Alright, Alright, Alright

by Melissa Maerz

  Deena Martin-DeLucia: Joey tripped and fell right on her face. I guess she kind of deserved it after what they did to me.

  Joey and Parker and I were supposed to all hang out as girls on the town, and they led me to a bar to meet them there, and they went to a totally different place to play a joke on me. I got to the bar, and I’m like, “I’m meeting two girls here!” And the bouncer’s like, “Yeah, we know that.” Like, of course you are! And I’m like, “Really? You knew that I was gonna meet two girls here?” And they were like, “Well, yeah.”

  And then I find out that it’s a lesbian bar.

  Parker Posey: I don’t remember this! I have no idea where the idea came from. Jim Jacks may have suggested it. Deena’s character rode the edge between the good girls and the bad girls, so she could hang out with us. The dissension between the popular girls and the bad girls was dictated early, and we played it out. For the record, I love lesbians.

  Sasha Jenson: It was kind of catty between the girls. I think that’s the difference between guys and girls. With guys, it’s like, “Who’s got the ball? You got the ball? I’ll be your buddy!” It’s all activity-driven. And it’s not that simple with girls.

  Michelle Burke Thomas: When we’d get up in the morning and go to the makeup trailer, Parker and Joey would be talking about how fun it was last night and laughing and giggling and, you know, “What are we doing tonight?”

  And I’d go, “Yeah! What’s happening tonight?” And they’d just kind of look at me like, Ha ha ha . . . It was just nasty.

  I would leave the makeup trailer every morning as fast as I could so no one would see my hurt feelings after hearing about everybody’s awesome night. Holding back my tears while they all laughed hysterically about the amazing time they had together. I can’t tell you how many times I cried.

  Parker Posey: I had no idea. She was always smiling and seemed so happy.

  Joey Lauren Adams: I can’t imagine us being that cruel, but I respect her memory about it.

  Richard Linklater: Everybody wanted to be Jodi. So if you’re not Jodi, you’re gunning for the person who’s playing Jodi. You’ve got 23-year-olds in the group, and they should be beyond this petty, backbiting, bitchy high school stuff. But they weren’t.

  Parker Posey: Well, we were the bad girls in the movie! That’s the thing. It’s like, it’s too bad we had to be enemies! Michelle was playing the most popular girl on Dazed and Confused, and the jealousy and envy toward that is in the mind of those girls. And Michelle was so likable! And she was so pretty and so popular! And we were the outsiders.

  Michelle Burke Thomas: I think they were jealous of my career. I was the girl who came from fucking nowhere, who didn’t know anybody, who didn’t have Hollywood royalty on her side, didn’t come from money, didn’t fuck anybody to get where I wanted to be. I just worked really fucking hard and got the role, and they didn’t like it.

  Joey Lauren Adams: I’m sure there was some really immature jealousy that she was the lead, because I had read for that role, too, and I probably thought she knew she was all that, you know? And we probably did think she was a girlie-girl, with her hair extensions. That was an extra little nod against Michelle: they gave her hair extensions, but I wasn’t important enough to get them.

  Jason Davids Scott: The scene in the truck where Shavonne says, “She called you a bitch and she called you a slut”—Joey and Parker wrote that scene on their own.

  Transcript from Dazed and Confused

  Final Film, 1993

  DARLA

  What did she call me?

  SIMONE

  You hang out with her. You know it. I mean, we know they talk about us. Just tell us!

  SHAVONNE

  Nothing!

  SIMONE

  We don’t care!

  DARLA

  Oh, come on, “Nothing,” that’s a lie. When you do that, I know you’re lying, you bitch! I know you’re lying.

  SHAVONNE

  Well, you’re not gonna get mad?

  SIMONE

  No. Like we care what they think!

  DARLA

  We’re not gonna get mad! I think it’s a riot. I don’t care what she thinks.

  SHAVONNE

  Alright, alright. She called you a bitch and you a slut.

  SIMONE

  A slut? She called me a slut? That bitch!

  SHAVONNE

  Everybody calls you a slut!

  DARLA

  Oh shit!

  SIMONE

  Oh, that bitch. I’m gonna kick her ass! I can’t believe that! What a bitch!

