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  I never got the sense that racism against African Americans was a bigger issue in Huntsville when I was growing up, because all my friends were Caucasian. But the more I think about it over the years, I’ll remember going to a store and not being waited on for 10, 15 minutes. You didn’t see it back then, but now you think, Hmmm.

  Richard Linklater: In the very early drafts, I had a subplot where this African American guy comes out with them, but he doesn’t want his brother to see him hanging out with a bunch of white guys.

  Excerpt from Dazed and Confused

  Draft as of February 20, 1992

  The car pulls up near a black nightclub called Elizabeth’s Soul Power.

  TONY

  I can’t believe you’re bailing out on us, Royce. Just think of how you could be cruising around endlessly all night from the Sonic to the Emporium back to the Sonic and then to the Emporium . . .

  ROYCE

  A little too WASP-y for my taste . . . Drop me off here, man.

  Tony keeps driving and is soon right in front of the club. The guys milling around in front check out this car of white people. Royce ducks down a little.

  ROYCE

  Shit. Pull up farther.

  Tony finally snaps to Royce’s dilemma and pulls up a ways.

  TONY

  Oh . . .

  Royce is a bit amused at all this by the time he gets out of the car.

  ROYCE

  What are you trying to do, get me killed?

  He walks away toward the club.

  Leslie Warren: I did have a brother who was a senior when I was a freshman. Outside of school, you didn’t see black kids and white kids hanging out together much. There was the Emporium, and then there was another pool hall called Pete’s. My brother would hang out at Pete’s. I think Rick and those guys hung out at the Emporium.

  Richard Linklater: My freshman year, I was like, “I wanna be wherever the party is going on.” There were two categories: Are you cool or not? There was never pressure to smoke pot. It was just, are you cool or not? And when I started learning that, like, the cool athlete I look up to smokes pot? Well, fuck! It was okay for me to do it.

  My football coach did pull me aside once, like, “We’ve had some reports of your indulging in marijuana.” And I was like, “Me? More than anybody? Come on, I’m just a weekend toker! In the off-season!”

  Andy Slater: There was pot everywhere. There were several big drug dealers in town. There was a pool hall that was the adult version of the Emporium, and that’s where you went for your serious drugs. Woody Harrelson’s dad, Charles Harrelson, was involved with some people in Huntsville, and he ended up in some bullshit where he killed a judge. We had our own little East Texas mafia going on.

  Keith Pickford: A lot of people grew weed, because it was East Texas and there was a lot of woods and it’s the right climate.

  Matthew McConaughey: East Texas is behind a big thicket in the piney woods. They call it the Pine Curtain. It had many names that mean people don’t get out from behind it.

  Jay Clements: Early in high school, a student was interviewed in the local paper, and they said that 75 percent of the student body at Huntsville High School was either using or abusing drugs or alcohol. It became a big controversy, as you can imagine. If you look back, statistically, they say drug use almost peaked in the ’70s. And it was happening in small towns, not just big cities.

  Don Watson: I don’t know how we got away with this, but one year, the school talent show was called “The Bong Show.” I mean obviously, we tried to convince the teachers that we were knocking off on The Gong Show, which was a popular TV show at the time. But surely the teachers weren’t that naïve.

  Richard “Pink” Floyd: I worked at the Emporium part-time. That was the place to obtain drugs.

  Don Watson: The Emporium was the center of the universe. This was before cell phones, before email, so if you wanted to know what was going on around town, you had to go to the Emporium. I think the soundtrack for Dazed and Confused came from the jukebox in the Emporium. I remember it playing Foghat’s “Slow Ride” and Bob Dylan’s “Hurricane.”

  Richard Linklater: Oh yeah, I walked into the Emporium more than one time with “Hurricane” blasting out of the jukebox. I have a story for every song in that movie. “Low Rider” was my CB radio handle in high school. I saw Ted Nugent in concert multiple times, in Houston, and he’d swing out on a vine, and he’d have some kind of animal tail, and it looked like he’d stepped out of The Flint-stones. I went to an Aerosmith concert in ’77 and they opened with “Sweet Emotion.” All of these songs were personal to me.

  Andy Slater: Next door to the Emporium was a head shop, and they sold beer.

  Brett Davis: The scene where they go into the convenience store, and Mitch is buying the beer? That’s hilarious, because the drinking age was 18 in 1976, and nobody really cared, so that was accurate.

  Excerpt from Dazed and Confused

  Seventh Draft, April 16, 1992

  CLERK

  You’re 18, right?

  MITCH (QUICKLY)

  Oh yeah, just graduated.

  The clerk bags it up and gives him change.

  Richard Linklater: That was based on me buying beer for the first time my freshman year in high school. A guy at the Emporium gave me five bucks and said, “Hey, go get me a six-pack.” And I was like, “Could I do that?” They were selling to minors and they didn’t even care.

  Andy Slater: Everybody showed up at the Emporium on Friday, and then we’d pool our money and buy a keg or two or three right next door.

  Don Watson: You talked to people in the Emporium parking lot to find out where’s the beer bust. The movie used the words “beer bust,” which I thought was unique to Huntsville. Most people called them “keggers.”

