Linklater ultimately finished Dazed on time and under budget, but only after brutal fights with his producer, Jim Jacks, over how every minute of both of their days was spent. Two weeks into production, Linklater sent a memo to Jacks with a list of complaints about the way he was working. He claimed that Jacks was drinking too much around set, socializing with the cast in inappropriate ways, and basically ruining his film by micromanaging the director. “Whether this is an okay movie or a great movie, your job is to enable me room to make a great movie,” Linklater wrote in the memo. “Two weeks in, I’m making a compromised piece of shit.”
Ethan Hawke: What motivates Rick most, in life and work, is a heightened awareness of time.
Jason Reitman: There has never been a more laid-back person who seems to be more concerned with the passing of time. He seems to understand the feeling of sand slipping through your fingers on a cellular level, and he’s been able to approach that concept in multiple films. I think you really see that in Dazed and Confused.
Alison Macor: I think what Dazed does so well is capturing different approaches to time. There’s the sense of urgency when you’re a teenager, that things have to happen right now. But there’s also a sense of, “Oh my god, this is going to last forever,” that this time period will never end.
Richard Linklater: In school, you just stare at the clock all day long. That was the best thing about not being in school anymore. I never felt like I was run by a clock again. Until I started making movies.
Jim Jacks: Rick would fall behind on schedule, and he’d say, “The studio will give us six more days.” And I’d say, “Rick, I don’t think they will!” It took a lot of pounding before he finally understood that they weren’t gonna give us more money.
Wiley Wiggins: I wasn’t cognizant that there was any kind of tension between Rick and Jim until the baseball game scene, where we do the “good game, good game” hand slap.
Richard Linklater: Every day, during lunch, Jim took it upon himself to say, “We don’t really need this scene. We’re running late anyway. We can cut this. We can cut that.” He took it upon himself to be the arbiter of what we needed. And when I said, “No, that’s important!” he didn’t believe me. I don’t know if he ever won those arguments, but it was like that every day, and it felt like a constant stream of negativity.
I wanted that “good game” scene because that’s what you do after those Little League games! Everybody who played Little League in that era knows that.
Bill Wise: You know, when they do that little “good game, good game”? That’s the small-town stuff that Rick definitely nailed. I remember touching gloves and doing a walk-down line after those Little Leagues games, saying, “Good game, good game, good game.” And then you got a soda pop and you were on your merry way on your bicycle back to the house.
Ethan Hawke: When the game is over and Wiley’s character goes through the obligatory “good game” line—that’s where the movie stumbles on real grace, the stupidness and beauty of our ridiculous lives.
Wiley Wiggins: I guess they were behind schedule and Jim didn’t want to shoot that “good game” scene. Rick had a cup of water, and he was so mad, he threw it on the pavement.
Katy Jelski: I said something to Jim about how we had to shoot the scene. I made up some reason why we wouldn’t be able to cut from the game to the guys paddling in the parking lot unless we had this moment. Jim looked at me like, “This is bullshit. I know it’s bullshit. You know it’s bullshit.” And then he just threw up his hands and we got the shot.
Richard Linklater: When I tell him, he thinks I’m lying, but when she tells him, he believes her.
Jonathan Burkhart: Jim was always just gently off to the side, pacing, looking at his watch.
Jim Jacks: Rick believes in improvisation and rehearsing, rehearsing, rehearsing. As a producer, that drives you somewhat insane, because you don’t know if you’re ever gonna get a shot.
One day, we literally got to the lunch break and we didn’t have a shot.
Richard Linklater: The biggest self-serving lie Jim ever told in relation to me and the movie! Years after the fact, I noticed he was starting to tell these fictional, desperate-sounding scenarios to retrospectively justify his bully behavior. You don’t finish a movie on schedule, especially this schedule, not shooting for half a day. Maybe the first hour, or hour and a half at most. I once challenged Jim to look through the production reports to prove there wasn’t a day when I didn’t shoot anything in the first half of the day. He wouldn’t, of course.
