10 things you might learn about ‘Dazed and Confused’
You don’t expect to read the oral history of one of the great American hangout movies and find heartache.
But a touch of longing lingers at the end of Melissa Maerz’s new book, “Alright, Alright, Alright: The Oral History of Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused.” Maybe it’s just proof that the pain of returning home always holds a little bittersweetness.
Linklater first hoped his 1993 film would push back against sentimentality and nostalgia for high school and the 1970s, but the Austin filmmaker realized in the making of “Dazed” that the medium of film has the power to enrapture audiences and glamorize subjects regardless of authorial intent.
Maerz’s book, like the film it chronicles, also cannot help but be nostalgic. Such is the place that the film holds in the hearts and minds of many of its cast and crew, young people who would come to realize that their artistic lives and professional careers may never again be as innocent and full of promise as they were in that carefree summer of 1992 filming in Austin, Texas.
Here are 10 things readers might learn in reading “Alright, Alright, Alright”:
1. The characters are loosely based on fragments of personalities and anecdotes about people named Slater and Wooderson with whom Linklater attended high school, and Maerz goes behind the Pine Curtain for stories from Linklater’s high school classmates that will sound awfully familiar to viewers of the film.
2. A natural observer and “incessant note-taker,” according to a high school peer, Linklater says that one of his filmmaking heroes and one he models himself after is Francois Truffaut, whom Linklater describes as “obsessed with the notion of truthfulness — not necessarily that it happened to him but that it really happened to somebody.”
3. Both the characters of Mitch (played by Wiley Wiggins) and Randall “Pink” Floyd (portrayed by Jason London) operate as surrogates for Linklater, and like Floyd, Linklater was a high school quarterback. But Linklater left his Huntsville high school before his senior year to play baseball at Bellaire High School, and he led the city of Houston in batting his senior year.
4. Several young actors in “Dazed” went on to be massive stars (Ben Affleck, Matthew McConaughey, Renee Zellweger), but there were just as many eventual big names who were considered but passed on, including Claire Danes, Jared Leto, Mark Ruffalo, Vince Vaughn and Hilary Swank.
5. Many film lovers have heard a story that McConaughey was discovered by legendary casting director Don Phillips at the bar atop the Hyatt on Lady Bird Lake, but McConaughey was proactive. He got a tip from the bartender that the casting director was there, headed up to the bar and approached the hard-living Phillips himself. A raucous night ensued, and the rest is history.
6. McConaughey, who most realized almost immediately was destined for stardom, improvised the line that gives the book its title. And the actor, whose role kept expanding during filming, turned to the lessons learned from his father, who died just days into filming, for the film’s one-line life motto, “Just keep livin’.”
7. Stars Milla Jovovich (“Michelle”) and Shawn Andrews (“Pickford”) engaged in a borderline obsessive romance that caused a rift with cast and crew. Both ended up parting the film early and ended up with very limited roles in the film. Neither lent their voice to the book that features about 150 cast and crew members.
8. Linklater didn’t want the cast watching TV or consuming modern music, according to London, in order to get them in the spirit of the movie’s period. The director also gave the young stars mixtapes with ’70s music to help them build their characters and get a sense of the vibe.
9. Affleck (and his brother) purchased the 1969 Cadillac Sedan de Ville driven by Cole Hauser (“Benny”) in the film and still has it in his garage. The Oscar-winning filmmaker calls “Dazed” one of the most fulfilling creative experiences of his life. He has only two of his own movie posters up in his house — “Dazed and Confused” and “Argo,” for which he won the Oscar.
10. The book confirms Parker Posey is a force of nature. The indie queen improvised one of her most famous lines, “Wipe that face off your head, bitch!” from the mistranslation of a line in a college production of the Bertolt Brecht play “In the Jungle of Cities.”