Alright, Alright, Alright Page 3
Richard Linklater: The prison wasn’t far from where our high school practice field was. If you jogged up a hill and went across a street, that’s where they do the executions. Real close to home. I wanna look through my varsity roster, because I know friends where it’s like, “That guy ended up on fucking death row. That guy is doing time. That guy is dead.”
Gary Price: At one point, many years later, Rick was working on a movie about a football team in a town like Huntsville, and I think one of the players ends up becoming a prison guard or something. He told me, “That could’ve been a possibility for my life if I hadn’t started making movies.”
Excerpt from Dazed and Confused
Seventh Draft, April 19, 1992
SHAVONNE
Do you ever think like, what’s the guy I’m going to marry doing right now?
KAYE
The guy you’re going to marry is probably just going to prison.
Lydia Headley: Rick had a stepdad who worked at the prison. I had friends whose dads were wardens. There was a “gotta control people” kind of perspective in Huntsville.
Richard Linklater: I had a series of male figures in my life—coaches, teachers, principals, and definitely stepfathers—who were just kind of in my face, fucking with me, and I wanted to be free of that. Like, god, how can I set up my life and not have somebody alpha-maling me?
Brett Davis: I think a lot about what shaped us at the time, and I think it’s military culture. In the ’70s, we had the benefit of not having to fight in Vietnam, but our teachers had most likely come out of the military. They had probably been in the Korean War, and that affected how they treated us. Sports were about: you don’t drink water during practice, you gut it out. And you got hazed, which had some military implication.
John Pease: I remember reading Roger Ebert’s review of Dazed and Confused, and he praised the film a great deal, but made the comment that the paddling did not seem realistic. He was wrong about that.
Keith Pickford: The principal actually paddled your behind when you had discipline problems. If you got caught fighting, you didn’t get expelled. You went down to the principal’s office and you got licks.
Terry Hoage: The principal had a little gorilla statue on his desk. You had to lean over and put your hands on the desk, and he would say, “Tell me if the gorilla blinks.”
Andy Slater: One of my nerd friends had a notebook of how many licks people got [by high school officials], and I had 80 in one year. It wasn’t like I was cursing the teacher out, or starting fights. It was mostly for having long hair, or not having my shirt tucked in, or having holes in my jeans.
Terry Hoage: Because licks were part of our school, it wasn’t so far-fetched for upperclassmen to be giving underclassmen licks, too.
Lydia Headley: We called it “freshmanizing.” It wasn’t called hazing.
Don Watson: In today’s world, it’s just physical abuse, but we had a safer name for it.
Jay Clements: Hazing is not just a Texas thing, but the paddling element, and the community acceptance of it, that’s what was unique.
Keith Pickford: I made a paddle in the woodshop. Guys would engrave their name in it and drill holes in it, so that when you swung the paddle, the wind gets to flow through it, and it would leave marks on the butt.
Excerpt from Dazed and Confused
Shooting Script, June 25, 1992
Out in the hallway, Benny proudly shows his board to Don as they start to walk down the hall.
BENNY
Check it out. I just drilled a series of small holes . . . to cut down on the wind resistance and create more of a sting on impact.
Katy Jelski: When Rick told me that guys hit each other’s asses with paddles when he was in high school, I said, “Isn’t that kind of homoerotic?” I thought I was pointing out the obvious to him, but he’s such a guy’s guy, he was totally taken aback. He’d never seen it that way. It was just a thing everybody did in his town.
Richard Linklater: I played on the varsity baseball team as a freshman, and there were a lot of seniors on the team. After practice one day, I was going to my car, and a guy comes over, and tells me one of my teammates wants to meet me at his car. And he gave me licks! A teammate!
I got invited to high school parties because I was friends with older guys. And they’re like, “Hey, were having a party at Thompson’s house Saturday night. Come on by.” And I’m like, “Older girls? Yeah, I’ll be there!” Word got out that I was at this party, and a bunch of them rounded me up and gave me licks. My butt was bruised that whole summer, off and on.
