Richard Linklater: He was clean-cut. I was like, that’s not Wooderson at all. I need an asshole. Rough around the edges. I mean, Wooderson has his charms, but I wanted a little more sleazy. You can’t say that I cast Matthew for his looks, because his looks almost kept him out of the movie.
Sam Lawrence: The thing that’s disarming about him is that, back then, he didn’t realize he was so attractive. He just kind of was a cool personality who happened to be wildly good-looking. When Matthew was practicing Wooderson’s lines in my living room, I said something to him about the part, and he said, “You know, I really want to be like Brad Pitt.”
Cool World had come out and we were making fun of Cool World a lot, and he was like, “Look, man, at least Brad is taking these roles! That’s what I want my path to be. I want to take roles where it’s about the character and not my looks.”
Richard Linklater: I had imagined Wooderson as a creepier guy, just kind of predatory. But there was no dark edge to Wooderson when Matthew came on. He was just a sad older guy.
Sheri Galloway: Matthew made that guy likable. He had a twinkle in his eye.
Richard Linklater: Matthew just set the tone for the party.
Rory Cochrane: When I first saw Matthew, he was wearing a pink Izod shirt, tucked into khaki shorts, with a belt and brown loafers. He looked like he was on his way to pick up his golf clubs.
Adam Goldberg: He looked completely different in real life. I was like, That’s the guy?
Jason London: Rick says, “Hey, everybody, this is Matthew. He’s gonna be playing Wooderson.” And we’re like, “Oh that’s right, he’s the character who hangs out with the high schoolers and stuff, cool cool.” And all of the sudden, Matthew slinks down in a chair, his eyes droop, and he goes into character, and we’re all just like, “What the fuck?”
Marissa Ribisi: Matthew transformed himself more than anybody else. He was this innocent, sweet Texas boy, and he transformed himself into a pot-smoking, subdued, jaded character.
Richard Linklater: He told me, “I ain’t this guy, but I know this guy.” And I thought, that’s interesting. That’s an actor thinking. And then he became that guy, right in front of me.
Matthew McConaughey: To this day, my brother is like, “You say I inspired that character? God dang. Guy’s still hangin’ out, tryin’ to pick up high school chicks? Thanks, dude.”
Part II
The Shoot
top photo: (from left) Christin Hinojosa, Michelle Burke, Chrisse Harnos, Deena Martin, and Richard Linklater.
Courtesy of Richard Linklater.
bottom photo: (from left) Joey Lauren Adams, Adam Goldberg, and Chrisse Harnos.
Courtesy of Richard Linklater.
(clockwise from top left) Ben Affleck, Sasha Jenson, Cole Hauser, and Rory Cochrane.
Courtesy of Jason London.
Chapter 8
All of These Attractive Children, Unsupervised
“We were driving along Seventh or Eighth Street, just asking randos for bud.”
When Cole Hauser left his audition for Dazed and Confused, Richard Linklater called after him: “It’s gonna be like summer camp in Austin!” With those words, the director shaped how the cast viewed their experience making the movie, and what the vibe would be behind the scenes. Many of them still describe making Dazed as “summer camp,” whether they consciously remember Linklater’s words or not.
When they weren’t shooting, they were swimming, boating, running around barefoot, and getting into trouble. Linklater didn’t try to rein anyone in. No one did. Dazed was about ’70s kids coming of age at a time when adult supervision was sporadic, and behind the scenes, these kids were unleashed. Long before he became an actor, a 22-year-old Jason Lee—future star of Almost Famous and My Name Is Earl—agreed to be the legal guardian of his 17-year-old girlfriend, actress Marissa Ribisi, and he ended up partying even harder than she did. It was summer camp, for sure. But it was summer camp with alcohol, weed, and locked doors.
Adam Goldberg: You heard about the flight there, right? We had a horrible flight, the people coming from L.A. to Austin for the first week of rehearsal. I was sitting next to Michelle Burke. I met Michelle by holding her hand. It was crazily turbulent as we came into Austin. I think lightning hit the wing or something? We thought we were gonna die.
Michelle Burke Thomas: It’s not just turbulence. It’s whoooo zhooooo brrrrrrrr! I mean, we were in the middle of a lightning storm. It was the scariest flight I’ve ever been on. We were definitely praying. We were all clapping and screaming when we landed.
