And he was like, “I’m sorry!”
And then we started hanging out. The first time that I really felt butterflies was when we were in his hotel room listening to Jimi Hendrix really loud, closing our eyes. I had never heard Jimi Hendrix that way before.
Jason London: Michelle was so blatant in that flirtation. Cole said something like, “She called me to her room, and when I went in there, she was taking a shower.” He walks in and she’s like, “Hi! Oh, sorry, I’m in the shower. Just sit on the bed.” And he’s like, “Yep!”
Deb Pastor: I’m sure a lot of people were talking about Rick’s personal life, too.
Katy Jelski: One of the women Rick was seeing during Dazed was the woman who’s now his partner.
Richard Linklater: Tina and I had been hanging out a little bit in the spring before the movie started, but I didn’t want to be anyone’s boyfriend, so I just said, “I’ll see you in September.”
When I was making films back then, it was such an intense process that I would get all monk-like in redirecting all my life energy solely into the film, like there would be no other needs or desires. There had always been that thing in athletics, like, “Should athletes be having sex before games?” Remember Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull? He won’t have sex before a match. He’s dumping cold water on his crotch. I took that to heart. When I was in my early 20s, working offshore, I was celibate for almost two years, because I was like, I need to read, I need to write, there are so many movies to see, I’m not going to spend any time chasing that. You can actually turn that off and on.
So for Dazed, it was like, No, I’m off the market. But then, there was always that one day off a week, where I could maybe get a beer and spend some quality time with Kahane.
Wiley Wiggins: I think Rick was also dating Kahane while he was making Dazed, which is probably a none-of-my-business situation.
Melanie Fletcher: Kahane is the pregnant lady buying vodka and cigarettes in the movie. She had a little cameo in Dazed.
Richard Linklater: Kahane and I had met at Sundance, two years before Dazed.
Kahane Cooperman: Rick was there for Slacker, and the film that I made was Cool Water. It was a “young-ice-sculptors-in-love” story. They carved Jimmy Page out of ice because they loved Led Zeppelin. Ultimately, I saw a little metaphor in this young love of this couple, and the fact that they put so much into these 300-pound blocks of ice with their chainsaws, only to have it melt away.
Richard Linklater: Kahane and I dated for some time. I really liked her. But it was a long-distance thing—she lived in New York—and it was not in the best spot when I started on Dazed. I was making a movie. I didn’t want to be dating anybody. But she was cool. I think she understood that.
Kahane Cooperman: We were young and our relationship was definitely complex but full of intensity and adventure. I was game for that at that point in my life.
Katy Jelski: Obviously, Kahane is an ambitious, talented person, and she wanted to make a documentary about Dazed.
Kahane Cooperman: Every instinct of my filmmaker self was telling me there was a compelling story here. And it turned out, my instincts were right, and I’m so glad to have captured this seminal experience of making this now classic film at such an interesting time in the trajectory of Rick’s career, the earliest experiences of some superstars-to-be, and of a real moment when indie met studio film.
Ben Affleck: I remember Rick being kind of frustrated with her being there, but he was also like, “Well, I agreed to let her do this.”
Richard Linklater: I didn’t bring Kahane out to make the documentary. I didn’t want her to do it. She wanted to do it. She was like, “Oh, I can stay at Deb’s.”
Kahane Cooperman: One of my best friends from high school, Deb Lewis, was living in Austin. She was a cinematographer. We worked on the documentary together.
Richard Linklater: It just seemed like an extra level of pressure, and I was under enough pressure.
Katy Jelski: Kahane kind of got fucked over, because she came down, and Rick had all these other girlfriends. He would shoot these incredibly long days, and then go rewrite stuff, and then hang out with all these different women. I don’t know when he slept!
Richard Linklater: What the fuck is she talking about? I wasn’t with anyone that whole summer, except Kahane, and that was in a “not enough to be a very good boyfriend” way. How would Katy—the script supervisor—know anything about what I was doing later at night after dailies, which was simply planning the next day’s shoot, with barely time to do that? The gossip she’s describing might apply to other, less strenuous times in my life back then, but definitely not anywhere near the making of the film.
