The ways in which Hollywood has handled weed on set over the years has fascinated me ever since I found out my (much) older brother’s roommates were extras in Dazed & Confused back in the day. There’s a scene when all the actors are walking out to the ‘party at the moon tower’ towards the end of the film, and as the actors walk by some random car you can see my bro’s old roommates ripping a bong inside of the car. All of the weed smoked in the film was real. Even though a lot of it was shot in Texas, which has/had some of the strictest anti-marijuana laws around, the film’s producers were still able to pull that off. I’m guessing Matthew McConaughey wanted it that way.
Now that cannabis is legal in California, filmmakers can use real marijuana whenever they want on set. The drawback, of course, is that an actor could get way too blitzed in one take and become unable to keep on filming. This is precisely what happened to Kirsten Dunst, but instead of knowing she was smoking a blunt full of Humboldt County’s stickiest weed she actually thought she was smoking some fake prop weed. So it was one hell of a shock when she found herself, minutes later, too stoned to function.