Marissa Ribisi: My sister [Gina Ribisi], my brother [Giovanni Ribisi], and my boyfriend, Jason Lee, took me to the airport in our ’68 Chevy Caprice that had no brakes and no gas gauge. My mom worked, and I was 17 and I wasn’t emancipated. Jason lived with us, so my mom was like, “Okay, he’ll just have to be your legal guardian.”
Jason Lee: I was a professional skateboarder. Dazed and Confused was my first time being exposed to moviemaking. I had done a one-scene, no-dialogue day of work on Mi Vida Loca, Allison Anders’s film, but I really got the scope of the process of moviemaking when I was there in Austin. You can’t help but get really excited when you’re behind the scenes on a movie set, and you wonder what it would be like to be an actor.
Rory Cochrane: It was the first time I’d flown first class, and the plane was delayed for like five hours on the runway, but I didn’t care because they were giving me champagne. It was probably shitty champagne. But to me it was amazing.
Someone was supposed to pick me up from the airport, but because of the delay, there was no one there to pick me up. So I get off the plane, and I don’t know what to do. And I literally had 10 bucks on me. I used it for the taxi from the airport to the hotel.
Jason Davids Scott: I arrived on the first day of shooting, which was right after the Fourth of July, 1992. I was 22. And they put me up in the same hotel as all the actors. It was called the Crest hotel, on Congress, right by the bridge that goes over Town Lake.
Cole Hauser: It was this crappy hotel by the river. Austin now is glamorous, but this place was a dump.
Ben Affleck: Everybody called it “the Crust.” But the only other hotels I’d stayed in were the Motel 6s I’d stayed in driving cross-country when I moved out to L.A., and at home, I shared a room with a roommate. So I thought, “Look at this! I can have my own room for my own private life!”
Esteban Powell: I was checking into a hotel room at 16 years old, and the people behind the desk were like, “Are you for real?” I’m like, “Yeah, I’m for real! Also, I can’t drive and my mom’s not here.” McConaughey was having drinks at the bar. It was like living an adult dream at 16.
Matthew McConaughey: I don’t think I was a presence at the hotel. I lived in Austin, and they had their own thing.
Ben Affleck: Rick created this three-month-long party environment for the cast that mirrored the energy of the movie itself, just letting all these 19-year-olds hang out and get drunk and get stoned and run around the hotel and cause trouble. That now strikes me as incredibly risky.
Richard Linklater: For the most part, they all bonded. Later, there were little rifts amongst them, but it doesn’t work well when you try to control people’s social behavior. That’s one strain through the movie: the Man is trying to control your extracurricular behavior. I always hated it when coaches tried to do that with us, or when they tried to get involved in who we should date. Everybody deserves autonomy in their private life.
And I didn’t encourage drinking or smoking. I was strictly there for rehearsals. I couldn’t really control that. I was only at the hotel for rehearsals.
Marissa Ribisi: I honestly think we destroyed that hotel.
Joey Lauren Adams: We bought candles and different bedspreads and decorated our rooms. And we bought these lacy slips and we took all of these photos together. Some were of us in bed.
Don Stroud: Parker [Posey] and Anthony [Rapp] and Joey were rolling around in their underw
ear and taking pictures. I think the three of them were pretending to do a sexy Calvin Klein photo shoot or something.
Wiley Wiggins: There definitely was something in the air with all of these kids. All of these attractive children, unsupervised!
Sasha Jenson: Jason London’s room was the drug den. He encapsulated the ’70s in that room. Walking in there was like walking into Jimi Hendrix’s greenroom.
The first day I got there, I was kind of nervous because I didn’t know anybody and we’re all supposed to be best friends. Somebody told me, “You’ve gotta come up to Jason’s room.” So I go there, and it was literally like walking into a Vietnam drug den. I mean, like, red lights, the biggest, scariest stereo system. I get out of the elevator and blasting down the hall is the soundtrack, because Rick gave us these tapes. And the minute I walked in, London is walking around with his shirt off, like Jim Morrison. And Rory was almost in this Groucho Marx rant. And then everyone shoves joints in each other’s faces, and it’s like, “Here we are! This is gonna be so great!”
