Alright, Alright, Alright

by Melissa Maerz

  I was like, “No. I’m Jason London. Remember me?”

  Parker Posey: We all went from Rick’s place to the park, where we watched the movie in the grass with 5,000 to 10,000 people, and they were all talking back to the screen, jamming along to the music, and quoting it back to us.

  Sasha Jenson: We got there late, and it was so weird. They’d been acting out this experience we’d had, without us.

  Priscilla Kinser-Craft: It was like Woodstock, all these people with their blankets. They sold VIP tickets to get in. Parker got bombarded by a lot of people who wanted to take her picture. I think I even asked her, “Does this make you anxious?”

  Parker was doing selfies with people before selfies were a thing. Everyone had cameras, and she was saying, “Look! It works better if I hold the camera.” She would literally turn it around and click it, like, let’s not waste time getting someone else to take the picture. She had that down.

  Parker Posey: I was kind of bummed that there were cameras there. I wanted more time to chill out. I think I would have preferred a retreat. It was so special, that time. It deserved more than just an “event.”

  Priscilla Kinser-Craft: You had McConaughey walking around with two security guards. All these girls were wanting to get at him. Matthew picked me up and he squeezed me really hard, and when I was trying to get back to my car, all these girls wanted to touch me. They were like, “You touched Matthew McConaughey!” I’m like, “No no no! It doesn’t rub off.”

  Jeremy Fox: I sat next to Linklater, and McConaughey was on the other side. At one point I had to walk up to where the restrooms were, and this guy—I swear it was Alex Jones—started chasing me, wanting an audio recording. He’s like, “I run this radio show here out of Austin!” And he demanded that I give him an audio recording of one of the lines from Dazed and Confused.

  He said I was his favorite character ’cause he was heavyset when he was in school. He wouldn’t leave me alone until I said my line from the movie: “Man, I had my hand up her shirt!” It’s like, come on, guy!

  Catherine Avril Morris: After the movie, we were doing the Q and A, and all of the questions were directed to Matthew McConaughey and Parker Posey.

  Michelle Burke Thomas: We all got paid the same for doing Dazed, and we all got the same honey wagons, and we all flew to Austin on the same coach ticket. It was a favored-nations deal. That means there was no negotiating, everybody got the same thing. So it felt wrong that at the 10-year reunion, the whole emphasis was on the ones who became celebrities. It was only about McConaughey and Parker Posey, and people were mentioning Renée Zellweger.

  Priscilla Kinser-Craft: You know how, now, you go to a Comic-Con panel and it’s nicely organized? This was like a free-for-all, in terms of whoever got there to ask a question first. We weren’t sitting up there in seats or anything. We were all just standing there. I was drinking a beer on stage.

  Michelle Burke Thomas: I’d been hanging out with the audience, and they were like, “Have a shot of vodka! Have a shot of whiskey!” And I was like, sure! And of course by the time I got on stage . . .

  Jason London: Michelle was a little drunk.

  Michelle Burke Thomas: I got up there and somebody asked me if Jason was a good kisser. And I said, “Well, I don’t know. He was a good kisser back then. Pink, are you still a good kisser?”

  Jason London: She wanted to kiss me and, in front of a thousand people, I had to be like, “Stop. No. No.”

  My wife was standing right there in front of me in the front row with her arms crossed, looking at me like, “You do it, you DIE.” I got really angry with Michelle.

  Mark Vandermeulen: We were all drinking at the pre-party at Rick’s house, and the movie was over at like 11:00, so we didn’t even get to the after-party until midnight, and then we drank until 4:00 in the morning. It was a marathon.

  Sasha Jenson: There was a party at a restaurant after the screening, and by that point, it had turned into a bit of a celebrity fest. Sandra Bullock was there.

  Christin Hinojosa-Kirschenbaum: Sandra and Matthew were dating.

  Michelle Burke Thomas: Sandra Bullock and I were both up for the lead role in Speed. That was a hard one, because I was like, this movie is stupid, I don’t even want this movie, but I’ll go in anyway. And then she got it and it made her a huge fucking star. So everybody at the party was like, “Oh Sandra Bullock! Sandra Bullock!” And I was just like, Grrrr.

