April 22, 2025
by Carla Hay
Directed by David Bushell
Culture Representation: The documentary film “Cheech & Chong’s Last Movie” features a racially diverse group of people (Latin, Asian/multiracial, African American and white) discussing the lives and careers of former comedic duo Richard “Cheech” Marin and Tommy Chong, better known as Cheech & Chong.
Culture Clash: Cheech & Chong rose to great heights in the 1970s and 1980s with their brand of “stoner comedy,” but the partnership fell apart because of conflicts over power, creative control and egos.
Culture Audience: “Cheech & Chong’s Last Movie” will appeal primarily to people are fans of Cheech & Chong, classic stoner comedies and documentaries about famous entertainers.
“Cheech & Chong’s Last Movie” is a very nostalgic documentary that’s partly a narrated retrospective by the former comedic duo and partly a semi-scripted road trip. The movie has some unique elements that are contrived but clever. This biographical film serves as a reminder that Cheech & Chong were groundbreaking for their time and had a comedy act that would still be considered unusual today, as interracial celebrity stand-up comedy duos are still very rare.
Directed by David Bushell, “Cheech & Chong’s Last Movie” is Bushell’s feature-film directorial debut. He has been a longtime movie producer, with producer film credits that include 1996’s “Sling Blade” and 2010’s “Get Him to the Greek.” Bushell is also a producer of “Cheech & Chong’s Last Movie,” which had its world premiere at the 2024 SXSW Film & TV Festival.
“Cheech & Chong’s Last Movie” goes back and forth between two formats, with plenty of archival footage in between. One format is a traditional interview format that shows Richard “Cheech” Marin and Tommy Chong talking in separate interviews in a studio setting. In these interviews, they tell their life stories, going all the way back to their respective childhoods up until the Cheech & Chong partnership first broke up in in the mid-1980s. The other format shows a more casual conversation between Marin and Chong while they are driving on a desert highway, with Marin as the driver. Along the way, certain people from their lives appear in the car’s back seat for occasional commentary.
Cheech & Chong can be considered a duo that is very much a case of “opposites attract.” Chong was born in May 24, 1938, in the Canadian city of Edmonton, Alberta. He was the younger of two sons born to a Chinese immigrant father and a Canadian mother with Scottish Irish ancestry. The family lived mostly in poverty, according to Chong. Born in Los Angeles on July 13, 1946, Marin was born to parents of Mexican American heritage and lived in a middle-class household.
Chong describes his upbringing as religious, but his childhood was marred by racism that he experienced for being half-Chinese. He says his mother taught him from an early age: “You’re different, so you have to be your best.” Chong, whose childhood education included Bible camp and being enrolled in the Canadian Cadets, says he dropped out of the cadet school soon after he discovered smoking marijuana and the music of Ornette Coleman at around the same time.
Marin says that his father—a police officer with the Los Angeles Police Department and a World War II veteran of the U.S. Navy—was a tough and abusive parent at home. Marin remembers that from an early age, he learned to lie to his father. Marin quips, “That was my first role as an actor.” Marin says that his relationship with his father was “always contentious” and they got into physical fights. He mentions that during the last brawl that they had, Marin threatened to kill his father if his father ever attacked him again.
For much of his childhood, Marin lived in South Central Los Angeles, which has mostly black residents. Although his family was middle-class, Marin says he wasn’t shielded from violence in the neighborhood: “I saw three murders right before my eyes before I was 7,” Marin says. Marin’s family moved to suburban Granada Hills, where Marin was exposed to a more racially integrated environment. He also switched from going to public school to Catholic school. When he was a teenager, Marin says he discovered a love of pottery making and smoking marijuana around the same time.
After dropping out of cadet school, Chong moved to United States for a while, including a stint in San Francisco at the height of the counterculture era in the late 1960s. He became a musician with modest success in various R&B/pop bands, including The Shades, Johnny and the Bachelors, and Bobby Taylor & the Vancouvers. Chong says, “When I discovered black culture, my life changed beautifully.” By 1965, Bobby Taylor & the Vancouvers were signed to Gordy Records, which was part of Berry Gordy’s Motown Records. Chong also had a co-songwriting credit on Diana Ross & the Supremes’ song “Does Your Mama Know About Me,” which was on the group’s 1968 album “Love Child.”
The road to Marin and Chong meeting each other began after Marin dropped out of college and moved to Canada to avoid being drafted in the Vietnam War. For a while, Marin worked as a ski instructor in Vancouver, as he bided his time to figure out what he really wanted to do with his life. By sheer coincidence, Marin says that when he was recovering from a broken leg from a skiing accident in Vancouver, he was staying at a friend’s house, and the only album in the house was “Love Child,” which he played repeatedly. Marin had a vague idea that he might be a comedic writer and/or performer, but at the time, he didn’t have enough connections to get started in showbiz. Marin says he was also influenced by left-wing political ideas and greatly admired writer/activist David Harris, who “influenced me the most.”
By 1969, Bobby Taylor & the Vancouvers had broken up. Chong had soured on the music business and had moved to Vancouver. Chong says he became enamored with stand-up comedy and performance art, especially after he had seen an avant-garde performing arts group called The Committee. Chong (who admits that he copied a lot of ideas from The Committee) formed his own unconventional comedy improv group, which is how he met Marin, who was recommended to Chong. Marin started as a writer for the group and eventually became a performer.