Jim Jacks: Rick just kept rehearsing and rehearsing and rehearsing. I came out there and I said, “Where’s Rick? I need to talk to him!” And they said, “Well, he’s asleep in his trailer.”
Richard Linklater: Another big lie he started telling years later! I basically never left the set. I spent about 30 minutes in my trailer the whole shoot, and that was only toward the end of the movie when I realized I even had a trailer. And I certainly never slept.
Jim Jack: I went and banged on the door, like, “Get on the set!”
Richard Linklater: Jim was disappointed with me because I didn’t want to sit in a bar with him all night telling old war stories. He’d get pissed at me, like, “You know, some directors don’t sleep!” And I’m like, “I like to get eight hours of sleep, because it’s important that my brain works!”
Alison Macor: Jim had to leave town once, and as a joke, Rick put a picture on the camera of Jim looking at his watch. Jim was like, “It pissed me off, but I kind of liked it.” That was his personality.
Richard Linklater: Jim would leave town to work on other films. He wasn’t around the entire last week and it was such a relief. He and Sean [Daniel] had like four other films coming out that year—Tombstone, Heart and Souls, all these movies. He’d be all, “The script for Tombstone came in, and it’s great!” I’d be all, “Wonderful, but I’m trying to make a movie here.” Now, Dazed is a big film on their résumé, but at the time it was kind of this arty thing. Jim was so busy working on other films that he would be on the phone talking while we were shooting.
Nina Jacobson: I can’t tell you the number of times that Jim Jacks would call me on the phone and recite lengthy monologues from the Tombstone script. He’d say, “Like you know like you know like you know . . .” and then he’d read you Doc Holliday’s entire monologue.
John Frick: We used to call him Phone Jack.
John Cameron: He never shut up. He was one of the most logorrheic people I’ve ever known. Once he started talking, you couldn’t get a word in edgewise. It drove people insane. It drove me insane. If he buttonholed you and started talking to you, you were doomed.
Kim France: When I visited the set, the Hollywood producer kept fucking up the shots. He had a cell phone, and they had to cut a scene because they could hear him talking in the background. It was the scene where Michelle Burke kisses Jason London.
Richard Linklater: Jason London broke character, like, “Can you shut up over there? Jim, stop talking on the phone, we’re rolling!”
I printed that tape, just so Jim would watch it in dailies: “Will you shut up?” Okay, cut. “Jim, we’re trying to make a movie here!” A wonderfully awkward moment.
Kim France: This was before anybody really had cell phones. Anybody who had a cell phone was instantly an asshole.
Richard Linklater: Jim resented me because I wasn’t being his best friend, so he had to find that elsewhere, by bothering the actors. He shouldn’t have been staying in the hotel with the actors. I wasn’t partying with the actors! I was their boss! But Jim just wanted attention. He’s the nerdy kid who never had any friends.
Jim Jacks: One night, I almost threw Joey into the pool with Cole Hauser. She said, “Oh my god, the producer’s about to throw me in the pool!” And I said, “What am I doing? I’m acting like I’m 18 years old again.” So I put her down and said, “Well, never mind. I’m going to my room to try to remember that I’m 20 years older than you.”
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sp; Joey Lauren Adams: When you’re 23 or 24, anyone over 30 is ancient. So we were all just like, “What are you doing here? You’re like, 80, dude.”
Jim Jacks: I felt pretty old sometimes. I was supposed to play Renée Zellweger’s father in one scene that got cut from the movie, and I said to her, “So I guess I’m gonna be your father?” And it was, “Ah, Mr. Jacks, you’re not nearly old enough to be my father!” And I said, “You’re gonna do very well in this business.”
Richard Linklater: It was so unprofessional. It was just creepy. They all had to be nice to him. And he was promising the actors future roles, like, “Eh, you know this Tombstone script? There might be a role in it for you.”
Ben Affleck: He told me he’d produced Midnight Run. At the time, I considered Citizen Kane and Midnight Run to be the two greatest films ever made. And then I became vaguely aware that he didn’t really produce it. He was sort of an exhibition executive, or he had some peripheral role. He was prone to exaggerating his involvement in stuff. I think he liked having all these young people around who looked up to him.
