Alright, Alright, Alright

by Melissa Maerz

  Monnie Wills: Matthew told me if he got up in the morning and came down with a bad attitude, she’d send him back to his room and would literally say, “Get back in bed. Get out of bed. Try again.”

  She did not let Matthew have any sense of, “Oh, you’re a victim, you poor thing.” It’s like, something’s not going right? Go look in the mirror. That’s the guy right there that can handle that for you.

  Matthew McConaughey: We had very simple rules in my house. You weren’t allowed to say “can’t.” You can say, “I’m having trouble.”

  I remember that lesson very clearly. It was a Saturday morning, I was supposed to mow the lawn; I was having trouble getting the lawnmower started. I went in and told my dad, “I can’t get the lawnmower started.” And he’d hear that word, and you’d see his ears perk up, and you saw his jaw start to kinda grindin’ his molars, and he slowly got up, walked outta the house, tried to start the lawnmower, didn’t start. He took the thing apart, put some new gas, put a new spark plug, whatever, and about 45 minutes later, it started.

  He hadn’t said a word this whole time, and then he looked at me, he goes, “See? You were just having trouble.”

  Monnie Wills: I think Matthew would tell you the way his dad died is about as good as you could ask for. The logic of that made sense to Matthew, that his dad was a happy man and had no real regrets and it wasn’t tragic. And I think that nexus between being right in the middle of production and his father passing created some kind of energy in him.

  Matthew McConaughey: My family was like, “You’ve got to go back.” It was obvious to go back. What my dad taught us was resilience. No way was I going to be moping around and miss what I was in the middle of doing.

  Jason Davids Scott: Don Phillips had flown in for the funeral, and everybody was like, okay, he’ll be gone for a couple of days. This was the beginning of the Emporium week, so it was like, we’ll shoot around Matthew, he’s not a major character, he doesn’t have to be in every scene.

  Jason London: Matthew wasn’t on set. So it was like, “Where’s Matthew?” And Rick takes me aside, like, “We’re flipping the schedule around right now, we’re trying to figure out what we’re gonna do. Matthew’s father died.” And we’re like, “Oh my god oh my god oh my god.”

  We look up, and Matthew’s right there. And I’m like, “Are you sure his dad died?”

  Jason Davids Scott: He was back the next day. I remember seeing a couple of people crying. Everyone’s coming out, saying, “Oh Matthew, I’m so sorry.”

  Richard Linklater: I saw him walking up. I just ran over to him and we talked for a while. I was just trying to gauge where he was at. But he was like, “No, man, I’m good.”

  Jason Davids Scott: That was the day he does, “That’s what I love about these high school girls, man. I get older, they stay the same age.”

  Anthony Rapp: “I get older, they stay the same age”? That’s funny, but it’s really fucked up.

  Richard Linklater: It’s meant to be harsh. Sasha’s character, Don, says Wooderson should go to jail for saying that.

  Ben Affleck: In light of the Me Too era, it’s not an entirely appropriate thing to be quoting. It probably never was. “I keep getting older and they stay the same age”? That’s R. Kelly’s anthem.

  But to this day, people still quote that line to me, and I’m not even in the scene. That’s a testament to Matthew’s enormous charm.

  Matthew McConaughey: I mean, if we’re gonna sit here and do any kind of psychoanalysis or objective judgment, if you’re gonna try to break Wooderson down, you’re already in a different narrative than he is. The everyday world, the manners and social graces, and the way life is supposed to go on and men are supposed to evolve—yeah, he doesn’t fit in that. He’s on his own frequency. He is living in ignorance.

  Wooderson is not the kind of guy who’s gonna get conscious of, like, “Oh, this is creepy.” He’s just the kind of guy that goes, “I’m sorry you see it that way. Whatever’s going on in your life, I hope you get through it.” I love characters and people in life with great convictions that are outside of the mainstream. At least you see where they stand. At least they’re not trying to placate and pander. You can trust Wooderson, man. He’s right there in the open with you. There’s nothing about him that I ever saw as creepy—which might be exactly why that’s even creepier. But you can say that, not me, you know what I mean?