The improv group fell apart, so it wasn’t long before Marin and Chong decided to perform as a duo. Marin got the nickname Cheech because when he was a baby, an uncle said he looks like a little chicharrón, a fried pork rind that is a well-known snack in Mexican culture. Cheech & Chong’s comedy act had the duo portraying themselves or various characters, with many of the jokes about drug use, especially marijuana, as a reflection of the druggie lifestyles that Chong and Marin had in real life.
And the rest is history: Cheech & Chong became a popular comedy act based on their “stoner” personas. Cheech & Chong had sold-out live shows, hit albums and major studio movies written by Marin and Chong, who both relocated from Vancouver to Los Angeles during this period of success. Cheech & Chong won their first and only Grammy Award for their 1973 album “Los Cochinos” (which mean “The Pigs” in Spanish), their third comedy album. Cheech & Chong’s first movie—1978’s “Up in Smoke”—was an immediate hit (it grossed $104 million on a $2 million production budget) and is still considered Cheech & Chong’s best scripted movie.
Lou Adler had signed Cheech & Chong to his company Ode Records, produced Cheech & Chong’s comedy albums, and directed “Up in Smoke,” a movie that Adler independently financed and sold to Paramount Pictures. Cheech & Chong learned a harsh lesson in showbiz when they found out that the contract they signed with Adler only gave Cheech & Chong 10% of the grosses from Cheech & Chong album sales and tickets for “Up in Smoke,” while Adler got about 90% of the grosses. Cheech & Chong had to tour in order to make most of their income.
Determined to have more creative control and more money for their movie work, Chong directed four of the five subsequent “Cheech & Chong” movies, which had diminishing returns in commercial success and critical acclaim. (The other Cheech & Chong movies are 1980’s “Cheech & Chong’s Next Movie,” 1981’s “Nice Dreams,” 1982’s “Things Are Tough All Over,” 1983’s “Still Smokin’,” and 1984’s “Cheech & Chong’s The Corsican Brothers.”) Chong and Marin also parted ways with Adler as their manager and replaced Adler with Howard Brown, who is described in the documentary as a sleazy New York wannabe gangster type. Chong and Marin both say in the documentary that Chong liked Brown a lot more than Marin did.
In the documentary’s car commentary, Marin and Chong have mostly comedic conversations. When they bicker and disagree, it’s about what went wrong in their partnership. Marin says that Chong didn’t give Marin enough credit for Marin’s ideas when they made movies together. Chong says that Marin didn’t give enough respect to Chong’s role as director of the movies.
They both agree that a breaking point came when Chong refused to be in Marin’s 1985 music video for “Born in East L.A.,” a parody of Bruce Springsteen’s song “Born in the U.S.A.” Chong (who sometimes refers to himself in the third person) said he didn’t want to be in the music video because he thought having a small role in the video would be beneath him. “Born in East L.A.” (the song) was a hit. Marin later starred, wrote, and directed a critically panned 1987 comedy movie flop of the same name.
Adler is one of the people who shows up in the documentary car’s back seat. He mostly just sits back and watches Chong and Marin talk but he occasional chimes in with obviously scripted jokes. So do Chong’s first wife Maxine Morrow, formerly known as Maxine Sneed (whom he was married to from 1960 to 1970), and his current wife Shelby Chong, whom he’s been married to since 1975. “Things Are Tough All Over” director Tom Avildsen appears in the back seat very briefly to look like an awkward bystander during one of the Cheech & Chong arguments about creative control of their movies.
The documentary has the expected archival footage that shows mostly clips from Cheech & Chong’s movies, stand-up comedy shows and TV appearances. There’s a clip of an interview that Cheech & Chong did at the Playboy Mansion in the mansion’s famous grotto area, where two topless women dive and swim in the background. TV journalist Geraldo Rivera was a big fan of Cheech & Chong and is seen in several of the archival interview segments shown in the documentary.
In the interviews filmed for the documentary, Tommy Chong is more forthcoming about his personal life than Marin is. Marin married Natasha Rubin, his third and current wife, in 2009. Marin has been divorcd twice, and the only marriage he briefly mentions in the documentary his first wife Darlene Morley, whom he was married to from 1975 to 1984.
Tommy Chong says that for a period of time from the late 1960s to the early 1970s, he was juggling simultaneous relationships and children with Maxine and Shelby. He says that he began his love affair with Shelby in 1967, and they took LSD on their first date. Tommy Chong comments on the love triangle by saying Maxine was “cool about it” for a while.
Maxine then suddenly appears in the back seat and says, “I wouldn’t say I was cool about it, but I had two kids, and I loved him.” Their two daughters are Rae Dawn Chong (who became a famous actress in the 1980s) and Robbi Chong, who is one of this documentary’s producers. Cheech & Chong’s children are not interviewed for the movie.
Even though the bickering in the documentary shows some of the bitterness that led to the duo’s split, “Cheech & Chong’s Last Movie” ends on “good vibes” tone. Marin admits that in the early years of the partnership, he learned a lot from Tommy Chong, but he compares their breakup to a student outgrowing a teacher and needing to move on to other things. During the end credits, there’s a compilation of clips showing some highlights of what Marin and Tommy Chong did after they parted ways in the mid-1980s. Cheech & Chong have had sporadic reunions since their mid-1980s breakup. This documentary is a worthy tribute to Cheech & Chong’s history and their legacy.
Keep Smokin’ will release “Cheech & Chong’s Last Movie” in U.S. cinemas on April 25, 2025. A sneak preview of the movie was shown in U.S. cinemas on April 20, 2025.