My personal life was not very orderly, put it that way. But I wasn’t interested in a relationship. There was just that full-on, crazy commitment to Dazed. It was like a relationship where you’re too much in love. And that’s going to burn itself out.
Renée Zellweger (top left) and other senior girls hazing incoming freshmen.
Photography by Anthony Rapp.
Chapter 13
Air Raid!
“You get to torment younger people . . . It gets a little screwed up.”
Ask any woman, and she’s likely to tell you that her closest friendships during high school were pretty intense. Parker Posey and Joey Lauren Adams were only pretending to be high school girls in Dazed, but the bond between them was just as strong as the real thing.
Both had come from unglamorous backgrounds in the South. Posey grew up with a twin brother in Louisiana and Mississippi. Her father sold cars. Adams grew up in Arkansas with three siblings. Her father owned a lumber yard. Posey was dark-haired and ironic, while Adams was blonde and direct, but Posey says they were “two sides of the same coin.” Both women considered themselves tomboys in a cast full of “girlie-girls,” and both viewed themselves as outsiders who didn’t have many friends back home. Their first big scene together was the infamous “aid raid” scene, where their characters haze the incoming freshmen, with help from the other senior girls. (You can spot Renée Zellweger among them. She’s at the far left in the photo opposite this page.) The chemistry between Darla (Posey) and Simone (Adams) was immediate and natural. Over time, it would become the movie’s most memorable female friendship.
On the page, Darla was just your average bitch. But Posey made her that bitch—the hilarious sadist who’s feared and admired by freshmen forever. She played Darla like a ruthless queen from the Old Hollywood era, amplifying the melodrama and relishing her role as torturer. When she shouts, “Smile! You love us!” she’s not just commanding the freshmen—she’s commanding the audience. Adams is right there beside her, but she’s the sunnier, perkier second-in-command. “I kind of felt like Parker’s sidekick in real life, too,” Adams admits.
Together, the two actors improvised some of the film’s best lines, bringing a tangible charisma to characters that could have been one-note bad girls. It’s a tricky balance: Play a mean girl with too little charm, and it’s hard to understand how she got popular in the first place. Play her with too much charm, and you risk making the whole film look latently cruel. On screen, Posey and Adams both found the perfect middle ground between likable and sinister. But according to a few other actors, it was sometimes hard to tell whether to love them or hate them even when the cameras weren’t rolling.
Joey Lauren Adams: At first, I didn’t like Parker at all. At the callback auditions, she already had the part, and she was smoking and smacking her gum.
I was very into being Southern. That was sort of my identity. I tried to be like, “Oh, you’re from Mississippi? I’m from Arkansas!” And she was like, “I don’t know where that is.” I just felt dismissed, like, “You’re denying your Southernness? You’re so New York now? You’re from Mississippi, girl!”
Parker Posey: Oh my god! Well, my parents would play geography with me in the car, and they were like, “What’s the capital of Denver?” They got me a map of the United States an
d a puzzle and I was like, “I don’t care where anything is! I will know where it is when I get there.” So yeah, it was like, “Where’s Arkansas?” “Well, it’s a hundred miles . . .” and I’m like, “You know what? I’m not interested.”
Joey Lauren Adams: I was probably a little envious, too, because I still felt like a fraud. Like, “Who am I to be here?” I watched Fame when I was growing up, and I was like, god, how great would it have been to have gone to school like that? Parker was living in New York, and she went to drama school. It felt like somehow Parker deserved it more. I didn’t go to acting classes, so I’m sure I was a little intimidated by that.
Parker Posey: Drama school was hard. I was on probation almost the entire time and almost kicked from the program for my attitude.
Joey Lauren Adams: Parker and I got teamed together, which at first, I was like, Oh my god . . . But then of course I fell in love with her.
