movie.
I saw how not being designated the official “director” had affected Tommy, and I wanted to bypass that problem. I was really not interested in “titles”; I was interested in making a funny movie. I assumed that nothing would change and that we would continue working together as we always had, doing things together and making decisions together.
Little by little, however, that dynamic started to change. Chong finally found himself in the position he had always seen himself in.
But was he, really?
Though his name was now in the group’s title, he was not the sole star performer.
Though he was the credited director, we both wrote and directed the movies together.
At some point, he decided that he would be the star director and that everything was his idea. It got to the point where I had to tell him that something was his idea or it wouldn’t get done.
As we made the rest of our movies, he decided at some point that he had written everything and I was there just to help him fulfill his vision.
I guess I was just lucky to be in the room.
From the time I met him, Tommy always had a very big ego. That’s fine. You need a big ego to succeed in showbiz. But now it had expanded into megalomania.
Like I said earlier, we were not best friends, we were brothers. He was the older brother and I was the younger brother.
However, there comes a time when the younger brother gets old enough. And with each film, I was learning more and more about how to make movies.
But now Chong increasingly wanted to be the boss and make all the decisions. We were improvisational artists, and when we were working at our peak, the ideas flowed back and forth like water. We were most assuredly equals when it came to creating our work.
But around our third or fourth movie, he didn’t want me to write with him anymore. He said he was writing a script with his sister-in-law’s stoner-artist boyfriend.
What fucking gall.
I told him, “Good luck getting me to do it.” And I told his friend to get lost.
The great writing dynamic between Chong and me was that we could be honest when one of us was full of shit. He could tell me. I could tell him. We could also be honest with each other when one of us came up with an idea that was really great. We’d had a lot of success that proved this formula worked.
Now Tommy didn’t want me—or anyone else, for that matter—to tell him he was full of shit and increasingly… he was full of shit.
The end came when we were about to make our final movie, The Corsican Brothers. I didn’t especially want to make this movie because it was a period remake of an old Douglas Fairbanks Jr. movie. I thought we had more original things to say. I rationalized it by saying that Laurel and Hardy and Abbot and Costello had made period films, and I guess we could, too.
Tommy also presented this as a deal that he alone had worked out with the studio, which was news to me. He told me that he didn’t want me to write this film with him or interfere with the direction. If I didn’t want to do it on these terms, I should give back the money that I had accepted as an advance. He knew that I had already spent the advance on rebuilding my Malibu house.
I knew right then that we were making our last film together.
To make The Corsican Brothers, we moved to Paris in 1982, which would prove to be the agony and the ecstasy.
I wish that all young, adventurous people could spend a year of their lives in Paris. It is an enchanting, magical, romantic city. We had been spending more time in Europe as we had shot Still Smokin in Amsterdam, the dope-smoker capital of the world. What a cool city for Cheech and Chong.
Tommy and Shelby had decided to move to Paris on a long-term basis and even bought an apartment there. Rikki and I really lucked out. Through friends, we leased a luxurious, art-filled apartment on Avenue Foch in the sixteenth arrondissement, one of the most prestigious neighborhoods in the city.
The previous occupants had been Jerry Hall and Mick Jagger. Jerry called a couple of times and said, “Y’all seen anything of a big black book… It’s got a black leather cover.” That sentence seemed to take five minutes to say in her slow, sexy Texas drawl. The franc had gone to eight to one against the dollar. We were living “phat.”
It should have been the happiest time of my life, and in many ways it was.
However, my partnership with Tommy was disintegrating and my marriage was coming apart at the same time. Rikki had gone to England to do horse training. She was trying to make the Olympic team in three-day eventing. It was a long shot, but if she didn’t train for it, it was a no-shot at all. Believe me, we needed the time apart.
When I first arrived in Paris, I didn’t enjoy it much. The weather was always gray and dreary. I didn’t see the sun for months. I actually had dreams about lying on the beach in Malibu and having the California sun beat down on my back.
Eventually, the sun peeped through, and I started meeting new people who showed me around the city. Our publicist, Yanou Collart, represented movie stars and chefs. At least twice a week, we were taken to some three-star restaurant where the latest hot chef would make us special meals.
Tommy’s daughter Robbie was one of the hot fashion models in Paris at the time, and she was walking in all the high-end designer shows like Issey Miyake, Kenzo, Jean Paul Gaultier. For a while, she was Karl Lagerfeld’s muse. Through Robbie, we were introduced to the fashion world and its denizens. Like I said, it was an exciting and busy time.
Even the location for the movie was fabulous. We shot at the amazing and historic Chateau Dompierre just outside of Versailles. Every day we had lunch under a big white tent next to a beautiful lake filled with white swans… and always three kinds of wine. Ahh, the French.
Despite the rigid ground rules laid out by Chong, I wrote a couple of gags that appeared in the movie, like the scene with Rikki while I’m washing her horse. If you’ve seen the movie, you’ll know which one it is.
I really stopped caring about the movie one day when we were shooting a big action scene in the courtyard with a hundred extras. Tommy and I were standing up high on the guillotine waiting for “Action!” when I heard from across the courtyard a high-pitched, feminine voice yelling, “Cut, cut.” It was Shelby, who came walking across the yard and yelled at Chong to “Stand up straight. You’re slouching.” I think they had this idea that he was going for “handsome leading man” or something.
I remember thinking, My dear fucking God, I have had enough.