  Sasha Jenson: It turned into one of those nights where everyone splintered off back into their high school dramas.

  Jason London: I went back to my hotel after that reunion and cried like a baby. It was hard, because when we were doing the movie, my sister and my mom and my stepdad came down and I got to see my sister’s baby for the first time. All of those guys from Dazed had met my sister and her baby. After she died, I thought for sure that Richard Linklater, Don Phillips, and McConaughey would go out of their way to reach out, especially since I’d been with McConaughey so much after his father passed. But not a single one of those bastards ever called me. And then I was there at the reunion, and everyone looked like they were still so close, and I didn’t feel like I was part of that anymore.

  When we were making the movie, I remember being on the boat with everyone, and I was getting emotional. I was talking to Cole, and I said, “I just don’t understand how I got so lucky to be a part of this unbelievable group of people who I feel like I’m not even worthy of even being around.” And he said, “London, you’re our fuckin’ Pink. Shut the fuck up.”

  Jason London.

  Courtesy of Jason London.

  But I didn’t feel like their Pink anymore. It didn’t feel like family anymore.

  Richard Linklater: It’s so heartbreaking to hear Jason’s feelings about this! I remember him in the swirl of things like everyone else, but you never know what anyone’s actually experiencing inside. He seemed a tad melancholy, but I figured that’s just Jason. I feel bad that I didn’t call him after the tragedy with his sister, but I had never met her, and didn’t hear about it until a while later—we were in the ol’ communication dark ages. I just kinda felt awkward reaching out so much later, but as you slowly learn, or need to learn, better late than never.

  Nicky Katt: What’s that quote with Lorne Michaels, where they’re asking him about John Belushi? They’re like, “Can you talk to us about how you felt about John? That must’ve been such a massive loss.” And he’s like, “Well, you know, things change . . .” And he starts to get choked up and they cut away.

  It’s like that. You can’t hold on to that thing forever.

  Parker Posey: God, I’d love to get together with everybody. Whenever I run into people from Dazed, it’s like, that was just a pure, untouched, bittersweet feeling. But you lose that, you know? You lose that.

  (left to right) Deena Martin, Chrisse Harnos (kneeling), Adam Goldberg, Parker Posey, and Marissa Ribisi.

  Photography by Anthony Rapp.

  Chapter 36

  A God-Awful Failure of an Anti-Nostalgia Movie

  “People always want to return to something they recall being pure.”

  Linklater believed Dazed and Confused contradicted the notion of nostalgia. He thought he was documenting small changes in the culture, and that his depiction of the ’70s as boring and oppressive would stop people from lionizing the past. What he failed to realize was that the reality he’d reconstructed was not that different from what was still happening in most of America. When teenagers saw Dazed and Confused in 1993, they were still driving around, listening to rock music, making out, getting busted for weed.

  Today, it feels like the teenage culture represented in the movie didn’t just change, it totally disappeared. The number of teenagers who have a driver’s license has sharply declined. No one under the age of 18 really listens to rock music anymore. Weed is legal in many states, but opioids are killing young people. If you believe the polls, teens aren’t having much sex, and their parents spend so many hours per d
ay with them that it’s hard to imagine when they’d even have this much unsupervised time to mess around.

  In retrospect, if you’re a certain type of (likely white, likely male, likely Gen X) person, you’re going to long for the era you see on-screen in Dazed and Confused because of what has happened since—which, of course, Richard Linklater never could have anticipated.

  Looking back, it seems ironic that Linklater wanted it to be an anti-nostalgia movie. Without nostalgia, Dazed wouldn’t exist. Universal was interested in the project in part because the studio head, Tom Pollock, had fond memories of American Graffiti. Many people watched it because they were nostalgic for their own high school years in the ’70s. The costumes and the soundtrack gave viewers a temporary time machine.

