Richard Linklater: All the money’s gone. In the place of some of the songs, they wanted to record ’70s-style guitar licks. I’m like, “What the fuck?” Harry had to oversee that.
Harry Garfield: I played guitar, and I hired [keyboardist] Nicky Hopkins. He’s the one playing on the Kinks’ “Sunny Afternoon” and John Lennon’s Imagine and the Rolling Stones’ “She’s a Rainbow.” He was our studio guy. And I had Rick Marotta on drums and Leland Sklar on bass, and I had them record some stuff that was the same groove as the songs that Richard wanted. We didn’t even put it up to picture. It didn’t work.
Richard Linklater: And then I got a call from Harry, and he was like, “Plant says no.” I was like, “What? Come on!” I just let loose in my little diary.
Excerpt from Richard Linklater’s “Dazed by Days” Diary
Los Angeles, July 1993
Robert Plant says no . . .
The official reason is that “it is in direct competition with his solo career.” Plant doing lame covers of old songs and uninspired new garbage is not much of a solo career. But, hey, by not having a Zeppelin tune in this movie, everyone will naturally forget that Zeppelin and Mr. Plant’s only viable blip on the music history’s scene ever existed. Then they will all run out and purchase this pathetically aging rock star’s (who still wants to look and act like he did 20 years ago) illustrious solo album. Yeah, right.
It’s always the lesser talents who have the major attitudes. Everyone knows who the major architect behind Zeppelin was. One’s a musical genius, one’s a construction worker with a good voice. Lifetime boycott.
Richard Linklater: Once Zeppelin said no, I played with other alternatives, like Thin Lizzy’s “Cowboy Song.” But the Thin Lizzy song had technically come out two and a half weeks after the day Dazed was set. Plus, it was cheaper to use Foghat’s “Slow Ride” again. It was a financial thing.
Steven Hyden: You hear the same songs and the same bands more than once in the movie. You hear Peter Frampton in the background of several scenes. You hear the same Ted Nugent song in a couple of different scenes. And obviously the same Foghat song. I think that’s very true to being a teenager growing up in the ’70s—or in the ’90s. Now, kids can listen to whatever’s on Spotify, but back then, you heard the same songs on the radio all the time, and they implanted into your brain. Even if you didn’t like the song, you ended up loving it because you heard it so many times in someone else’s car.
Roger Earl: Foghat had just reunited for the first time since 1984 when they put two of our songs in Dazed and Confused: “Slow Ride” and “I Just Want to Make Love to You.” “Slow Ride” opened us up to a much younger audience. Many of our younger fans tell us that the movie was the first time they heard our music. The interesting thing is, they don’t get what the song is about. They hear it in the movie, and they think it’s about riding slowly in your car. They don’t understand that it’s about sex.
Richard Linklater: When the album got dropped, we couldn’t get anyone else to take it. So there was a lot of the pressure to have something promotional. In ’92, ’93, MTV was showing music videos with movie footage in them. Like there was Wayne’s World footage in the video for “Bohemian Rhapsody.” So I thought, we have a good KISS sequence in the movie. What if we got them to cross-promote?
Jason Davids Scott: The plot about the KISS statues used to be a bigger part of the movie.
Richard Linklater: Yeah, the story came from Bill.
Bill Daniel: When I was in high school, my friend Grant and I stole a huge fiberglass Ronald McDonald statue that had a little speaker in the stomach, like, “You order here” in the drive-through, you know? We’re in my mom’s station wagon, and we stuff him into the back and hide him in my garage. And we’d take him to keg parties as our mascot.
There was a party where Ronald was dressed up as Gene Simmons. And the cops bust up the party and see there’s Ronald McDonald looking like KISS, and it’s obviously stolen, so the cops carry it out. We’re dying laughing at the cops trying to wrestle this huge statue out of the party. They called a paddy wagon because it won’t fit in a cruiser.
