Alright, Alright, Alright

by Melissa Maerz

  Ben Affleck: All I can say is, I am not the kind of person who would hit somebody with a paddle. I wouldn’t think that was fun or funny or cool. If I hit him a little hard, it was an accident.

  Richard Linklater: Ultimately, that would be my fault. If he got hurt, I feel horrible. But it was a failure of a stunt. It didn’t feel like Ben or Cole ever did it intentionally. But the crew mostly sees them in character and judges them accordingly, not really acknowledging that they’re acting. And young actors at that age, they’re kind of wild and dangerous in general. They want to get real, and you really have to get them to back off. What we learned is that you can’t let them make any contact whatsoever.

  Catherine Avril Morris: After that, we shot the scene where Ben Affleck gets the paint spilled on his head.

  Robert Janecka: Rick had wanted us to use real paint. I was like, “Are you crazy?” We ended up using flour and water. We were running out of time at the end of a 20-hour day, and everybody was tired, cranky, and the wardrobe only had one change of clothes left, so we had to nail it in one take. We did it one time, and we nailed it. It looks like we poured a gallon of paint on him, but it was five gallons of papier-mâché material. You pour five gallons of shit on somebody, they’re gonna go, “What the hell?” I don’t think he expected it to be that much. Ben was totally pissed off. That was real.

  Ben Affleck: It wasn’t one of those, like, stunty things where everyone prepares for it. It was a little loose, like, “They’re just going to dump shit on you.” And they did it—but it was fun! And I turned around, and I wanted to laugh, but I had to act like Biff in Back to the Future when he gets punched in the face, like, “Gosh darn it, heroes!”

  Catherine Avril Morris: Rick was shooting these reaction shots of us being like, “Whoa!” while Ben spazzes out. I was genuinely scared of him.

  Don Stroud: We thought he was going to kill everybody!

  Deb Pastor: I was standing there during the scene when the kid got swatted, so when we dropped paint on Ben’s head, it was really a highlight for everybody. If you watch Kahane’s documentary, you hear everybody in the crew shrieking in happiness. Not because he just did a good job, which is what he probably thought.

  Keith Fletcher: A large cheer went up from all the people hanging around the set that night. It was like, “Yes! You jerk!”

  Ben Affleck: Oftentimes, people repeat stories about me—strange apocryphal stories that I know aren’t true. But people come to believe them over time. Being any form of celebrity, you get talked about, so it’s like, “Oh yeah, so-and-so was in that movie, and he paddled me!” But no. That’s not true.

  Everybody sort of inhabited their characters, and mine was just this incredibly douchey, fratty, redneck bully. People will send me replicas of the paddles we use in the movie, and they’ll tell me they really loved my character. And I always think, “That’s the way I know you and I are not going to get along. I think hazing sucks.”

  Chapter 18

  The “Fuck” Police

  “You want me to quit this movie right now?”

  Ben Affleck with Dazed crew member (and future director) Athina Rachel Tsangari.

  Courtesy of Richard Linklater.

  When it came to the final cut of a movie that was full of cursing, drinking, and smoking weed, there was one person who believed in propriety: producer Jim Jacks. He tormented Richard Linklater in pursuit of it, even though he was known to drink and curse himself, and the two men fought hard over two scenes: when the freshman boys pour paint on O’Bannion (Ben Affleck), and when Mitch (Wiley Wiggins) makes out with Julie (Catherine Morris) in the grass while “Summer Breeze” plays in the background. The cast was caught in the middle between Linklater and Jacks, unsure whether they should listen to the cool, permissive director or the guy who was in greater danger of totally losing his mind.

  Deena Martin-DeLucia: Universal wanted to keep the movie PG-13. It ended up being rated R because of the language. And Jim Jacks was so angry at us, and angry at Rick.

  Jim Jacks: I wasn’t trying to get a PG-13. I knew we weren’t gonna get that. But there is a section of the audience that is turned off somewhat by heavy profanity. I was watching dailies, and I’d asked to cut down on the profanity, because I said, “Guys, each of you is saying ‘fuck’ twice every scene. Now, if you guys each do that, and we shoot for 48 days, we’re gonna end up cutting a movie that’s gonna sound like Mean Streets. We’re gonna have 700 versions of ‘slut’ and ‘cunt’ and ‘cocksucker.’ Use it sparingly!”