  SHAVONNE

  I thought you said you weren’t gonna get mad, man?

  SIMONE

  I’m not mad.

  Deena Martin-DeLucia: Parker and Joey kind of sprung that scene on me late. And we rehearsed it, and we shot it in one take, two takes at the most. But I didn’t know the background of it.

  Jason London: That was from real life. They’re bitching about Michelle.

  Michelle Burke Thomas: I didn’t know that. That makes my heart break to think that that was their little inside joke. How fucking mean!

  Joey Lauren Adams: That scene wasn’t particularly about Michelle. It’s just like, that’s what high school girls did, ride around and talk shit about other girls! But I can see someone asking Parker, and Parker just saying, “Yeah!” because she’s Parker, you know? “Yeah, it was about that bitch!” Even if it hadn’t been.

  Parker Posey: I don’t remember it being about Michelle, but I’m sure I was acting out in some way. I’m just sorry I didn’t go, “Hey! It’s all tongue in cheek!”

  Jason London: Michelle was so va-va-voom. She was built like a brick shithouse and she had that ass on her, and all the guys were like, Uhhh uhhhh uhhhh. I think that’s another reason why the other girls were like, Bitch.

  Peter Millius: Chrisse thought Michelle was flirting with Jason, because Michelle and Jason kiss in the movie, and I think Chrisse felt Michelle was crossing lines.

  Chrisse Harnos: Definitely there was a part of me that didn’t trust Michelle. Now, whether she was trustworthy or not, I have no idea.

  Michelle Burke Thomas: No, I’ve never kissed Jason outside of those scenes. You know, Chrisse was the epitome of everything I wanted to be. She was cool. She was smart. She was savvy. She was an amazing actress. She was that quintessential, everything-you-want-in-a-woman, but she couldn’t see that. She was very self-conscious about who she was. I think that’s what prevented us from being close.

  Jason London: I would’ve had to have been the most stealth guy on the planet! Chrisse and I were together all day, every day, and all night, every night. It didn’t happen!

  Chrisse Harnos: Poor Jason! I was probably like, Rrrrroar! Joey also had to kiss him, and it was like, “Oh, so you did a scene with Joey today?” Jason was getting grilled at every turn. I was jealous of both Michelle and Joey. I was even jealous of Milla!

  Jason London: I think maybe there was also some judgment from the girls’ side because Michelle had a child.

  (left to right) Parker Posey, Chrisse Harnos, Adam Goldberg, and Joey Lauren Adams.

  Courtesy of Michelle Burke Thomas.

  Michelle Burke Thomas: I got pregnant in high school and had a baby. You know, Dazed really was my high school experience, because I didn’t get to graduate and I didn’t get to go to prom and I didn’t get to do all those things, because I had a baby. Which was a whole other reason that I felt like nobody liked me.

  My manager didn’t want anybody to know I had a child because she felt it would typecast me into certain roles and people wouldn’t want to deal with, like, the extra expense of having a tutor on set if I wanted to bring the kid, and blah blah blah. So not telling most people was a choice I made solely based on the advice of people that I trusted, and now I wish I hadn’t done that. But some people knew.

  Marissa Ribisi: Not many people knew about her daughter. She was four. Michelle told me, and I kept it a secret. Back t
hen, it was so inappropriate: if you were a certain age, they would use it against you, and Michelle was afraid, because she was the lead girl, so she had a lot of pressure to hide it.

  Christin Hinojosa-Kirschenbaum: Michelle always thought that people were against her. I think that’s why she latched on to me. She kind of played up that “big sister” role that she had in the movie in real life.

  Richard Linklater: Michelle took Christin under her wing. I think that didn’t help Christin’s relationship with the other girls.

  Christin Hinojosa.

  Photography by Anthony Rapp.

  Christin Hinojosa-Kirschenbaum: Most of the girls didn’t like me very much. I found out later from Joey. She said, “Well, we all thought you were sleeping with Rick.” I never slept with Rick in my life! We were friends. Nothing even remotely romantic ever happened. People can’t believe, like, why would she get this part? I think that’s part of it.

  Michelle Burke Thomas: Well, she was playing the role of the girl who Rick loved when he was a kid.

