Alright, Alright, Alright

by Melissa Maerz

  Lydia Headley: Rick had that same bowl haircut as Pink. It was kind of startling the first time I saw the movie, like, wow, he really picked someone that physically looked like him!

  John Pease: Clearly, the Pink character was autobiographical. But Mitch was reminiscent of Mitch Kerr. Mitch was a smart-ass guy, two years younger than Rick. He played baseball. He’s somebody that would inspire somebody older to want to put him in his place.

  Don Dollar: The last day of school, we would go and pick up freshmen, and we literally did chase Mitch Kerr through the neighborhoods. I even had the same truck that “Don” has in the film.

  Mike Riley: Mitch Kerr isn’t alive anymore.

  Richard Linklater: I never got to know Mitch Kerr. He was just a name. And he was in a similar boat to me because his older sister was very popular, and he was a freshman when she was a senior. People were gunning for him the way they were gunning for me because of my sister.

  Don Dollar: Rick’s sister, Trish, some of her friends’ names were in the movie. There was a Shavonne Rhodes. Her name is Shavonne Conroy now.

  Excerpt from Dazed and Confused

  Shooting Script, June 25, 1992

  SHAVONNE RHODES—boy crazy, popular, hot stuff

  Shavonne Conroy: It’s funny because I was not that girl in high school. I wasn’t popular. I was a nerd. I was in theater. I didn’t go to parties, because I was allergic to smoke. I was a virgin. So when I saw the movie, I was thrilled!

  Don Dollar: Shavonne and I ended up in the fire tower, making out, one night in high school. She was the first girl I went skinny-dipping with.

  Excerpt from Dazed and Confused

  Seventh Draft, April 16, 1992

  DON DOLLAR—cocky, charming, not smart, womanizer, fun guy, has a thing with Shavonne

  Don Dollar: Some people have told me, “I think that character was emulating you.” I did play football. And I was a teacher’s pet. There’s that one scene where Pink and Don are walking to a class, and the teacher comes out, and it shows Don hitting on the teacher. That was real. I used to flirt with teachers a lot.

  Richard Linklater: There was a real Tony and a Mike. Those are friends. That was a shout-out to them.

  Excerpt from Dazed and Confused

  Shooting Script, June 25, 1992

  TONY OLSEN—witty, intellectual, paper editor, poker group member, a bit shy around girls but ends up with Sabrina

  Tony Olm: I was on the newspaper staff my senior year, and Rick wrote regular stories, concert reviews, sports. I had a column called “Left Is Right.” It was not politically appropriate for a redneck town. You know that character who’s talking about neo-McCarthyism? My junior English class, I did a research paper about McCarthyism.

  Jay Clements: You know in the movie when Tony tells the story of the dream he had about Abraham Lincoln? Well, that was Tony Olm. His father was a history professor. That’s what made it funny.

  Excerpt from Dazed and Confused

  Shooting Script, June 25, 1992

  TONY

  Okay . . . in this dream I was getting it on with what had a perfect female body but . . .

  MIKE

  But what? What?

  Tony changes his mind.

  TONY

  I can’t say . . .

  MIKE

  Oh, come on, you can’t give a build-up like that and then not deliver. Okay, so, a beautiful female body, we’re off to a good start . . .

  He gestures for Tony to continue.

  TONY

  But the head of, uh, Abraham Lincoln.

  Tony Olm: My grandparents were from Illinois, so one summer when I was 15 or so, I went to visit them in the Land of Lincoln and slept in a Lincoln-style bed and had that dream. What made it even worse was, that was my first wet dream, so I’m pretty much scarred for life. I didn’t tell anybody about that until I was a senior and I confided in one of my friends during honors English class. By lunch, everybody heard about it. And then in college in intramurals, I’d get called Honest Abe. I still get a hard time about it.

  When Dazed and Confused came out, I hadn’t talked to Rick in a long time, and on the radio there was a promo clip with that line about Abraham Lincoln. I said, “Daggum! I oughta charge you for that!”

  Richard Linklater: There was a real O’Bannion.

  Richard “Pink” Floyd: They called him O’Bannion in the movie, but his name was O’Bannon.

