Hollywood's Bong Show, A Genre Gone to Seed

Writer: Okay, I got it. Two guys, slacker types, go in search of some falafel. Or a Chewbacca costume. Or maybe they have to pick up the kid brother from yodeling practice.

Producer: And?

Writer: And that's it. That's the plot.

Producer: Seems thin.

Writer: Right, right, I see your point. Okay, what if we make the two guys high?

Producer: Now you're onto something.

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Cheech and Chong, Harold and Kumar, Thurgood and Scarface. For 30 years, we've been stupidly giggling over the impaired antics of schlubby guys -- it's always schlubby guys -- and the ganja they love.

Now we have "Pineapple Express," a stoner flick for a generation paradoxically symbolized by both BlackBerrys and Judd Apatow.

Which, in some ways, makes it not a stoner flick at all, at least not according to King Schlub Seth Rogen, who co-wrote the script with buddy Evan Goldberg.

The film stars Rogen as Dale Denton, a man-child process server who witnesses a murder while smoking some Pineapple Express, a.k.a. the best pot ever. As luck and plot necessity would have it, the killer is a drug lord who can trace a left-behind roach straight to its smoker. So Dale and Saul (James Franco), his lonely mensch of a dealer, must make a trippy escape from the bad guys and also get to Dale's girlfriend's house for a meet-the-parents dinner.

"When you're a pot dealer, you're taking a hit for society," says Rogen, who talks in real life as his characters do on-screen. "You're a necessary evil, but no one wants to hang out with you." The relationship between Saul, who sells drugs but has a kind heart, and Dale, who has the trappings of adulthood but is kind of a jerk, is what Rogen hopes audiences will focus on.