  Sasha Jenson: Rick had a crush on Christin. Everybody knew that. Christin was the beautiful Bambi of the cast who everybody wanted to take care of. Here comes the boisterous Hollywood crew rolling in, and she’s beautiful and sweet. That’s going to get some attention.

  Richard Linklater: No. That’s crazy. I probably did treat her a little special because she was younger and I knew her parents and I was trying to protect her from others. But I was doing a similar version of that with Wiley, too.

  Joey Lauren Adams: We all had crushes on Rick. I wanted to sleep with Rick. I ran into him in a bar in L.A. after the movie. I tried to kiss him, and he didn’t cross the line, which made you want him to cross the line even more.

  Richard Linklater: I was like, I’m not going to be that guy. I’m not going to date someone I’m working with, because word gets out and it throws off the ensemble. Like, “Oh, there’s an extra scene for Joey now?” No.

  Joey Lauren Adams: Rick always treated you in a nonsexual way, and for all of us women who had been treated in sexual ways for so long, to have a man who’s not like that? It’s weird. It’s like, how come you don’t like me?

  Anthony Rapp: Being a woman in Hollywood is hard anyway, and being a woman in that very high-testosterone environment of Dazed and Confused was probably extra hard. The guys already got so much attention, and the women had to fight for what was left.

  Michelle Burke Thomas: My experience with the girls on that movie sucked, but it didn’t feel like high school. My freshman year, I was head cheerleader for varsity football and basketball. I had a lot of friends. However, 30 years later, hearing what other people were saying about me back when we were making the movie? That feels like high school.

  Parker Posey: Rick wanted to create an authentic high school experience in 1976, and we were fully committed. High school can be catty. Does that sound sexist? Weren’t the ’70s sexist? Aren’t we still in this patriarchal thinking? Obviously. This pitting [women] against [one another]. It’s constant and it’s catty. Do I think men like to see that? Yes. Do I think women play into that? Yes. When will this dialogue get so boring to the point of getting back to [something more] interesting and human?

  I think of Bette Davis and how much fun she had playing bitches. That quote of hers, “When a man gives his opinion, he’s a man. When a woman gives her opinion, she’s a bitch.”

  And the other one [about Davis’s longtime rival, Joan Crawford]: “Why am I so good at playing bitches? I think it’s because I’m not a bitch. Maybe that’s why [Joan Crawford] always plays ladies.”

  Chapter 22

  They Stay the Same Age

  “It’s like Babe Ruth pointing the bat and telling people where he’s gonna hit the home run, and then hitting it.”

  Sasha Jenson, Matthew McConaughey, Jason London and Wiley Wiggins.

  Courtesy of Universal Studios Licensing, LLC.

  One of the reasons people still love to watch Dazed and Confused is that it transports you back in time—not just to 1976, but also to 1992. You can return to the days when Ben Affleck still had baby fat and Parker Posey still smacked her gum. We get older. They stay the same age. The cast is forever preserved on-screen at a moment of infinite potential, one of the last moments before they’d have to start acting less like regular goofballs and more like movie stars. “We went into the movie a bunch of kids, and we came out a lot more mature,” says Jason London. “It was the beginning of us becoming adults.”

  No one felt that change more acutely than Matthew McConaughey. He was 23 years old when he filmed Dazed, and like his character, Wooderson, he was still mostly hanging out with younger people. He hadn’t yet finished his undergraduate studies at the University of Texas, and he was still partying with his fraternity brothers. But he was only on set a few days when two things happened that forced him to grow up fast. First, his father died. Then he delivered the line that transformed him from a bit player into a leading man.

  Matthew McConaughey: I was about four or five days into shooting and I got the call.

  Monnie Wills: Matthew was shooting nights, sleeping during the day. His mom tried to call us and we didn’t answer the phone because it was early. We might even have turned the ringers off. His girlfriend Toni came to the house and came to my room because she couldn’t bring herself to tell Matthew what had happened. She was in tears. I could barely get it out of her. She said, “I can’t be the one to tell him.”

  So I went down and said, “Matthew, something’s happened. You need to call your mom.”