The next Monday at school, the announcement voice goes on: “Will Bill and Grant please come to the principal’s office?” And we go, “Holy shit.” So somehow we met and said, “Okay, we’ll say we found it in the creek where it goes under LBJ Freeway, on the north side, in the grass next to the water.” Airtight story!
We walk into the principal’s office and there’s a Dallas police officer waiting for us. He takes us down in the back of the cruiser, and they put me in a room and Grant disappears with a cop. They were gone for five hours, and I am terrified. Then the cop comes back for me and we get in the car and he says, “Alright, tell me where you found him.” And I say, “There’s a little trail over here, and we found him right there.” And the cop says, “Was he faceup or facedown?” And I’m like, “Holy shit! We didn’t figure that out!”
I thought, what would Grant say? Grant’s really smart, so he would say faceup, because something faceup is much easier to see. So I say, “Faceup!” And the cop doesn’t say anything. He starts walking back to the car. And we get in the car and I’m like, “What is happening?” And then the cop starts telling me all the hell-raising stories that he did when he was in high school! Like, shit he stole! Like commercial statues that he stole! He’s killing me with hell-raising stories. So we get back, and he’s like, “You can go.”
Greg Finton: That’s why, in the film that exists today, the cops show up on the football field. They were originally there to bust them for the theft of the statue. We changed it in post to make it look like they were busting them for just being on the field.
Richard Linklater: That subplot was jinxed from the beginning. Someone at Universal called McDonald’s and asked them if we could use Ronald McDonald before we could even talk about fair use! And, of course, they said no. I was really mad. Don’t collect a legal “no” for something that important when we didn’t even discuss a strategy!
That story gets cut down in the movie, but the statues are still there, and I wanted to do something with KISS. I thought, “This will help us get a label, and this will make the studio feel happy.” And then Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley came to a screening in New York.
Peter Millius: I worked with KISS on two records, so I was helping Rick make this happen.
Jason Davids Scott: We’d planned to record a syndicated half-hour radio feature that was going to be KISS and Rick talking about rock music in the ’70s and playing some songs from the movie. We had rented a recording studio, and Gene Simmons was going to see a cut of the film where there was more of the KISS plotline. I think it opened with the scene of them stealing the statues. And the screening was gonna be at 7:00 p.m., so it’s 9:10, and then it’s 9:30, and nobody’s showing up.
Richard Linklater: Peter came up to me, and he was like, “They’re not coming. They saw the movie, and they don’t want to be associated with drugs and alcohol.” I was like, Are you kidding me? The band that sang fucking “rock and roll all night and party every day”?
Jason Davids Scott: Rick was just hanging his head, but I was furious. Nobody freaking cared about KISS in 1992, 1993! The only people who cared were the people who were drunk and stoned in 1976. For them to say that’s not their image? It’s like, Come on! This film would do you a favor.
Richard Linklater: Later, KISS changed their mind because they heard the film was good, so they threw together a music video for “Rock and Roll All Nite” with Dazed footage in it. But that had nothing to do with me. I don’t know if they even remembered me. Gene Simmons kept calling me Art Linkletter.
Burt Berman: Someone still needed to pick up the soundtrack. But when one place passes on the album, people are wondering, Where are the cooties? What smells about this?
Now, Irving Azoff had just left Universal. He was trying to spread his wings in a whole new corporate orbit of Warner Bros. He had started a new label, Giant.
Lo and behold, I’m on a flight with Nina Jacobson, and she’s telling me that her brother works for Irving. He was kind of a hustler, in the positive sense of the word, and he brought the album in to Irving.
Richard Linklater: Irving picked up the soundtrack.
Burt Berman: It’s kind of ironic that, ultimately, he ended up with the soundtrack. There was a twisted poetic justice that Irving might have a hit album that he got from a place where he used to work. I always had this feeling that he was rubbing it in Universal’s face.
Richard Linklater: We were supposed to get an advance, but Kathy Nelson called up Irving and told him there were no other bidders, so they lowered their advance to almost nothing, for no reason except that they could.
