Even as they shot the scene, the actors were asking themselves those very same questions.
Joey Lauren Adams: There was a sadness to shooting that last scene in the car, where we’re driving off to get Aerosmith tickets. It was like, This is it. Because that was the last scene we shot, and then we were all going to go our separate ways. And we shared this moment, and it kind of felt like everyone was going to be moving on. Our characters, and us. We were going to be leaving Austin.
Rory Cochrane: Matthew wasn’t supposed to be in that scene. Pickford was supposed to be driving the car. But we all rallied around Matthew, and Rick agreed, because we knew that was the end of our summer. It was bittersweet for sure.
Jason London: The last shot of the movie is us smoking a joint in the car. So Rory pulled out a real joint.
Rory Cochrane: We had a prop joint, and those things didn’t taste very good. They kind of burned your throat, and they weren’t really rolled properly. In that scene, I take a huge hit and I’m coughing, and that leads me to believe that that was the fake stuff, but we probably had multiple takes on that shot, and I might’ve switched to something real.
Anthony Rapp: That last sequence? There was a cut I saw where they’re all just staring out the window. And I liked that cut, because it was real. They’ve had this all-nighter, and they’re just wrecked, and the horizon didn’t end. It was like the ending of The Graduate. That close-up of them, like, “Now what?”
Jason London: Shooting that last scene was insanely emotional. I’d just gotten to experience something that, in my wildest dreams, I would have never thought I would have experienced, and now it was over. And I had to hang up Randall “Pink” Floyd. After that, I’d have to go back to being the guy that wasn’t the cool dude.
Rory Cochrane: I don’t think any of us wanted it to end.
Peter Millius: We had a wrap party on Lake Travis. We were all told it was gonna be a day party, and the park closes at sundown. Either you get out of the park by 8:00 or you spend the night in the park. I turned to Matthew and I said, “Let’s fuck with everybody. Let’s let everyone think they’re locked in for the night.” Matthew was like, “Fuck yeah!”
So I jumped out, closed the gate. I took the chain, wrapped it around the gate so it looked like it was locked. It was one of those big gates that you go through at a tollhouse, and it blocked the road. We pulled the car around behind the trees so they couldn’t see our car. And we hid in the bushes and waited for everybody to come up.
Matthew McConaughey: I had a speaker in the grille of my truck; on the inside on my CB I could turn it into a PA. So everyone’s there in the park, hanging out, and things are getting loose, and I come back like I’m highway patrol.
Deena Martin-DeLucia: Matthew was yelling, “You are locked in for the evening! It’s not my rules, it’s the state rules! You guys sleep in the park.” Everybody was getting out of their cars: Jim Jacks, Donnie Phillips, Lee Daniel, all walking up to this big chain fence.
Peter Millius: Everyone was like, “You gotta let us out of here!” And we were laughing our asses off behind the bushes. Lee Daniel walked up to the gate. He was pissed off, like, “Come out and talk to us! Where are you?” And Matthew wouldn’t answer.
Lee kicked the gate really hard, and the chain unraveled. We pulled out from behind the bushes and Matthew said in his trooper voice, “Get in your cars and continue to Sixth Street! We’re gonna continue this party!” We were waving and honking our horn.
Matthew McConaughey: Everyone got a new bolt of energy to continue partying harder.
Deena Martin-DeLucia: We were such a tight-knit group that a lot of us were scheduled to fly out that day, but we canceled our flights and stayed one more night at Matthew’s. We all crashed on the floor, ’cause we just couldn’t leave yet.
Marissa Ribisi: We didn’t have smartphones. We didn’t have cars. We just had these crazy conversations. And that’s why I think it got so crazy deep in the end. Everyone was sobbing. It was hard to leave.
Joey Lauren Adams: It was one of those “art imitating life” things. I felt like I’d graduated from something.
Katherine Dover: After the movie, Milla ran off with Shawn. They got married in Vegas. Milla’s mother had just left the week before. She’d gone back to L.A. Milla’s mother started procedures to annul right away.
