Alright, Alright, Alright

by Melissa Maerz

  Cole Hauser: I’ll never forget the moment that I was at Blockbuster and I saw that Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Dazed and Confused had been packaged together in a box set. And I was like, Holy shit! Because Fast Times was my film growing up. So when I saw that, I thought, that’s probably getting people to see Dazed who might not have seen it before.

  Richard Linklater: It found its audience. Nobody would prefer that to a big box office, but I guess it helps its cult status. It became something that got passed around.

  Jay Duplass: Oh my god, people got obsessed with the movie. I have friends who still watch it yearly, like, “Let’s just get drunk and watch Dazed and Confused!” And I think that’s because high school is a pretty wonderful time for a lot of people, and they want to revisit it. The movie is all about cutting school and making out and going to parties and smoking weed and drinking beer. Who doesn’t want to go back to that? I mean high school can also be horrendous, but Rick made it look pretty fucking fun.

  Robert Brakey: Why do people keep watching Dazed over and over? I mean, why do people keep going back to high school reunions?

  Wiley Wiggins: For about a couple of years after it came out on video, I entered into some sort of Twilight Zone.

  Marissa Ribisi: The first time I could tell Dazed was a thing was when I was shopping at American Rag [in L.A.] and these people were following me around in the store, and I was like, Oh my god, they think I’m shoplifting! How do I fucking tell them that I’m not stealing shit? And just as I was about to yell at them, they came up to me, like, “Were you in Dazed and Confused? We loved that movie!”

  Sasha Jenson: I went to a Halloween party dressed as Buster Poindexter, and some friends were like, “There’s a Dazed and Confused party down the street, you gotta go!” I walked in, and they had the movie playing, and the bartender was a spitting image of McConaughey. I was like, if I ever get a free drink, it’s gonna be today, here.

  Wiley Wiggins: People would ask me to touch my nose or put my hair behind my ears. They would ask me if I had a joint. People would try to get me to smoke weed with them, and I don’t really smoke pot. I have anxiety problems.

  Rory Cochrane: I went to an ESPYs party and Peyton Manning and Eli Manning were there. Apparently, Peyton Manning had dressed up as Wooderson and Eli had dressed up as my character at a Halloween party.

  Jason London: People thought I was Pink in real life. I had a grown man crying his eyes out because he said, “I was bullied in school, and I just want to thank you for being the person who was nice to everybody!” And I was like, “C’mere dude, give me a hug.”

  Christin Hinojosa-Kirschenbaum: I’ve had people track me down and call me at work. I think that because my character was kind of a vulnerable character, people feel a connection to it. Men do. Everybody’s like, “Oh, you’re just like my first love!” Like they see me as that person.

  Wiley Wiggins: There’s now been about eight or nine famous baseball players who are skinny with long hair, and every time there’s a new one, I have to close Twitter because there’s literally hundreds of people making the same joke about how, you know, Chuck Corndick is the new Wiley Wiggins. It never gets old for those people! Tim Lincecum was the first guy. It just turned into this running gag that people would call him Wiley Wiggins. It got so bad that I actually did an interview with the Wall Street Journal about it. The headline was “Unfazed by Confusion with Lincecum.”

  Adam Goldberg: After maybe a decade, you’re like, “Oh, okay, it’s got a permanent place in film history.” Maybe that’s why everyone started to talk about a sequel.

  Chapter 34

  Dazed and Confused: The Series

  “Ashton Kutcher is the dumb Randall Floyd.”

  (left to right) Joey Lauren Adams, Jason London, Chrisse Harnos, Matthew McConaughey, and Rory Cochrane.

  Courtesy of Jonathan Burkhart.

  Linklater never wanted to make the ’70s look cool. But when Dazed and Confused opened in Dallas, he found himself at a ’70s-themed after-party filled with young fans wearing period-appropriate clothes. “Omigod, I’m contributing to this,” he wrote in a Dazed press tour diary for the Austin American-Statesman. “I’m helping give a reason for this to exist again.”

