Russell Schwartz: Dazed and Confused was such a druggie movie, you didn’t know who the audience was, other than druggies. What else are you gonna lay it on? There was no real story. It was difficult to market, because we had no stars. It wasn’t really a genre film. It was art-house leaning, but the subject matter was very non-art-house. So finally we just said, “Screw it, we’re going the pot route.”
Richard Linklater: Today, films are green-lit by the marketing departments. Studios are like, “Can you sell this worldwide? Because we ran the numbers, and for that actor, the budget can’t be more than this exact figure.” There’s formulas. The industry’s trying to be data-driven, and they’ve never quite cracked it. But back then, they weren’t even trying.
I knew high school kids would like Dazed the way we liked American Graffiti. And I thought the stoner angle made it look a little dumber than it was.
Russell got it into his head, like, “There’s 30 million people who smoke marijuana regularly! If they all go to the movie, we’ve got a big hit.”
I’m like, “Stoners don’t go to movies. They stay home on their couch and get high. I don’t know if they’re a first-weekend crowd.”
Samantha Hart: Rick didn’t like the stoner movie idea, but Russell taught me to take risks. Here’s a perfect example of Russell: The O.J. Simpson trial was going when we were working on the second Candyman movie. The poster was a black man coming up behind this white girl with the knife. So what does Russell do? He buys a billboard right in front of the courthouse where the O.J. trial was happening. That is Russell Schwartz.
Russell Schwartz: When I worked at Miramax, we sued the MPAA over the X rating for Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! the [Pedro] Almodóvar movie, and we sued them on the X rating for The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, the Peter Greenaway movie with Helen Mirren. [O.J. Simpson’s defense attorney] Alan Dershowitz was the lawyer, and a lot of hoopla came out of those lawsuits, so we knew that when the marketing or advertising is banned for a movie, it sometimes helps.
That idea was also in the rebel spirit of Dazed and Confused, and the rebel spirit of Richard himself. When we were at the screening in the Marina del Ray, Tom told me, “This is the most socially irresponsible film that Universal has ever produced.” And I said, “Congratulations!”
Richard Linklater: Tom Pollock’s not a total square. I think he said that with a slight grin. Afterward, I think Russell might have told the Austin American-Statesman that Tom said that—or maybe I was the one who told them. It was part of the plan to play that up for marketing.
EXCERPT FROM “LINKLATER FILM RUFFLING HOLLYWOOD FEATHERS,” BY MICHAEL MACCAMBRIDGE
Austin American-Statesman, May 7, 1993
Last month in Marina Del Rey, Calif., the executives for Universal Pictures took a couple hours out of their all-consuming promotional preparation for this summer’s mammoth better-be-blockbuster Jurassic Park to visit a test screening of another film they’d underwritten, Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused . . .
The screening went extremely well. An auditorium full of teen-agers laughed throughout and cheered afterward. And it was at that time that the Universal executives finally realized exactly what they were getting into. Tom Pollock, the chairman at Universal and one of the four or five most powerful men in the film business, walked over to Russell Schwartz, head of Gramercy Pictures, Universal’s new prestige subsidiary, and told him, “This is the most socially irresponsible film that Universal has ever produced.”
And the buzz has started.
EXCERPT FROM DAZED AND CONFUSED REVIEW BY PETER TRAVERS
Rolling Stone, September 24, 1993
[Linklater’s] shitfaced American Graffiti is the ultimate party movie—loud, crude, socially irresponsible and totally irresistible.
Samantha Hart: Wait, Peter Travers called it “socially irresponsible,” after Tom said it was the most socially irresponsible movie that Universal had ever made? Well, when marketing is working, you are almost brainwashing critics. They fall in love with the marketing.
Richard Linklater: The same thing happened when we finally got our rating. We got an R rating for “pervasive and continuous alcohol or drug use.” And it sounded like an endorsement. Gramercy used it in an ad, but they just used the “pervasive and continuous alcohol or drug use” part. They didn’t say the MPAA said it. I said, “You idiots! It’s only funny because the MPAA said it!”