Keith Pickford: While the seniors were out strolling around in their cars looking for freshmen, they would tell them, “Air raid, freshmen!” And they had to hit the deck.
Kari Jones Mitchell: It was different for the girls. We had to “air raid,” but the girls were also saturated with the grossest things possible. We buried eggs for weeks to throw on our girls, to make them rotten so they stunk. I had one friend who could never eat Thousand Island dressing because the smell reminded her of that day. It was mustard, mayonnaise, ketchup, relish, cooking oil, oatmeal, flour, honey. And they poured it all over you. And the whole town came out to watch! It was a socially accepted rite of passage.
“Freshmanizing” in Huntsville, 1976.
Photography by Kari Jones Mitchell.
Julie Irvine Labauve: They made you push a penny on the concrete with your nose. Many times when you were pushing it, you’d scrape your nose on the concrete, so many of the girls had bleeding noses.
Kari Jones Mitchell: A senior girl would befriend a freshman girl as their “big sister.” If they were making you do embarrassing things, big sis could step in and pull you back, so you had somebody who’s got your back. Somebody put a condom on the end of my little sister’s nose. So I went over there and pulled it off.
Don Dollar: They made girls walk around with a pacifier, and made them propose to guys.
Julie Irvine Labauve: I had to propose to a guy named Carl, and he said, “What will you do for me?” The answer was always “Anything you want.”
Kari Jones Mitchell: You had to say the specifics of “What will you do for me?” Like, “I would do blow jobs and ‘in the butt.’” Some of the guys would drag it out and make you say the most disgusting things until they finally said yes, they’d marry you.
Excerpt from Dazed and Confused
Shooting Script, June 25, 1992
SHAVONNE
Propose to Mr. Dawson.
Freshman Girl #1 gets down on her knees.
FRESHMAN GIRL #1
Will you marry me?
DON (SMILING)
Well, I dunno . . . what’ll you give me?
FRESHMAN GIRL #1
Anything you want.
DON
Anything?
FRESHMAN GIRL #1
Anything
DON
Do you swallow or spit?
She’s not even sure what he’s talking about.
FRESHMAN GIRL #1
Uhh, whichever you like.
DON
Okay, I guess I’ll marry you.
Lydia Headley: All the freshmen, we went to a car wash to get cleaned up afterward. Then I went to my house, undressed in the backyard, and threw my clothes in the trash. I walked naked back to my house, and I didn’t even care. We spent the whole night consoling one another, washing each other’s hair, trying to get the motor oil out. We couldn’t get our hair clean, it was so oily.
I’ll be honest with you, the first time I saw Dazed and Confused I couldn’t watch it. I was a little angry that Rick had captured it so well. It was so personal, especially the scenes about the hazing of the girls. I knew it had been billed as a comedy, and I thought, “This is not funny, people!” It was so raw and so real for me.
Richard Linklater: Whenever you’re fighting for your physical safety, it’s traumatizing. It’s nothing like the abuse many other people have suffered, but I know there’s often a del
ay with abuse survivors. Twenty years later, you’re going, “Hey, wait a second. That was fucked up!” It takes a while, because so many of us are just trying to survive, so we repress all this stuff. But I did look back at the hazing and go, “What the fuck was that? That was sanctioned.”
We were the first class ever that took licks but didn’t dish them out. Because I was kind of a leader in high school, I said, “I’m not gonna give licks to any of these eighth graders, that’s fucking stupid.” So we didn’t do it. But I think the next class picked it back up.
John Pease: The year after I got out of high school, a girl got something in her eye that required hospitalization. That put an end to it.
Terry Hoage: Rick was the child of divorced parents, and because of that, he had the freedom to make his own choices about what was right and what was wrong. His mom couldn’t watch everything that he did.
Richard Linklater: My mom is kind of Mitch’s mom at the end of the movie, where she catches him coming home drunk. I came home drunk my freshman year and she was like, “Okay, I’m going to let you do that once, but if you start making a habit of this, I will start clamping down.”