Burt Berman: I think Irving paid $35,000 for it. That was purely covering the legal costs. That added insult to injury.
Richard Linklater: At that point, I said, “Okay, fuck you guys!” That’s so mean. Unnecessarily. I said then that I’d never have anything to do with anybody involved in the album. Every time the album went gold, platinum, or double platinum, they always wanted a picture with somebody, so they’d ask me. I always refused. For years, I had the gold record hung up right by the toilet in my office bathroom.
I think the soundtrack was the final linchpin. I could tell they were dumping the movie.
Sean Daniel: Losing the album put the filmmakers at a political disadvantage in winning the marketing battle. Everything’s a war in making a movie, and it’s always, what are your weapons? We didn’t have any weapons anymore.
Chapter 29
Seduced and Abandoned
“There’s 30 million people who smoke marijuana regularly! If they all go to the movie, we’ve got a big hit.”
Rory Cochrane.
Photography by Anthony Rapp.
Stoner comedies didn’t really have a place in the “Just Say No” society of the ’80s. The genre hadn’t really changed much since Cheech and Chong’s 1978 classic Up in Smoke. Most movies involving weed featured a pair of slow-witted, longhaired burnouts who dodged authority figures in pursuit of some cute girls and the perfect strain. In teen movies, weed smokers were generally depicted as cartoonish figures. When Emilio Estevez’s character gets high in The Breakfast Club, he goes cartwheeling down the hall.
Those movies were particularly out of touch by the early ’90s. When Linklater asked people at Universal whether the drug use in Dazed would be a problem, they told him no one in Hollywood considered marijuana much of a drug. It was a time when Dr. Dre named an album The Chronic and still sold three million copies. Bill Clinton smoked weed and still became president. There was room for a new kind of stoner comedy that reflected a more laid-back attitude toward drugs.
Gramercy Pictures president Russell Schwartz had a hunch that he should market Dazed as a stoner comedy. It was as good a hunch as any. As screenwriter William Goldman wrote in his 1983 book Adventures in the Screen Trade, “Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what’s going to work. Every time out it’s a guess—and, if you’re lucky, an educated one.”
Clever, mischievous, and highly regarded in the industry, Schwartz had come to Gramercy from Miramax Films. As executive vice president, he’d overseen the marketing of movies like Madonna: Truth or Dare. In the trailers for that 1991 documentary, a black box appeared over Madonna’s mouth whenever she said something even slightly dirty, making the film seem more salacious than it was. The trailers ended up earning an infamous “red band,” meaning the previews themselves were R-rated. While working on the 1991 British satire The Pope Must Die, Schwartz also oversaw TV ads that showed the pope character advocating for safe sex, which shocked Catholics and successfully got the ads banned. Both controversies drummed up more publicity for the movies.
Schwartz had taken the political movement toward chasteness—the Parents Music Resource Center, the culture wars—and turned it to his advantage, pushing scandal as a marketing tool. Gramercy’s press kit comprised articles on the “resurgence of marijuana use,” promotional pot-leaf earrings, and rolling papers. Linklater didn’t love Schwartz’s marketing strategy. The soundtrack battle had left him exhausted, but he could always muster energy to fight with a movie executive.
Jason London: One of the things that’s always pissed me off is that people made Dazed a drug movie. It’s not.
Richard Linklater: Look, there’s a history of stoner comedies out there. I definitely came of age with Cheech and Chong albums, and I was there opening weekend, summer of ’78, for Up in Smoke. They occupy a really special place for me, and their movies were just increasingly crazy. You know, like, joints the size of a log, and just funny, funny, funny. I guess Dazed was in the stoner humor vein, but I didn’t want weed to be the big joke. I just wanted it to be a natural part of their lives.