Samantha Hart: I’d joined Gramercy out of the record business. When I was at Geffen, Nirvana’s Nevermind came out. It was Kurt Cobain’s idea to do the naked baby reaching for the dollar bill, so I had a photo shoot and we threw a bunch of babies in the water, and the art director picked one of a baby boy. I took it up to the president of the company, and he’s like, “You gotta take the penis off the album. Walmart won’t carry that.” I said, “Well, that’s probably a good thing for this band. You’ll create more publicity from that than anything.” I finally took it to David Geffen, and he said, “The penis stays.” Walmart wouldn’t carry it, and the rest is history. To me, the strategy behind Dazed was similar.
Russell Schwartz: The most fun we had was sitting with Samantha and the marketing team and coming up with shit that would make people say, “This movie should be thrown off the screen!” We tried to stir things up.
Samantha Hart: Russell really wanted an icon for the movie so that, when you see that icon, you know it’s Dazed and Confused. In high school, I did a lot of drugs, and the first thing that came to my mind was the sad happy face I used to draw that looks stoned. Then I wove it into the ’70s iconography of the smiley face.
If you had a newspaper ad and couldn’t buy a lot of ad space? Boom! You’d just put that in the corner. Everybody would know it’s Dazed.
Adam Goldberg: From the second I saw that smiley face poster, I thought the whole thing was fucked. Because I was like, that’s not the movie we did!
Samantha Hart: Rick hated the happy face.
Richard Linklater: The smiley face was out of the culture by late ’74. It’s a ’72 to ’74 thing. I was like, “No, no, no!” It was just one more indicator that Gramercy didn’t care about authenticity. To this day, when someone gives me a smiley face poster to sign, I always do the same thing: I put a little mustache on him. I do little stoned eyes. I put little horns on him. I deface him.
Nicky Katt: Rick got this rock ’n’ roll poster guy, Frank Kozik, to design a different poster. Rick used to plaster Austin with flyers for Slacker, and people thought the flyers were for a punk band. The Kozik poster for Dazed was a reflection of that ethos. What better way to attract folks to a rock and roll movie.
Cole Hauser: Kozik’s poster was iconic. There were yearbook pictures of the cast and a badass Duster driving down the middle. It just screams ’70s.
Nicky Katt: The idea was of course swatted away by Gramercy. Fucking morons.
Frank Kozik’s Dazed and Confused poster.
Courtesy of Frank Kozik.
EXCERPT FROM RICHARD LINKLATER’S LETTER TO THE CAST
Fall 1993
Me: yearbook photos just scream high school, and in our case, ’70s fashion. There’s an immediate connection.
Gramercy: They’re a bunch of people nobody knows, we don’t have any stars, we need a hook. (“A pro-reefer movie.”)
Me: Everyone in our society has been through high school. They know what yearbook photos are. I think the public would have a more natural connection to real people, especially people who seem pretty familiar to them, than to a stoned happy face.
Gramercy: You’re just going to have to trust us. (Hollywood translation: fuck you.)
Richard Linklater: The smiley face kept coming back.
Samantha Hart: At the bottom of the smiley face poster, I wrote: “The Film Everyone Will Be Toking About.” At the time, The Crying Game was very popular, and that was their logline: “The Film Everyone Will Be Talking About,” so I thought to myself, maybe this will slip through the MPAA.
The MPAA was a huge obstacle
back then. Jack Valenti was in charge, and he was very uptight. It was like Sunday school teachers approving ads. But the MPAA approved it! I don’t think they got what “toking” was. So Russell’s like, “No way! MPAA approved this? lt’s going up!”
Then we needed another poster. It was an ensemble cast, and there was no star, but Milla was kind of known, so we put her on the poster and gave it a smoky background.
Jason Davids Scott: It was like, “Oh look, here’s Milla, and she has a funny expression on her face!” And it’s like, she’s barely even in the movie!
Samantha Hart: I had the story line for that poster: “It was the last day of school in 1976. A time they will never forget. (If only they could remember.)” Why can’t they remember? Because they’re old? No, because they were on pot!
