A Playboy photo shooting is, more often than not, an afternoon of quiet, intimate moments, punctuated by the soft mechanical noises of a motor-driven shutter. It is a series of shared discoveries between photographer and model. It is serious business. It is art. It sells magazines. The shooting on the afternoon in question started like any other. Playboy photographer Ken Marcus was establishing a good working relationship with his model--actress Evelyn Guerrero, who was taking time off from the role of a sexy welfare-office worker in something called Cheech & Chong's Next Movie. Marcus is a craftsman, a master of studio lighting techniques. He was not prepared for what happened next. Marcus was about to be transported to The Twilight, or maybe The Crazy, Zone. Without warning, lo and behold, a couple of maniacs were driving a motorcycle through the door of the studio and into the carefully arranged set. Who were those cutups? Were they Hell's Angels outcasts? A couple of representatives from a bizarre collection agency? Escapees from a local funny farm, perhaps? No, they were none other than Cheech and Chong, friends and co-workers of Evelyn's, who had just finished a day's shooting on Cheech & Chong's Next Movie and were looking for trouble. As you can see from the pictures above, Evelyn was quite upset by their arrival and tried to get them to leave immediately. She tried to persuade them by hugging them, which didn't work. Marcus wasn't too wild about the interruption, either, but what could he do? They're celebrities. So, in the interest of history, he instructed his assistant to continue with the shooting. Not that any student of history could conclude anything from these ridiculous proceedings. "We'll see what we can salvage," he said.
As it turned out, photographer Marcus was lucky he even had a studio left. If you saw Cheech and Chong's last movie, Up in Smoke, you know what we mean. Their new one, by the way, is--how shall we put this?--even more riotous. Cheech plays a cool chicano ladies' man trying to hold on to a delivery job at a movie studio and Chong is his roommate, a dedicated unemployable who's into motorcycles and hard rock. In the new film, the duo manages to break up a welfare office, a massage parlor, an upper-middle-class living room and a comedy-improv café. They end up aboard a spacecraft. You figure it out.
Fortunately, Ken is heavily insured. We thought, for a brief moment, that Cheech (far left) was falling in love with one of our stylists and that the mayhem would soon subside. No such luck. Once Chong lit up his first superjoint (below), Ken disappeared into his office to check his insurance forms. He read the small print and decided that what was happening to his studio fell under the category of "natural disaster." In California, people insure themselves against natural disasters, be they mud slides, earthquakes or contact highs. In California, anything can happen.