Jason London: Everyone came in my room to smoke weed. I guess I’m similar to Pink in the sense that I don’t imagine myself as part of a clique of any sort. Never did. I moved to so many different schools growing up, I’d have to adapt to new cliques, but eventually I was like, there’s none of these clubs I want to be a part of. So I think that’s why my room was the room you could go to and just be yourself.
Esteban Powell: The first time I ever had a reaction from cannabis was during Dazed. I was with Jeremy Fox, who played Hirschfelder. We had to take apart the sink drain and borrow the screen from the hotel sink because we forgot to buy one because we didn’t know any better. And I think somebody at the hotel had some herb? I know we were able to get our hands on some and were walking around Sixth Street, just giggling our heads off.
Jeremy Fox: Yeah, at one point, we were so stoned, we ended up rolling down this hill, laughing our asses off.
Esteban Powell: My love of weed grew out of that movie.
Jason Davids Scott: Esteban really wanted to get weed, so he had me driving him around to head shops. And he was like 16 years old! But he was like, “I’ll just go ask people if they can hook us up.” And I’d be like, “Okayyyyy. I’ll be waiting in my car.”
Esteban Powell: We were driving along Seventh or Eighth Street, just asking randos for bud. Jason was just like, “Okay, here’s 60 bucks!” Then the guys took off and never came back. We waited for like 20, 25 minutes until we realized we got juiced. But Jason was super casual about it.
Jason Davids Scott: Everyone was named Jason. There was a bellboy there whose name was also Jason, who got us weed.
Adam Goldberg: Are you sure he didn’t think Jason Lee was a bellboy?
Joey Lauren Adams: The bellboy? He was probably somebody’s weed hookup. Probably Rory’s.
Rory Cochrane: I didn’t really smoke that much pot because, ironically, I wanted to be more clearheaded while playing stoned. But it’s not like I didn’t smoke pot ever. It just wasn’t as frequent. For some of those other guys it was just, you know, constant.
Peter Millius: Rory liked to smoke a lot. Rory probably smoked more than . . . well, nobody smoked more than Shawn Andrews, the guy who played Pickford.
Marissa Ribisi: I would hang out with Shawn Andrews and Milla at times, but it was just a lot of pot smoke and both of them in the room. And she was like 16! Milla brought me to a head shop to buy a bong.
Wiley Wiggins: No one was getting me high. I never got to do any of that fun partying shit! The closest I got was, the night before we started filming, they took us to Hole in the Wall to play pool, and I’d never played pool before, and I shot the cue ball off the table. I think Milla asked me to dance with her at one point and I went and hid in the bathroom.
Rory Cochrane: I was 20 years old, and I was able to have a running bar tab at the hotel, and I thought that was the coolest thing in the world.
Marissa Ribisi: I could drink at the bar, because in Texas, if you were married and your spouse was underage, they could drink. And I had a ring on, so I’d just be like, “Oh yeah, Jason and I are married,” and they never asked for a marriage license or anything. I didn’t drink that much. One day, I had two piña coladas and it destroyed me.
In the end, my hotel bill was $1,500 from the bar, and I slid it right over to Jason. I was so fuckin’ mad at him! I was like, “I think I had two piña coladas out of that!”
Joey Lauren Adams: Jason Lee was funny as hell.
Adam Goldberg: Jason was a hipster of his day. He was in Sonic Youth videos.
Jason Lee: Spike Jonze was filming me skateboarding, and I started improvising a song, and it sort of became a famous song that people would quote. It was called “Video Days,” made for [the skateboard company] Blind, and that led to Spike getting noticed by Tamra Davis, and then she was directing a Sonic Youth video, and she hired Spike to shoot all the skateboarding footage from that video. From that, he went on to start directing music videos.
Marissa Ribisi: Even my mom, when she first saw that Blind video, she was like, “Jason, oh my god, you are amazing. You have to be an actor.” And he’d be like, No no no no no.
Jason Lee: I was happy with my career as a professional skateboarder, but Dazed helped get the gears going.
(left to right) Jason Lee, Cole Hauser, and Rory Cochrane.
Courtesy of Michelle Burke Thomas.
Wiley Wiggins: Jason Lee is the one who yells “Fuck her! I did!” during that drive-by scene in Dazed.
