Despite my attempts, they never got with the concept of pushing the characters (or the rebellious rock ’n’ roll aspect) as a selling point of the film. They spent a fortune sending out bullshit like roach clips and Dazed rolling papers but never thought to make a big deal out of the ensemble cast . . . A little drug humor would’ve been okay and in the spirit of the ’70s but it was never what this film was all about. Gramercy got carried away thinking they were being so cool. All of us in Austin started referring to most of their ideas as “The 45-year-old guy who wears a toupee will think it’s hip!”
Maybe it wouldn’t have mattered all that much. Russell at Gramercy was being such a fence-sitting wimp about what the film’s commercial prospects were, and was intentionally low-balling it so as to play both sides with his bosses at the studio. He always promised me he was going to go wider with it, and even when it had a $5,000 per screen opening weekend (some cities without any television support) he said he wanted to hold off a little before going wider . . . Several weeks later, he “couldn’t justify it.” No guts, no glory . . .
Long before I knew anything about this nasty side of the business, I would’ve rolled my eyes at a filmmaker who got to make his film (something so few ever get to do) and have it actually “get seen” (i.e., I saw it) and then complained about some obscure business details of its distribution. Films have a relatively short economic life, and it truly affects only a handful of people anyway. Soon Dazed will take its rightful place as one of the more honest teenage movies and will continue to find a new audience. A few years down the road, they will be saying how Dazed had this line-up of young stars and wondering how we got them all in the same movie.
Until then, I remain,
Dulled and Confounded?
Seduced and Abandoned?
Dazed and Confused?
Chapter 30
I Was Alive, and I Wasn’t Afraid
“It was a crazed and biting purge, but it’s an accurate reflection of my volatile mind of that time.”
Richard Linklater.
Courtesy of Jonathan Burkhart.
An indie filmmaker who just completed his first studio film might want to ensure he’d have the chance to make a second one. But Richard Linklater wasn’t too concerned about that when he published “Dazed by Days,” a behind-the-scenes diary of his experience making the movie, on the cover of the Austin Chronicle on September 23, 1993—the day before the film came out.
The compromises he’d made were, constitutionally, too much for Linklater to bear. If he had to lose out to a Hollywood studio, he could at least air his grievances. So he wrote a detailed account of the studio’s attempts to clean up the cursing, their “slimy” dealings over the soundtrack, and the film’s unceremonious handoff from Universal to Gramercy. He called out specific offenders by name. He broke a long-standing Hollywood rule that what happens behind the scenes doesn’t travel beyond a psychiatrist’s office. The tone of his article was sarcastic, brutally honest, occasionally hilarious, and possibly a little smug, which wasn’t lost on Linklater.
“I know everyone thinks I’m the snotnose who got everything he wanted and was a real jerk in the process,” he wrote at the end of the diary, “but they’ll never really know, nobody will, and at the end of the day it won’t matter. As I leave Los Angeles for the last time in relation to the production of Dazed and Confused, my thoughts drift to the words at the ending of Stanley Kubrick’s most recent masterpiece, Full Metal Jacket: ‘I was in a world of shit, but I was alive, and I wasn’t afraid.’”
Marjorie Baumgarten: When Dazed came out, we knew we had to do something with the movie at the Austin Chronicle. Rick had already been on our cover for Slacker. So we approached him about doing a story. It was his suggestion about providing us with excerpts from his diary.
Richard Linklater: The Chronicle asked me to write something, and if you’re going to do something, do it honestly—and do it all the way. I didn’t really know another gear. Once I opened that door, I was like, “Holy shit!” It was a purge, man. It was a crazed and biting purge, but it’s an accurate reflection of my volatile mind of that time.
Russell Schwartz: Richard was on a rant to blame everybody for everything.
Tricia Linklater: The article Rick published was scathing. I was like, “Do you ever want to work again?”
Richard Linklater: I was aware of how I was coming across. By the end I said, “They’re going to see me as this little snot-nosed punk.” It was portrait of someone who was inexperienced and paranoid, and I knew that, even at the time.