Adam Goldberg: Jim was like, “Hey, there’s a Coen brothers movie coming out, and there’s a part for you: the elevator guy.” I read the script for The Hudsucker Proxy on the train on the way home to L.A. from Austin. And by the time I got home, they had already cast Jim True in that role.
Joey Lauren Adams: When I think of Jim Jacks, I think of him sitting in a chair, watching us, amazed by us. He’s such a geek, there’s a sadness to it. Maybe he was wishing he had been like us when he was young. Or maybe it was just, like, I have power over these kids.
Richard Linklater: Jim was a frustrated screenwriter, and he was acting like Dazed was his film. I started to feel like, god, how do I get this guy out of here? I certainly learned not to allow someone like that around on future movies—just cut out that middleman, and life gets a lot easier.
Chapter 16
We Turned into Vampires
“They were like, ‘We wanted to make sure you were still alive.’”
Cole Hauser shooting at Red’s Indoor Range.
Courtesy of Nicky Katt.
About 30 minutes into Dazed and Confused, the film switches from daytime to nighttime. There’s a marked difference between the breezy, “school’s out for summer” tone of the beginning and the more manic tone of the rest of the movie. The daytime part mostly focuses on kids hanging out and chasing one another around, with some mild humiliations along the way. But once the sun goes down, the freshman boys get paddled, Mike (Adam Goldberg) gets into an ill-advised fistfight with Clint (Nicky Katt), and a total stranger points a gun at Pickford (Shawn Andrews). Dazed was mostly shot in sequential order, and when the cast started working at night, they felt the vibe changing, too.
Sasha Jenson: When we transitioned from day shoots into night shoots, that’s when it shifted gears for us, too. We all got a little darker during that period, because we turned into vampires. We’d work all night and then hang out all day. We just wouldn’t sleep.
Peter Millius: Our hotel was by the Congress Avenue Bridge, and that was the bridge where the bats would come out at dusk every night.
Jason London: Right when it’s time for the bats to wake the fuck up and eat, they all fly out at the exact same time. It’s kind of scary at first. As the sun is setting, a million bats fly out and people go down and lay on the banks of the river. The bats have sonar—they won’t run into you. You’d lay down and have a million bats flying right over you, so many that it almost darkens the sky. And in the morning, you can watch them come back in.
Peter Millius: Our nights would end long after the bats were coming back under the bridge to sleep.
Marissa Ribisi: We’d come back from working, and then everyone would go to the bar at 7:00 a.m. and start drinking till noon.
Rory Cochrane: After the first night shoot, I wake up in my hotel room, middle of the day, and the maid’s in the room. And I’m like, “Fuck, I’m sorry, let me put the Do Not Disturb sign out.” The next day, the maid’s in the room. I’m like, alright, I’ll put the Do Not Disturb sign out and the dead bolt. And the next morning, I hear the door open and boom! It’s the dead bolt. Boom! And I’m like, what the fuck is going on?
And then I hear voices, and I see a guy’s arm reaching inside the door with a screwdriver, trying to take off the dead bolt. And I just lost it. I opened the door, and I was like, “What the fuck is wrong with you people?” And they were like, “We wanted to make sure you were still alive.” You know: Maybe you’re a fucking heroin addict?
Adam Goldberg: Everyone was just drinking and getting stoned the entire time.
Cole Hauser: As you get older, you can’t get smashed on a Sunday from 1:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m., fall asleep, and wake up at 6:30 p.m. and feel good. But at 17 years old, you’re like, “Give me a bottle of water! I’m ready to go.”
Adam Goldberg: I got so high one time in Jason’s room, I didn’t recognize myself in the mirror. I think that was the last time I smoked pot while we were shooting. I went into the bathroom and looked in the mirror and thought, I don’t know who you are.
