The Spirit of '76
Do you know the inside story of Dazed and Confused, one of the greatest movies about high school ever made—and the flick that made this dude famous? It'd be a lot cooler if you did!
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Phillips: I went to Austin to cement the cast with Rick, who put me up for the weekend at the Hyatt. Usually I took all the perks I could, which meant staying at the Four Seasons, but it was graduation weekend at UT and I couldn't get in. So it's the end of the day, and I'm up in the bar having a couple drinks to unwind, and I see this really good-looking girl at the end of the bar with this pretty cool-looking guy.
Matthew McConaughey("Wooderson"): It was, like, a Thursday night that summer, man, and I wanted to stay in and watch some flick, but my girlfriend talked me into going out to have some drinks. There was this bartender I knew from film school who worked at the Hyatt and would give us a discount, so we went there. And when we walk in, he's there, and he goes, "Hey, man, the guy down at the end of the bar is in town producing a film." So I went down and introduced myself. That was Don.
Phillips: Next thing I know, I'm having a drink with this kid and talking about golf. I think I remember him saying briefly that he was studying to be a director.
McConaughey: Gets to be four hours later, and my girlfriend is gone, man, and Don and I are pretty lubricated. We're talking about life and women and some great golf hole he's played, and I guess we got a little rambunctious.
Phillips: And a little loud, because some big-muscled, red-shirted, UT-football-player bouncer guy escorts us out of the bar. So Matthew and I went to my room and he said, "How dare they throw us out of the bar, Don. Don't they know who you are?" And I said, "No, and they don't give a damn either." So he said, "You know what I'm doing? I'm calling a manager." And he does. And he demands an apology. Wow. So after all that, I ask him if he's ever acted before. "Naw," he says in that Texas drawl of his. "I've been in a beer commercial and a music video." And I said, "Look, I'm in town casting a movie with Rick Linklater. We have this character, Wooderson, who's a little bit older than the high school kids. He's only got a couple lines, so it's too expensive to bring anybody in from Los Angeles. Why don't you come to my office and pick up the script? Maybe we'll put you on tape to see what you look like."
Linklater: I thought he was too good-looking. Matthew looked like he'd do fine with college girls; but I needed Wooderson to be a little creepier. But Matthew just sunk into character. His eyes shut to little quarter slots, and he said, "Hey, man, you got a joint?" He just became that guy. I thought, "Okay, don't cut your hair. Can you grow a beard and a mustache?"
McConaughey: Man, they told me to dirty down. They said that once we got started, I'd get $300 a day. That's a lot more than I made waiting tables on Thursday nights at the Catfish Station.
With the cast in place, Linklater set out to instill the spirit of '76 in a group of kids who, by and large, weren't old enough to pronounce "bicentennial" the first time around.
Adams: Before we ever got to Austin, Rick sent us mix tapes of seventies music to get us in the mood.
Linklater: I wanted them to own their characters, so I gave them music to listen to. "Cynthia, you're listening to Joni Mitchell and Carole King, but Simone, you're listening to KC and the Sunshine Band."
McConaughey: Nugent's "Strangle Hold" was in my head the whole time I was Wooderson.
Anthony Rapp ("Tony"): There were all these old People magazines lying around for us to flip through.
Marissa Ribisi ("Cynthia"): I went through all these yearbooks from the seventies looking at the different looks, and I saw all these white girls with curly hair who had let it grow into an Afro. It was sort of cute but sort of awkward, and I thought that was apropos for my character. I was willing to be ugly because I remember all the other girls looking really cute, and I thought, "I'll be that awkward girl who gets to feel really confident because she's got something up here."
Rory Cochrane ("Slater"): I got a wig, which was kind of freaky to have on when you've never had long hair. I'd put it on and walk around. Austin is a cosmopolitan city and everything, but it's still Texas. Guys would drive by and shout out, "Hey, hippie" or say something about rock and roll.
Linklater: The stylistic thing was not to go overboard but to act like we dropped the camera down on this date in history. You had to nail it, with the clothes, the design, and the music too. If a song came out in June 1976, it was a no-go. For a second I had Thin Lizzy's "Cowboy Song" coming over the closing credits, but that song didn't come out until July. So I didn't use it.