I had a single mom who couldn’t keep up with me. Later, I wondered, “Would my life have been different if I had had a dad around the house, saying, ‘No’?”
Terry Hoage: Rick was really unafraid of authority.
Tricia Linklater: I’ve read that Nobel Prize winners typically have a strong mother and an absent father or a weak father. I think when there’s a vacuum of power, the sons tend to rise up and fill it. When there isn’t a man in the house, they do what they want.
Richard Linklater: I never saw it that way. I still saw my dad on weekends. But yeah, he wasn’t the one there, like, “Hey! Get your homework done.” The “manly” chores fell to me—mow the yard, take out the trash—but I was the youngest, and my older sisters say I didn’t do shit.
This anti-authority thing definitely kicked in for me around eighth grade. Up to that point, I was like, I’ll run for class office! I thought there was some carrot on a stick about doing everything right. Then that began to change when my California uncle came and lived with us for an extended stretch with radical ideas and lots of great music. And a lot of it had to do with who my mom was hanging out with. She had these radical friends who’d stay with us for a few months and then disappear, and then later you’d find out that they were with Students for a Democratic Society, and they’d just blown up a bridge in some other state. You see a little of that in Boyhood. Those people would bring these radical conversations to our dinner table. That must have meshed with a certain sensibility on my part.
Brett Davis: Rick is a very principled person. I think you saw that in the drug agreement that our football team had to sign. Rick was really good at football. He actually played quarterback on the junior varsity team. My freshman year, they hired a new football coach, Coach Clements. One of the first things he did was ask us to sign an agreement that we wouldn’t use drugs. That’s a perfect illustration of Rick’s principles. I’m probably like 99 percent of the people, like, “Oh, hell, just sign it and then let’s go party!” Not Rick.
Richard Linklater: I don’t remember a drug pledge at our school, but they had drug and alcohol pledges everywhere. At another school, they kicked six guys off the varsity baseball team because they had been at a party on Saturday night. That was yet another way to discipline these damn kids.
If you’re a nonconformist and an anti-authority person, it’s just kind of like, School’s not gonna be the key to my future.
Frances Robinson Snipes: I got the feeling that there was some kind of “mindless establishment” that Rick didn’t want any part of. I had a brand-new Camaro that my dad bought me, which was pretty hot stuff in 1978. And Rick said to me, “You stand for everything I despise.”
Brett Davis: Rick has a heart for people who are struggling, and a distaste for unearned wealth.
Richard Linklater: I’d seen my mom struggle financially. What I learned is, you don’t need all this shit to make you happy. Keep your costs low. Don’t have your first kid as a teenager. And don’t have three kids you need to support.
Tricia Linklater: Mom was a college professor, but money was tight at our house. She was paid barely anything, and she didn’t get paid over the summers, so she kept on doing odd jobs.
Richard Linklater: Growing up kind of poor, you see that it’s not a level playing field. You see injustice everywhere. I had no qualms about beating the system. I’d join the Columbia Record Club under assumed names and get all the records and not fulfill my obligation financially. I was like, fuck them!
Tony Olm: Sophomore or junior year, a bunch of us decided we liked playing poker. We met a couple times a month, usually at my house. Rick played sometimes, but he mostly hung out. He didn’t like losing money.
Richard Linklater: Hey, man, the Linklaters are Scottish, so they’re very frugal. It’s different than being cheap. Frugal is just spending money wisely. My poker buddies always accused me of being “nickel blackjack Rick.” But I didn’t have much money, so I wasn’t going to lose it playing cards.
Lydia Headley: In general, no one in Huntsville had a lot of money. You develop in your own mind the sense of poverty, and that you lack what others have, and you develop this sense of, “I’m different than everyone else.” I wonder if Rick has that same perception. I think it created a sense of a greater purpose for him than staying in Huntsville.
Brett Davis: There wasn’t a whole lot to do in Huntsville. You could go sit in the Piggly Wiggly parking lot and eat a 10-pound bag of ice for entertainment. We had to create our own activities.