John Pierson: The piece was a seven-page breakdown of every piece of studio interference with the movie. With some added complaints about Robert Plant.
J.R. Helton: Rick was like, “Jimmy Page is the real talent, Robert Plant’s just a dumb construction worker.” I was like, “Fuck you!” Because I like Led Zeppelin. Plus, I was a construction worker!
Richard Linklater: We got a call from Plant’s people: “How can an artist even talk about another artist like that?”
Plant had the unfortunate timing to be in Austin that very second, at a studio here. And I guess people who had read my thing were asking him about it. Margaret Moser from the Chronicle, who was a friend, goes, “Why didn’t you let Rick use the song?” And Plant says, “Why do people keep asking me about that? We don’t just whore our songs out to any old movie!”
It’s funny, 10 years later, it came full circle in a way. I’m doing School of Rock, and I’m like, “Gotta get that Led Zeppelin song!” So we recorded Jack Black asking Zeppelin in front of a big crowd of people, and it worked. We got the song we were going for. But in my Dazed diary, I had written that Plant was “responsible for the assholes around him he’s empowered to do this thinking,” and Randy Poster, my music supervisor on School of Rock, said, “Oh, the guy in Plant’s office says, ‘Tell Linklater, the same asshole is still in the office.’”
I’m still embarrassed by what I said about Plant, and I learned not to take things so personally. He was actually living in south Austin for a while, not that long ago. I had friends who’d end up hanging out with him, making some music. They all talked about what a great guy he is. He’d be at Whole Foods and other spots around town. I was actually a little nervous that I might somehow end up in a situation where I got introduced to him. It never happened, but I dreaded seeing the expression on his face.
Marjorie Baumgarten: The reaction to that piece was instantaneous and swift. The Chronicle prints on Wednesday night, and we distribute in town on Thursdays. But first thing on Friday, the reaction came in. I don’t know who faxed it to the Universal people, and I can’t remember who called me, but they objected to Rick’s overt detailing of how they duped him.
Sean Daniel: I do remember hearing from [Tom] Pollock and others at a pretty high volume. This did not go undiscussed.
John Pierson: The studios didn’t like that stuff in writing. On Slacker, Rick would fax memos to them like, “Here’s what’s wrong with the trailer,” and they didn’t like that, but at least he wasn’t publishing it. Appearing in print was a big deal.
Richard Linklater: I was thinking, “I’m a nobody. Who gives a fuck what I say?” I did it in print, not online, and I did it in Austin. I counted on things not leaking out.
Kim Krizan: Rick positioned himself as David fighting the master Goliath. And Austin is the sort of place where a David and Goliath story will really be palatable to the people. It’s a small, liberal city in the midst of the big, conservative, redneck state. The artistic, sensitive, liberal people congregate in Austin and wage battle with the rest of the state.
And there are limited opportunities in Austin. A great success is running the cheese department at Whole Foods. So there was a tremendous suspicion at the time that if one was successful, especially in a place like Hollywood, that person sold out. Definitely, it would help someone like Rick to create a narrative in which they’re fighting the Man.
Sean Daniel: The diary hurt pe
ople’s feelings. Not Jim’s—Jim was a pretty thick-skinned guy. But Pollock’s feelings were hurt. Nina’s were. Russell’s were.
Nina Jacobson: I must’ve blanked it all out. But listen, it’s unusual to put your grievances out there, right as the movie enters the bloodstream. It’s certainly not the best way to endear yourself to the studio that’s trying to get people to see your movie. I can certainly imagine that Tom Pollock would’ve been pissed.
Richard Linklater: By the time the film came out, Nina and Tom had long ceased talking to me, so I wasn’t going to be on their call lists. But Jim called me first thing Friday morning. He wasn’t happy, but he was more concerned about his reputation, because he was positioning himself to be the producer that indie filmmakers want to go to when they do their studio film. And, hey, Kevin Smith worked with him right afterward, so it didn’t cost him anything. But he was worried, like, “If you tell everybody I’m an asshole, you might be fucking with my business.”
