Wiley Wiggins: Anne was a really sweet, cool, kind lady who I definitely felt maternal attention from. She was great at talking to kids.
Anthony Rapp: Our hotel was right on Town Lake, and it wasn’t that far to walk to the cafés on Sixth Street. I used to be a big in-line skater, so I did that a lot around Austin, and I found an LGBT youth center that had a really cool vibe. I was the only queer person in the cast, as far as I knew. I was out-ish, but not totally. I wasn’t that close to everybody.
Adam Goldberg: The only one of us who wasn’t trying to be cool all the time was Anthony. He was more himself than the rest of us. He was rollerblading, for Christ’s sake.
Joey Lauren Adams: I fell in love with Austin. I’m from Arkansas, and when I first moved to California, I didn’t feel like I had an identity. And then being in L.A., that was amplified, because everybody has an identity. I knew a beautiful girl who had dyed her hair gray, and this was way before girls were doing that. I was dating an artist and meeting all of these different people who dressed different. I was really struggling, like, “Who am I?”
So, at one point, I decided that I was gonna be country. I bought a bumper sticker that said, “Clean up the South, buy a Yankee a bus ticket.” And I got belt buckles. It felt authentic to me. So being in Austin was a perfect fit. My cowboy boots worked there.
Sasha Jenson: For me, talking about that summer feels the same as if you were in the schoolyard with your friends many years ago and you just were playing around with a bunch of people, and you never really paid attention to the moment, because it didn’t feel special at the time. And then many years later, people were like, “Remember when you were on the swing set? That was so awesome!” And you’re just like, “Huh?”
It didn’t feel like we were making a movie, you know? It just felt like we were all playing together, and there happened to be cameras there. That’s the thing that’s so unique about this movie. I go back to other high school movies and the relationships feel contrived. But Rick was trying to build real-life chemistry with these kids. And I think he got it.
Chapter 9
Maybe the ’70s Didn’t Suck?
“Oh my god, I’ve re-created my high school.”
(left to right) Jason London, Wiley Wiggins, Sasha Jenson, and Shawn Andrews.
Courtesy of Richard Linklater.
Somehow, we only remember the good parts of some decades and the bad parts of others. The ’60s are now often viewed as the golden age, largely because the boomers wrote and control that history. Every decade since has been held up in comparison, and usually found (by boomers) to be lacking. The ’60s, in this simplified scenario, are the Beatles, JFK, birth control, and civil rights. Wow! By comparison, the ’70s are disco and wide lapels and gas shortages. Sucks!
There’s a scene in Dazed and Confused that captures this received wisdom perfectly. “The ’50s were boring,” argues Cynthia (Marissa Ribisi). “The ’60s rocked, and the ’70s—oh god, well, they obviously suck.”
Of course, Cynthia’s wrong, and Linklater knows it. He was smart enough to realize the mythologizing of the ’60s was a lie perpetrated by boomers. He didn’t want to glorify the ’70s, either. But in 1992, it seemed like he was the only person of his generation who even thought about the ’70s at all.
Dazed and Confused isn’t just set in 1976, it looks and smells like 1976. Linklater understood that era, and he got the details right. Before Dazed, the ’70s felt uniquely uncool, underestimated, and embarrassing. For many late boomers who graduated around the same time as Linklater, this was the first film that even attempted to accurately represent their generation on-screen, flaws and all. They saw it and they felt loved.
The cast of Dazed, who were mostly Gen Xers, came to the film from a different perspective. To them, Linklater’s vision of the ’70s felt like a fantasy of free-range youth. “You want me to tell you what’s interesting about this movie?” Ben Affleck told Kahane Corn on the set of Dazed in 1992. “Nowadays, there’s a moral push on everything: not smoking, not drinking and driving, safe sex . . . The ’70s were a time when there was an ashtray on every table of every restaurant, [but] there’s no talk about secondary smoke. Every time I’m in my car in this movie, I have a beer. And it doesn’t foreshadow death. It’s just a fact. Only recently could you, like, not buy a beer in Texas and drink behind the wheel.”
