\t\tWhen Hollywood and Hash Collide, Magic Happens\t 0BY <span style="margin:0px;font-family:inherit;">JAY ARTHUR </span>ON <span style="margin:0px;font-family:inherit;">SEPTEMBER 10, 2014</span>ENTERTAINMENT, FEATURES, MOVIES, THE STONER EXPERIENCE <div style="margin:0px 0px -1.857em;font-size:12px;font-family:inherit;color:rgb(61,61,61);">They go together like wine and cheese, meat and potatoes, Indica and HDTV. They're a match made in Hindu Kush Heaven. The cinema experience is best enjoyed while high. Whether your seated on a ratty old couch at a friend's apartment or in the plush leather seat of a high-end movie theater, there is a certain magic to the moment when the lights dim, the screen brightens and that first rush of sound hits you square in the ears. In that instant you're freed from all responsibility: there's no more work, no more stress, no more small talk. We rest in the comfort of total anonymity. The risk of a paranoid high drops to zero the second the lights dim. Movies invite us to forget everything except the images that are flashing right in front of our faces. There's nothing quite like the experience, especially when you've had a bit to smoke before hand. Weed makes the highs higher, the lows lower, and the mildly funny f*#*ing hilarious. We learn a lot at the movies. We suspend disbelief and open ourselves up to the internal logic of the story being told. As a result of this opening, we tend to learn a lot from the movies we watch. We internalize the behaviors of the actors and the beliefs of the writers without even knowing it. This is proven as much by the musings of psychologists and film theorists as the fact that my brother spent his thirteenth year pretending he was Ron Burgundy. So much of our worldview comes from the movies we grew up with which thus explains the ways marijuana in the movies shapes our opinions, and the opinions of legislators, in regards to the legalization movement. Would Project SAM exist were it not for reefer madness? No one can say for sure. What follows is a short list surveying the many ways in which Weed appears on the big screen. Unlike tobacco, we didn't have to pay to get it there. Depending on how old you are these movies defined what it means to be young, wild, free and stoned in their respective eras </div>