Ben Affleck: I had a bad experience with marijuana at 15. I had a dissociative panic attack. So I only smoked weed if everyone else was smoking, and I had to sort of “Bill Clinton” it and fake it. I didn’t really like marijuana. I also wasn’t a very heavy drinker then. I became an alcoholic much, much later, and I’m in recovery now, so that was a whole different time. I was a little nervous, like, “Should we be drinking before we’re working tomorrow?” Some people were actually drinking and getting stoned at work.
Jason London: The first time I smoked real pot and worked was the scene where the old man grabs my arm and says, “So you’re gonna throw for so-and-so yards this year?” I went into the scene and met this lovely old couple and I was like, Holy crap, this is surreal! So that’s when I discovered, like, wow, for certain scenes, having a little puff was not a terrible idea.
Sasha Jenson: I got high during the scene on the baseball field, with the paddles, and I hated it. I wasn’t comfortable doing that.
Joey Lauren Adams: I was high for the scene on the football field. A lot of us were.
Rory Cochrane: We were shooting one scene where we’re driving around in a Chevelle, and I took a hit off a real roach. That scene’s not in the movie, but Matthew had to hit me on the back when they were rolling so I’d wake up.
Jason London: We basically smoked Austin out of all of its weed, and the person who was the worst was Milla. The rest of us were like, okay, we just have to wait till we can get more weed. She just went into full meltdown mode.
It might’ve been just her getting into character, but there was a certain point where people were like, “There’s no more weed! I gave you all we had! It’s not like this shit is growing in the backyard. This shit comes from Mexico.”
John Frick: There was a cast party in the Emporium and the cast pretty much trashed it. The owner of the place we used for the Emporium scenes, one of his big demands was no smoking, no drugs, no alcohol on his property. We had rented expensive pool tables. It must have been a long, wild, late-into-the-night party, because there were beer cans on the pool tables and cigarette butts everywhere.
Keith Fletcher: I was at the party, and Milla was standing next to me, and she literally just passed out.
Tracey Holman: At one point I looked up and I think Affleck was carrying Milla outside.
Keith Fletcher: She woke up a minute or two later. We were all standing over her, trying to help her, give her air, and she comes to, like, “Oh, that was weird!” Got up, and went on with the rest of the night.
The rest of us were like, “That was not healthy.”
Melanie Fletcher: Everybody was getting high, and Milla wasn’t eating. She always felt like she was just about to tip over.
Adam Goldberg: Back at the hotel, we were all getting into trouble.
Jason Davids Scott: Ben Affleck got a baby Siberian husky, but he had
to keep it in the hotel room and not let them know, so he just didn’t have them clean his hotel room, and it smelled.
Ben Affleck: Only when you’re 20 do you think, “I’m broke, I have nothing, maybe I can be responsible for an animal?”
Anthony Rapp: I heard the cast got reprimanded because they went through the hotel, tipping over the tall ashtrays that were near the elevators. But I didn’t do that.
Ben Affleck: We’d come back to the hotel from wherever we were, and everyone would break into the kitchen.
Marissa Ribisi: My brother came to visit. At one point, he and Jason [Lee] broke into the kitchen and stole cheese in the middle of the night. I was like, “You fools! We’re gonna get kicked out of here.”
Adam Goldberg: It was Marissa’s brother, Giovanni Ribisi, Jason, and me, chasing each other, running up and down stairs, and drinking. I was sent to my room the day before my fight scene with Nick, and when we shot it, I used the security guard who sent me to my room as my substitute for Nick, because he was just some fuckin’ asshole security bully dick.
Cole Hauser: This was around the time Matthew [McConaughey] came into the fold.
Joey Lauren Adams: I didn’t know what to think of Matthew. He wasn’t staying at the hotel, so I didn’t get to know him that well. The whole cast was there for two months and got really close, like family. And Matthew didn’t feel like a part of that to me.
Adam Goldberg: I thought McConaughey was just a bartender who got a kitschy, nonsense role. He directed me in the last scene we shot together, like he was telling us what to do. I was just like, “Oh, I’ll let this local have his little power trip.” I mean, that’s Matthew.
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