To Affleck, these seemed like good things. The ’90s were safer, for sure, but the ’70s were the last decade in which teenagers were largely unsupervised, unscheduled, and footloose.
Richard Linklater: When I was in high school, our school had a ’50s day, where you could dress up 1950s and roll cigarettes up in your sleeve. My uncle had been a teenager in the ’50s, and he was like, “You guys like the ’50s, but let me tell you, the ’50s sucked.” I took that in for Dazed, like, yeah, the ’70s kind of suck, too.
Tom Junod: Many people who grew up in the ’70s felt that they had missed out on growing up in the ’60s. Linklater nails that so accurately. The second-phase baby boomers, the people who came of age in the ’70s, were almost Gen X precursors, because we felt that the real meat of the revolution had happened before we got there. In the ’60s, people had protested. They had stopped a war. They had pioneered using drugs. They had pioneered rock music.
By the time that stuff made its way to us, it was simply as lifestyle choices. You weren’t making a political statement by smoking a joint. The few times we did protest, we were already self-aware enough to look at it ironically. The movie nails that with perfection.
Chris Barton: By the time you get to 1976, when Dazed takes place, the Beatles are done. The Rolling Stones haven’t had a great album in years. The economy was not great. In a couple of years, Carter would use the word “malaise” in his televised speech from the White House. I could see how you might think the best stuff has passed you by.
Tom Junod: My generation was guilty of nostalgia way before they got old. I was class of 1976. When I think of my own experiences in the ’70s, it’s like, Happy Days was on. Sha Na Na was an act that people my age went and paid money for, even though it did not in any way memorialize their own time. American Graffiti was a really popular movie with people who graduated high school in 1976 rather than in 1962. And it was the same way with Dazed being popular with people who graduated in the ’90s.
Brian Raftery: When they were making Dazed, I don’t think they realized there was ’70s nostalgia on the horizon. By the early ’90s, the ’60s revival had reached a saturation point. We had The Wonder Years. We had Oliver Stone relitigating the entire ’60s, whether it was Vietnam or the Doors. I think the height of the ’60s nostalgia was an infomercial for a record set called Freedom Rock, with two grizzled hippies who were like, “Turn it up, man!”
There was a weird rewrite of the ’60s because the boomers had taken over the media, and these guys were like, “Hey, we were the second-greatest generation!” and it became insufferable by the end of the ’80s. So Dazed was definitely a turning point. It was like, the ’70s? That sounds cool.
Richard Linklater: I think teenagers are looking to escape the misery of their own time, whatever that time is. It’s like, “It had to have been better back then.”
Parker Posey: When I got the call about this movie, it was like, “Oh my god! The ’70s!” The ’90s had a ’70s nostalgia. I was walking around in bell-bottoms. I listened to disco. I was a child of the ’70s. And then the ’80s happened and there was Reagan and “Just Say No” and that time was gone. So it was great going back there with Dazed.
Tom Junod: The ’70s were arguably the freest time that this country had ever had until then. It was post-pill, post–Roe v. Wade. Cops were not really busting people, because there was a tacit decriminalization going on. I’m sure younger people looked at Dazed and Confused and were like, “Really? You could just throw a bowling ball out your window? You could get beer when you were 14?”
Jason London: I was born in ’72, so those were formative
years! I’d walk by my parents, and I’d hear a bubbling sound, and I had no idea that they were smoking weed, but it sounded cool and it smelled really good. People just did what they felt like back then. My babysitter and her friend took a bath while they were watching my brother and me, and all I remember was big bush. The ’70s were an out-of-control time, man. And it probably stayed that way until that first case of AIDS came out.
Rory Cochrane: Growing up in New York, I was terrified of AIDS. In the ’70s, you didn’t have to worry about unprotected sex.
Wiley Wiggins: When Kahane was making her documentary, she was asking some of us what we liked about the ’70s, and more than one of those older boys were like, “You didn’t have to wear condoms back then!” Yeah. That’s why everybody had herpes, dude. That’s not a plus.
Peter Millius: Not many of those kids really knew what it was like to be in the ’70s, but they captured it, and Rick cultivated that. That wasn’t by mistake. It was by design.