DURING
After opening with Aerosmith's "Sweet Emotion"—the rights to which cost Linklater more than the entire $23,000 budget of Slacker—Dazed essentially unfolds in three acts: The Hazing, The Cruising (back and forth between the Top Notch burger joint and the Emporium pool hall), and The Beer Bust. The first act opens with scenes in the school, where, among other things, the senior boys are in shop class working on paddles to "bust" the incoming freshmen guys and on other unauthorized projects. The action moves quickly to a parking lot where the freshmen girls get theirs.
Lee Daniel (cinematographer): I worked out that shop-class scene with Rick. In junior high and high school I spent almost all of my time in wood shop, and one of our teachers was a stoner. He taught us how to make bongs that didn't look like bongs, so if the principal came in, we could say, "Oh, it's a bedpost. We're making bedposts."
Adams: Those girls' hazing scenes were all-day shoots on a hot, black-asphalt parking lot. The freshmen had tan lines from the mustard we were squirting on them.
Parker Posey ("Darla"): I decided the older girls had been terrible to Darla when she was a freshman, so this was her day to act out. I'd talked to an aunt who'd been hazed by girls who made her swallow oysters tied to dental floss and then pulled them back up. That's what's in Darla's mind when she's putting pacifiers in the girls' mouths, screaming, "Wake up! Wake up! Wake up!" She is going to transfer everything that happened to her onto these girls.
Walker-McBay: The freshman girls spent the whole day with the mustard, ketchup, and oatmeal baked on them. I ran into some of them eight years later, and they said they still can't eat mustard or ketchup.
Linklater believed the movie wouldn't really come together until the second act, when the cruise through the night began. That just happened to coincide with Wooderson's entrance.
Posey: At the time, I was on As the World Turns, and the producers had put my character into a coma, which freed me up to do the movie that summer. But I had to fly home after the hazing scene to do something on the soap. When I came back to Dazed, everyone in the makeup trailer said, "Wait till you meet Matthew McConaughey. You're gonna die."
McConaughey: I do remember the first night on the set. I was just supposed to drive through the Top Notch and that was it. But when I came out of the trailer, with the hair and the peach pants and the Nugent T-shirt and the necklace with the pipe on it, Rick said, "Hey, there's a beer bust going on later in the movie, and we need a character to get that information to some of the other characters. Maybe Wooderson is the guy to do it."
Ribisi: Cynthia was supposed to have a huge crush on Tony, but in real life, I just didn't. When it came down to shooting, Rick was like, "I need to find another guy for Cynthia. Maybe Wooderson?" I thought, "Oh, this is genius." He's everything she's against. She's this girl with a future, kind of preachy, and suddenly she's into this guy who only likes high school chicks. She's so smitten she can't speak.
McConaughey: Rick and I worked that out in maybe thirty minutes. He said, "You know, Wooderson's been around. He's been with good-looking brunettes, blondes, everything, for ages. Now I think he's into the redheaded intellectual, something a little different." So Wooderson pulls up, throws her a little Spanish about the fiesta later, and then—and I don't know where this came from—asks if she needs a ride. And she's driving her own car, man! It all just flowed real easy. That's the scene when I tuned into who Wooderson was. He's about women, pot, his car, and rock and roll. And at that moment he's high, he's in his Chevelle, and he's listening to rock and roll. The one thing he doesn't have is the chick for the night, right? As soon as Rick went, "Action!" I remember thinking, "There's my fourth thing. Completion. This is as good as it gets for Wooderson."
Ribisi: Then there's that great scene when Wooderson, Pink, and Mitch walk into the Emporium in slow motion with Bob Dylan's "Hurricane" playing. The first time I saw it I cried.
Sasha Jenson ("Donnie"): There was a lot of improv stuff in there that was worked out in rehearsal. Rick didn't always have the time to set up everything he wanted to shoot, so we'd be in the Emporium, and he'd say, "Okay, everybody, go to where you think you should be." So Ben [Affleck] goes to the pool table, and we got that great bit of him kicking that guy's ass at pool right before he gets the paint dumped on him.
If the kids seem to spend the second act waiting for something big to happen, the true extent of their aimlessness isn't clear until that big something happens in the third: a keg party in the woods.
Linklater: I wanted a montage sequence at the beer bust to give the essence of the party. But it's hard to script the essence of a party, and if you don't have it in the script, you don't have it on the shooting schedule. So we had about thirty minutes and a couple of cameras to get it. We cranked up the music, asked people to move, and followed them around. I'd run up to Rory Cochrane and whisper, "Okay, you're trying to score some weed off somebody," and he'd go with it and we'd film.
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