Parker Posey: She was like a sister to me. I think Joey having come from Arkansas, that connected us. And we both had strong fathers. And we were both outsiders. We didn’t grow up with money. I think if you grow up with money, and you didn’t have to struggle, you are really different from people who are middle class or lower middle class. When you have to create something for yourself on your own, it’s just a different game.
Joey Lauren Adams: My father had a hardware store, and I worked there when I was younger. So I knew, like, plywood comes in four-by-eight sheets and what a two-by-four is. That helped when I first came to California and tried to get into acting. I was dating an artist who grew up in Topanga, and there was an area right where Topanga comes down and hits the ocean, and all these kind of weirdo people ended up leasing out these little lots and building these little shanty houses down there. Our friend rented a place for us, and it was literally a shack, and I added on a bedroom myself.
Parker Posey: Joey’s not what she appears to be. You think she’s, like, this pretty girl, but she seemed like an outsider to me.
Anthony Rapp: Like I said, weirdos are drawn to other weirdos. Parker was definitely a weirdo, and Joey was a secret weirdo.
Joey Lauren Adams: Parker was that drink of water I’d been so thirsty for. In L.A., a lot of people I thought were cool, I realized later were posers. To be surrounded by that, and then meet Parker, who is so authentic, and so who she is? It was amazing. Parker was larger than life. How can you not be attracted to her?
Parker Posey.
Courtesy of Jonathan Burkhart.
Marissa Ribisi: Oh, yeah, Parker was the life of the party!
Wiley Wiggins: Parker had cultivated this almost drag queen–like personality that’s super larger than life. She wasn’t referring to herself in the third person yet at that point, but she was getting there. You know: “Mother needs a drink!” I love her.
Jason Lee: Parker was very punk rock in her attitude. Very confident. Very uninhibited.
Tracey Holman: We used to hang out at the Carousel Lounge in Austin, and it used to have an old guy named Ray who played the organ. Parker was dancing on top of the table, holding a slice of pizza for Ray, who was blind.
Jeremy Fox: I got high with Parker on top of a 24-hour doughnut shop. We climbed a ladder to the top and got baked and ate a bunch of doughnuts.
Joey Lauren Adams: Parker was getting recognized on the street.
Parker Posey: Right around the time that Dazed happened, I got cast as a love interest for Andy Kavovit, who played Paul, on As the World Turns. My character was kind of a podunk Sammy Jo Carrington—like, Heather Locklear from Dynasty. She was conniving and manipulative. I don’t remember much about that experience except, like, sitting on rocks made of papier-mâché and learning that I shouldn’t project my voice like I did in theater. I love melodrama. To me, that stuff is so funny!
Catherine Avril Morris: Her character was some young hick ingenue girl with the fakest Southern accent.
Parker Posey: My character was from Kentucky. I was like, I’m supposed to be from the backwoods? But we just went to Saks Fifth Avenue to buy my silk wardrobe!
Joey Lauren Adams: People hated her character on that soap, so they’d yell mean things at her as she walked down the street in Austin. She just laughed: “Ah ha HA HA HA!” I mean, she’s Parker! She loved it.
Deenie Wallace: Parker Posey was everything. She had so much charisma. Just watching her walk around set, I thought: Who is this woman? How can I be just like her? My whole body froze up any time she was around. I don’t think I had a single conversation with her the whole time, because my brain would just glitch off any time she got nearby. I couldn’t talk. It was like when you have a crush on someone and everything just starts rattling and your brain is empty and you don’t know how to even say your name.
Erika Geminder Drake: Parker sort of took the “freshman girls” under her wing. We went out to a bar with her, even though I was 13 and I had no business being in a bar. And she lent me one of her dresses and she just kind of hung out with me like I was like a little sister.
Catherine Avril Morris: Honestly, I hated Parker. She was really bitchy to me. My mom was a single mom, working really hard to raise her daughters, and one time she came to visit me on set, and we go to the makeup trailer and I’m showing her around, like, “Here’s the makeup person!” And Parker’s sitting there and she looks over at us and says, “Ughhhh, showbiz moms.” Like really loudly, so we both heard. And it was just completely untrue! That was not our life! My mom and I were both just like, “Dang, bitch!”