Jason London: Rick was saying, “Don’t turn on the TVs! I don’t want you watching anything modern. Don’t listen to any modern music, either.” So all we could do was smoke weed, have sex, and listen to ’70s music, I guess. When we were out on the boat, when we were tubing, that’s the music we played. That was a really good way for Rick to get us into the groove. You really felt like you were part of that time period.
Chrisse Harnos: My character was supposed to be this feminist character. When I first got there, Rick gave me The Feminine Mystique and said, “I think you should read this.” I was born in ’68, and the message I got from my mother, who was born in the late ’40s, was that you attach yourself to a man and somehow your value and your power lies with that. I read the book, and I was blown away by it.
It was nice that Rick cared enough to do that. And imagine, he was doing that for 20 of us. I mean, it almost makes me want to cry for Rick! It’s like, no wonder you look tired!
Jason Davids Scott: Everybody trusted Rick. He gave them so much in terms of helping them build their characters. He was a great big brother who was helping them dress up in these cool outfits and immerse themselves in those characters.
Jason London: Rick even had a joint-rolling class. I think I was one of the teachers. When I was a kid, my dad would be driving with one hand, and with the other hand, he would deseed his weed, take the stems out, roll a joint, and smoke that shit in the car. My dad was basically my inspiration for Randall “Pink” Floyd.
And Rick also taught us how to talk in a ’70s way. He wouldn’t let us say “dude”—it was always “man.” But you know how people stereotype the ’70s, like, Groovy, man, right on, high-five, baby? I’m glad Rick didn’t put that shit in there.
Richard Linklater: As soon as Rory got off the plane, he was like, “Hey, Rick, man, I was thinking that every time someone says something, I’m going to say, ‘That’s what I’m talking about.’” I just melted. I was like, “I was going to tell you the same thing! I remember guys always saying that in the ’70s.”
Nicky Katt: When I got to set, Rick came up like, “Hey, man! You wanna pick out your car?” They had so many different ’70s muscle cars, and I was like, “I’ll pick the Trans Am.” It was a dream come true.
Richard Linklater: My only crazy purchase with my Dazed money was my ’68 GTO. I bought it for $6,500. That ended up being the GTO in Boyhood, the one that Ethan drives. We used that car to shoot some inserts of a hand shifting a gear and punching the gas in Dazed, in the scene when the guys are busting the mailboxes and they get confronted in the parking lot, and I was like, “Wait, that car’s beautiful!” It was love at first sight. So I said, “Oh shit, I’m going to buy the muscle car.” I could never afford it in high school. That was the one time I felt like, okay, I’m rewarding myself.
Rory Cochrane: Those cars were so amazing. The Chevelle, which I could’ve bought for $6,000 back then, is worth probably $200,000 today. It was so fast that the teamsters had to make it run on six cylinders rather than eight cylinders. And the truck that Cole drove? The engine in that thing alone was like $12,000 back then.
Cole Hauser: When you’re 17 and you’ve got that kind of power, you’re like, “Fuck yeah, let’s do this!” And it’s not your car, so if you wreck it, you’re just like, “Take it away!”
Nicky Katt: The cinematographer on Dazed, Lee Daniel, was a real gearhead and knew a lot about ’70s cars. You know the scene where Matthew and I are talking about our cars? That scene was not in the script. The cars pulled up and Matthew said, “What’s some stuff we would say?” And Lee said, “Say ‘pop-up pistons’ and ‘four-over-one compression.’” He was off-camera, feeding him these lines that he didn’t know anything about.
Katy Jelski: This boy culture where you know all the vintage cars was so foreign to me. We were doing a dolly track down the front of the cars, and it’s supposed to be the end of the school year, summer ’76, and in the middle of shooting this thing, one of the extras ran up to me, really upset, like, “You’ve got to stop! The grille on that car, that didn’t come out until December of ’76.” I looked at him like, you have got to be kidding me! But then I thought, this is the audience for the movie, these young nerdy guys.
Catherine Avril Morris: The first night I got to set, they showed me the car that I would be driving, and I was like, “Oh, I can’t drive standard.” And they were like, “Oh, okay, we’ll get you another car.”