John Frick: Milla was 16 when they got married.
Katy Jelski: Milla’s mother, who was a real formidable Eastern European stage mother, wanted big things for her girl. She had been an actress herself, and she was not going to let her daughter get stuck with this loser.
Kahane Cooperman: I was really invested in what would happen to the younger kids from Austin. Because they weren’t really people who were really seeking out an acting career, I had more access with them, and I really connected with them. When we finished filming, I drove Wiley back to his first day of high school.
Wiley Wiggins: That was weird. In Kahane’s documentary, you can see me standing outside my high school, telling her camera crew to leave. I was wearing a Dazed and Confused T-shirt, which didn’t mean anything to anyone except for the extras. That was a pretty uncool thing to do, wearing a T-shirt from your own movie.
Catherine Avril Morris: My last night of filming ended the morning before the first day of school. I got to school at 11:00 a.m. and it started at 9:00 a.m. My schedule all summer had been to go to bed during the daytime. I was sobbing. My mom had to leave work and come get me.
Dazed taught me to look at my own high school experience from the outside. You know how Rick and Lee do those shots, like the one with Jason London on the football field, where it centers on somebody’s face, and the sky is behind them, and you know exactly what that moment is like for them, that moment of removal from their own present reality? It’s like they’re already their older selves, looking back, from a later time?
I already had that feeling. Rick just gave me the real framework for it. Making a film with somebody who was already in his 30s and was making a film about what he remembers about high school showed me that this is all gonna be done, and we’ll be moving on and looking back on this.
Christin Hinojosa-Kirschenbaum: There is a kind of magic to making a movie. Doing an artistic endeavor in such close collaboration with each other forms this very special thing. And everyone else was going back to L.A. to do that, and I think I was like, “Oh, I don’t get to do that anymore? I have to go to, like, chemistry class?”
I felt left behind. Everyone was going back to do other movies, and I was going back to high school. So after I was done, I couldn’t really go back to high school life. It kind of did form a rift between me and the other kids. Maybe it was me? I felt like it was them. But maybe it was me not feeling like I belonged anymore.
Wiley Wiggins: I didn’t stay in school much longer. I didn’t get my GED until 2017.
Jeremy Fox: Six months after the film was released, I dropped out.
Christin Hinojosa-Kirschenbaum: The last day of shooting, I had talked to Parker about going back, and Parker told me what she had done, which was march into her guidance counselor and say, “I’m dropping out if you don’t let me graduate a year early.” So that’s what I did. I wanted to be in the new reality. I was just kind of done. I graduated at 17 and moved out to L.A.
Adam Goldberg: My plan was to take the train back to L.A. It created a transitional period for me where I could ease my way back to society. I think it seemed too crazy to me, the idea of being there in Austin and then being in L.A., back home. It was just too heavy of an experience.
Jason London: Chrisse and I went straight from Austin up to see my mom, my stepdad, my sister, and her baby in Tulsa. And then I went to Atlanta where my brother Jeremy was doing his TV series, I’ll Fly Away.
So I meet with my brother, we go out and have a few beers, and something felt weird. So we were like, let’s go back to the apartment. We go in, and the voice mail is blinking. He pushes the button, and it’s my stepdad. A
nd he says, “Boys, you need to call home right now, it’s an emergency.”
My sister’s son was seven months old at the time. He had been born with so many diseases and health issues that we immediately thought, “Shit, the baby died.” We’re in my brother’s apartment and we’re like, Oh my god oh my god oh my god please please please please. I remember staring out the window on the seventeenth floor of his building and hearing Jeremy get on the phone. He’s calling and calling and can’t get ahold of my mom or my stepdad, and then all of a sudden the phone rings. And I’m sitting there, going, Everything’s fine everything’s fine everything’s fine.
Then I hear Jeremy go, “Dedra’s dead.”
