Renée Zellweger: Yeah, that was through Rory, actually. I wasn’t picking up my phone at my place—you had to call up from downstairs and I was in the shower—so Rory went to wait at Adam’s, across the street. But Adam wasn’t home. So [talent manager] John Carrabino saw Rory wandering the hallways and offered to let him use his telephone. John said, “Who is your girlfriend?” And Rory explained, and John said, “I know her! She’s the girl from Love and a .45. Give me the phone.”
He said, “Renée Zellweger from Texas?”
And I said, “Yes?”
And he said, “Walk to the window right this minute, so I can see you.” And I walked to the window, and he was in the window across the street, waving. And that’s how it started.
Rory Cochrane: She was very ambitious. It’s not surprising to me that she got what she wanted out of the industry. She wasn’t going to take no for an answer.
Ben Affleck: I remember Rory talking about how he was dealing with Renée becoming really famous. Dazed was this pure time before it all got kind of infected by ambition and fame and money and competition and narcissism and all the negative parts of Hollywood.
Shana Scott: Both Renée and Rory were cast in Empire Records.
Rory Cochrane: I didn’t want to do that movie. I asked for more money than I had ever made before and real stupid, specific stuff, like, “I want a green BMW! And I want a house on the beach!” I was just trying to be a dick so that they would say no, but they were like, “Okay.” And when I got there, there was a green BMW.
Richard Linklater: I wasn’t at all surprised when Renée got cast in another thing, and another and another. I told her, “Had you been one of the main Dazed people, you probably wouldn’t have gotten Jerry Maguire, because you wouldn’t have been a fresh face. You would’ve just been the girl from Dazed.”
Michelle Burke Thomas: I was one of the contenders for Jerry Maguire, and Renée got it, and I was so upset that I didn’t get it, because I was a mom! If there’s anyone that can play that role, it’s me. I was like, How did she get that fucking role?
I was the second choice for everything. It was always me against Winona Ryder. Reality Bites—Ben Stiller called me at home and said, “I’m so excited, I can’t wait to do this movie with you. I’ve got to tell you, I’m meeting with Winona Ryder this weekend, but I don’t want her. I want you.” And later when I auditioned for Cable Guy, he said, “I’m really sorry, but the only way I was going to get my movie made was if I used her.”
Wiley Wiggins: I was up against Leonardo DiCaprio a few times, but I didn’t stand a chance. The first time was What’s Eating Gilbert Grape. I also auditioned for The Quick and the Dead, which Leo got. I auditioned for To Die For, and got really far. I was in a room with Buck Henry and Nicole Kidman, and Nicole Kidman pretending to go down on me while I read lines, which was wild. Gus Van Sant took pictures. But Joaquin Phoenix got the part.
Deena Martin-DeLucia: After Dazed, my father had a heart attack. I was out in L.A. for pilot season, and Matthew McConaughey and Brad Pitt let me stay in their places while my father was in the hospital. Matthew had just got a big film, and then Brad was off filming Interview with the Vampire. I ended up staying in Los Angeles for a while. My agent finally got me Swingers, but then the auditioning dropped off. Eventually, I packed everything up in my truck and I drove back across the country to Delaware. I’ve been there ever since.
Christin Hinojosa-Kirschenbaum: I got some roles in some very low-budget, silly little TV shows and movies of the weeks. I never did anything like Dazed again, which is why I left L.A. I wanted to do something more meaningful with my life.
Chrisse Harnos: I ended up getting a role on ER not long after Dazed, playing Anthony Edwards’s wife. And I was cast in a movie called Remembering Sex, about a woman who’d been raped in college. I was really proud of it. I was going around to festivals, and women were coming up to me afterward in tears saying, “This was my life!” But then the director wasn’t able to sell it for the amount she wanted to. I had a contract that said she couldn’t include scenes with me that involved nudity, but she recut it with nudity, and they changed the name to Getting Off, and it was an awful experience. And this was a female director! After that, I stopped auditioning. It was just like, I’m not doing this anymore.