I said, “Sorry, Jim, you were kind of an asshole! I’m not lying.”
Jim just totally missed the point of the piece. He was like, “Rick! You have this line in here saying ‘some producer’ was going around telling all the actors not to say ‘fuck.’ I’m not ‘some producer.’ I’m the producer!” I’d belittled him by calling him “some producer.” That’s what bothered him.
Jim wasn’t that upset. The only people who were really concerned were my own parents. They were living in Portland, in Oregon, and a local film person read my Chronicle diary and wrote an article. It said something about the piece being “a heart-wrenching, potentially career-ending diary entry.” It basically said I was burning every bridge. And my dad said, “What’s this potentially career-ending thing you’ve written?”
Russell Schwartz: I don’t think a filmmaker had ever published a diary like that before. Certainly, many have since. Richard was always an initiator, and an instigator, so I would have no problem giving him credit for that.
Sean Daniel: Did he ever apologize for it? I don’t remember.
EXCERPT FROM RICHARD LINKLATER’S LETTER TO RUSSELL SCHWARTZ, JIM JACKS, SEAN DANIEL, AND OTHERS
October 4, 1993
Dear Dazed Folks,
This is an official apology for any hurt feelings regarding the “Dazed diary” I wrote a while back that recently ran in my local arts paper. These are the paranoid, sometimes funny, sometimes not-so-funny rantings of a filmmaker who at times along the way did in fact feel needlessly abused, and that his film was being ignored or dumped. I hope everyone will keep in mind that this is a small circulation, local entertainment weekly that is not read outside of the Austin arts and entertainment community . . .
Why put anything in print that even touches on anything negative? First you have to realize my local situation is very different from everywhere else. I obviously would never write such a piece for a larger publication. The editors of that paper are friends of mine and wanted more than what they saw as the press release version. I accepted their offer to give them my “real version” of my two years on Dazed because it was an opportunity to communicate the experience to friends in my community and answer in my own way the “sellout” that has naturally hovered around the film and me all along. We’re talking local politics here. I wrote it in one 15-hour sitting and it was perhaps my most cathartic/coming-to-peace-within-the-film experience of the last year. And I stand by every word as an accurate depiction of my true state of mind at various points along the way.
Sean Daniel: Look, Rick really embodies a certain independent American artist spirit. And he’s true to it. And I think that’s where a lot of that diary comes from. The executives at the studio didn’t think of themselves as soul crushers or philistines—and, in fact, they weren’t. But they made a lot of wrong calls about Dazed and Confused. Nothing Rick said in that diary was wrong.
Frankly, Rick captured the excruciating pressure for a filmmaker working on his first big-budget movie. And he captured the struggle of having a big vision for a movie that you had to constantly figure out how to get made inside of budgets constraints. But Rick’s struggle wasn’t a new struggle. It wasn’t his alone. When I reread his diary now, on one hand, I feel bad that I wasn’t able to win more of those battles for Rick, but on the other, getting the money to make the movie was a battle in itself. And the process resembled the process on every movie I’ve ever worked on. And a great movie got made.
Richard Linklater: Talk to any filmmaker about that early film where they’re in the system for the first time. That’s just how it fucking feels! When you’re a young filmmaker on your first studio film, you hear stories about what happened to Sam Peckinpah, or Orson Welles, or John Huston, or Scorsese, who had to cut the happy endings sequence from New York, New York after it didn’t test well. It seemed like every filmmaker I’d admired had been punked out by some studio at some point. This was nothing new in the perpetual art-versus-commerce collision. That is the film industry. Nobody sets out to make a bad movie, but you have to know you’re just a few bad decisions away from that, and all a director does all day long is make decisions. It’s precarious, and you have to have a really strong vision for what it is—and maybe, more importantly, what it isn’t. And the less experienced you are, the more it feels like navigating a minefield that’s threatening to blow up your whole movie. That piece is my trip through the minefield.
