Joey Lauren Adams: I was never the popular girl in high school. I didn’t make the cheerleading team. I hated high school. I was always ready to quit and get my GED and move to L.A.
Marissa Ribisi: I hated school so much, I didn’t go. My brother was already a successful actor in television, and he wasn’t going to school, so I felt like, why do I have to school? And my dad was like, “Well, he has a job.” So I had to get a job. I was acting in a movie about high school so that I didn’t have to go to school.
Parker Posey: Dazed was the dream high school experience that we were all able to live out. I was a good Southern Catholic girl in high school. To get to play Darla and express all my repressed feelings was liberating.
Jason London: I got to play the quarterback, and I never got to be a quarterback in real life. When I was 15, I lived in DeSoto, Texas, and during the summer, we worked construction with my dad. I was bringing home $300 a week. For a poor kid from a trailer park, I was rollin’. But one day I got my foot caught in the lift mechanism on the forklift and got two of my toes cut off on my left foot. My whole life at that point was all about sports, and the only way I was gonna get to go to college was through scholarships in sports or the military. All of the sudden, that path was gone. I thought it was the worst thing that could’ve ever happened to me. But then I decided to take drama. I guess it was destiny. I had to think about a life beyond sports, just like Pink.
Adam Goldberg: My high school was pretty different from Dazed, but making that movie felt like my college experience, because I didn’t really go to college. My college experience: I had a chronic 99-degree temperature. I was laying under the sink, crying, calling my mother. And then I dropped out. So partying with the Dazed cast was as close as I ever got.
Jonathan Burkhart: Adam Goldberg and Anthony Rapp together, their role was to not totally fit in. And that’s the way they were off-camera as well.
Jason London: As the dynamics of the movie are, it played out the same way in real life, the sense of, like, Anthony Rapp wasn’t gonna be the guy getting hotboxed in my hotel room.
Anthony Rapp: I always felt like an outsider, because I was never a bro. I wasn’t a frat guy at all. I was the nerdy weirdo, and the people I was drawn to were weirdos. Adam’s a weirdo, but he’s the weirdo who wants to fit in. It was sort of like in the movie. He’s sick of being a nerd.
Marissa Ribisi: The dynamic between Adam and Anthony and me completely changed in rehearsal. Adam became the alpha among us because he’s so angsty. He was always popping Advil. I’m like, “Why are you taking Advil every day?” And he’d be like, “I just got off the phone with my therapist.” He was just very heady. Anthony would jab him and make fun of him, and then I existed as sort of a buffer. The characters became more us.
Adam Goldberg: It wasn’t until the movie came out that I was like, Oh, these three characters are the nerds? I know that seems crazy, because it’s so obvious, but I didn’t think of it that way. I wore steel-toe boots and a flannel shirt in the movie because that’s how I was dressing in real life. It’s not like I was dressing like Anthony Michael Hall in The Breakfast Club.
Mark Duplass: The three dorks in the car? That is the utterly unique portion of this film for me, because they’re not your typical nerd stereotypes. They’re kind of cool. They’re sitting in the car philosophizing, but they also get invited to the party. To me, those conversations in the car are the closest thing to Slacker and Before Sunrise. That’s the closest to the true Linklater form.
Parker Posey: I flew back and forth to a soap I was working on, so I had to miss the two weeks of “bonding rehearsals.” I missed the talk that the rehearsal bonding would’ve elicited, and I wish I’d been there. I was new to the game of this kind of working experience. We all were. That’s what was so perfect and pure about it. It felt like an unknown ensemble experiment that was created.
Adam Goldberg: People who were comfortable doing improvisation ended up staying in the movie more. And the people who weren’t, didn’t. I felt bad about that, but also impatient with people who couldn’t keep up.
Joey Lauren Adams: One night, Shawn [Andrews] improvised a scene about his character wanting to drive drunk, and Milla trying to take the keys, and it was like, that wasn’t an issue in the ’70s! I remember feeling embarrassed for them, like, I don’t want to make that same mistake. I want my improv to be good.