Sasha Jenson: As an actor, I never got a big money job. But the funny thing is, I sold some scripts. I sold a script to Disney, with Oliver Stone attached, in ’97. It was called A Day at the Zoo, and the premise was, a Forrest Gump–like zookeeper who has worked at the zoo forever has been fired, but he refuses to leave the zoo. He holds the zoo hostage. They ask him for his demands, and he says he wants a boat to take the animals away with him. It’s like Noah’s ark but framed like a Dog Day Afternoon.
It never got made, but that was the first time I’d made real money. I did a few of those, and then I did some art direction in advertising.
I kind of had to go and join the real world.
Esteban Powell: For a while, Sasha became a set dec. I think he was working in advertising. I would see him out in Los Angeles, and I just remember him being completely different than the person I remember. He was just a person with a normal job, and he wasn’t dying to reminisce about old times.
Jason Davids Scott: Dazed and Confused was such a once-in-a-lifetime type of experience. People were so creatively invested, because they had nothing to lose. Maybe, theoretically, Milla Jovovich had a career to protect, but for everyone else, it was the only thing they had—and still is, for a lot of them. Shawn didn’t do much after. Deena didn’t do much. They didn’t all go on to be Matthew and Ben. The only people I stayed in touch with were Jason and Chrisse. It’s not like I need Ben Affleck’s phone number, but I always wonder: Does everyone else remember the same things I do? Do they remember how close everyone felt?
Richard Linklater: It’s always sad when the circus leaves town and we all go our separate ways, but the actual making of movies is very ephemeral. I’ve never totally gotten used to it. People’s lives eventually change. Priorities change. People get husbands and wives, and you’re not in a marriage with the people you work with, so you’re not legally bound to them. It might’ve felt like a family, but it was a family with a few months’ lifespan. And by the time Dazed came out, I already had my own family. My daughter Lorelei was born on May 29th, ’93. I went straight from her birth, in San Miguel, Mexico, to the Dazed premiere in Seattle.
I didn’t think having a kid changed me that much at the time. I’m not one of those people who’s like, “When I’m a father, I’m going to be different.” I didn’t spend any less time on my films, and I still had all of these stories from youth that I wanted to tell. After Dazed, I made Before Sunrise, and the characters were only like five years older than the kids in Dazed. But I wouldn’t have done School of Rock if I hadn’t had a kid. I never would have done Boyhood. I would be a very different person, making very different movies. But I didn’t know that at the time. It wasn’t until years later that I figured that out.
Holly Gent: So many of the people from Dazed and Confused have gone on to do so many projects with Rick. I looked at the crew list the other day, and it’s like, Sandra Adair, she’s still his editor; and Kari Perkins, who was the costume designer on Dazed, has done many of Rick’s films; and Vince [Palmo Jr.] and I worked on Dazed together, and we’ve been married for 26 years, and we still work with Rick all the time. We’re making a film with him now. Rick is a loyal person for sure.
Richard Linklater: I don’t really work with Anne and Lee anymore. I don’t know if my relationships with them changed when we made Dazed. Maybe they just matured a little. We had gone through something together, and worked our asses off, but I think, long-term, I had my journey and they had their own. To everybody else, Dazed wasn’t a project like Slacker, where I was making it feel like some communal thing. To me, outside of the scale of it, it felt exactly the same in the artistic approach. But to them, it was much more overtly “Rick
’s movie,” and everyone sort of had to buy into that and make their peace with it. Or maybe they didn’t, I don’t know.
Clark Walker: On some recent projects related to Linklater’s career, I’ve noticed that Lee and Anne have chosen for personal reasons not to participate. I think both are extremely proud of their contributions to Dazed, which were integral to the film’s eventual success on deep levels, and felt generally supported and uplifted by this project and the director. We were all unified as a team during the shoot, but years later, many projects later, both Lee and Anne eventually fell out with Linklater over complex matters.
Richard Linklater: With Anne, it didn’t feel like a big breakup, it was kind of a slow fade. I don’t know why she retired from the “Rick industry,” but she’s the one who took the hiatus from me, you know? You’d have to ask her.
