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!

by John Spong

October 2003

THERE WAS NO GOOD REASON to expect Dazed and Confused , the second feature film from Slacker director Richard Linklater, to become a pop-culture phenomenon when filming began in Austin in June 1992. The only remotely recognizable faces in the ensemble cast were a bitchy teen villainess from a low-rated soap and a sixteen-year-old sorta-supermodel who had no lines. And the action, such as it was—small-town kids driving muscle cars in slow circles while smoking dope and listening to Edgar Winter eight-tracks—was set on the last day of school in . . . 1976. Could enough time ever pass to make a return trip to the days of pet rocks and Peter Frampton worth embarking on?

Well, a funny thing happened on the way to obscurity. Like American Graffiti and Fast Times at Ridgemont High before it, Dazed became the rookie card for a generation of new stars, both of the Hollywood and independent-film varieties. Matthew McConaughey, Ben Affleck, and Renée Zellweger (who had a small, nonspeaking role) are the names that now need no introduction. Almost as familiar, but in more of a where-have-I-seen-that-face-before way, are co-stars Milla Jovovich (a L'Oréal spokesmodel), Parker Posey (Waiting for Guffman), Joey Lauren Adams (Chasing Amy), Rory Cochrane (TV's CSI: Miami), Cole Hauser (2 Fast 2 Furious), Anthony Rapp (the original Broadway cast of Rent), Marissa Ribisi (Pleasantville), and Adam Goldberg (Saving Private Ryan).

The secret of Dazed's success isn't Linklater's paper-thin plot: Against a backdrop of the annual hazing of incoming ninth-graders at Lee High School, the star quarterback, Randall "Pink" Floyd, wrestles with signing a pledge to lead a drug-free summer, and a freshman-to-be, Mitch Kramer, gets a first taste of his new life. It's the characters, who, despite being played by unknowns, are immediately identifiable to anyone who can remember high school. McConaughey's Wooderson is the guy who has already graduated but continues coming around the school anyway. Affleck's O'Bannion is the sadistic bully suspected of intentionally failing his senior year so that he can terrorize yet another class of freshmen. Posey and Adams are Darla and Simone, the pretty, catty, popular girls. Cochrane is Slater, the stoner who gets to hang out with the cool kids because he always has pot. Goldberg, Ribisi, and Rapp are Mike, Cynthia, and Tony, the nerdy journalism-class kids who serve as the movie's geek chorus, struggling to make sense of a world that places no value on their greatest asset, intelligence. The travails of Pink and Mitch, played by Jason London and Wiley Wiggins, respectively, don't so much provide narrative arc as pairs of eyes through which to view Linklater's dead-on re-creation of high school.

Critical praise was nearly universal when Dazed opened ten years ago, in late September 1993—Newsweek called it a "crushingly funny and knowing ode to misspent youth"—but a small initial release, on only 183 screens, meant the film barely broke even at the box office, taking in just $8 million. Fortunately, many of those screens were in college towns, where the movie found a natural audience and built the word-of-mouth buzz by which cult favorites are made. Eventually it even outgrew cult status; home video and DVD sales and rentals total more than $30 million, and the two volumes of the soundtrack have together sold more than two million copies. Fittingly enough for a coming-of-age movie in which no one actually comes of age, watching the film has become a rite of passage in and of itself.

But Dazed is about more than rolling papers and tall boys. Unlike American Graffiti, it does not pretend to depict the biggest night in a generation's life. Instead, it's one of the few teen movies honest enough to show just how much of high school was spent spinning our wheels, and how few of us were aware of it. And for Dazed's mostly untested cast and crew, it marked the last time they were able to make a movie that no one expected much from.

* Here are their recollections, gathered this summer, of the making of Dazed and Confused.

BEFORE

Richard Linklater (writer, director, co-producer): I'd always had this idea for a strange high school film. I remember being a high school freshman in Huntsville and driving around all night with three or four guys in a Le Mans, listening to an eight-track tape of ZZ Top's Fandango. Eight-tracks never ended; a song would get quiet, you would hear a click, and then it would pick back up. So I wanted the film to start with a close-up shot of Fandango sliding into the eight-track player and then have a whole movie in this car, meeting people who drove up next to you, going through the drive-through, getting out and getting beer—basically always in and around the car.