Marissa Ribisi: Jason had everybody rapping. He would do these off-the-cuff, really funny, dorky rap songs about what was going on.
Adam Goldberg: Jason got his guitar and we made a song for [game show host] Chuck Woolery, which Jason recorded—I hope to god he still has it. We both had a Chuck Woolery obsession.
Nicky Katt: There were sing-alongs in the lobby.
Ben Affleck: Jason London wrote and played a song called “Rosemary” that I really liked that I heard in my hotel room, stoned, during that movie. Let me see if I remember: it was “Put your bags away / We’ll stay home tonight / There’s no reason you should be alone.” I fucking remember the song lyrics from a stoned night 30 years ago! He was that talented.
Rory Cochrane: People would get too drunk and not have shoes on. It was collegiate.
Sasha Jenson: We overtook two hotels. We overtook our hotel and then there was a hotel next to us.
Peter Millius: One night, we went to the Four Seasons hotel next door. There must’ve been eight or 10 of us. We were bored and looking for things to do, and they had those nice, big Texas longhorns on display, and we grabbed them all off the mantelpiece and put them on our heads and started running into each other like we were a bunch of bulls that were fighting in the lobby. We did that until we got thrown out.
Sasha Jenson: It would blur into almost spring break–like episodes, where groups would get a day off or two days off and all of a sudden it was like, “Did you hear what happened last night to so-and-so?” One night, we went from one hotel to the next, swimming naked. I don’t know why we wanted to swim naked, but we did.
Jason London: We were not old enough to go to the liquor store and buy beer, so that’s why it was great to have Deena Martin’s boyfriend, Pete, there. I don’t mean to throw you under the bus, pal, but Pete would provide alcohol for us, and we’d pay him our per diem.
Peter Millius: I was a recording engineer and producer in New York. I recorded “Walk This Way” by Run DMC, and I worked with the Stones, KISS, Foreigner—lots of records. So I was an older guy, and some of the kids weren’t quite drinking age yet.
When Deena was filming, I would go out with the guys. I had rented a car and we would pile eight people into my Jeep, and we would go find a bar that would let everyone in to drink. Sometimes we wouldn’t get in, so we’d find another bar. There was always that ID issue. But we always stuck together. We went out drinking until the bars closed, and then we would get more beer.
There was lots of drinking and getting thrown out of various places.
Ben Affleck: I’d never been to Austin before. I’d been in Boston and Los Angeles—really, that was the extent of my travel. So I felt like I was somewhere really exotic.
Marissa Ribisi: Being in Texas felt like being on Mars. Everything was so flat and so spread out. It was wild.
Catherine Avril Morris: The L.A. people acted like they were just in Bumfuck, U.S.A. Like they were in the most backwoods place. Like there was nothing to do. We Austin kids all thought Austin was pretty cool, and they all came with this attitude like, Uck, where are we?
Adam Goldberg: I went to the Continental Club and was slightly annoyed, because Austin was supposed to be a big music town, but the music was a really specific kind of music. I was a jazz freak and an alt-rock freak. I used to play Dinosaur Jr. on the way to work. I went to the Continental Club, and the guitars were like, b-dang b-dang b-dang! It wasn’t this explosive thing that I thought it was gonna be.
Marissa Ribisi: I got a chigger bite. Oh my god, it was just the most intense pain, because it’s a bug that goes inside your skin! You have to put nail polish on it. I still have a scar from that. Yeah. Texas.
Parker Posey: We went to Good Eats at like 5:00 a.m. and ate so many tacos. I heard on NPR that there was a diet where you eat tacos every day for 30 days. We were eating tacos for 30 days.
Joey Lauren Adams: We went two-stepping at the Broken Spoke.
Marissa Ribisi: Anne [Walker-McBay]’s husband, Clark, would take us line dancing at this place on South Congress. And I remember going to Clark and Anne’s place one night, and that’s where I got my first real exposure to guerrilla filmmaking and independent filmmaking. I was so young, and they were film buffs, and they’d be like, “Have you seen this film? Or this film?” Clark showed us Slacker, which was amazing, and I just learned about so many different filmmakers that I made a little list of the ones I liked. I wish I still had that list. I’m in my 40s now, and now I know film, because of that experience.
Alright, Alright, Alright Page 12