Parker Posey: I was being a snarky high-school bitch. That was the job. I was in character and being obnoxious. I’m truly sorry it landed flat and hurt her feelings. But who’s to say, when boundaries blur, how this affected the performances? Weren’t we “at work”? In the sets of the ’90s, which were improvisatory in nature, [this level of working] was not only permissible but encouraged.
Jason London: When Parker would go into that mode of Darla, we’d all be dying. It was amazing how she could turn from being such an angel to such a bitch, and then right back to angel.
Priscilla Kinser-Craft: When the senior girls were loading us up in the truck to go do the hazing thing, Parker was stuffing our mouths with the pacifiers, and she literally shoved it in my mouth as hard as she could. It hurt. And I gave her a dirty look. And Rick said, “I love that look that you gave her!” It was because I was like, “Do it again and I’m gonna jump out of here and pull your wig off!”
Parker Posey: There was something fun about the hazing thing. Like, “Oh yeah! This is when I play a badass bitch!” You get to torment younger people, and you know the boundaries, but people get carried away and it gets a little screwed up.
Jason Davids Scott: The first day I was on set was the “Air raid!” day. In the script, it’s like, “Darla, angry senior, comes out and says, ‘Air raid, you freshman bitches!’ and they get on the ground.” So I’m like, okay, they’ll do this setup with this one little actress and then they’ll move on. But the second Parker opened her mouth, everyone was like, “Oh my god, who is that?” They ended up spending half a day on Darla, and that was all driven by Parker just stepping up and saying, “This is my scene.”
Parker Posey: Rick said, “The crane is going to come down, and it’s going to land on you, screaming, “Air raid!” The crane camera looked like this alien thing coming out of the sky, and it was going to land on me in a medium shot, so I thought that bigness was what was called for. I was like, “Okay, I can really scream!”
Excerpt from Dazed and Confused
Shooting Script, June 25, 1992
The freshman girls are in a circle with the senior girls walking around them. The attitude of the senior girls varies from fun-loving to sadistic. Darla seems to have assumed the role of tyrannical drill instructor.
DARLA
You disgusting little freshman sluts . . . AIR RAID!
The freshman girls are on their stomachs immediately.
DARLA
That was pitiful
! On your feet, you lazy little bitches!
As soon as they are all up, she yells again.
DARLA
Air raid!
They drop again.
DARLA
How did you pre-pubes ever make it out of junior high? The future of our high school is doomed with losers like you coming in. Now, let’s try it one more time . . .
Most don’t know exactly what she wants and don’t get up very quickly.
DARLA
That means GET UP you worthless little bitches!
They all get up immediately.
DARLA
Air raid!
They all are on the pavement quicker than ever.
DARLA
Well, we tried, we gave you a chance. But because you little prick teases can’t quite follow instructions, we’re going to have to try something else.
She signals to several of the others who bring over “the supplies.” Soon they are dumping rounds of flour, syrup, ketchup, and vegetable oil all over them.
Parker Posey: I tapped into the stories I remembered of wild girls from the South. Like the Farrah twins. They were these twins I knew of back home who keyed a boyfriend’s car because he cheated on one of them. They had feathered hair and drove fast cars and they were acting out. They were my inspiration for Darla. It was all unprocessed rage.
Melanie Fletcher: The hazing in the parking lot was a horrible, horrible experience. It was blazing hot and the girls were lying on asphalt. We didn’t have an adequate budget. So, we didn’t have enough money for everybody to have enough sunscreen.
Deenie Wallace: A lot of the freshman girls had sunburns on the parts of our hair, from keeping our hair parted down the middle and having to stand out in the sun all day.
Don Stroud: The prop crew couldn’t find the right match, tint-wise, for the condiments. So they used real mustard and real ketchup. Those girls smelled like a hot dog stand.
Alright, Alright, Alright Page 17