But at that time, teen movies were John Hughes movies. There was so much drama. Maybe I'm an undramatic guy, but I remember a complete lack of anything big going on in high school. The essence of being a teen to me was a whole lot of energy and music but nothing much technically happening. On any given night there wasn't a car wreck. There was no one impregnated, no huge love story from the wrong side of the tracks. So when I was doing press for Slacker, a Hollywood producer called up and asked what I was working on. I told him I had this teenage rock and roll film that I felt was my next movie.

The producer, Jim Jacks, and his partner, Sean Daniel, were Hollywood veterans who had set up a production company on the Universal Studios lot. They convinced Universal that Linklater could be the next George Lucas and his project an updated American Graffiti. The studio bit, to the relatively tame tune of $6.9 million; to insure the investment, Daniel asked casting legend Don Phillips to come out of retirement and round up the talent. Phillips agreed on one condition: He wanted the freedom to use all unknown actors, as he had for the last film he'd cast, 1982's Fast Times at Ridgemont High.

Linklater: The studio would have liked Brendan Fraser, who had been in Encino Man and was sort of an up-and-comer. But he passed, which was fine. If he's in it, then it's a "Brendan Fraser movie."

Jason London ("Randall 'Pink' Floyd"): When I went to the first audition, I was waiting in the lobby, and Ashley Judd was there. She hadn't hit the big time or anything yet, but I thought, "Wow, this is a pretty girl." So she started flirting with me. Then she went in before me, and when she came out she said, "It was nice to meet you." When I walked in, Don Phillips said, "That girl did nothing but talk about you the whole time she was in here! You'd better go get her number!" I turned around, ran out, and was like, "Hey, hold up! What's your digits?" Don was impressed. I think that was one point for me in the stud department.

Don Phillips (casting director): After meeting a lot of kids at a couple rounds of calls, I convened what I call a "casting pizza party," something I'd instituted with Fast Times. We picked forty people to come in all day one day and read for eighteen parts, and we weren't specific about who was trying out for what. At noon the pizza delivery guy came, and all the kids got a little picnic while we mixed and matched people and parts.

London: So all the guys read for Pink, and all the girls read for Jodi [Dazed's female lead, eventually played by Michelle Burke], and to rehearse you basically went to a practice room with one of the girls and made out. We got to make out with, like, three different girls each. It was the greatest audition of all time.

Joey Lauren Adams ("Simone"): I don't know who came up with the idea for a pizza party, but it was just awful. A nightmare. You sat there with people you were competing against, which is bad enough when you're just waiting to go read. But this was all day, with everyone. A couple of people, like Parker Posey, already had their parts and were just there to read with us. I remember asking her where she was from, and she said, "Mississippi." I said, "Oh, I'm from Arkansas," and she said, "Where's that?" and went on smoking and chomping her gum. I fell in love with her later, but I hated her then.

Phillips: Vince Vaughn was there, but he was competing with Cole and Ben, and he didn't get it. Neither did Claire Danes, whom Rick Linklater and I loved but was more of an Eastern-school type. And poor Ashley Judd—she never even got to meet Rick. Then I get to Austin, and that's when I met Renée Zellweger. I went, "Isn't this girl interesting?" When Rick and I saw her together, we read her and thought, "Ahh, man! Too bad that everybody's set, because she would have been perfect." So we gave her that teeny part in the parking lot.

Casting of the younger characters was done in Texas. The pivotal role of freshman Mitch Kramer went to an actual Austin high school freshman named Wiley Wiggins. And through a series of highly lucky coincidences, the small role of hanger-on David Wooderson wound up in the lap of UT frat boy Matthew McConaughey.

Anne Walker-McBay (co-producer): I found Wiley out on the Drag in Austin, coming out of Quackenbush's. I'd been scouring the 7-Elevens and any other place where all the teenagers hung out, handing out business cards to anybody who looked interesting. He said his name was Wiley Wiggins, and I went back to the office thinking, "That's the most incredible name." All afternoon I kept asking, "Has Wiley Wiggins called?" Finally he came in for an interview, and we went through the entire thing without him saying anything about being in a PBS series [The Perkins Family] when he was ten years old. I gave him a ride home afterward, and he mentioned it offhandedly, and I said, "Wiley, don't you think that would have been a good thing to have mentioned?" "Oh, yeah, I guess."

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