San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
‘Alright’ charts the creation of a cult favorite film
By reporting on and writing about a movie made by filmmaker Richard Linklater more than a quarter century ago, Melissa Maerz inevitably wound up telling a story about time. Time courses through Houston native Linklater’s films, which often find characters and stories compressed into a narrowly set time frame or pushed against some deadline. Admittedly, time is a theme in just about any work of art, but Linklater’s work meditates on the passage of time with a particular focus.
“It’s a theme that is always interesting, right?” he asked me years ago. Right.
As Maerz points out in “Alright, Alright, Alright: An Oral History of Richard Linklater’s ‘Dazed & Confused,’ ” Linklater’s second feature film was a period piece not because it was set in the 1970s, but because it focused so intensely on a period of relatable life between the ages of 14 and 17. A ’70s pastiche would have been forgotten, as subsequent ’70s pastiches in film and TV have been. Linklater’s film, rather, was a meditation on the agelessness of the complexity of adolescent years, which is why it remains beloved a quarter century after it proved a modest box office success.
So the entire arc of “Dazed & Confused” as told by Maerz becomes a story with a sharper narrative arc than the understated film ever offered. Whereas “Dazed & Confused” was minimalist in its almost verité storytelling, “Alright, Alright, Alright” touches on the volatility of young artists, the hormones of youthful performers, the conflicts between corporate and artistic stakeholders, the ways our entertainment is presented to us and how we consume it. The book, like the film, is a story about time.
Maerz first saw the film as a freshman in high school in Portland, Ore. “Now,” she says, “I see it as a more complicated thing.”
Linklater is a remarkable combination of gregarious and elusive. I’ve found him always amiable and willing to discuss his work, but never effusive during the discussions.
Maerz found him reticent, initially, to talk about his first film made with financing from a Hollywood studio. “He said he was sick of talking about it,” she says, “but he kept putting me in touch with other sources. A big turning point was when I went to Austin and he spent about six hours just talking about the film, which is more than generous.”
She ended up talking to more than 150 people for the book, a task complicated because “Dazed & Confused” was an early credit for several actors who went on to greater renown: Matthew McConaughey (whose easy catchphrase as the beloved, creepy Wooderson gives the book its title), Ben Affleck, Parker Posey, Anthony Rapp, Adam Goldberg, Cole Hauser and several others. They signed on, most of them teens, for Linklater’s vision of a
“massive underachievement,” a film that used a true-to-the-era ’70s vibe not to provoke nostalgia, but rather to suggest that high school years were fraught and complicated for those who lived them, without regard to era.
“It was a movie about the future,” Maerz says. “What high school will be like for other people in the future. He caught the vibe of high school in a way that would be imprinted on other people’s lives.”
That said, as Maerz digs up in the book, Linklater wasn’t interested in his 1976 setting in a town based on Huntsville as abstractions. He fought with the studio over the music, he fought over marketing materials with a yellow smiley face that he felt was too 1974.
“He was very specific about dates,” Maerz says. “Somebody told me a story about a Time magazine in the background of a classroom scene. The date on the magazine was correct, but he didn’t think it would have reached that classroom by that date. That gives a sense about how much the detail of time means to him.”
One of the joys in “Alright, Alright, Alright” is the perspective Maerz attains with the time that has passed since the making of “Dazed,” as well as its release, its lukewarm reception and its long-tail embrace.
Her book becomes less specifically tied to the film and more about how time affects all of us after adolescence. Linklater’s young charges run wild around Austin during the film’s shoot. And some of them found top-tier fame. Some of the players thought they’d become the director’s go-to actor, a Robert De Niro to Linklater’s Martin Scorsese, only to see actor Ethan Hawke, who doesn’t appear in “Dazed” become Linklater’s primary actor over the subsequent years.
Without punches thrown and with only rickety lawsuits filed, the book captures micro-conflicts that almost always melt into disappointments and regrets. Its story lacks much in the way of catastrophe or revelation, which lends it the feel of a Linklater film.
“It’s funny because all these actors talk about it as the best summer of their life, making this movie,” Maerz says. “The one person who didn’t feel that way was the guy who made the movie. He’s not nostalgic for this time at all. But it was his ‘Welcome to Hollywood’ movie.”
Maerz’s book doesn’t flinch from Linklater’s regrettable moments, including his decision to allow his journal from the shoot to be published in the Austin Chronicle, barbed text that left his studio contacts feeling burned.
Linklater’s career has been fascinating to chart. After dropping out of Sam Houston State University, he worked on an offshore oil rig and became a regular at Houston’s River Oaks Theatre. He moved to Austin in the early 1980s and became a selftaught filmmaker. He first drew notice with the independently made “Slacker” in 1990, which drew enough attention to help him get “Dazed” made. He has made another 17 films since “Dazed & Confused,” and based on his reflections in Maerz’s book, he clearly learned dos and don’ts from the experience that allowed him to create both a career and also an admirable body of work noted for a distinctive style.
That path can feel remarkable today, considering “Dazed & Confused” made the most minor ripples at the box office after its studio released it with little fanfare and a dubious marketing plan.
But Maerz wonders how “Dazed” would have fared in a more wideopen marketplace today. “If it premiered on Netflix, would it have spread the way it did?” she asks. “Would it have had a more immediate impact? Stories like this one take a long time to develop. And you can’t manufacture that. A marketing team can’t create that.”
A marketing team could create a story like the one included in the book involving the comically absurd negotiations about the film’s soundtrack, which involved the hard rock band Jackyl in a way that makes Jackyl come across as, well, endearing all these years later.
But Linklater himself describes to Maerz his approach in a way that explains the seemingly unlikely endurance of his defiantly independent career. “The deal I made with the film gods was simply to be able to make films,” he said. “The definition of success wasn’t spelled out.”