Ben Affleck: Rick was saying that people could write their own scenes, which was such a radical idea. At the time, I thought, “Oh, that’s cool and permissive and welcoming and open.” Now that I know more about production and the way things have to be prepared for in advance, I just think that’s fucking crazy. You can’t just have 25 actors show up and start handing you scenes they want to shoot throughout production!
Richard Linklater: It wasn’t risky at all. I’m the director. If something doesn’t work, I don’t put it in the movie. I have final cut. I’m trying to let the movie be its best version of itself, but I hold the cards. I just don’t tell the actors that. I want them to think that they have dominion over their character.
Ben Affleck: Rick was long-haired, and free-spirited, and very laconic and easygoing, and he somehow seemed stress-free. And I just thought, like, “God, this is the kind of guy I would like to be one day. He can direct, and write, and maybe I could do that, too.”
Joey Lauren Adams: There was a remarkable freedom to Rick’s way of working. We all knew it was special, even at the time. You just couldn’t believe it that you could be so lucky to be in Austin, working with Rick, doing your first film with all of these people. It was what I left Arkansas for. It was that experience.
Chapter 11
The New Kid Versus the Old Guard
“It was like, ‘Jesus is coming!’ . . . you had to put your weed away.”
Anne Walker-McBay, Deb Pastor, Clark Walker, and Jonathan Burkhart.
Courtesy of Jonathan Burkhart.
Dazed and Confused was definitely not Universal’s highest priority. When Linklater started principal photography, the studio was also working on Jurassic Park and Schindler’s List. That didn’t prevent them from micromanaging Linklater’s decisions. The previous year, Universal had watched as some of its bigger-budget films flopped, including the Babe Ruth biopic The Babe and the Tom Cruise/Nicole Kidman romance Far and Away. Linklater sensed that everyone at the studio was scared of getting fired.
“They’ve determined to do their little jobs all the better and tighten their belts,” he wrote in his “Dazed by Days” diary. “Experienced directors with track records would tell them to get fucked, so it’s easier for them to focus on Dazed and the new kid, even though that film has less than one-quarter of the budget of their average film.”
Linklater also felt that some of the more experienced crew members didn’t trust him because he worked differently than other directors who’d worked their way up through the studio world. Tensions emerged between those who understood Linklater’s process, those who seemed to be working against it, and anyone who fell into both categories. “By the time we’re in production,” Linklater wrote, “we’re at war.”
Bill Wise: Before we started working on Dazed, amongst Rick’s friends, it was like, “Are you gonna work on Rick’s little ’70s movie?” Then all of a sudden, you’re there. The first day on set, you see six semis, and you see all the period cars lined up in that one little area, and the lights coming down, the 2Ks and the 4Ks. You inhale and you realize, “Oh, this shit is real!”
Kim Krizan: What was the difference between Slacker and Dazed? We had trailers on Dazed. We had makeup artists. There was a first assistant director, and a second assistant director. We were escorted onto the set. There were blow-dryers in case we were sweating through our clothes and someone needed to dry our clothes. The day we shot our scene for Slacker, the two other women and I just sat in a booth at the café where we were filming and hung out until it was time to shoot our scene. With Dazed, I sat in a trailer, alone. Everyt
hing was totally different.
Michael MacCambridge: With Slacker, what Richard was doing was, to borrow a phrase from Spike Lee, “guerrilla filmmaking.” It was very much insurgent, and very much outside the mainstream. But what he was doing with Dazed and Confused was still audacious. He was making a film with a studio, in many of the most difficult ways possible: with a large ensemble cast, a period piece, doing it away from Hollywood and the studios but still relying on their money. When I visited the set, I thought, “This is a proper film!”
The pressures that were attendant upon him because of that were also much greater. Yet Richard was dressing exactly the way he dressed for Slacker. He still had the Prince Valiant haircut. He was playing in the big time, but he seemed totally unaffected by the changes in his life.
Tricia Linklater: Rick wore the same cutoffs every day to set, and drove my grandmother’s ancient Cutlass from the ’70s. Anthony Rapp asked if Rick was okay, financially. Like, in the sweetest way possible.