“See it with a bud” was the button. We didn’t think it would get approved.
And—what gold is this!—all of this happens after Bill Clinton says, “I did smoke a marijuana cigarette, but I didn’t inhale.” So we did a television spot that started out: “Finally, a movie for anyone who did inhale.”
That’s when the MPAA went batshit crazy.
It was like that moment [in The Usual Suspects] when the cop realizes Keyser Söze is the guy sitting in front of him the whole time. Like, “Ahhh, the whole thing is a pot show!” They banned most of it.
Russell Schwartz: We tried to set up screenings for Christian groups, or antidrug groups, or conservative groups, so that they would protest. No one ever did, though. We should’ve created our own group and had them protest! In this fake news era, that’s where my mind goes.
Richard Linklater: To be protested against, you have to be a more mainstream, commercial thing. The national conversation usually doesn’t swarm around an indie film. It might’ve worked if it was a bigger release.
Russell Schwartz: One of the first areas we tried to book was Utah. In Provo, they have their own censorship organization because of the Mormon thing. The movie was banned by the exhibitor in Provo, Utah. They would never tell you why it’s banned, but of course, we knew immediately. It was a field day for us! There hadn’t really been a movie in decades that was banned because of the subject matter.
Jason Davids Scott: Nobody had thought to pitch High Times about the movie, so I called up the editor, like, “Look, this is like the stoniest stoner movie ever made.” And he saw the movie and we got the cover of High Times. Initially, it was going to be Rick on the cover, but he was uncomfortable with it, so it ended up being Rory.
Rory Cochrane: I got extremely high for that shoot, and I didn’t necessarily want to. They flew me out to New York. Everybody was just packing the bong like, “Rip it up!” And Sebastian Bach from the band Skid Row was also doing a photo shoot for them, so he sort of kidnapped me afterward and took me to his recording studio in his convertible IROC with Radiohead blasting out of it. He was like, “You want to drive the car?” And I was like, “No! I don’t!”
Marjorie Baumgarten: The way Gramercy promoted the movie really upset Rick.
Richard Linklater: They didn’t really have a distribution plan for the movie. I wrote about that.
Excerpt from Richard Linklater’s “Dazed by Days” Diary
Los Angeles, February 1993
After our latest Canoga Park preview, we have our first marketing meeting. Somewhere early on, somebody looks up and asks, so when should this film come out? I can’t believe these people about the obvious time this film should be in theaters. Since the film takes place on the last day of school and has that end of school energy, maybe it should come out a little before school’s out? Russell Schwartz (Gramercy) says that’s not enough time, and the others seem to agree with him. He’s absolutely right—it isn’t enough time, if the first fucking time you’re thinking about it is here at breakfast in February.
Russell Schwartz: You can’t forget that the movie was in limbo while Universal was deciding what they wanted to do with it. There was certainly no reason for Gramercy to think about the movie before February of 1993. I don’t think we had gotten a confirmation that we were even getting the movie until right before that.
Richard Linklater: I was like, “Well, I had my first big Slacker success at the Seattle International Film Festival in ’90, before I even had national distribution. Could we show it there?” So that was our premiere.
Russell Schwartz: The Seattle International Film Festival was in June, but we already had a September release date in our minds. If Richard wanted to do that, I’m sure we said, “Okay,” but you don’t necessarily want to go with the world premiere of the movie three months before the film goes into the theaters, because that can only hurt you if it doesn’t get good reviews.
Sean Daniel: By the time the year was over, Dazed and Confused had the second-best set of reviews at Universal, after Schindler’s List. Richard likes to point that out.
EXCERPT FROM DAZED AND CONFUSED REVIEW BY OWEN GLEIBERMAN
Entertainment Weekly, September 24, 1993
Once every decade or so, a movie captures the hormone-drenched, fashion-crazed, pop-song-driven rituals of American youth culture with such loving authenticity that it comes to seem a kind of anthem, as innocently giddy and spirited as the teenagers it’s about. George Lucas’ American Graffiti (1972) had this open-eyed exuberance. So, to a lesser degree, did Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982). Now, in the exhilarating Dazed and Confused, 31-year-old director Richard Linklater delivers what may be the most slyly funny and dead-on portrait of American teenage life ever made.