Two weeks later, it’s the same car. And they were like, “Okay, let’s have a driving lesson.” So we go out for literally an hour in the neighborhood, and we go back to set, and they wanted me to drive slowly through the Top Notch drive-in and park and then pull back out and around. The entrance to the parking lot is on a ramp, and I kept stalling out. So then they put sandbags behind the wheel, and I tried to feather the clutch and it was like, ka-chunk ka-chunk ka-chunk through the entire scene. They ended up cutting it.
Renée Zellweger: When we did the car wash scene, I was driving the truck, and I think it was like “three-on-the-tree” [manual transmission], and I was really trying to not go in reverse when I meant to go forward. There was a lot to think about.
Jonathan Burkhart: You know that scene where they’re cruising around in those ’70s cars and they throw a bowling ball out the window? Well, Shawn Andrews was driving, and in the back seat are Wiley Wiggins and Jason London. We were in a residential neighborhood south of Austin, and Wiley was supposed to pretend he threw the bowling ball. On the first take, he actually threw the ball out the window! The look on Wiley’s face and Jason’s face is real, because he wasn’t supposed to do that. We were on a tow rig, and we were traveling at 20 miles an hour going downhill, and the ball just started rolling faster and faster, crashing into trashcans, rolling into lawn after lawn.
Robert Janecka: The ball is going 100 miles an hour down this steep-ass hill, and it went right through this guy’s garage door.
Louis Black: The story was that the house belonged to Jimmie Dale Gilmore, one of the great singer-songwriters from Texas, who plays with the Flatlanders. He says the bowling ball just appeared in his yard, out of nowhere.
Jonathan Burkhart: All of those kids had trouble with the driving scenes. There’s this shot at night when Ben Affleck is racing away in his truck, and sparks come out of the bottom. That was our one and only take. For some reason, the road was not even, so even though he was going totally straight, the truck was bouncing up and down, and it bounced so hard that it bottomed out and all these sparks came out of the back. It’s in the movie, and it’s fucking beautiful. I remember saying, “Man, visual effects could never pull that off!”
Ben Affleck: That movie was my introduction to great ’70s muscle cars. After that movie, I bought Cole’s ’69 Cadillac Sedan de Ville off of him. My brother and I split it and restored it. I still have it to this day in my garage.
Steven Hyden: One of the points the movie is trying to make is that being a teen always feels the same, no matter what era it’s in. You can tell
that from the costumes. If you shoot an audience at a rock show in the ’70s, it still looks like the crowd at a rock show now. There’s certain kinds of people that just look like rock people. The long-haired guy who’s kind of disheveled. The girls in the flowing skirts. There’s certain archetypes. So when I look at Dazed and Confused, there’s certainly elements of it that are very ’70s, but Randall “Pink” Floyd? He just looks like a kid from any era.
Michelle Burke Thomas: When we first got there, they sent us to a big warehouse that was like a Best Buy full of racks and racks of ’70s clothes, and we got to pick our own costumes.
Kari Perkins: The actors were so young, and really didn’t understand the way people wore their clothes back then. In the ’70s, it was all about tight, and in the ’90s, it was loose and baggy.
Marissa Ribisi: Well, in the ’90s, every girl was skinny skinny skinny. Kate Moss ruined it for a lot of us.
In the audition, Anne said to me, “Cynthia’s gotta be the intellectual. She can’t be pretty. You could be too pretty.” So I thought, okay, I’m just gonna really go for this. I ate waffles and fried chicken every day, and I put on 10 pounds, which wasn’t a lot. It was just enough to fill me out a bit. But I was real! We all had to try on the clothes together, and I was trying on pants that were bigger than everyone else’s, and I filled them out.
Deena Martin-DeLucia: That scene where my little sister’s pulling up the zipper on my jeans with pliers? That pair was a size one. The rest of the filming, I had a size seven, so I wouldn’t be so uncomfortable. The size ones were very tight.
Jason London: I was dead set on going for the most outrageous thing. So when I got those tight bell-bottoms, I was like, “I’m gonna wear these nuthuggers!” To sit down in my chair, I would have to unbutton and unzip my pants because it hurt so bad!
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