  Matthew McConaughey: My dad died making love to my mother. Six thirty on a Monday morning. My dad had always told me and my two brothers, “Boy, when I go, I’m going to be making love to your mother,” and he did. Talk about a badass! The guy called his shot about how he was leaving this Earth and did it.

  S.R. Bindler: That’s perfect, right? It’s like Babe Ruth pointing the bat and telling people where he’s gonna hit the home run, and then hitting it.

  Sam Lawrence: Matthew called me the day his dad died. “Dude, I need someone to hang out with.” And we ended up at a strip club. By the way, if you ever want to feel completely invisible, go to a strip club with Matthew McConaughey.

  It was weird. He was talking about his dad, really emotional stuff; we’re talking across the table, just looking at each other, and in the meantime, strippers are walking across the table.

  Monnie Wills: Maybe the next day, he called me and said, “We’re having a little thing. Do you wanna come up to Houston?” I said, “Of course.” So I drove to Houston. It was a small, intimate gathering.

  Jason London: He had one of those incredibly close families. I met his dad once, and Jim was like your typical John Wayne Texas cowboy, and his mother was lovely. You could tell that they were all madly in love with each other, and if the world ended, they would be out there on their compound and they would be the last to survive. I mean, they had fucking tanks and shit! They had rocket launchers! I don’t know why. For fun?

  Monnie Wills: Everyone was telling stories about Jim. We were drinking a lot of Miller Lite and trying to be upbeat.

  Matthew McConaughey: We had an Irish wake. It was full-on roasting the snot out of him.

  Jason Davids Scott: Later, someone said, “What was the service like?” And Matthew said, “Well, my mom told the story about how my dad died. They were in the act of lovemaking.” And apparently his mom said—at the funeral!—“By the way, he did get to finish.”

  Monnie Wills: The telephone book story made the rounds at the funeral.

  Matthew McConaughey: Dad was in the oil business, and he had a lot of people that owed him money. He had hired two guys to go collect for him. Well, one of them was like 6’4”, his name was Big Ray, and he had dark shades, dark suit. And the other one was this little Asian guy, about 5’2”. And what they evidently did was, Ray went over behind the desk of the person who owes Dad. “Hey, I hear you owe Mr. McConaughey. We’ve been trying
to collect this in a congenial manner. We’ve given you a few chances. Time’s up.” And he’s like, “Yeah, it’s comin’! I’m gettin’ it right now!”

  “See, we’ve been really patient with you, sir . . .” And as they’re having this creepy, quiet conversation with this man, Big Ray moves behind the desk, and the Asian guy’s putting on a pair of black gloves. Big Ray grabs the Houston phone book, lifts the guy up, holds the guy’s arms back, and holds the Houston phone book against his chest. Now, the Asian guy lifts up a pistol. Well, the guy just fell to the ground, shit himself, crying, “I’m payin’! I’m payin’!” Goes to the safe, gives him the money, blah, blah, blah.

  Big Ray says, “Don’t let it happen again, or next time my man here won’t just use a .22.” Because a .22 will only make it to “M” in the Houston phone book.

  Isn’t that great? Dad loved shady deals, man. He collected on that, but what was better than collecting the money was having that story.

  S.R. Bindler: Jim was a great storyteller, charming as hell. He had a twinkle in his eye, man. Matthew is a movie star, and charms everybody he meets, but you put him next to Jim McConaughey, you’re gonna watch Jim McConaughey, you know? And Matthew would love to hear that.

  Matthew wasn’t dwelling on the fact that he lost his father. It was, how can I honor my father? What are great stories I have from my father? What did my father teach me?

  Matthew McConaughey: I was trying to figure out what that means, when you lose a father.

  Monnie Wills: I know Matthew was probably processing all that was happening, but there’s no universe where K-Mac, his mom, is gonna let those boys wallow in any kind of self-pity.

  S.R. Bindler: At Matthew’s house, if we went out and spent the night there, it’s 7:00 a.m., K-Mac storms into Matthew’s bedroom, flings open the blinds and the drapes. Texas summer sun is ripping in. And she gets a big gallon pot of water with ice in it, and would dump it on us. “It’s 7:00 a.m.! You guys can’t sleep all day! Get out of the bed!”