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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Daniel: My older brother, Bill, graduated from Richardson High in 1977, so he was right there with these guys, and he said we had to have a beer-bong scene. So we did. But, like, I don't know where Rory's Martha Washington bit came from [Slater riffs that the mother of our country was a "hip, hip lady" who had a "big, fat bowl" of pot waiting for her husband at the end of each workday]. He didn't do it in rehearsal, and I wasn't prepared when we were filming. It was hard to keep the camera still, I was laughing so hard.
Adam Goldberg ("Mike"): The main reason I'd wanted to play Mike was because of the fight scene at the beer bust, where he could work out all his unrealized revenge fantasies. He had all this desire for visceral experience, all these Beat aspirations, but ultimately he got carsick very easily. Throughout the film he sees everybody else have all this experience; the freshmen get their asses kicked, everybody else goes out and gets messed up, and all he does is comment. So then he tries to participate, and he gets his ass kicked too.
McConaughey: Yeah, Wooderson breaks up that fight, not because he's some kind of an authority figure, but because he's thinking, "No, don't be getting in a fight that goes on too long and breaks up the party and messes up my groove." Call him an egotistical utilitarian.
As one would expect, the party extended beyond the set.
McConaughey: It's a bunch of New York and California actors, right? One Saturday I say, "Okay, tomorrow morning we're going to float the Guadalupe River. I know it sounds early, but trust me, you do not want to just hang out in the hotel. New York has the Hamptons, Los Angeles has the beach, and Central Texas has the Guadalupe."
Jenson: We'd do an inner-tubing thing, and it was the greatest. We'd work all night and then go watch the sun come up, floating on the river. Sometimes we wouldn't even sleep—but, hey, we're supposed to look like we're so damned tired and stoned and drunk anyway.
London: The journalism kids never did the "go on the river and get on the boat" stuff. They were very much their characters, going back to the hotel and playing chess in the lobby.
Goldberg: We would hang out in the lobby, drinking beer and playing cards. I was with Jason Lee [Almost Famous] a lot. He wasn't acting yet; he was skateboarding. But he was dating Marissa, and since she was seventeen, he came as her guardian. We would sort of run wild in the hotel.
Ribisi: We hung out with Renée a lot because she was from Texas. I remember her saying, "God, I want to be out there doing what you guys are doing."
Deena Martin ("Shavonne"): I remember seeing Renée with the extras and telling her, "Get over here. You don't belong there." And I hung out with Ben a lot. My boyfriend and I went with Ben to get a husky puppy, which he kept in the hotel.
Adams: At the time, I couldn't keep straight who was playing O'Bannion, because O'Bannion was such an ass and Ben was a really sweet guy.
Daniel: The only problem with Ben Affleck was that he didn't know how to use a clutch. He knew how to use the brakes, but he burned up the clutch on that gray Duster.
Adams: I only went tubing once. It was a blast. But mostly I was in the lobby with Parker, Adam, and Rory, whom I'd started seeing, drinking beer. I'm sure the hotel hated us, because when the regular clientele came down for their continental breakfast, we'd still be there in our pajamas, smoking, drinking beer. I think the manager actually sent Adam to his room once.
Linklater: Yeah, tubing, dating, whatever they were doing, I tried to stay out of it. I was just glad they were having fun. I always expected to show up for work and find somebody had been in a car wreck or broken an ankle.
The party concluded at the only logical place, the football field, where Pink had called a "joint subcommittee meeting at the fifty-yard line." Among the kids with him was Wooderson, in place of the Pickford character Linklater had originally written as Pink's running buddy. When Shawn Andrews, the actor playing Pickford, had a hard time fitting in with the cast, McConaughey's Wooderson picked up his slack. And so, in the scene where Pink mutters the line Linklater wrote to sum up his film—"If I ever start referring to these as the best years of my life, remind me to kill myself"—Wooderson announces a corollary moral.
McConaughey: My father had passed away in, like, the first seven days of shooting. So when we were finishing up the film out there on the football field, I was with Rick, just talking about the scene, what was happening, what was being said, what needed to be said. And he reminded me that one time I had gone to him and said, "Well, basically, man, it's just about livin', isn't it? Just keep livin'." So we went out there and we shot it, and it became the thing that Wooderson told Randall "Pink" Floyd. It was kind of like, "You can sign the drug pledge or not, whatever you got to do, man, because in the end, of course, it ain't that big a deal. Life's gonna go on. You got to just keep livin'."