  In every script, you hopefully get at least one what I call a “launchpad line.” You go, okay, if I deconstruct the meaning of this, there’s a book on this character.

  That line Rick wrote, you unpack that line. Who not only thinks that, but believes that? That’s this guy’s DNA. He has gotten to a place where he’s like, “I’ve out–Peter Panned Peter Pan! I have got this figured out!” I mean, he’s not thinking ahead: “Oh, this will be tougher in 10 years.” No, no, no, no. Wooderson steps forward to the curb and says that, like, to the world. To the ether.

  It’s a mantra. It’s a philosophy. He’s pleased with his place and his coordinates in the universe. You could say he’s delusionally optimistic.

  Valerie DeKeyser: The minute those words came out of his mouth, I swear to God, he immediately took us all: the cast, the crew. It was like, “Holy shit. Who is that guy?”

  Jason Davids Scott: Don turned to Jim Jacks and said, “This is a movie star.” It was weird because he wasn’t a big character. He wasn’t even on my radar.

  John Cameron: He was just a guy, right? Just another one of the cast, and one of the lesser-known people. We had people who had already established a reputation, even in their youth, and Matthew just came in and blew everybody away. And it really elevated the film. It made it something, to me, beyond just funny. He brought a sense of sadness.

  Deb Pastor: He was processing this deep, deep loss as he was doing his job. How could all of us not love this guy after experiencing that? And this was going to stay with him, through all the successes he experienced.

  Matthew McConaughey: It was very cool that I had already started the film when my dad passed away. He got to be alive for what ended up being what I do with my career. There’s grace in that for me.

  Monnie Wills: After his dad died, a switch flipped for sure. You know, you hear these stories of, like, Bill Clinton meets John F. Kennedy when he’s 16 years old and he decides, “I’m gonna be president one day,” or the moment that makes Tiger Woods decide, “I’m gonna be the best golfer.” After his father passed, I think some sort of ambition clicked into Matthew. Like, life is short and I’m gonna do the things I’m good at. And I don’t give a fuck what anybody else thinks.

  Chapter 23

  Party at the Moon Tower

  “It’s kind of a recipe for chaos.”

  (left to right) Shawn Andrews, Jason London, Rory Cochrane, and Wiley Wiggins.

  Courtesy of Universal/Photofest.

  Sometimes, it’s pretty obvious that a screenwriter has forgotten what high school parties are actually like. Too often, the party takes place in some rich kid’s mansion, where literally everyone is dancing, and someone is always about to fall, fully clothed, into a swimming pool.

  By comparison, the moon tower party in Dazed almost looks like a documentary. It’s dingy and unglamorous and takes place in the woods. The beer is foamy. The faces look greasy. No one’s doing much beyond standing around, talking. And yet, the excitement is still palpable. From the moment Mitch arrives, it’s clear that he’s so eager to party with the upperclassmen that he has to focus really hard on wandering around aimlessly, finding kids he knows, pretending that drinking beer is something he totally does all the time.

  The whole scene looks so natural that shooting it should’ve been easy. There were real moon towers in Austin, and the actors were already partying together at local bars, rock clubs, and in their rooms. In theory, all Linklater had to do was gather the cast at Walter E. Long Park and film them doing exactly what they’d been doing ever since they got to Austin.


  As it turns out, that’s exactly why it was hard.

  Jeffrey Kerr: Austin put their moonlight towers up in 1895. In the late 19th century, every city with aspirations to be a big city was trying to figure out how to light up the streets, and one of the methods proposed was putting up these big towers throughout town, rather than trying to string streetlights with miles and miles of electric cord throughout the city.

  About 10 years before the towers went up, there had been a series of grisly murders in Austin by a serial killer known as the Servant Girl Annihilator. The first few murders were all black servant girls. The murders were never solved, and people still had this on their minds as these towers went up. All of a sudden, it was light and people felt much safer walking around the streets. Over the years, the moonlight towers became obsolete in other cities. As they started putting up taller buildings, they would take them down. Austin became the only city in the United States that still has functioning moonlight towers.