  Richard Linklater: I remember getting licks from a guy who’d flunked and was going to be back in high school repeating his senior year. I thought, wait a minute, is this fair? But he seemed pretty sure it was a perk of his situation. I thought that would be just one more detail to make this O’Bannion character a little more of a bad guy.

  Excerpt from Dazed and Confused

  Shooting Script, June 25, 1992

  BENNY

  Okay, all you freshman wimps, listen up! Any of you ever heard of Fred O’Bannion? He was the baddest senior last year. I would’ve been the baddest senior this year except O’Bannion just found out he’s gonna be a senior again this next year. He flunked out, and he’s really pissed off about it!

  Jay Clements: I was surprised to find that, in the original draft of Dazed and Confused, Rick had used my dad’s name as the coach’s name.

  Richard Linklater: I felt bad. In some of Joe Clement’s obits, it was like, “He was portrayed as the coach in Dazed and Confused.” And I was like, “No, that was never official!” It was Coach Conrad in the movie, not Coach Clements. The coach was a jerk in the movie. Coach Clements wasn’t a jerk. I’m very proud to say I played for him. He was a legendary coach.

  Jay Clements: The assistant coach was Bob Alpert, and that was the assistant coach’s name in the original draft. Bob passed away some years ago, but that bit in the movie about, “My grandmother’s tougher than you, ’course she’s 6’3”, 250, and runs a 4.5 forty”? That was one of Bob Alpert’s lines in real life.

  Don Dollar: Coach Alpert would walk around campus, and he’d tell you to break down. If you didn’t break down, you ran your guts out on the football field during practice. That was true.

  Julie Irvine Labauve: Not everybody from Huntsville loves that movie.

  Richard “Pink” Floyd: Andy Slater was a really hard-core Linklater hater. He felt betrayed by Dazed and Confused.

  Andy Slater: I knew zero about the movie before it came out. I rented it and I went, What the fuck? This guy Slater acts all stupid and doped up all the time. I didn’t like that. That wasn’t me. I did have a very good connection for marijuana in high school, and I got kind of famous for growing my own, out in the national forest, but I didn’t smoke that much weed. I was just smoking it socially like everybody else was.

  Kari Jones Mitchell: Dazed and Confused was a perfect representation of Andy Slater.

  He actually drew the cover of our senior yearbook. It’s got a knight riding a giant hornet—because we were the Huntsville Hornets—and some kind of castle off in the corner and all these weird little mushrooms. It’s just a pot trip on paper.

  We were in choir together and we were asking him, “Have you finished the yearbook cover?” And he takes it out of his backpack and hands us the piece of paper, and the paper reeked of pot. You could’ve rolled that piece of paper up and smoked it!

  Andy Slater: I was quoted in the movie saying things that I did say. You know the part about him saying that George Washington grew marijuana? I had a dollar bill, and someone had taken a Sharpie and made a balloon over George Washington’s head that said “I grew dope” in it. I was an advocate for marijuana. It pissed me off that the football players would get drunk, but marijuana was not allowed. I thought it was very unfair that people are out there killing each other on the highways, drunk, while stoners, all they want to do is sit around at home and watch TV and eat junk food. So one of my arguments was, why outlaw this stuff when the father of our country smoked dope?

  I didn’t like it when I saw that in the movie. It felt like a
n invasion of privacy. I didn’t even hang out with Rick that much. I don’t remember Rick partying with us out at the fire tower more than once or twice. It felt like Rick must’ve been in the woods, and instead of partying with us, he was taking notes.

  Richard “Pink” Floyd: Slater had work here in Huntsville, and he thought the movie was affecting his business.

  Andy Slater: For a while, I was living in Austin and commuting to Huntsville. Huntsville is a small town, and everybody knows you. I do construction, and I’d get questioned about it on jobs. Like, “Are you a stoner? Because I don’t want any drugs on the job site here.” At first, I thought it would go away, but it didn’t. It just got bigger and bigger.

  It started to affect me personally. I was dating a girl who was in college, and she was living with her parents. I went to go pick her up, and she goes, “Andy, there’s a little problem here. Slater from Dazed and Confused—that’s you, right? He’s a drug dealer!”