Marjorie Baumgarten: Well, I think Rick has learned not to be as free with sharing his diary.
Richard Linklater: No. I don’t regret any of it. I’ve never had to write a diary like that again, because I’ve never had to fight a battle like that battle again.
Louis Black: Rick told me, “Next time, I’ve got to be a little bit more careful.” But that’s classic Rick. He didn’t say there’s not going to be a next time.
Part IV
The Legacy
Jason London and Matthew McConaughey.
Courtesy of Jonathan Burkhart.
Chapter 31
Amazed and Confused
“Y’all smoked too much pot. Now you’re trying to make money off this guy?”
Huntsville High School students playing pool at the Emporium.
Courtesy of Kari Jones Mitchell.
How would you feel if someone you knew two decades ago made a movie inspired by your high school? When Dazed opened in Huntsville, some of Linklater’s former classmates didn’t know what to think. Many of them had lost touch with him by then. Many had no idea he was making a film set in their hometown. Even the people who’d been closest to Linklater were surprised by the characters and events they recognized in the film. He’d played around with identifying details and phrases they’d used in everyday conversations. He had used real names.
The director wasn’t making one-to-one comparisons between his classmates and fictional characters—like most fictional characters, they were composites of people he knew and things he’d made up—but he’d used their collective experience to make a movie that would be seen by people who’d never been to Huntsville and didn’t know what it was like to grow up there.
Reactions in his hometown varied. Most people were flattered. Others were conflicted. One person stayed angry for a full 11 years after the film opened, at which point he and two friends sued Linklater for defamation and negligent infliction of emotional distress. When news of the lawsuit broke, it was hard for some to understand how being associated with a beloved character from a critically acclaimed movie might cause emotional distress. When the Washington Post wrote about the lawsuit, there was a sarcastic tone to the article. The headline was “Bummer, Man.”
Richard Linklater: Dazed played in Huntsville. That was my dream! Russell did that as a favor to me, because films with that kind of release pattern don’t ever make it to Huntsville. And it got reviewed in the local paper.
EXCERPT FROM DAZED AND CONFUSED REVIEW BY JANET DIAL
Huntsville Item, October 31, 1993
Don’t look for plot, authentic charac
terization or drama the first half hour of Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused.
The first half hour of this film directed by a former Huntsville High School and Sam Houston State University student is replete with the inartistic caricature of every head, jock and nerd ever portrayed in the recent spate of teen adventure movies.
Each individual, from the young, hiply dressed history teacher to the muscle-brained coach, is overdone.
Richard Linklater: You know how Neil Young made a booklet of all the worst reviews of his great albums? If you want to do that for Dazed, go to my hometown paper. That’s the worst review I got. It was hateful.
And Dazed closed early. It didn’t even make it one whole week in town. But by the last few nights of its short run, people had sort of picked up that it was based on Huntsville.
Mike Riley: It’s written in a brilliant way, so that everybody who lived in Huntsville at the time sees themselves in one of the characters. You hear different opinions about, “Oh, that’s so-and-so.”
Julie Irvine Labauve: I heard the names and I went, “Wait a minute! This is uncanny.” These were people I knew! “Pink” Floyd was a year older than me. He played football.
Richard “Pink” Floyd: I did play football, but I wasn’t that popular. Actually, to be quite honest, I think that character was based on Richard Linklater, because he was the quarterback.
Richard Linklater: Ricky Floyd’s nickname was “Pink,” and I stole that, but Pink is me. And so is Mitch.
Excerpt from Dazed and Confused
Draft as of February 20, 1992
RANDY “PINK” FLOYD—runs with all crowds: jocks, stoners, poker group intelligentsia and acts accordingly . . .
MITCH KERR—Jodi’s younger brother, popular, athlete, gets “busted” the worst by the seniors but ultimately gets lucky, ends up with Julie
Alright, Alright, Alright Page 31