Richard Linklater: We could’ve had a bigger premiere than Seattle if they’d cared enough to plan further ahead. This shows how little Universal thought of the movie. We were coming out in September. We could have premiered at the Toronto [International] Film Festival in September. They didn’t care. So we just premiered it in Seattle. There was no L.A. premiere.
Adam Goldberg: The L.A. premiere was this KROQ radio screening that wasn’t really a premiere. No one even reserved a seat for me. I was standing as the film started.
Richard Linklater: If you don’t get an L.A. premiere, they’re kinda saying, “Fuck you.”
Russell Schwartz: The question was whether Dazed was a wide commercial release or whether it was going to be a smaller-platform release. The cast wasn’t well known, but because it had a topicality, it felt like it could’ve been more commercial.
Adam Goldberg: It seemed unknown whether it was going to be a Fast Times–type mainstream success. But from the moment I saw the trailer, which looked like it was actually made in 1976, I was like, Oh, this is an independent movie.
Richard Linklater: Other films got 800 screens and billboards and buses—they really got a studio release. We didn’t get that because we didn’t have stars.
Russell Schwartz: I wanted to go wider, but I think our release was about 183 theaters. That was death. Too big to be platform and too small to be commercial.
Adam Goldberg: McConaughey, Cole, Rory, and I went to see Dazed at the Beverly Center in L.A., and we were the only people in the theater. I think that was the first time we realized, oh, this isn’t going to be a success.
Ben Affleck: I came back to L.A. after doing the movie and I was walking down Fair Oaks Avenue in Pasadena, and I got hit up by somebody trying to give away tickets to a movie preview. He said, “Hey, do you want to come see a free movie?”
And I said, “What’s it about?”
And he said, “Well, it’s like a high school party movie. Honestly, it’s a shitty movie. You don’t want to see it.”
I realized that was Dazed and Confused. I was so bummed out, because I’d had such a good time making it, and I believed in Rick. And then the movie came out and it bombed.
Russell Schwartz: The movie opened to a little under $1 million. By today’s standards, that’s not bad. Dazed went on to gross $8 million, and we didn’t expand to more than 300 screens, so the fact that it grows to eight times the opening weekend number was pretty good. But,
of course, nobody was happy with that number at all, particularly at Universal. They were dealing with multimillion-dollar movies. To them, $8 million was a failure.
Richard Linklater: Before Dazed came out, I thought, maybe I’m one of those directors whose personal films are actually commercial, too. I think that’s what the disappointment was. I thought my little whimsical, quirky ideas were totally in sync with the broader public, and then Dazed kind of proved they weren’t. This set a template that I’ve gotten so used to, it hardly bothers me anymore. I learned right then and there not to consider how a film did financially as the barometer of much of anything. It’s really not something you can control—it’s out of your hands. The deal I made with the film gods was simply to be able to make films. The definition of success wasn’t spelled out.
Nicky Katt: It was a big bummer for everyone. Rick wrote us this beautiful letter, like, “I did everything I could. We just didn’t get the studio love.”
Ben Affleck: When I had to move houses, after I got divorced, I got everything out of storage, and I found all these old letters from the early and mid-’90s, and two of them were Rick’s letters that I had saved. And there was one from before the movie. That one was full of hope. And then the second was deeply bitter and profoundly disillusioned. And I thought, “Well, that’s the story of this movie.”
EXCERPT FROM RICHARD LINKLATER’S LETTER TO THE CAST
Fall 1993
Dear Dazed Cast,
Maybe some of you are wondering why Dazed never made it into more than 250 or so screens, or why it didn’t seem to get the typical studio film “push.” I truly hope all of you are on a higher level than me and don’t let stuff like studio incompetence and politics bother you too deeply. Like I hope you don’t wake up in the morning thinking about it.
I wish I didn’t. I try but I can’t. I can’t work two years on something that is very personal to me and then watch a bunch of idiots not do their job properly at the final stage of it all . . .
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