Last week, Steve Jelbert profiled Super High Me for The Times of London, highlighting B-Side’s Roll Your Own Screening program. The article, titled Super High Me reveals the secrets of a rolling stoner, opens with the choice teaser:

For once the heads have got it together. A documentary that began life as an offhand gag from America’s “second-best pot comic” (as rated by the toker’s bible High Times) has made a tiny bit of cinema history.

The previous week, Doug Benson and I spoke with Steve about Super High Me. Steve has an interesting background for a journalist, and talking with him was a gas. He grasped on to the idea of Roll Your Own as an exercise in “motivating the supposedly unmotivated.”

The article contains a great overview of the story behind the film from Doug’s POV. It also has a nice overview of Roll Your Own:

The film holds the record for the widest documentary opening ever. It was shown in more than 1,000 venues on the holiest day of the smoking year, April 20, 4/20 in American parlance. Supposedly named for the after-school meeting time of a gang of Californian teen-agers in the Seventies, 4:20 is now a universal smokers’ code. Knowing that the film could not get television advertising or a wide release, the producers approached the indie marketing and distribution specialists b-side, which simply made screening copies available to anyone who wanted one and could offer premises.

“We thought: ‘Let’s not even try to make money’,” says Chris Hyams of b-side. “The real question was ‘Can you get stoners off the couch?’

“Any dark room with places to sit can become a movie theatre, but we were stunned by the array of ideas and venues people came up with.”

From college campuses to comedy clubs, sympathisers joined in. An Illinois couple showed the film at their wedding reception. A San Fran-cisco “guerilla drive-in” outfit projected it on the wall of a local store.

“There’s hundreds of MBAs sitting round studios wondering how they can, quote, ‘make something go viral’,” says Hyams, the scion of a film family (his father is director Peter, his brother John an acclaimed documentary maker). The marketing budget for Super High Me was supposedly the same as the cost of a 2in advertisement in The New York Times. Judd Apatow’s forthcoming “weed action movie” Pineapple Express will not come so cheap.

Check out the full article here.