Terry Hoage: Friday and Saturday night, you got in the car with your buddy and drove down to the Sonic. Right next to the Sonic was Little Italy Pizza, so you’d stop there. Get out. Talk to people. You’d hop back in the car. Get back on the road. Then head down to the Emporium, which was the place to play pool, and then head back to the Sonic.
Excerpt from Dazed and Confused
Seventh Draft, April 16, 1992
TONY
Aren’t we having fun now. The promised party long since cancelled, we’ve been condemned to driving around endlessly. The masturbatory cycle continues: through the Sonic, then by the Emporium where we don’t go in because we feel out of place, then back to the Sonic where we don’t ever actually stop.
Kari Jones Mitchell: The way Sonic was set up, you drove in one side, and there was parking, but that was the uncool side. You never parked on that side. You made the U around the building where all the food was prepared, and you came up the other side, and the number one parking space was the very last one closest to the street, so you could see everybody that drove by. If there wasn’t a spot on the cool side, you didn’t stop. The uncool side, that’s where the parents park.
When the bell rang at 3:30 at high school, everybody would race out to their cars and jump in, because you wanted to get a strategic parking space. This happened every afternoon.
Richard Linklater: A lot like the movie, I was always trying to fit in and be cool. By the time I hit freshman year of high school, I felt like, “Okay, it’s on.”
Tony Olm: Rick was the guy every guy wanted to hang out with and every girl wanted to date. He was across all social groups, too: the jocks, the preps, the kickers.
Don Watson: The kickers were the cowboy kind of people. The shitkickers.
Ethan Hawke: He loves the jocks and loves the geeks, he loves women and men, scientists and space cadets—he relates to them all. I’ve never heard him waste a second of his life disparaging anyone. This shows in his work. He loves people.
Shavonne Conroy: The only thing that didn’t seem real to me about Dazed and Confused was that there weren’t many black people in the movie. Our school was about half black, half white. But I guess Texas was still pretty segregated, even in the ’70s.
Brett Davis: Brown v. Board of Education was in 1954. Desegregation in Texas wa
s not an overnight process. Starting in September of 1966, African Americans were asked if they wanted to come over from the black school in Huntsville to the predominantly white school.
My dad was the principal, and he was put in charge of desegregation. We had to move out of our house because there were threats from white people who didn’t want to comingle with the African Americans, and threats from African Americans who didn’t want to comingle with the white people. On top of that, the NAACP and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee felt like the school board was stonewalling, so they came into town and organized protests where you had a cauldron of people blocking the town square. And then you toss the white extremists into the pot, and it was a very difficult time. The FBI, the Texas Rangers, everybody got on this because it became a real flashpoint.
My dad died during that period. He had a cerebral hemorrhage and collapsed on the football field in October of ’66. I don’t know whether that had to do with stress over desegregation or not. But by the time I started high school in ’74, white kids and African American kids were in the same school, but we didn’t socialize together.
Kari Jones Mitchell: We had a separate black and a white homecoming court. We had black and white “Most Likely to . . .” This is ’76, ’77, ’78! That’s a thing people can’t wrap their head around.
Richard Linklater: On my football team, I was always the only white guy in the backfield, but after practice and on weekends, we’d go home to different neighborhoods and socialize separately. There was a little crossover, like the one black dude who would find it fun to hang out with the white boys. In my group, that was Leslie Warren. That’s why there’s one black guy in Dazed. The movie only really represents what “white Huntsville” was doing.
Leslie Warren: From kindergarten on, I was with white kids. We had [tracking] levels. All the way through school, we had level 1 through 13, and how high you were was based on how smart the teachers thought you were. I was always in level 12, so that’s how I became friends with those guys. There was about four or five black students who were always in level 12 or 13, and you knew that you were being shunned by the other black kids because they thought you were “acting white.” That’s how they described it. Me and one other guy may be the only ones that hung out with other races.