Richard Linklater: When I got paid for Dazed, I put a down payment on a condo, but I still drove the same shitty car. Sean Daniel visited Austin, and he said, “Rick, you can get a new car now!” But I didn’t care. I’d sit back and think, okay, what makes me happy? New clothes or a brand-new car won’t necessarily make me happy. To me, money equals freedom. Keep a low overhead, and you don’t ever have to do anything for money. You won’t have to whore yourself out.
Katy Jelski: I came from L.A. I thought the script was fantastic and the casting was fabulous, but there was a young director, a green DP, and this laissez-faire Austin crew. It wasn’t like working in L.A., where it’s like a factory. It was a bunch of hippies.
J.R. Helton: Well, some of the Austin people had worked on Lonesome Dove and a bunch of other movies. We were a professional crew, and it seemed like there was this new, indie-film, lower-budget, amateur hour thing going on.
Jonathan Burkhart: I had come from New York, where it’s like, “Shut up. Do not speak unless you’re spoken to, and never speak to anyone who’s above you.”
Deb Pastor: We always called D. [Montgomery] “the art department ghost,” because no one in that department would listen to anything she said. She’d say something, and they’d just ignore her. And it was weird, because she was going through cancer treatment at the time, and it was like, “Oh my god, this woman’s fighting for her life, and she’s totally invisible.”
Tricia Linklater: Everybody on set knew more than Rick did about proper 150-person crew behavior, because he had come from seven people on Slacker. This was this huge jump, going from “do everything yourself.” I mean, when he was doing Slacker, Rick was driving the film to the bus to send it to a lab in Dallas to get it developed. And now, on Dazed, there were all these people.
People would say, “We’re going to do the read-through,” or “We’re going to do the text out,” or whatever. Rick certainly knew filmmaking, but not these little vocabulary things. It was my job, as his assistant, to be protective of him, so everybody doesn’t go, “He doesn’t know what he’s doing!”
John Frick: Rick had a real crew and teamsters and wardrobe truck and grip electric truck, and those trucks take up a lot of space, and the last thing you want is to have them in a shot.
The teamster coordinator said, “Where can we park all of our trucks so we won’t be in shot?” Rick looked at Lee [Daniel] and they both had this look of, “We don’t really know?” It was like, oh my gosh, what are we getting ourselves into here?
Ben Affleck: Usually, when you shoot a movie, well in advance, you’ve done a tech scout, you know where the generators are going to go, you know where the porta-potties are going to go, you know where the trailers are going to go, and where the scenes are going to be, and what direction you’re looking at, and where the lamps get unloaded. You can’t change stuff in the middle. But Rick didn’t have a shot list. He did not have storyboards. He would change scenes.
Richard Linklater: I did have storyboards for the “action scenes,” like the car chase. And I did have a shot list! Every day. I just didn’t share it with the actors.
Robert Janecka: Normally, you would block all your shots. Well, Rick would come in and say, “No, I wanna shoot this scene over here,” and everyone’s like, “Well, we’re set up for this one over here!” It was just kinda whatever Rick and Lee felt like doing.
On the first day of shooting, they had an articulating jib arm for the camera on a dolly, so we’re shooting at the high school in the hallways, and Rick and Lee made up the most ridiculous shots, just because they had a new toy, and they were all so infatuated with this new jib arm. And we’re like, “Oh my god, c’mon, we’ve got to go!”
Sasha Jenson: Our first day filming, Rick was tracking Jason London and me walking down the hallway at the school. That was a fun day for me, because half of the morning was Rick like, “Okay, Sasha, what would Donny do? Let’s walk over here. Let’s say hi to this person. Let’s take a punch at this guy.” I would walk down the hall and grab my crotch, like, “Eat me!” We were doing the type of character exercises that you would see in an off-off-Broadway play in New York, or in an acting studio. It’s old-school, Method-acting stuff, but we were playing teenagers, so a lot of it was just crude! I’ll bet Universal was like, “What are you doing? I don’t want to see that!”
Don Howard: I’ll give you an insight into Rick’s willingness to let Lee do whatever he wanted early on. You know the car wash scene in the movie where that old-fashioned, rickety sprayer thing is going around the car? Lee literally rode that nozzle! He put the camera on the right side of it so that, as it went by the girls, it revealed each one getting sprayed, and it looked brutal. Lee was the ultimate documentary camera guy. That was Lee Daniel right there.