Jonathan Burkhart: Yeah, Anne says she doesn’t want to be interviewed.
Richard Linklater: With Lee, I just slowly realized, oh, it’s not typical to work with the same DP all the time. There’s different sensibilities and different skill sets. I started to think of crew people like casting. Maybe they’re good for one project, but maybe they’re just not right for another one.
Bill Daniel: I think the challenge for you with this book will be to explain and describe Lee in a way that’s truthful but not too hurtful. How do you do that? I think you have to say that Lee’s an addict now. It stems from an automobile accident he had after Dazed, in 1995. He lost the use of his left arm, and it left him with a condition of random phantom pain. It was extremely debilitating.
He continued to work on films. He did handheld documentaries with one arm. But after the accident, there were a lot of experimental surgeries and weird drugs, and he became an addict. It’s been happening for a long, continuous period, just kind of steadily getting worse, so he’s in really bad shape right now. That’s why there’s no way you could talk to him.
Richard Linklater: I feel horrible about it. Everything about Lee has this layer of sadness to it, like this slow-moving tragedy. Maybe he can still turn it around. Nothing would make me happier, but it’s really up to him.
Kal Spelletich: D. Montgomery passed away in 1997, from Hodgkin’s disease. I spent a lot of time with D. at the end of her life. At that point, she was alone, besides her amazing sister, Judy. She had moved to L.A. to be with her sister, and she reached out to me. She said, “I’m so depressed and lonely. I miss everyone so much.”
Richard Linklater: D. was receiving experimental treatment at UCLA, which ultimately failed. D. told me that, at best, it was going to extend her life five years, which sounded good to her. I always think of that—her being hopeful for five more years of life, as a best-case scenario. I was visiting her at what turned out to be the end, and I was the last person to have a full conversation with her. The timing of that made me feel like I was a representative of her Austin friends and her life there, and we had a soulful goodbye, and a nice “I love you,” before they wheeled her away to ICU as she was suffering organ failure. I gave the eulogy at her service. It was one of the hardest things I’d ever done.
Bill Daniel: Here’s a thought that I have that I know I’m not alone on. The story of that group of friends has become the Rick story, and as the Rick story goes on, it sheds supporting characters, and Rick’s name just gets bigger and bigger and bigger.
Louis Black: It’s a little awkward. I wrote a piece on Dazed for Texas Monthly back in 1993, and the first draft included stuff about everybody who was involved in making it, including everyone from Slacker, and it was three times too long. And the second draft mentioned everybody but was incoherent and too long. And the third draft was just about Rick.
Kal Spelletich: The outside world, they want one hero. They don’t want to interview six people. They don’t understand the concept of a collective. I don’t want to fault Rick for what the media is foisting on him, saying, “You did it. You!” It’s not like he grabbed the microphone. It’s more like they foisted it upon him, saying, “Answer the question, Rick!”
Louis Black: Over time, all the focus went to one guy. But that was how it should have been, to be honest. Rick didn’t take away anything from anybody else. They could’ve done stuff on their own. It really was Rick.
Chapter 33
The New Rocky Horror Picture Show?
“Every time Wiley touched his nose, they drank.”
Wiley Wiggins.
Courtesy of Joey Lauren Adams.
How was Dazed and Confused transformed from a box office underachiever into a modern classic? Film studios would probably love to know the answer to this question, if only to amass data for some algorithm that determines what, exactly, makes films successful. But the explanation is neither scientific nor mysterious: Dazed simply grew in stature, and profits, very slowly, through something no studio or marketing team can really manufacture: word of mouth.
In 1993, the film got a small initial release and made a modest $8 million at the box office. It might’ve seemed like it was destined to disappear forever. But according to Gramercy’s research, the movie tested really well with young men in college, or younger, and, luckily, many of the theaters where it did play were in college towns. By the time Dazed came out on video in March 1994, young people were renting the movie over and over again, often with George Washington’s favorite herb at their side.