  So I went, goddammit, I’ve had enough of this shit. At first, all I wanted was an apology. I wrote a letter to Rick. But that letter never got sent because I was approached by my landlord’s son, who’s a lawyer, and he said, “We might have a class action lawsuit here, Andy.” So they called up Ricky Floyd and Bobby Wooderson.

  Richard Linklater: Those guys sued me in 2004. It was Wooderson, Ricky Floyd, and Andy Slater.

  Linden Wooderson: My dad was Bob Wooderson. He passed away in May of 2018. Ricky Floyd was his first cousin.

  Kari Jones Mitchell: When you see the picture of Matthew McConaughey, his hair is exactly like Bobby’s.

  (clockwise from top left) Jason London, Adam Goldberg, Deena Martin, Milla Jovovich, Parker Posey, Michelle Burke, Marissa Ribisi, and Anthony Rapp.

  Courtesy of Universal Studios Licensing, LLC.

  Andy Slater

  Courtesy of Kari Jones Mitchell.

  Bobby Wooderson

  Courtesy of Kari Jones Mitchell.

  Don Dollar

  Courtesy of Kari Jones Mitchell.

  Keith Pickford

  Courtesy of Kari Jones Mitchell.

  Ricky “Pink” Floyd

  Courtesy of Kari Jones Mitchell.

  Leslie Warren

  Courtesy of Kari Jones Mitchell.

  Mike Goins

  Courtesy of Kari Jones Mitchell.

  Shavonne Rhodes

  Courtesy of Kari Jones Mitchell.

  Tony Olm

  Courtesy of Kari Jones Mitchell.

  Frances Robinson

  Courtesy of Kari Jones Mitchell.

  Tricia Linklater

  Courtesy of Kari Jones Mitchell.

  Jay Clements: I almost wonder how much of McConaughey’s performance has overwritten my memory of Bobby Wooderson.

  Richard “Pink” Floyd: When Bob passed away, I did one of the eulogies at his funeral. I got up there, and to break the ice, the first thing I said was, “Alright, alright, alright.”

  Keith Pickford: The stuff about the high school girls staying the same age—that rings a bell about Bobby Wooderson. Bobby was a womanizer.

  Andy Slater: When asked kiddingly about when he was going to graduate, Bobby said he was just sticking around for the chicks.

  Richard “Pink” Floyd: That was the running joke around our house: “Don’t bring your girlfriends around, boys!” Because Bob was quite the charmer.

  Tony Olm: There were plenty of older guys who hung around Huntsville and never were going to leave. “Yeah, I’m workin’ for the city, got a little change in my pocket.”

  Linden Wooderson: Right out of high school, my dad went and worked for the city. He was in Huntsville all the way till he was 35, or maybe 40? Then he went to Houston for two years and came back to Huntsville.

  Richard “Pink” Floyd: Andy Slater got the lawyers, and the lawyers came to us. At first, Bobby and I were like, “We don’t know about this.” But then we were at a family function, and we had a few beers in us, and we said, “Oh, what the hell.” Bobby and I were both working paycheck to paycheck at the time. So if we had a chance to hit a gold mine, we wanted to see about doing that. We were kind of like, “What do we get out of this?”

  Richard Linklater: Those guys saw an opportunity. Not much of an opportunity! An opportunity to get made fun of. There was a certain tongue-in-cheek quality to the story that was written about the lawsuit.

  Peter Carlson: I was a feature writer in the Style section of the Washington Post in 2004, and I went to Huntsville and talked to the “Dazed Three.”

  I don’t think any of them denied smoking weed. Slater did deny making a bong in shop class. I said, “Well, yeah, that does seem a little far-fetched.” He said, “Oh no, people did that! It just wasn’t me.”

  Wooderson said his son went to Harvard, and he went there to see the kid, and all the Ivy League scholars were like, “Wooderson! Let’s burn one!”

  Every time the plaintiffs started talking about the movie, they would start laughing. The lawyers, of course, thought this was a very serious legal case, that there was absolutely no humor in it whatsoever. The lawyers wanted them to be serious about this whole thing so it would look like they were horrendously emotionally distressed.