Brian Raftery: I don’t even think it’s fun to watch Dazed if you’re super high. It doesn’t have big laugh lines. It’s not like someone opens the door of the van and tons of smoke comes out and someone falls out the back. I don’t think there’s even that much weed in Dazed and Confused. And that’s probably a lot more true to what being a stoner is like when you’re a teenager. You fight hard to get a little bit of pot, and you get a little stoned, but you’re just kind of buzzed.
Tom Junod: The other thing that makes Dazed and Confused different from other stoner comedies is that almost everyone in that movie smokes pot.
Russell Schwartz: In other high school movies, there was always one character sitting in a corner getting high. There was never a whole group of people getting high.
Tom Junod: Weed is presented as the solvent that breaks up social stratifications between the different groups in high school, and that feels true to life, too. When you’re passing a pipe around in a car, it’s a communal experience. Weed starts these comic conversations in the movie and enables comic things to happen, but weed itself is not a comic device.
Jason London: If people think Dazed is a new kind of stoner comedy, it’s because of how brilliant Rory Cochrane is. He went to one of those Fame high schools in New York, and he’s one of those artists who approaches things in ways you might not expect.
Rory Cochrane: I just tried to make Slater a real person. There’s plenty of movies where stoners are just, like, eating Cheetos, and they’re only there so you can laugh at them. But I think the real laughs come when you can relate to a person who’s stoned.
Tom Junod: It’s interesting that Slater is one of the more popular characters in that movie, because he is not a cool guy. He’s such an innocent. He has no success at all talking to girls in the movie. When he says, “Check you later!” Don’s like, “I hate it when you do that.” Slater is a dweeb in a lot of ways.
Jason Davids Scott: Slater’s a smart stoner. That had not quite been seen in a movie yet. The stoner is usually Spicoli—the generic surfer, stupid, no short-term memory. Slater’s brain is really active.
Jason London: The George Washington stuff shows that he’s actually insanely intelligent.
Transcript from Dazed and Confused
Final Film, 1993
SLATER
George Washington, man. He was in a cult, and the cult was into aliens, man. You didn’t know that? Oh, man, they were way into that type of stuff, man . . .
STONER
George toked weed, man?
SLATER
Absolutely George toked weed. Are you kidding me, man? He grew fields of that stuff, man. That’s what I’m talking about. Fields.
STONER
He grew that shit up Mount Vernon, man?
SLATER
Mount Vernon, man. He grew it all over the country, man. He had people growing it all over the country, you know. The whole country back then was getting high. Let me tell you, man, ’cause, ’cause, ’cause he knew. He was on to something, man. He knew that it would be a good cash crop for the Southern states, man. So he grew fields of it, man. But you know what? Behind every good man there’s a w
oman. And that woman was Martha Washington, man. And every day George would come home, she’d have a big fat bowl waiting for him, man, when he’d come in the door, man. She was hip, hip, hip lady, man.
Richard Linklater: The thing about George Washington and hemp was just always around in the culture in general. I remember working on a scene for Slacker with King Coffey, the Butthole Surfers’ drummer, about that whole George Washington and hemp thing. He ended up on tour with Butthole Surfers, and we couldn’t shoot the scene, but that was a monologue we were working on, and that kicked it into my more immediate consciousness in that era. And I think it’s still around. Spike Jonze just made a commercial about the history of hemp, and it starts with George Washington.
Tom Junod: When I was a senior in high school, I wrote a paper advocating for the legalization of marijuana, and one of the things that I talked about was the fact that George Washington grew hemp on his Mount Vernon farm. I had a friend of mine draw pictures of George Washington smoking a big fat bowl. And this was in 1976! So of course when I see that scene, that was me, literally.
What’s wonderful about that scene is that marijuana is presented as a force of revelation. That’s a genuine way of showing the type of conversations you have when you’re high. I think that’s the weediest conversation that’s ever been recorded on celluloid.
It’s also very true to 17-year-old kids talking about things that they really have no understanding of, and have no business talking about. It’s like, you’ve smoked a bowl and you think that things makes sense for that moment. The movie captures that really beautifully.
Alright, Alright, Alright Page 29