  Just as the Dazed cast glamorized the ’70s, today’s high schoolers are obsessed with the ’90s. Like Linklater says, every generation thinks all the cool stuff happened before they got there. Crowds still gather in Austin every five years or so to celebrate Dazed and Confused anniversaries and dress as their favorite characters. At the 25th-anniversary party, people were handing out inflatable paddles. Women in “Seniors” T-shirts walked through the crowd yelling “Air raid!” Fans were fetishizing the exact same experiences that had made Linklater’s high school years feel like hell.

  A lot of people are still incredibly nostalgic for an anti-nostalgia film. And no one’s more nostalgic than the cast.

  Richard Linklater: I swear, I tried to make the movie immune to nostalgia. I even had the characters say the ’70s sucked. I thought it would be impossible to look back fondly on the ’70s. I would never want to go back to that.

  Rory Cochrane: I don’t think it’s an anti-nostalgia movie. I think it’s a complete nostalgia movie. How is it an anti-nostalgia movie?

  Matthew McConaughey: Well, it’s obviously seen as a nostalgia movie.

  Mark Duplass: Oh, it’s a god-awful failure of an anti-nostalgia movie! I mean, it’s a fucking great movie, but from the minute Rick goes into slow motion at the moon tower and you hear that Lynyrd Skynyrd song, “Tuesday’s Gone,” it’s like, “Come on, Rick. Like it or not, you are telling us this party is ending, and you’re feeling melancholic about it, and you miss this.” I was 16 when I saw it, and I was nostalgic for days that weren’t even over yet!

  Kevin Smith: That was the thing Richard Linklater fucked up royally: We can’t pick what the movie is. The movie’s gonna be what the audience says it is. And he might’ve felt it was anti-nostalgic, but it was nostalgic for lots of people.

  Christin Hinojosa-Kirschenbaum: At the 20th reunion, I saw the whole crowd of people watching the movie, and I wanted to say, “Hey! Pay attention to what Jason London says on the football field! ‘If I ever start referring to these as the best days of my life, remind me to kill myself.’” I think a lot of people hold up Dazed as, This is when life was great! I just want them to realize that they’ve missed the message.

  Richard Linklater: Now, I don’t think it’s possible to make an anti-nostalgic movie. That’s just the power of cinema.

  Do you remember in the book Jarhead, all the guys are sitting around watching Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket? And it’s like, wait, these are anti-war movies! But the soldiers are just like, “Yeahhhh!” There’s a disconnect there. Cinema can’t help but glamorize. Cinema doesn’t give a shit if you’re nostalgic or not. It’s a nostalgia creator.

  Jason Davids Scott: When I think of Dazed and Confused now, I don’t think of it as being nostalgic for the ’70s. I think of it as being nostalgic for the ’90s.

  Jason Lee: I really miss the ’90s.

  Brian Raftery: When Dazed came out, we were always being told that the boomers were the greatest generation. The whole story of Gen X is basically an entire generation growing up wondering when the hell they’ll get the chance to actually talk about themselves. Now, that’s all we’re doing. We’re all looking back at the ’90s going, “Hey, we had a pretty good culture back then.”

  Tom Junod: The rock and roll culture that was extolled in Dazed and Confused was just about to come to an end in the ’90s when it was released. People in the ’90s didn’t know that rock and roll music was going to lose its force as a galvanic power in pop culture, but that was all there in Dazed and Confused. Maybe we were missing it before we knew we were missing it. That’s the essence of nostalgia.

  Brian Raftery: Nowadays, if you were 15 and you watched the movie, you might be like, “This music sucks. Why are there guitars? What are guitars?”

  Tom Junod: Studio movies like Dazed and Confused were about to come to an end, too. Smaller, personal films were just about to get swallowed up by the demands of the Cineplex and the Disney/Marvel empire.

  Richard Linklater: The window was probably closing and I didn’t even know it. Six years after Dazed, Hollywood was starting to figure out, “Oh, we don’t give $6 million to little upstarts with their indie films. Fuck you.”