  Mark Vandermeulen: I got a talking-to by Jim because I dropped 50 f-bombs in that movie. I was 14 years old. It was the best thing ever. It was like a cursing free-for-all!

  Katy Jelski: We had to try to get a clean version of stuff without all the “fucks,” and it was really hard to get those boys to stop cursing. Rick wasn’t experienced working in a commercial system. He hadn’t had to deal with rating boards and PG versions and PG-13 or whatever it was. He was pretty laissez-faire about that stuff.

  Mark Vandermeulen: Later, I had to go back and dub over some f-words. I had to turn a “fuck” into a “shit” or a “damn.”

  Richard Linklater: Jim just assigned himself to be the “fuck” police. I said, “Jim, we’ve got kids drinking. We’ve got kids breaking bottles. We’ve got kids smoking pot. Everybody in this movie is underage. We have an R in the first eight seconds of this movie! We could change every ‘fuck’ to a ‘fudge’ and we’d still have an R. So let’s at least be authentic.”

  Sasha Jenson: Jim would come up and go, “No more swearing!” And then Rick would come up and go, “Swear as much as you want!” And we didn’t know who to listen to. Ben said, “You gotta listen to the producer.” It was like having two sets of parents.

  Ben Affleck: Well, I remember saying, “Jim, you’re wrong!” Dazed and Confused was more interesting than most comedies for kids. This is a movie about what it’s really like to be in high school, and they have to talk how people really talk.

  Richard Linklater: Jim’s from the South. He’s kind of a military, conservative guy who’s pretty straitlaced about sex and language. But Jim wasn’t there when Ben got the paint dumped on him, and that’s when Ben used the c-word. In the movie, he calls Carl’s mother a “fucking bitch,” but in one of the takes, Ben said “cunt.” Jim saw the dailies about 24 hours later, the same scene over and over, and lost his shit.

  Ben Affleck: Jim threw a fit. He threw something, and broke it, and we got into an argument. I said, “You don’t get it, man! Of course we’re going to swear!” There’s nothing like the fucking arrogance of youth, where you think you have all the answers because you’re 20 and you know everything. I was so sure that Jim was an idiot and I was right. Ironically, now, if some producer went crazy, I’d be much more inclined to be like, “Maybe we shouldn’t be swearing in this movie?” But at the time, I wanted to stand up for Rick. I wanted to be on his side.

  Jim Jacks: After that, I stormed out and found Rick in his trailer.

  Richard Linklater: I think Jim had been drinking. He’d have friends in town, they’d go to strip clubs and then come back to set, and you’d have to deal with that. And I heard this slam on my door. Pow! He was just crazy. He was like, “How dare you!”

  I was like, “Jim! He didn’t say ‘fuck.’”

  “‘Cunt’s’ a million times worse!”

  I’m like, “I didn’t get the memo, what’s the order of the bad words?”

  Jim was just going nuts. So I was like, “Is this it? Are we actually gonna fight?”

  He was triggering in me—and maybe this was appropriate for the movie—that state of self-protectiveness I remember from grades 1 through 12, where you just might have to fight at any minute and the worst thing you could do was back down. You’d always be at the ready, like, “If that guy makes a move, I’m going to aim for the side of his head.”

  I thought, Jim’s a wrestler, so he’s gonna come in for a bear hug. And he outweighs me by double, so I
’ll have to float like a butterfly and use my quickness and start pounding his face like, Pow! Pow! Pow!

  That was my strategy if he came at me. But he never threw the first punch.

  Jim Jacks: I punctuated that fight by smashing my hand on a telephone pole. I hit it so hard, I blew open a knuckle. There was blood dripping from my hand the rest of the day, and some poor little PA said, “Can I clean your hand, Mr. Jacks?” And I said, “No, I just want to stand here just like this.”

  Richard Linklater: Jim also wanted to cut the scene where Wiley is making out with Catherine at the end of the movie, because he thought Mitch was having sex! I said, “They’re just making out!”