Chrisse Harnos: He lost his sister, which was devastating. She died in a car accident. And she was only 16. There was a loss of innocence to him after that. The pain of that was really dark and heavy. Jason really loved her.
Jason London: Full blackout mode from then on. I remember just losing my mind.
Nicky Katt: When everybody had to go back to their lives after Dazed, it was a fucking hard comedown. For all of us.
Kahane Cooperman: It was poignant. They’d all had this amazing experience together, with a lot of extreme emotions, and a lot of fun, and when that was over, it really made you think about the fleeting nature of things. It was the end of a life experience, and they all felt it. Palpably. I felt it myself.
Kahane Corn (now known as Kahane Cooperman) in her pregnancy costume.
Courtesy of Jonathan Burkhart.
Richard Linklater: A ways into post-production that fall, I found out that Tina and I were going to have a kid.
Shana Scott: To find out that he got a girl pregnant and was having a child? Kahane blew up. She was like, “I came down to Austin, I’m spending all this money making this documentary, and apparently you’ve got a girl in every port!”
Kahane Cooperman: Admittedly, I thought I was in a monogamous relationship. When I found out otherwise, I ended it. But that didn’t have an impact on making the doc.
Richard Linklater: There was definitely a little overlap there with Kahane and Tina. We were friends again not that long afterward, but I think she thought I was Mr. Evil for a while.
Kahane Cooperman: I will say that the irony wasn’t lost on me that, in my Dazed cameo, I’m wearing a fake latex pregnancy belly and maternity bell-bottoms. But I’m glad Rick found his life partner.
Richard Linklater: It’s not like Tina and I were some long-term couple at the time. When I told my family that Tina was pregnant, they were like, “Huh? Who is this person?” We were still getting to know each other, even when we were becoming parents.
When I was growing up, I saw domesticity as the big trap. Had I become a father at 21 and had to work eight hours a day to support that kid, I would have never become a filmmaker. You can’t really do that part-time, at night, at home. Film is so all-encompassing. I never would have pulled it together had I been a young parent.
My mom and dad’s generation, all of them had kids young. That’s what you did. You go to work and you support that family and you do that. Growing up, I saw my mom struggle, and I was like, Don’t have a kid when you’re young! My generation was the first to say, “You know, we’re going to delay that a bit.” But by the time I was 32, I was like, okay, I can incorporate a kid into this. I was as ready as I was ever going to be.
I’d always thought having a long-term relationship would come down to finding that perfect partner, which I couldn’t imagine, because I knew I was an imperfect partner. So it’s probably good, the way it all happened, just getting thrown in together by fate. It confirms my worldview: Life isn’t perfectly planned. It’s all just randomness.
And that’s kind of how I felt about Dazed, too. I never could have predicted how everything turned out. When you’re young and full of yourself, you think, “Oh, the universe will reward my desires!” And it turned out I was wrong.
Part III
The Comedown
Top photo: Unidentified Dazed cast member cliff jumping in Austin. Bottom left: Rory Cochrane. Bottom right: Wiley Wiggins.
Courtesy of Jason London.
Chapter 27
Faster, Funnier, Stupider
“Everybody had a problem with the ending. It was like, ‘What ending?’”
(left to right) Rory Cochrane, Jason London, Sasha Jenson, and Richard Linklater.
Courtesy of Richard Linklater.
Dazed and Confused is largely remembered as a party movie, but it started out with a darker worldview than you might expect. In early drafts, Cynthia (Marissa Ribisi) considers the possibility of a global thermonuclear war. Kaye (Chrisse Harnos) wonders whether she was born simply because her mother couldn’t legally abort her. There’s a horrific encounter between Mike (Adam Goldberg) and a very drunk girl in the woods that reads like a rape scene.
