Aaron Hillis in Spin documents the story behind Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains, the '80s cult item that he terms, with some justice, "the missing link between punk and riot grrl." Stains was the brainchild of Nancy Dowd, who made her bones as a screenwriter in the late 1970s with Slap Shot and Coming Home. Punk was still a going concern when Dowd completed her script (originally called "All Washed Up") about some rebellious teenage girls whose bad attitudes and worse music briefly turn them into stars and role models for disaffected youth. The script fell into the hands of director Lou Adler, who had helped produce the 1967 Monterey International Pop Festival, brought The Rocky Horror Show to America, and then turned filmmaker with the first Cheech and Chong picture, Up in Smoke. Adler may have been looking for a new subculture to milk, but Dowd managed to bring in music journalist Caroline Coon to serve as the film's technical adviser, and the on-screen cast didn't lack for authenticity: Steve Jones and Paul Cook of the Sex Pistols and Paul Simonon of the Clash were brought in to make a raucous noise behind an aspiring punk vocalist played by an unrecognizable, skinny young Ray Winstone, and Fee Waybill of the Tubes contributed a surprisingly moving performance as a has-been metal singer, whose features hang down as if to protest all the make-up he's slathered on them over the years.

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We were going to call this Take Five "Buddha", and then, like, totally blow your mind by not including Kundun, but frankly, we're just too, you know, we're too, uh...what were we talking about?  Oh, right!  That weed!  The chronic!  Sweet Mary Jane!  A favorite in Hollywood for so many years that it doesn't even seem like a vice to some people (remember Tom Hagen warning the movie producer in The Godfather that one of his stars was about to 'graduate' from marijuana to cocaine), it was a while before social pressures eased up enough to portray herb in anything but the most hysterical terms.  How far we've come, bros!  Today, only a few scant days after 4/20 (the national stoner's holiday), we can each of us get nicely toasted and ditch work early for a matinee of Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay, which posits that even our Commander-in-Chief enjoys a good bong hit now and again.  The noir classic The Sweet Smell of Success contained a plot point that expected us to believe that a jazz musician -- and a white one, at that! -- might see his career ruined by the mere possession of the devil weed, while the new Kal Penn/John Cho vehicle implies that toking up on a regular basis is the best career move you can make.  Here's five more films that deal with the sweet leaf in all its hazy glory.

REEFER MADNESS (1936)

This absurd scare-flick is typical of the anti-drug hysteria of the 1920s and 1930s; it's only exceptional in that it's exceptionally over-the-top in its woozy narrative, lurid dialogue, and bizarrely sensationalistic vision of what marijuana will do to you.  (Apparently, it turns you into a murderer or a sex fiend instead of a lazy Xbox-addicted dolt.)  Directed by French-born Louis Gasnier (whose other major claim to fame was the Perils of Pauline serial), it's unintentionally hilarious to the degree that it's been reissued endlessly in every format imaginable for new generations of potheads to giggle at.  In fact, for a film that did poor business, featured no stars, and is incompetently made at every level, it very well may be that Reefer Madness is the most-watched film of the 1930s.  Ah, irony.

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