  At one point, I heard that scene was off the schedule, and I looked over at Jim and I went, “Can I have a word with you?” We walked one yard over. And I walked ahead of him. Then I spun around and got right in his face.

  I said, “You want me to quit the movie right now? It’s me or you. I’m leaving this fucking movie.” And then we just started at it, for like five straight minutes. It was intense. I had a good knock-down drag-out with Jim.

  Then I called Sean. And Sean didn’t call me back for like a week. I was gonna tell him, “It’s me or Jim. Get this guy out of here.”

  Sean Daniel: I have some memory of wanting there to be a slight cooling-off period between Jim and Rick, and urging Jim to just chill. The financial pressures were really intense on us. We had a deal where we had to deliver this movie for this price. I think it was, “Hey, these guys gotta calm down and get through the next number of days they have left.”

  Jim Jacks: Don’t get me wrong, I really like Rick. At one point, he was like, “You and I are gonna make movies together again!” and I was like, well, maybe not. I didn’t mean that I didn’t want to. It was just like, maybe we will and maybe we won’t, but first we gotta get through this one.

  Chapter 19

  Dumb and Horny and Mean and Drunk

  “You’ve gotta get me some tits in this movie!”

  Deenie Ellis and Jeremy Fox.

  Courtesy of Richard Linklater.

  If the high school movies of the ’80s have taught us anything, it’s that movies about teens are actually movies about sex. No matter what the film is about, someone’s probably going to lose their virginity. It happens in Say Anything, and Heathers, and Fast Times at Ridgemont High, and it happens most notably in Porky’s, an exploitation flick for the young, dumb, and smutty that was released in 1981 and set the precedent for the whole decade.

  Compared to the films that immediately preceded it, Dazed and Confused is notable for how innocent it looks. Pink (Jason London) didn’t even have a girlfriend in some early versions of the script. Someone at Universal suggested that Linklater give him a love interest or two so that he didn’t come off as sexless. There’s no nudity in the movie, and no actual sex that’s not just implied in conversation, though there are a few memorable make-out scenes. Mitch (Wiley Wiggins) and Julie (Catherine Morris) mess around in the grass while “Summer Breeze” plays in the background. Hirshfelder (Jeremy Fox) sloppily kisses a girl (Deenie Ellis, now known as Deenie Wallace) before his friends drag him away from the junior high dance. But it always looks more clumsy than sexy. And that’s exactly how it felt to the actors in real life.

  Before they shot the “Summer Breeze” scene, 16-year-old Morris and 14-year-old Wiggins talked to Kahane Corn about how to capture that tense moment right before two teenagers kiss. “You know what’s really terrible?” Morris told Corn at the time. “Forgive me, Wiley, but I keep wondering what type of kisser he is. You know how some people kiss and put their spittle all over your face and it’s kind of nasty?” Wiggins, who’s clearly nervous, looks like he wants to die right there. Making the scene look awkward didn’t require much acting.

  Richard Linklater: As a horny teenage guy, you think there’s never enough sex. You have to be home at the end of the night. You can’t sleep over. There’s not even a place to have sex, unless you’re in a car. That was the vibe I was trying to re-create with Dazed. That’s why there’s not a lot of sex in it.

  Jim Jacks: Universal really wanted more sex. Their point was, if we were gonna get an R rating, why not get it for sex? They weren’t saying don’t have language and drugs, but it was like, we might as well have sex, too.

  Don Phillips: Rick needed another million dollars for the budget, so I called Tom, and Tom said, “If you get Rick to do a nude scene, he’s got the million.”

  Tom Pollock: I don’t recall saying that. But I probably said something like, “If you’re going to go R, go R.”

  Richard Linklater: I think it was only half a million. Tom’s like, “Don! You’ve gotta get me some tits in this movie!” It was just a crude man-to-man joke. So I actually, in an almost jokey way, wrote a scene.

  Excerpt from Dazed and Confused

  Shooting Script, June 25, 1992

  Mike stares out the window at the cars going by on the main drag. Suddenly he perks up.

  MIKE

  Whooah! You guys see that?

  TONY AND CYNTHIA

  Where? What?

  MIKE

  A woman in that car that just drove by pulled up her shirt and flashed her tits in this direction . . .

  CYNTHIA

  I wish I was one of those people who could do something like that. You know, that spontaneous.