Richard Linklater: There was a definite camaraderie amongst Lee and Clark and Anne—the whole Slacker gang. And sometimes it was them against the others. Jim [Jacks] was always pissed at Lee for one thing or another. And Lee was making technical mistakes.
J.R. Helton: Lee almost got fired after the first time the dailies came back.
Richard Linklater: After the first week, there were errors, like, “Oh, that’s unusable.” You don’t notice that while you’re shooting. Lee was like, “The light shifted at the last minute and there was a reflection in the windshield, and I thought it was cool!” Lee was an experimenter. I was like, “No, Lee, that’s a mistake! We can’t use that!” The camera department are the Green Berets. They can’t fuck up. They have to be perfect.
But I thought Lee was my best bet to get the movie I wanted, shot by shot. If you’re inexperienced and some superstar DP comes in, then it’s their movie. It’s their set. Everyone’s looking to the DP for the choices, like, “Where is the camera going to be and what’s the shot?” I never wanted to be in that category. This was my movie.
Ben Affleck: The image of Hollywood as “the suits versus the creatives” was still very present in the early ’90s. In the ’80s, blockbusters and cocaine had kind of ruined the movie business, and I thought people like Rick were getting it back to where it needed to be.
Jason Davids Scott: The joke was, when Rick and Lee were talking about anyone close to the studio, they’d refer to them as “the VanPattons of the VanPatton family.”
Bill Wise: When anyone—Jim Jacks or Sean Daniel or anyone from Universal—would come through, it was kind of like, “Jesus is coming!” The word would go out that the VanPattons are on set, and that meant you had to put your weed away.
Jason Davids Scott: The opposing baseball team in the movie is sponsored by VanPatton Plumbing.
Bill Wise: John Cameron was the first AD [assistant director]. He was from the studio system. He was from the VanPattons.
Richard Linklater: At that time, I was thinking, Universal is going to assign some AD who’s going to want to make Dazed look like we’re making a fucking TV commercial. I mean, we hired John Cameron, but he ultimately felt like more of a studio guy. We weren’t on the same wav
elength.
John Cameron: It was, “Oh you’re from Hollywood. You work for the studio”—which I never had in my entire life! But I can see from Rick’s perspective that, “Oh, this guy’s here to restrain me and control me.” As an AD, you’re the one in the director’s face, saying, “Hey, we have to break for lunch” or “We can’t start the day until 8:00 a.m. tomorrow because of the actors’ turnaround.” Rick doesn’t want to hear that. There was an instance where he kicked a bucket at me.
Jim Jacks: The Austin crew didn’t get along so well with the L.A. people because they looked at them as studio people. But they were mostly people who worked with the Coen brothers and Sam Raimi, so they were hardly “L.A. people.” They were independent people.
Bill Wise: John Cameron had his own ideas about how to make a movie. There would be times when he would be tapping his foot and wringing his hands, like, “Waiting for you, Mr. Linklater.” Rick would just be looking at a light, or walking by himself, lost in the poetry of making a film and really enjoying it. And John’s kind of like, “Okay, dreamer, what’s the shot? I’ve got 75 people out here in Cuban heels. We need to figure something out!”
Ben Affleck: Rick would say, “I don’t know exactly what we’re going to shoot today.” To the small mind, that sounds like ineptitude, or inexperience, or both. But to the open mind, it was easy to see that, actually, what he was doing was creating a creative environment, making people feel free and open, and that’s one of the biggest challenges of directing.
Deb Pastor: John Cameron was openly disrespected by the kids. Not all of them. Not Matthew. Not Anthony Rapp. But there were some who openly disrespected him. It was humiliating to watch. This bunch of kids, who are inexperienced, are having the time of their lives, running around, and Rick is letting them throw whatever they want into something. So, if somebody has an idea, everything stops so an actress can talk about how she feels about what she’s saying. Understood. It’s important! But he was giving them a lot of free rein. You can see why somebody would go, “What? We have 20 shots to get done today!”
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