  Nostalgia tends to kick in every 20 years, so Linklater was slightly ahead of his time when he looked back at 1976 from the vantage point of 1993. Only seven months after Dazed came out, the L.A. Times reported that the young playwright Justin Tanner was adapting Linklater’s film for the USA Network. The series never got picked up, but within a few years, the ’70s nostalgia wave Linklater had anticipated would kick in as a trend: a glam-rock revival, a craze for vintage fashion, a wave of period films including Boogie Nights, The Ice Storm, and The Virgin Suicides.

  By 1998, Linklater and the cast were talking about making a sequel. It never happened. The closest thing the world got was Linklater’s 2016 college baseball movie, Everybody Wants Some!!, which the director often describes as a “spiritual sequel” to Dazed. Inspired by his college years at Sam Houston State, it takes place during the ’80s. Linklater says the timing is intentional: Mitch and the kids on his baseball team in Dazed would be the right age to become the characters in Everybody. There’s even a character named Willoughby (played by Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn’s son, Wyatt Russell) who’s a lot like Wooderson. Toward the end of the movie, Willoughby reveals (spoiler alert!) that he’s actually an older man, hanging out with college kids so that he can relive his college baseball years.

  On Reddit, one fan theorized that the character is named after the Twilight Zone episode “A Stop at Willoughby,” in which a man dreams of an idealized past that no longer exists. It’s a good theory, and possibly true, but then again, that’s how the past always works, for Linklater and everyone else. Regardless of how you feel or what you remember, you can never go back.

  Richard Linklater: At one point in the mid-’90s, Jim Jacks and I got approached to do a TV show based on Dazed. They used to do this kind of thing all the time. Remember, they did a show after Animal House called Delta House, but it didn’t really catch on.

  Sean Daniel: It was like doing Happy Days after American Graffiti.

  Richard Linklater: I said, “I don’t wanna be the capitalist who’s trying to do anything for a buck. No.” And then Fox made That ’70s Show. I’m not 100 percent sure That ’70s Show was made by the same people who were approaching us, but I like to think it was the same people. That helps my glib story. Especially since it’s a damn good show–the perfect cast.

  Mark Brazill: I was a co-creator of That ’70s Show. Funny thing is, two of the exec producers I hired to work on it said they’d had a meeting at Universal, and there were three or four pilots being written that were set in the ’70s, so there’s no denying the effect that Richard Linklater had on the entire ’70s resurgence.

  Years before That ’70s Show, I had been working on In Living Color, and I got in an argument with one of the other writers because I didn’t like the ending of Dazed and Confused. They said to me, “Well, if you don’t like the movie, why don’t you make your own fucking movie about the ’70s?” And I had forgotten about that conversation, but I guess, ultimately, I did.

  But That ’70s Show was really based on my life, not Dazed and Confused. I was in high school from ’76 to ’80, so everybody I wrote about was a group of my friends. I was basically Eric Forman. Kelso is still one of my best friends.

  Jason London: That ’70s Show was basically Dazed and Confused: The Series. Ashton Kutcher is the dumb Randall Floyd. When I saw that, I couldn’t fuckin’ believe it. It’s like, Pink is a complete moron?

  Melanie Fletcher: A lot of the clothes that we bought for Dazed ended up going right back to Universal, and they all showed up on That ’70s Show. I remember watching it and thinking, “I bought that shirt!”

  Melina Root: Actually, no. I love that movie, but mass-produced clothing from the ’70s is all over the place, and costumers use many of the same vi
ntage sources. Since That ’70s Show was set in Wisconsin, a lot of what I sourced was bought from dealers in the Northeast, or Midwest. Chances are there are many items from That 70’s Show that are out there being used on many movies and TV shows as we speak. Hollywood costumes are a big recycling machine.

  Richard Linklater: There was a moment in ’98 or so when I did have a vague, too-much-time-on-my-hands interest in a sequel. Jim and Sean were asking about it. Other people wanted it. So I had little stories for all of the characters, fun things they would be doing five years later.

  Jason London: Rick was like, “If we did do a sequel, the very first play of the very first football game back at school senior year, Pink would get wiped out and injured. And the career that he thought was gonna happen wasn’t gonna happen. And the coaches are upset about it, but Pink is not.”

  Richard Linklater: Because Wiley was a little computer nerd in real life, I told him, “Mitch is gonna be the guy in your dorm room who’s taking gray market computers, wiping them, and selling them via mail.” I had him as, like, Michael Dell.