AFTER
To this day, Linklater characterizes filming Dazed as a constant fight with Universal—over the language, the lack of nudity, his choices for his creative team, and everything having to do with money. Those were minor skirmishes compared with the war that raged in post-production.
Linklater: The real battle was over music. I'd picked all those songs—they were all in the movie—but we didn't have enough money to use them because the studio kept cutting the music budget. So we needed to make a soundtrack and get a $300,000 advance for it so that I could pay to clear the songs. Universal was going to use their own music division and label to do that, and the money was all set. But the head of music was convinced that to get on MTV we needed new bands to cover seventies songs. And I'm like, "No. Absolutely not. The whole authenticity will be out the window. This is all about this moment in history. There will be no re-recordings."
Wiley Wiggins ("Mitch"): I think they wanted somebody like Jackal to play seventies guitar licks throughout the film. I remember Rick talking about showing up at Universal with an Uzi.
Linklater: When I refused to re-record, Universal pulled the plug on the album deal. At that moment we didn't have any money, and I still needed it to finish the film. There was a threat that I'd have to start cutting songs. Dylan's "Hurricane" alone cost $80,000. Finally the studio said, "Okay, we'll come up with the money, but only if you give up all your royalties from the soundtrack." I said, "Fine. Just don't screw with my movie. You can rob me, take everything I have. Just don't kill my family."
Daniel: That was pure heroism on Rick's part, to give up all of his points, everything he was going to make from the soundtrack, to keep all the songs on there.
More disappointment awaited. The studio restricted the film to its initial, small release and downplayed any substance in the film with an advertising campaign that focused solely on its party-hearty aspects. But Linklater told cast members at the time, "We made a really good, authentic teen movie that people will find eventually." He was right.
Ribisi: I was sitting in a theater in Los Angeles waiting for Kalifornia to start, and the trailers came on. The screen is black, and suddenly I hear my voice, really loud, saying, "The fifties were boring, the sixties rocked, and oh, my God, the seventies obviously suck. Maybe the eighties will be radical." And I was like, "What? That's me." And then there's my face. It was amazing; people started cheering in the audience. I tried to see it six times when it opened, and each time it was sold out. I remember trying to go even three months later, and it was sold out. I thought, "Yeah, this is definitely a phenomenon."
Goldberg: Phenomenon? The day the movie opened, I remember going to a bar, and somebody started talking to me about that film, and that has been happening for ten years.
London: I've never seen anything like it. This movie came out and then seventies fashion came back and all this great retro stuff. And That '70s Show? Don't tell me that's not a Dazed and Confused sitcom. I mean, Ashton Kutcher in the first season with the long hair and the puka shell necklace? I was like, "That's me!"
Adams: I first realized what the movie meant about four years after its release, when someone came up to me and said, "You got me through college."
Cochrane: There aren't many college students who haven't seen it.
Rapp: I went to see it at a place in Chicago called the Brew and View, where they had been showing it for I don't know how long. And there were all these Rocky Horror-type games—like every time Mitch nervously grabbed his nose, the audience would count, "One! Two! Three!"
Wiggins: Whenever people recognize me, people I don't even know, they always say, "Grab your nose, man."
McConaughey: For me personally, Dazed fans are my favorite fans. They never want anything. They like to come by, say the first half of a line, and wait for me to finish it: ". . . It'd be a lot cooler if you did." Then they walk off giggling. Just giggling.
Phillips: To this day you can't go to a video store on a Friday night and get Dazed and Confused, because the kids still have Dazed parties, and everybody knows every line in the movie.
Linklater: There'll always be a new generation of kids who want to discover their pop-culture history. When I was in high school, it was American Graffiti, Happy Days, and Sha Na Na. We were finding the fluffy, fun stuff in the fifties, an era we had missed out on. I wanted to rub everybody's noses in the seventies a little bit. I tried to be anti-nostalgic, but the power of movies is that when you depict something, you create instant nostalgia. My point was that some things never change in teenagerland. I wanted to tell a story about what I remembered of being a teen, which was driving around and looking for something to do. I'm kind of amazed I got to make it.
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