  The beer bust was usually at the fire tower. We had a fire tower in Huntsville, not a moon tower. There are moon towers in Austin. That was Rick’s shout-out to Austin in the movie. The fire tower was out in the national forest, and it truly was a tower where the forest rangers would climb up into the crow’s nest at the top and spot wildfires.

  Andy Slater: The fire tower was a notorious hangout for high schoolers: a little box up in the air on four iron poles, way up above the tree line, and it had a spiral staircase that went all the way up to the top.

  Julie Irvine Labauve: This fire tower was probably 80 years old, and it hadn’t been repaired. We would dare each other to crawl up.

  Andy Slater: The structure was iron and the stairs were wood, so you had to climb up the iron poles and skip around the rotten stairs and stuff. It was a challenge to get up in it, but that’s what made it even more fun.

  Julie Irvine Labauve: We’d climb up and Ricky Floyd would tell me, “Watch out, there’s a board missing on this next step.” You didn’t see it. It was dark. I heard afterward that a couple fell through the slats, and they eventually took the fire tower down because of that.

  Transcript from Dazed and Confused

  Final Film, 1993

  MITCH

  Why’s it called a “moon tower” anyway?

  PINK

  I guess they just decided to put it up out here whenever they were buildin’ the power plant. Actually, it’s a good idea. I mean, you get a full moon out here every day of the year, you know?

  PICKFORD

  Yeah, but nothing’s ever been repaired, so this whole place could fall down at any time. So you’d better watch your step, junior. Whoa!

  SLATER

  This place used to be off-limits, man, ’cause some drunk freshman fell off. He went right down the middle, smacking his head on every beam, man. I hear it doesn’t hurt after the first couple though. Autopsy said he had one beer, man. How many did you have?

  MITCH

  Four.

  SLATER

  You’re dead, man. You’re so dead.

  Don Watson: You went to the fire tower to get drunk, get laid, or get in a fight. I knew a guy who had a Les Paul, which i
s a big, heavy solid-body guitar. At one of these beer busts, I’m hanging out with this guy. Next thing you know, some fight’s starting and he runs to his car, opens his trunk, and gets out his Les Paul. And I said, “Oh, you going to play music and calm everybody down?” He goes, “No. This is my bat!”

  Richard Linklater: It was a crazy, volatile time. In eighth grade, two of my classmates held up the principal at gunpoint after school, stole his car, and were arrested going 100 miles an hour down the highway. Shortly after, another couple of guys thoroughly vandalized the school and burned down a part of it. And there were a lot of fights in Huntsville. The principal called an assembly once because the fights on campus had gotten out of hand. He chastised the school, and he said, “The people who have been in the most fights this year are: first, white girls, then black girls, and then white guys, then black guys.” He actually listed the stats! And it wasn’t the order you might think. The girls were first.

  But the guys did it plenty, too. A guy had recently moved to town, and one of the overly aggressive tough guys, Johnny, was challenging him. We knew these guys were going to tangle, and before school one day, they were suddenly just tumbling down the auditorium stairs, going at each other. The new guy ended up on top of Johnny, just punching him in the face over and over again. It took a long time for someone to come and break it up. Some people were excited, because the bully was getting the shit beat out of him by the new guy in town. I think I modeled the fight in the movie after that one.

  Lydia Headley: Rick was an incessant notetaker. He was always writing stuff down. That’s how he sees life, sort of, “Oh, that’s a good story! I’m going to put that in something one day.”

  Richard Linklater: François Truffaut is one my heroes. There’s often him and two other screenwriters on his films, and he would send the other screenwriters out to do research, to get real stories that were relevant to the subject. He was obsessed with the notion of truthfulness—not necessarily that it had happened to him, but that it really happened to somebody. And I think I take a similar approach, to some degree. Anything’s fodder.

  Lydia Headley: He was always a good observer, because he was a bit of an outsider. There was a sense of, “I’m not a true Huntsvillian because I wasn’t born here.” He was smart, and funny, and easy to talk to, and good at sports, and most girls wanted to date him just because he was so cute. But he was also kind of quiet and reserved, difficult to get close to. He would date often, but he didn’t have long-term girlfriends.

  Richard Linklater: I had an undiagnosed attention deficit disorder. Not hyperactivity, but trouble concentrating on things I’m not totally into. Maybe that bled over into relationships with girlfriends. I had girls I dated on and off, but it was never sustained for lengthy periods. I was always drifting.

  Lydia Headley: You always got the sense that Rick wasn’t rooted in Huntsville. He was always on his way to somewhere else.

  Richard Linklater: My family moved to different schools a lot. It would be a Wednesday, and we’d pick up and move to a new school, midweek. We did that a few times. You see that in Boyhood, too. In Huntsville, it was all one school system, but every nine months, we’d still move to a new apartment, or new house. As soon as you settled in, put all the posters on your wall, and felt at home, it was like, “Oh, we’re moving.” So you go do it again.

  Looking back, my mom was probably undiagnosed bipolar. She had these brilliant qualities, but there was a fundamental instability there that kind of puts you on edge. I was probably looking for stable environments that I could control. And I was itching to get out of Huntsville.