  Jason London: Yeah, Wiley is still really into computers. Ten years ago, I got a brand-new Mac laptop, and I called Apple. A guy answers and says, “Hi, what’s your name?” And I said, “Jason London.” And he goes, “Jason London! It’s me, Wiley!”

  Wiley Wiggins: He’s like, “Wiley! You’re a Mac Genius now?” And I was like, “No, not a Mac Genius. I work for AppleCare. It’s different.”

  Matthew McConaughey: Rick and I talked about, “What would Wooderson be doing in the sequel?” Well, he’s got a little community radio station and he’s the DJ, and he works nights. He’s got a voice made for it, and they probably want him to go to Dallas, but he’d rather stay right there in his local community and play the music he wants to play.

  Richard Linklater: There was something about Parker and Joey being disco instructors.

  Parker Posey: Rick was like, Darla moves to San Francisco and becomes a women’s studies major.

  Nicky Katt: Clint and Wooderson own a chain of auto-repair shops, and Clint is a happy, sober family man who is being stalked by Adam Goldberg’s character, Mike, who has unraveled, near insane.

  Richard Linklater: Mike has built their high school fight up in his head, and Clint doesn’t even remember it. But Mike’s there to kill him. The story is mixed up with Crime and Punishment: “Can I kill someone? Am I one of those special people who’s above the law, who can take a life?” Mike’s sort of entrapped in that.

  Anthony Rapp: Rick asked if I thought Tony might wind up being gay. And it’s like, yeah, maybe. I do not think that Tony and Sabrina wind up having a relationship.

  Jim Jacks: Rick was thinking about the sequel culminating in a big Aerosmith concert.

  Ricard Linklater: Oh gosh, I don’t remember that. I think Jim might have riffed on the idea a little bit too much.

  Michelle Burke Thomas: Everybody had their own ideas for what the sequel should be and what would happen to our characters in the future. Chrisse and I had the idea that Matthew McConaughey’s character would die, and everybody gets together for his funeral, kind of like The Big Chill. We figured Matthew would be the hardest one to get back in the movie, so we thought, “Okay, we’ll kill him off.”

  Adam Goldberg: We had a thread where we were all discussing the sequel, and I pitched Rick the idea that it takes place on September 11th, 2001. I thought it would be interesting if, like, my character is working as the lawyer in New York and McConaughey is the gas station attendant who sees it on the news, and there’s some unifying event that brings us together. But I never heard back from Rick.

  Jim Jacks: Rick said, “The way we should do the sequel is a seven-week shoot,” because everybody was at a certain level in the business, and it would take them off the market for other films.

  So I said to Rick, “Why don’t we set it up that half the cast works the first three weeks, and half the cast works the last three weeks, and everybody works the middle week, for whatever scenes we need everybody for—the final Aerosmith concert, or whatever it was gonna be.”

  I was sitting with Nicky, Cole, and Rory at the time, and they said, “What if we want to stay the whole time?”

  Jim Jacks: Universal didn’t want to do a sequel. They were willing to make the movie for maybe $15 million, but they weren’t willing to give Rick 20 percent of the gross, or whatever his lawyer was asking. Rick and his lawyer were treating the sequel as if Dazed was a blockbuster, and it wasn’t. This would be a sequel to a cult movie.

  Richard Linklater: We never got anywhere near the “deal” stage with the studio! Jim probably called up my lawyer, John Sloss, and started being aggressive.

  Jim Jacks: A different studio, Paramount, was excited as hell about doing the sequel. The only problem was, they needed approval from Universal, and they would never be given approval.

  Sasha Jenson: For a minute, when there were rumors of a sequel, I went surfing up in Zuma. I was putting my wet suit on and some guy’s running by, yelling my name. I was like, “Who is that?” And it was McConaughey, jogging on the beach.

  I was like, “Are we gonna do this sequel?” And he was like, “It will probably never happen. And you know what? It’s probably better that way. Leave it alone! It’s perfect as is.”

  Chapter 35

  The 10-Year Reunion

  “You can’t hold on to that thing forever.”

  Matthew McConaughey with two security guards at the Dazed 10th anniversary party.

  Courtesy of Wiley Wiggins.