  Richard Linklater: When I wrote the scenes at the moon tower, I wasn’t thinking about Austin—the towers were just functioning as a believable light source for the scene. I was really thinking about the fire tower in Huntsville. Everybody would go out there with a bunch of six-packs and the occasional keg, and park their cars, and party at the fire tower, just like in the movie.

  The fire tower was just one of several locations in Huntsville where we’d have parties. You always tried to be a little unpredictable and stay ahead of the law. If the word got out too far in advance, the word would spread and the police would know where the party was on Saturday night. So it behooved everyone to be spontaneous and say, “Hey, there’s going to be a thing later tonight.” So that’s why it happened like that in the movie.

  You’d have a few beers, climb up to the top, maybe if you’re with some girl you’ve been hanging out with, you’d make out and look out over the town. It was typical teenage shit. But the purpose of being there wasn’t to climb the thing. The party was happening on the ground. I would think, on any given night, probably 25 percent of the people at the party actually climbed up to the top.

  Jeffrey Kerr: The story in the movie about the kid who falls off the moon tower? I’ve always wondered if that was based on a true story.

  In 1930, an 11-year-old boy named Jamie Fowler was out late at night playing with his friends downtown, and one of them issued a challenge: You’re a chicken if you haven’t climbed up one of those towers by the time you’re 12 years old. So up they went. They made it all the way to the top, and then they started down, and Jamie slipped and fell and literally did bang off the bars all the way down until he landed on the catwalk that’s about 15 feet above the street level. But he survived.

  Richard Linklater: That story is not ringing a bell with me. I just thought it would be funny for Slater to exaggerate a story like that. I don’t know how you would even climb a moon tower. I’m not saying people haven’t done it, but moon towers are mostly in urban neighborhoods, and there’s not really a ground area below them where people would party, and it’s really hard to get up those things. They’re really tall. The real ones are like 165 feet off the ground—that’s like a 16-story building. The ones we used in the movie were not that tall.

  John Frick: You could never get the cast to climb that high. The producers and the insurance people, no way would they allow it. So we actually had the real tower company come and build a fake moon tower for us, with real moon tower parts.

  Richard Linklater: I wanted the actual cage part, where they climb up, to be real, and then they could make the actual tower as tall as they wanted. But when it finally showed up, it was truly the Stonehenge moment from Spinal Tap. It was just a little bitty column! I was like, “Oh my god, you’ve gotta be kidding me!” I think it was technically about 25 or 30 feet off the ground, but it looked embarrassingly short. I used a really wide lens and put the camera as low as possible, so when they’re climbing up, you can’t tell how tall it is. You never see it head to toe.

  Wiley Wiggins: I was really scared of heights, so even with those short, fake moon towers, climbing up and down them bugged me out. I was already a little on edge with that, and then we were climbing down and Shawn Andrews had these fucking boots with these big heels on them and he planted one right on my hand. I probably overreacted because I was so scared of falling.

  Jason London: When we were shooting the stuff at the moon tower, it felt like a real party. There were all these people out in the park with a tower and some kegs, but they could only film us in groups. So, if they’re filming Adam and Nicky fighting, I’ve got two hours where I’m not doing anything, and I’m out there with all these people, and we’re supposed to be drunk and stoned off our heads. What do you think we were gonna be doing?

  Richard Linklater: When you’ve got a ton of young people in a party scene, out in the woods, it’s kind of a recipe for chaos. You do the math and you go, “Oh shit. This is going to be a challenge.”

  Jonathan Burkhart: All those night scenes at the moon tower, there was always the smell of pot in the air.

  Robert Janecka: They had this smokable herb, which actually smelled like weed. So we would put that in all the bongs. And they’re smoking so many joints in the movie, every scene, I was rolling two joints at a time, one-handed each.

  Jason London: We were supposed to be smoking this passionflower herbal tea stuff, but it was disgusting, and I got so sick on that damn near beer! So we decided to get something real.

  Robert Janecka: Back then, the normal keg of beer was 50 bucks, and for a nonalcoholic, I think it was 80. So Matthew and all those guys were like, “We’ll get real beer.” I was like, “I can’t get real beer! You guys are all underage and shit!”