  My dad lived in Houston, and he was zoned to Bellaire High School, which happened to have the best baseball program in the state. I was a good all-around athlete, but it was clear by then that baseball was my best sport. I was shorter than most of the other athletes at my school—I’m 5’9”—but I was fast, and I was known for stealing bases. One of my friends used to say, “If you got to first, we knew you’d already gotten to second.” The summer after junior year, I got a job in Houston and was playing on a very competitive summer league team, dating a cool girl from work, going to concerts and fun big city stuff. I was like, I’ll stay here, live with my dad for the first time since first grade, keep having fun, and, oh yeah, play on the best baseball team in the state, which had a fall program, so I was in heaven. I saw the opportunity and took it.

  Mike Goins: Heading into our senior year, Rick was going to be the starting quarterback for the football team. So think about how important that is in high school, and how central a figure he was. And for him to be able to say, “Nope, I’m going to go to Houston and play baseball instead.” That was something we marveled at.

  For the starting quarterback to quit the team, it was hard to get our minds around. Coach Clements was devastated. He was an offensive-minded football coach. Once he had good quarterback talent, he was able to take the team all the way to state and win the championship. So he might have seen Rick as a solid entry into the 1978 season. And then Rick just left.

  Richard Linklater: My heart was less and less in football, and Coach Clements knew it. I was always battling a dual loyalty between football and baseball. My allegiance was more to baseball, but Huntsville was a football town. Football was too serious. My friend and I would walk around making fun of it, going “Game face! Game face!” You’ve got coaches watching you all the time, keeping you in line.

  Excerpt from Dazed and Confused

  Shooting Script, June 25, 1992

  BENNY

  So tell me the truth: you’re not really thinking about quitting football. You’re just not into signing that pledge, right?

  PINK

  Maybe I’m not into any of it anymore.

  BENNY

  No one quits in their senior year. We’re going to kick ass this year, man—we got a shot at state. It’s what we’ve been working toward all these years. You gotta be part of it.

  PINK

  See, no one can comprehend someone quitting something they’re good at. If everyone says you are good at something and keeps patting you on the back, it’s like there’s a law you have to do that forever. But what if you DON’T LIKE doing what everyone thinks you’re so good at? See, whatever your parents, teachers, and everyone else wants you to do is usually wrong, it’s mediocre, because it’s usually what everybody else is doing.

  BENNY

  But you can’t quit. Because it ain’t just about you, it’s about us. You’d be fucking US over. Your little waste-o friends might think you’re cool, but the whole team and everybody else in this town will never forgive you.

  PINK

  You think I care what anyone in this town thinks?

  Lydia Headley: When Rick left, there were hard feelings in our group of friends. It was like, “Rick, you’re abandoning us! We’ve been together all this time. You’re not gonna graduate with us? How could you do that to us?”

  Richard Linklater: I just felt like I was kind of done with Huntsville at that time, and I ended up having a very memorable, crazy fun senior year in Houston. The bowling ball incident you see in Dazed? That happened in Houston that year. My senior year, I was driving, and my friend had a bowling ball he was carrying around and he just rolled down the window and flung it out, driving 60 miles an hour. It hit a curb and went like 40 feet in the air and disappeared into a neighborhood. I was like, “Holy shit!” And he’s just laughing. So it was like, okay, let’s see if we can find it. And it had gone through a car windshield. Like, we could’ve killed somebody.

  Another night, I was once again fucking around with a couple friends, busting mailboxes, and a guy came after us. He started chasing me. I was driving my friend’s Challenger, and I got in a dangerous car chase. He would peel out in front of me, and we were at a red light, and he’s like, trying to cut me off, vroom vroom. I’m like, I have to lose this guy. He either has a gun or he’s gonna try to hold us until the police come.

  He was behind me, so when
the light turned green, I somehow pulled in front of two other cars and went the other way. And he followed me! I was driving 100 miles an hour at one point, just trying to lose this fucker. He rammed us, and he made a dent in the back of the car. Eventually, we lost him, but we had to lie to my friend’s father because it was like, “Oh yeah, this dent was there, and we don’t know where it came from!”

  Keith Pickford: Rick was in Houston when he graduated in ’79. After high school, he came back to Huntsville and went to college at Sam Houston. He got a scholarship to play baseball, starting centerfielder, because he was a great player in high school.

  Richard Linklater: Oh, you want me to brag? I think I led the city of Houston in hitting that year.

  Keith Pickford: Then in his sophomore year, he had a heart murmur, and that was the end of baseball.

  Richard Linklater: It was called “atrial fibrillation.” Now they can correct it fairly quickly. Back then, they really didn’t have a cure for it. Even if I walked up a second flight of stairs, I would get lightheaded, much less running out to the outfield or running the bases. It was kind of an overnight thing, like, “Oh, you can’t run!” At that moment, I was craving more reading and writing time, and now I had it.

  Looking back, it was a good thing. You don’t grow up until you stop playing sports. You’re playing a kid’s game. You’re in a uniform. And the most toxic thing about it is, if the coaches are telling you how important this is, you can let a lot of other things slide, like thinking of what you’re going to do with your life.