  Ten years after Dazed and Confused was released, it had become one of the defining high school movies of the decade. There was even a 10-year reunion, which feels appropriate for a movie about high school.

  The Alamo Drafthouse celebrated the film’s anniversary on May 31, 2003, by hosting an outdoor screening and keg party at Walter E. Long Park in Austin, where the beer bust at the moon tower was shot. A local cover band played ’70s songs from the soundtrack. It was a lot like a real school reunion, except there was also a VIP tent, and a red carpet, and thousands of people in the audience watching the cast come together for the reunion of a high school they didn’t attend.

  The fact that some people had become stars made it harder for everyone in the cast to interact in a natural way. Matthew McConaughey, who’d become a leading man thanks to The Wedding Planner and How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, arrived wearing a “JK Livin’” shirt, and had to ward off screaming fans. And yet, he says he doesn’t remember much about the reunion. Parker Posey, who’d broken into the mainstream with parts in Scream 3, You’ve Got Mail, and Josie and the Pussycats, was trailed by paparazzi. Ben Affleck, who was co-starring with his fiancée, Jennifer Lopez, in Gigli, didn’t show. Everyone else hugged and caught up and some got a little more intoxicated than they should have. And just like a real high school reunion, things got awkward.

  Sasha Jenson: For the reunion, we all met up at Rick’s place, just outside Austin. He’s got a full-on artist’s compound, an enormous amount of land with a baseball park and a fishing lake and a swimming pool and different bungalows. He houses people when they’re writing scripts. Nicky was staying there for a while. I think Rick bought it for $1 million after he did Before Sunrise.

  Richard Linklater: It was 38 acres for $132,000. And funny, like Sunrise was some big money-maker? It cost less than half as much and made about half as much as Dazed!

  Sasha Jenson: The whole thing was completely surreal. It felt like what happens when they develop a small town into a big city, and then there’s, like, a mall where something else once was. It was like, we’d all done this magical thing together, and it was organic and small. And then 10 years later, Matthew McConaughey had bodyguards.

  Richard Linklater: Matthew’s not a bodyguard kind of guy! There might have been a designated driver, or the Alamo probably had some security for the event. This is why guys like Matthew maybe shouldn’t, and usually don’t, go to stuff like this. Everybody projects
all their shit on you: “He’s arrogant and changed so much!” Matthew has no axe to grind or anything to prove, so why the hell would he be like that? He wasn’t. I remember Matthew in a nice, generous mood the whole time, cooking for everyone.

  Christin Hinojosa-Kirschenbaum: Matthew was kind of the ringleader at the reunion. Adam wasn’t there. Ben wasn’t there. Cole wasn’t there. Chrisse wasn’t there. But pretty much everybody else was there.

  Jason London: I wish Chrisse had been there. Still to this day, I don’t think I’ve ever been more in love with somebody.

  Michelle Burke Thomas: I’d like to imagine that Cole didn’t go to the reunion because he was too heartbroken to see me. After Dazed, Cole told me, “Wait for me, and when my relationship ends I’ll come find you.” And he did, a few years later. The next time I saw him, he came to my house, and my boyfriend—who’s now my husband—opened the door, in a towel, fresh out of the shower. There were very few words exchanged. I’ve heard from other people that it really devastated Cole. I wonder if that’s why he didn’t come.

  Cole Hauser: Fuck no! I had to work! And I have nothing but fond memories of Michelle.

  Ben Affleck: At the time, 10 years seemed like a long time. I felt kind of disconnected and weird. It took me a long time to stop feeling insecure about things like that.

  Adam Goldberg: I think I had a scheduling conflict, but, it’s like, the people you want to stay in touch with, you stay in touch with. You don’t need to go to a reunion. The same goes for high school, right? After 10 years, you would probably just be seeing people you’d wanted to ignore by that point.

  Jason London: We were all at Rick’s house, but I felt like a complete stranger. Everybody else was so close, man. Rory and Rick and Nicky and Matthew were all hanging out together, laughing like they’d spent tons of time together, and no one even wanted to talk to me except Parker. People were being so weird. McConaughey cooked a bunch of burgers for everybody, but he would talk at you without even looking at you. He was like, “Randall Pink Floooooyd! Randall Pink Floooooyd!”