Over the years, any time someone from Dazed got cast in a big movie or won an award, it generated a round of press mentions and a new wave of interest in the actor’s early work. In 1996, A Time to Kill boosted the profiles of Matthew McConaughey and his co-star Nicky Katt, regenerating interest in Dazed. So did 2012’s Argo, which reunited director Ben Affleck with actor Rory Cochrane and won an Oscar for Best Picture. In 2020, when Renée Zellweger won an Oscar for her role in the Judy Garland biopic Judy, journalists were still asking her questions about Dazed—which is ironic, since she is barely in the movie.
Every few years, as a new crop of high schoolers graduates, new generations discover Dazed. The fact that it doesn’t really have a plot means it holds up better with repeat viewings. You aren’t watching for the story. You’re watching to hang out with the characters. Quentin Tarantino, who counts Dazed among his all-time favorite films, once said that renting the movie from a video store cured his loneliness during a stretch of time when he lived alone in Amsterdam. “You really get to know this whole community of people in the film,” he said. “Those people have become my friends.”
Long-term, Dazed is far more beloved than some of the films that were box office hits in 1993. The week that Dazed was released, the number one movie in America was the Macauley Culkin drama The Good Son. No one’s writing an oral history of that movie.
Russell Schwartz: You could say that the theatrical life of Dazed was what set it up for extraordinary success in the long run. What happened with Dazed is similar to what people are doing now with smaller independent art movies, which can’t really play theatrically anymore. Now, they’ll open those movies in 10 theaters, get some good reviews, and then go right on to their streaming platforms. That’s not what we planned for Dazed and Confused, but that’s basically what happened. The fact that Dazed was only out on 300 screens really set up the film for what happened when it went to DVD and everybody watched it.
Richard Linklater: If Dazed had made $100 million at the box office, it probably wouldn’t have had the same longevity. If it’s a huge hit, and being shoved at you, do people think it’s theirs? Probably not.
Nicky Katt: In a weird way, it deserved to be a cult film, something that people could discover on their own, like a good stash. Like, “Hey, check this out, you’ve never heard of this?”
Rory Cochrane: High school and college kids were the ones that made the movie popular. All of these college kids watched it in the theater, and they told their younger brothers and sisters to watch it, and it started to become a cult classic.
Richard Linklater: First, we became a midnight
film. We would play for an entire year at certain theaters. They would turn it into a mini-concert where you go in the theater and you could smell pot smoke.
Jason London: I heard stories about how we’d kicked Rocky Horror out of its venues because people wanted to get in to watch Dazed and Confused instead.
Anthony Rapp: There was a thing called the Brew and View in Chicago, where they served beer and put up a screen at different venues. And I don’t know if it was as orchestrated as a Rocky Horror thing, but every time Wiley touched his nose, they drank.
Wiley Wiggins: That will kill you! Don’t do that!
Jason London: I did a movie with Susan Sarandon, and she said, “I saw your movie two nights ago, but we didn’t realize you needed to smoke a joint first, so we’re going to get blazed and go see it again tomorrow.” That’s when I started to realize, this could be big.
Wiley Wiggins: It wasn’t until Dazed came out on VHS that it became a thing.
Richard Linklater: We caught the video age, and then we caught the DVD age, but I always say, Universal really tried hard not to make money on that movie. I think they undershipped the video. You’d go into a Blockbuster, and there’d be 87 copies of the new Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, and then there’d be one or two Dazed and Confused. But Dazed sat there on the new release shelf for a couple of years, because they keep videos on that shelf when they’re always checked out.
Jim Jacks: For a long time, Dazed had the record for most video turnovers per copy. It was just some ridiculous amount. I had a lot of friends tell me they could never find it at the video store because it was always rented.
Richard Linklater: At the time, the videos themselves cost $79, and the stores had to pay $50 for every video. The studios were making a fortune, but at that big price, it’s not really a consumer item, it’s just for the stores. You’re not going to pay $79 for a video unless you’re rich. But a year or two in, they discounted it, where you could buy the video for $19. Then people started buying it themselves.
Alright, Alright, Alright Page 35