  TONY

  Don’t let us discourage you.

  Richard Linklater: At my very first concert in fall of ’75, ZZ Top, a lot of women were pulling up their shirts and flashing. So I wrote in a little tit flash. And they didn’t up our budget. So I took it out.

  Deena Martin-DeLucia: Early in the first audition, I told them I would absolutely not do any nude scenes, because I’m Christian.

  Michelle Burke Thomas: You know the story about them asking me to show my boobs? Richard pulled me aside that night when we were filming the scene where I’m making out with Jason and he said, “Okay, I have to ask you, because I told them I would: Will you show your boobs?” And I said, “Nope.” And he said, “Okay, let’s film.”

  He didn’t pressure me. There was no, “But the studio really wants it!” That was it! He felt like he had to ask, and he did, but he didn’t ever mention it again. Wouldn’t it be a different movie if I had shown my boobs? It’s just so sweet and innocent the way it is!

  Richard Linklater: I decided to have Pink cheat on his girlfriend with Jodi because I needed some tension for his character. I was getting notes like, “Pink just sails through life and everyone likes him.” So I thought, I’ll add this conundrum. It felt real. When I was in Huntsville, I remember being at the beer bust and being with, like, three or four different girls in one night. I wasn’t much of a loyal boyfriend. I was prone to dating one person, and then getting caught making out with someone else, or getting caught with a hickey on my neck. That was my weak area, from high school into adulthood. But in high school, it wasn’t that much about sex. It was about making out.

  Tom Pollock: There was a lot of talking about sex in Dazed, but not much actually seeing it.

  Autumn Barr: This scene got cut from the movie, but my character, Stacy, was supposed to make out with a guy in the car, get out, tuck her shirt in, and then go talk to the girls about losing her virginity, and how it kind of hurt, and the girls ask how big “it” is, and she says “kinda big.”

  Rick asked me if I was comfortable talking about that, and I was like, “Yeah, absolutely!” Of course, at the time, I totally had not lost my virginity, so I was really nervous about having to talk about that on set—in front of my mom! And the person I was supposed to make out with was Rick, and I was terrified about that. And then, all of a sudden, Rick was not going to do it.

  Richard Linklater: God, I’m so glad that didn’t happen. It was a joke that came up in rehearsals, like, “Rick! You have to make your cameo!” But then the cast was pressuring me, and I felt weird about it. I was so busy that night, I didn’t have time to go thro
ugh hair and makeup. So I had Pete do it.

  Autumn Barr: I made out with Deena’s older boyfriend, which is equally intimidating for a little 16-year-old.

  Wiley Wiggins: It’s a weird thing to tell 15- or 16-year-olds to go make out while a bunch of people look.

  Christin Hinojosa-Kirschenbaum: When Anthony Rapp and I were supposed to shoot our kissing scene, I remember him putting breath spray in his mouth. And I thought, oh my god, am I supposed to do that too? I was so stressed!

  Sasha Jenson: Certain scenes in the movie are horrific when you look at them now. It hit me the other day that one of my lines is like, I’m talking to a 14-year-old girl and I’m asking her if she spits or swallows. And I’m laughing.

  Erika Geminder Drake: When I saw that “spit or swallow” scene, I’m not even sure I knew what that meant.

  Catherine Avril Morris: That scene just hit way too close to home. I was one of those teenagers who was like, “I’m sexually active and proud of it,” and that was because I was protecting myself from being taken advantage of—by becoming the wise, experienced one.

  So seeing that young woman on camera who’s like, “Whatever you want”? That is very vulnerable for me, emotionally. I feel like that’s the little girl in my heart. You want her to be like, “Fuck you!” But she doesn’t even know enough to do that.

  Wiley Wiggins: That scene has a much darker tone to it when you watch it now. And I’m glad it’s there. There’s a dark undercurrent when you’re a teenager. Teenagers are dumb and horny and mean and drunk.

  Richard Linklater: Oh, yeah, that scene is crude and abusive. Don is a total asshole for saying that. But that’s a guy under peer pressure. You get a group of people together, and there’s a group asshole thing going on. It’s like pack animal instinct. You do things in a group that you would never do alone.