By the time the movie reached final cut, though, it had become a much more lighthearted film, one that stayed true to Linklater’s vision—and yet, it wasn’t quite what Universal wanted. The studio had signed up for the next American Graffiti. They’d ordered that Dazed should be cut in the style of a broader comedy, and still weren’t satisfied at the end. The director acceded to as many of their demands as his personality would allow: virtually none. And some people believe Universal punished him for it.
Robert Brakey: For the last 25 years, whenever people talk about Dazed and Confused, they say, “Oh, that movie’s so funny!” And I’m always thinking, there’s a whole other movie that was part of Dazed that you’ll never see. The first cut of the movie was over three and a half hours long. I was like, how are you gonna get this down to 90 minutes? At that point, the whole push from the studio and the producers was to go for the comedy part of the movie, and Rick and Sandra resented that.
Sandra Adair: From the very beginning, Jim Jacks and Sean Daniel were calling me in the cutting room and saying, “Are you getting enough coverage? Do you have enough shots to really cut this in a comedic style?” Rick is a very stylistic director. You can’t always do fast cutting with him. But they were always asking for faster, funnier, stupider.
Richard Linklater: Kate Jelski, my script supervisor, accused Jim of thinking that way, and she threw in that line: “faster, funnier, stupider.”
You couldn’t make Dazed any more stupid than it was already. That kind of comedy was baked in. But I had these long monologue scenes that were probably more soul-searching, more thoughtful. I didn’t really pull them off. And I admitted it to myself. The teenager in me was beating out his more reflective adult collaborator, who was trying to say too much. So we cut a few scenes.
Robert Brakey: We cut a lot of the poignant, thoughtful, angsty stuff and went for the jokes. And so the paddling became more of a big deal. Wooderson became more of a big deal. The party at the moon tower became more of a big deal. And all this other stuff just got lost. Like this scene about Vietnam.
Richard Linklater: In 1975, after the war was over, three Vietnamese girls moved to our town in Huntsville. I felt sorry for them, like, “Wow, what have they been through?” I probably wasn’t that conscious of North Vietnam, South Vietnam, what side we were on, but I just knew the war was fucked up. There were all these slogans out there, like, “Return home with honor.” We didn’t want to admit that we’d lost the war. But then we all saw the last chopper out, and it was pretty horrific images. You see it on TV at 14, 15 years old, and you realize, “Oh, those people left behind are going to die. That’s not a victorious send-off from a war.” So I conjured up this scene where Benny would be the nationalist guy, like, “Hey, we never lost no war.” We shot that.
Excerpt from Dazed and Confused
Shooting Script, June 25, 1992
Three Vietnamese girls walk down the street.
BENNY
That’s the second group of them slant-eyed Vietcong I’ve seen today. What the hell’s going on? Why didn’t they stay where they came from?
PINK
Well, maybe because our country had something to do with fucking up where they lived and the least we could do was help out the ones that got away.
DON
The side we were fighting for finally lost, right?
BENNY
But not while we were fighting with them . . .
PINK
Everyone was bailing out, but hey, when they lost, we lost.
BENNY
We never lost no war, man.
PINK
When the Communist troops swarmed into Saigon and everybody was running for their lives, holding onto the outside of planes that were leaving, it was all over.
BENNY
It might not have worked out perfectly, but I bet we killed a lot more of them than they killed us, right?
Jason Reitman: In the original script, there’s an amazing scene where the girls go up to the top of the moon tower. They’ve just walked through this graveyard, and the sun is rising and they’re looking out over the city.
Excerpt from Dazed and Confused
Seventh Draft, April 16, 1992
KAYE
I can’t stop thinking about this tombstone I saw back there. This girl was only 19 when she died. 1948 to 1967.
JODI
Sucks, but you can’t let stuff like that bother you.
KAYE
It’s just sad. Like, who’s even thinking about her right now?
JODI
I don’t know. People that knew her. You’re thinking of her.
KAYE
Because there’s a rock in the ground with her name on it.
They both stare out at the horizon.
JODI
I don’t think anyone can ever really know anyone else.
Alright, Alright, Alright Page 26