Eventually the movie wrapped, and I got out of there as fast as I could.
By this time, Rikki and our daughter Carmen had moved back to the United States to continue to train for the Olympics. Bruce Davidson, the world champion in three-day eventing, had a school in Unionville, Pennsylvania. I joined them there, but after about a week it was evident that our marriage was over.
I went back to Malibu with my tail between my legs and tried to figure out what was next.
Chong and Shelby and their three kids stayed in Paris after we made The Corsican Brothers. Over a year passed and finally the film came out in 1984. It didn’t open well and then sank like a stone out of sight. It was our least successful film and was gone from theaters in two weeks. I think Tommy was very content to stay on the Left Bank and not have to come back to the United States and answer questions about the film.
Tommy and I weren’t getting along at all. We hardly even spoke to each other after we made the movie.
Chong and I always had a love-hate relationship right from the start. We did both of those things with equal intensity. But the one undeniable thing we always had was comic chemistry. We had it in spades. We never had to think about it; it just was. We were lucky to not only have it but to recognize it and try not to get in its way.
We had developed it over the years through stage, records, and now movies, but our essential timing was there right from the beginning. As I have said, it was because we were both musicians. We viewed comedy as a type of music with its own distinctive rhythms and timing and inflections. We both knew exactly where to come in, or not come in, because we heard it as clearly as we heard a four/four beat. It was in our DNA. We were also each other’s biggest fans when we weren’t clashing over who was in control. I didn’t necessarily want to be in control. I just didn’t want to be controlled. And there was the rub.
At the beginning of our partnership, I usually deferred to his lead because he was older than I was and had a bit more experience. But I developed personally and was able to more than hold my own in our creative process. We had been doing this tug-of-war pretty much throughout our whole career. Most times, this friction was the irritant that produced the pearl. We could have all the heated arguments we wanted, and we had many, but in the end if something was funny we both knew it, because we’d be on the floor laughing our asses off. Those pearls invariably came out of an improvisation during recording when our egos were shut off and we listened to each other and didn’t get in the way of our natural chemistry. The dynamic was manageable during the record and concert touring period, because nobody knew who did what on the records. And relatively few people saw us live onstage. Movies changed everything.
Now everybody saw who was the lowrider and who was the stoner, because we concentrated on those two characters for the movies. We did other characters in some movies, but Pedro and Man became Cheech and Chong and vice versa. The net effect of that was that people thought we were those characters.
I remember doing an interview with a major newspaper writer in LA, and after he asked his first question, I gave a long and involved answer after which he just stared at me.
“What? What’s up, dude?” I asked.
After several more seconds of staring he said, “You don’t speak with an accent.”
I remember thinking, Man, if this guy, who is a professional entertainment writer, thinks I’m Pedro, then what must everybody else think?
It didn’t bother me. In fact, I thought it was funny and I was getting so much positive feedback. What was there to complain about?
Increasingly, though, it seemed to bother Chong that everybody thought that he was the dim-witted Man character.
So, as we continued to make movies, a real struggle set in between us. Although Tommy was the credited director, we wrote and directed the movies together. Which he has often verified. We had never disagreed over who had done what before. Most of the time we didn’t know who had done what, because we were in the moment of creativity doing improvs in the studio. I don’t think our audience thought or even cared about who was the director and who was the writer. They thought of us as one unit: Cheech and Chong.
With movies there is a real division of duties. There are so many moving parts that have to come together to make the whole, and credit is a very jealously guarded asset. It shouldn’t have been with us but Chong, as I have noted, increasingly wanted to be recognized as a director and more crucially as… the writer. His theory was that if he wrote down our ideas on paper, then he was the writer. I pointed out to him that that was stenography, not writing. We were having problems. More than once we split up during the movie years, always to get back together somehow and do another one.
All things have a shelf life. For film comedians, it’s about six films, and that’s if you’re at the very top rung of the ladder. After that, you’re into a generation different from the one who made you the biggest thing in the history of the world. The next generation wants their own comic heroes that capture the zeitgeist of their age group. There is nothing more Pop than a Pop comedian. They capture what’s in the air right now. It’s very mercurial. It’s the definition of lightning in a bottle. It’s not a hard-and-fast rule, but it pretty much holds true. That’s why film comedians try to get into dramas, action films, animation, and so forth. Not only do they want to show other skills and ranges, but the returns start to dwindle if you’re the comic voice of a generation for too long.
Cheech and Chong had reached their film use-by date around 1985. I think that was a big, underlying factor that fed into our discord.
More and more, I wanted Cheech and Chong to do other things than just the same old Sex, Drugs, and Rock and Roll. It would be very easy to turn our attention thirty degrees to other subjects like politics or other things happening in the world. We would have our own Cheech and Chong take on these new topics, but we needed a different beat.
But Tommy didn’t want to stray from his image as the quintessential stoner, although he disdained it at the same time. It was typical of his personality. He was a true Gemini. I used to call him the World’s Humblest Megalomaniac.
Our shrinking box office results also indicated that we needed a different direction.
Chong was, is, and always will be the world’s best stoner. I knew we had come to the end of this particular journey. We had been together for seventeen years through clubs, records, concerts, and movies, and we were with each other virtually 24/7 for that whole time. Not only were we sick of each other and didn’t want to hear anything the other guy had to say, we had pretty much run out of fresh things to say about the same old subjects. You know you’re out of juice as the voice of your generation when you start doing remakes.