  Joey Lauren Adams: Not long after the 10-year reunion, around 2005, all the studios started closing their indie divisions.

  Cole Hauser: You couldn’t do casting like that anymore, either. When they had the pizza party thing at Universal, everybody was young and full of life and wanting to make something special, and Rick and Don could watch us and be like, how do these kids work together?

  Today, there’s a different method. You just put yourself on a tape and send it in. No great director or actor would do that back then.

  Adam Goldberg: I don’t even fucking meet directors anymore. They don’t even show up. It’s pretty bad.

  Wiley Wiggins: The casting process for Dazed spoiled me, frankly. It should be studied, that organic process of a director and a casting director getting to know a person, then finding the aspects of the person that can be the character—rather than, like, expecting somebody to tap-dance and talk like a pirate.

  In the early days of indie cinema, people were looking for interesting performances from nonprofessional actors. Now, the same principles of indie movies have fed into reality TV, and now all we have is reality TV. Everything good will get used for evil at one point.

  Parker Posey: In the independent film world, there’s been a collective grieving of the culture that was supposed to support character actors.

  Jason London: You know that song “Video Killed the Radio Star”? Well, digital killed the movie star. Not only is it cheaper to make movies now, the world is so saturated with people who want to do it, they go, “We’ve got these actors who’ve made all these films, but they require us to pay them money. There’s a million people out there that we don’t have to pay. Let’s just hire one of them.”

  Joey Lauren Adams: Now you can just find someone that’s got a million followers on Instagram and cast them.

  Cole Hauser: When we made Dazed, it was not only a special moment in Hollywood but also a special moment in our lives, because of the freedom we had. Nowadays, you can’t go into a hotel and sit in the lobby and smoke grass and cigarettes and congregate there and create scenes and not have the police show up. But we could do that at the Crest.

  Mark Duplass: There’s this theory amongst a lot of storytellers right now that if you’re creating a television show or a movie, you should set it before the year 2000, because people really want to live in worlds where social media doesn’t exist. It’s the biggest wish fulfillment you can offer audiences right now. And I think that might relate to the legs on Dazed and Confused, particularly now.

  Jay Duplass: In the movie, they’re sneaking out of class, trying to steal beer, trying to destroy mailboxes, trying to find the party, trying to hook up, trying to get in a fight. There is so much that they’re doing! If you made that movie now, all those scenes would be, like, kids looking down at their phones.

  Cole Hauser: You could never make that movie now. I hate to say it, but if you made Dazed and Confused today, it would be pretty boring. You could never have that bullying stuff. All those kids would be sent to juvie!

&
nbsp; Mark Duplass: The nature of the way you connect with your friends is totally different. They’re stuck in this smaller town, and they’re hanging out with people that they don’t necessarily like, but they do it anyway, just because they kind of need something to do. Whereas if I’m a teenager now, and I’m in that position, and I don’t like those people? Dude! I got options galore on my computer and my phone to entertain myself. I’m probably not gonna throw myself in the car and cruise around for 80 minutes. We’re just not that desperate anymore.

  Sasha Jenson: Now, my kids don’t even want to drive a car. They just want to Uber.

  Samantha Hart: Dazed came out during a time when high school was just fucking fun. And a few years after it came out, there was Columbine. And now it’s Newtown and Parkland—I’ve lost count. That was the last moment in history when kids went to school and the worst thing that could happen is they got busted for pot. It really makes Dazed and Confused a time capsule.

  Jason Reitman: Watching it when you’re older is a completely different experience, but that’s the genius of it. Because, frankly, how did Linklater know? He made it while he was young. He didn’t make it when he was old. He somehow knew what was coming. As young people, we are keenly aware that there is this time limit, and something is quietly dying inside of us, something really special. It’s like that line in Breakfast Club: “When you grow up, your heart dies.”

  Jay Duplass: I’m terrified to go back and watch it, because I’m realizing it’s going to make me feel super fucking old. I was 20 when it came out. Most of those actors would have been older than me. To go back and realize that they all looked like babies would just be fucking devastating.