  Richard Linklater: I didn’t even know those guys that well in high school! They were all older than me. I was friends with their younger brothers, Bubba Floyd and Tommy Wooderson, both very cool guys. I played with Bobby Wooderson on the same tournament baseball team, briefly one summer. He was a good catcher. I was in eighth grade, he had just graduated. He wouldn’t remember me, hardly. And Slater, he was only a year older than me, and I think we might’ve been together at some concerts, but I didn’t think he was any more of a stoner than anyone else. I just liked the name Slater.

  Andy Slater: The lawsuit fizzled because the statute of limitations was about to run out. Eleven years was the cutoff point, and the lawsuit was happening right before that.

  Peter Carlson: Why did they wait so long to sue?

  Linden Wooderson: When the movie came out in theaters, it was such a dud, nobody really cared. People saw it, and then it was sort of forgotten. When I was in high school, it really wasn’t that big of a deal. But then the DVD came out, and people started watching it, and by the time I went to college, everybody knew about it.

  Richard “Pink” Floyd: The lawsuit wasn’t a good decision on our part. In hindsight, I wouldn’t have done it. All it did was end up giving us our 15 minutes of fame. On the internet, people were saying, “Y’all smoked too much pot. Now you’re trying to make money off this guy?” And, well, it’s true!

  Richard Linklater: I think Tina Fey picked up on it. It was a Saturday Night Live thing, in their news section that week. She made a joke implying that they were so stoned, they didn’t realize the movie was using their names until just now. Anyone can sue anyone in our legal system for anything. But then there’s a process where they start judging the merits of your allegations. I gave depositions on a Saturday, and the judge threw out the case on a Monday, but that never makes the news.

  Andy Slater: Everybody was mad at me because of the lawsuit. I ran into Rick’s mom in a restaurant. We were both waiting in line to pay, and she said, “I understand you got a lawsuit against my son.”

  I said, “Yeah. He should have called me up. I probably would’ve said, ‘Okay, no big deal.’ But he didn’t. And now my life is changed. And I didn’t get anything out of that movie.”

  Rick’s mom was a funny lady. She goes, “Well, I got a Cadillac and a house!”

  Peter Carlson: Didn’t the lawyers for the movie company make sure that he didn’t use real names? Lawyers make sure that if you’re using peoples’ names, that they’ve agreed to be portrayed.

  Richard Linklater: I didn’t use anyone’s first and last name. It was just the last name or the first name. I was told that, legally, you could do that.

  Holly Gent: There was a memo I distributed while we were making Dazed that was literally switching out a ton of the original na
mes Rick had chosen and mixing them up with different first or last names. But I think there were some he felt more of an emotional connection to. I think, at times, he just did what he wanted, regardless of the naysayers.

  Peter Carlson: If he changed their first names, why the hell didn’t he change their last names?

  Richard Linklater: Well, it was personal. Either I just like the way the name sounds, or they’re shout-outs to my friends. I do that in a lot of my movies. Hopefully, you’re just messaging someone from afar, and people who were friends of mine took it as such. My high school friends love the movie. Anyone who was anywhere near there feels like, oh yeah, that’s about me.

  I did the same thing with my movie Everybody Wants Some!! I used the name Plummer in the movie, and I told the real Plummer, “Hey, the only thing this character has in common with you is the last name. He’s this drunk guy. You weren’t that. He really doesn’t have much in common with you at all.”

  Andy Slater: Rick was showing that movie at Sam Houston University in Huntsville, and I wasn’t there, but somebody told me that he said, “Anybody that hears their name in this movie and doesn’t like what they see, I apologize that I didn’t contact you firsthand.” That was like a stab in the eye, him apologizing to them. He never apologized to me!

  Richard Linklater: If you have friends who are writers, buckle up. You’re going to find yourself as some kind of a character in someone else’s story, and it can be unnerving, how you’re characterized in someone else’s thing. We’re all aghast when we see what a small part we play in other people’s lives. We’re all the lead character in our own lives, and we’re only supporting characters in other people’s lives, and that hurts. That’s the dilemma we all live with.