  Christopher Morris: There was a rumor going around that the beer in the kegs was alcoholic, so a bunch of us tried to chug as much beer as possible. Then the second AD told us, “Hey, there’s no alcohol in the beer, stop drinking it.” A bunch of us got stomachaches, because those were long, 12- to 14-hour nights, a lot of standing around, pumping the keg.

  Jason London: We were supposed to be more and more wasted as the night went on. So Deena’s boyfriend, Peter, had a cooler in the trunk of his car with beers and weed.

  Peter Millius: I wasn’t supposed to do that, but, I mean, we’re at a keg party! I always joked that I was the craft services for beer and weed.

  Jason London: It didn’t even occur to me that when I walked back to the set, they could smell me.

  Matthew McConaughey: Peter Millius! He turned me on to the greatest Lynyrd Skynyrd song ever, “The Ballad of Curtis Loew.” He had good music, and in between scenes, we’d go sit in his car and get right. It was a gray Ford Explorer. And he always had cold beer and one to burn.

  Wooderson’s always pulling on a doobie, right? Or a pipe. And there was always the oregano version, but you know the scene where Cochrane jumps in the back of the car? We’d done like two or three takes, and then the fourth one, Cochrane passes the real deal to me. As soon as I hit it, I can tell. And that’s the part where I go, “Whoa, watch the leather, man!” And that stuck. And I was like, “Thank you, Cochrane. That was a good choice.”

  Deenie Wallace: There was a shift in McConaughey’s character that you could sense after that. His eyes were kind of drooping.

  Don Stroud: Some of the extras there that night, the AD staff was having a tough time keeping track of them. They were running off into the woods and hooking up with each other.

  Tracey Holman: We were literally beating the bushes going, “Hands off!”

  Cole Hauser: I wasn’t smoking a lot of grass, but I liked to drink. I would drink on set, but I was never shitfaced or out of control.

  Bill Wise: I remember the drunken shenanigans of Cole Hauser! During the beer bust scene, Rick came all the way from his monitor at a full sprint to one of the trucks, which was fucking 40, 50 yards away, and yelled at Cole, “You need to fucking take it down, man! You are being way too loud back here!”


  The way he had said it was like, “You fuckers are too drunk!”

  Richard Linklater: I think I just meant they were acting too drunk. Were they drunk in real life?

  Cole Hauser: No, that’s bullshit. Rick came over during the party scene and said, “What do you want to do?” And I said, “One night here in Austin, I was so drunk that I started to stand up, and then I realized I was too drunk to stand, so I sat back down.” And he said, “Great! Let’s film that.” I think that’s an iconic moment. Thousands of people have brought it up in the past 25 years, like, “Man, I love that moment!”

  Robert Brakey: It was like an all-night party that went on for hours and hours and hours. They were shooting in the middle of the night. You can see it in the film: the traffic lights are blinking red, which they don’t do until 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning.

  Ben Affleck: I don’t remember any opiates or cocaine or speed or anything like that around. It was all very innocent. Everything that was happening then is legal in the state of California now.

  Don Stroud: Toward the end of the shoot, everyone was falling asleep—the DP, the extras, just everyone, nodding off. There’s some bootleg behind-the-scenes footage with a silhouetted, 4:00 in the morning image of John Cameron with the bullhorn. Nothing short of, “Alright, you motherfuckers! Here’s what needs to happen!” Everyone’s patience is very slim, and you can hear the tone in his voice. He has just about had it.

  John Cameron: These were young kids! This represented the hardest work they’d ever done. Making movies, when you’re 15, it sounds glamorous and fun, but it’s 12 to 14 hours of grueling, repetitive work, and for teenagers, it’s hard to sustain that creative energy over the course of a night. It could be as simple as messing up their blocking, like, “What are you doing? We rehearsed this!” And at the end of a shoot, everybody’s tired.

  Jason London: We worked all night until the sun came up. When you see the sun coming up in the movie, that’s really the sun coming up. That was one of the greatest filming nights of my life.