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  Kal Spelletich: By the time Slacker started taking off, I was completely broke. You know, literally shoplifting food. Living out of a van. I got a sublet shared apartment in San Francisco, and someone’s like, “Wow, man. That movie you were in is screening. Some big, fancy theater.” I was like, “What?” I don’t know anything about it!

  Then it was on the cover of the weekly San Francisco paper. And then, at that point, I was living with a guy, Seth Malice, who was also in the film, and I was like, “Seth, we should go out front of the theater and panhandle! Say, ‘Hey, we’re in the movie. Give us some money!’” We’re like, that would be a great performance piece! Of course, we never did it. We’re slackers.

  Jay Duplass: I would see Rick walking around in jeans and a T-shirt, eating crackers at the student union, because he didn’t have money. And it was a true a-ha! moment of, this guy made a movie! I could make movies, too. He wasn’t wearing a beret. He wasn’t the child of Francis Ford Coppola. He was just a dude.

  Wes Anderson: When we lived in Austin, Owen Wilson and I watched Slacker filming behind Mad Dog & Beans, where we used to have lunch. A few months after that, we saw the finished movie showing at the Dobie Theatre. The next year, we snuck our way onto the set of Dazed and Confused but were eventually asked to leave. I didn’t meet Rick until more years had passed, but he has always been there ahead of us, leading the way for us to follow.

  Kevin Smith: Amy Taubin had done an interview with Richard Linklater in the Village Voice that said, “Richard Linklater is the filmmaker most people want to be.” And it talked about how Slacker had been shown as a work in progress at the IFFM and how it had come back to the IFFM as a case study panel, because it had been picked up by Orion Classics by then. I always considered that article to be a road map, Richard Linklater’s coded message of, “This is how you do it.”

  I have that article framed. I still have it in my office! It’s in the same dopey-ass frame that I bought at Kmart when I was a kid. I took that with me when I went to film school in Vancouver and then dropped out and subsequently came home and started writing Clerks. It stayed above my desk wherever I was. It’s what I’d look at for inspiration.

  Jason Reitman: I grew up on big studio movies of the ’80s, and when I saw Slacker, I was like, “Oh, there’s a different kind of filmmaking. We can tell stories about ourselves that are small and quirky and interesting.” Because I think, in my head, an art film or an independent film was something just incomprehensible, and, frankly, boring. And Slacker was the first time I had thought of filmmakers as being punk rock.

  Richard Linklater: I had the indie film success to some degree. And one night, Gus Van Sant was in town, showing My Own Private Idaho, and one of his producers told me, “You’re going to say a lot about yourself in your next film. You’re going to tell everybody where you see yourself. Are you the weird indie guy, doing weird films? Or do you belong in the studio system?” And I took that to heart. If I was ever going to do that, now might be the right time.

  Chapter 4

  How to Pitch an Unpitchable Movie

  “That’s always the correct Hollywood order—money, money and then maybe a decent movie.”

  (left to right) Dazed producers Jim Jacks and Sean Daniel, with Richard Linklater and script supervisor Katy Jelski.

  Photography by Anthony Rapp.

  Linklater released Slacker at the ideal cultural moment. The Sundance Film Festival was just emerging as a launching pad for a new style of American movie. In 1989, Steven Soderbergh’s debut, Sex, Lies, and Videotape, had taken home an Audience Award, landed a deal with Miramax, and grossed $25 million. Its budget was $1.2 million. The moment marked what journalist Peter Biskind called “the big bang of the modern indie film movement.” Suddenly, there was an actual market for films that existed outside the mainstream.

  By 1991, the festival was starting to change the way independent films were sold. “It was an incredible year,” says Making Dazed director Kahane Cooperman, who was there with her own short film. “Slacker was there. Paris Is Burning was there. Hal Hartley’s Trust was there, and so was Todd Haynes’s Poison. Alexander Payne had a short film called The Passion of Martin.” Of the 16 dramatic films selected for the Grand Jury Prize competition, about half were released. “The indie film scene was finally picking up steam,” says Cooperman, “and there was a lot of buzz around Slacker.”

  Jim Jacks, a VP of production and acquisitions at Universal Pictures, saw Linklater’s film at the festival. Jacks was thirteen years older than Linklater and had an industrial engineering degree from Carnegie Mellon. He was hardly a hipster, and he later admitted he didn’t totally get Slacker. But something about it stuck with him. It made him laugh.

  From Sundance, Jacks called his colleague Sean Daniel, a second cousin of Steven Spielberg who had worked for five years as production president at Universal. Jacks and Daniel were starting a production company, Alphaville Films, which would have an exclusive production and distribution deal with Universal, and they were searching for their first project. Jacks had broken into the industry at Circle Films in Washington, D.C., where he had executive-produced the Coen brothers’ Raising Arizona. He’d come to Universal with the remit of launching new filmmakers. He’d worked with Sam Raimi (Darkman) and Spike Lee (Do the Right Thing, Jungle Fever), and now he wanted to work with Linklater.

  The two producers thought they could get Universal to finance Linklater’s next film for somewhere around $6 million—not a huge risk for a studio, but a significant boost for a filmmaker whose previous film was made for $23,000. They sent Linklater a first-class ticket from Austin to Los Angeles—the only first-class flight Linklater had ever taken in his life. “I didn’t even know how to put the tray up,” he later admitted.

  Jacks put him up at Chateau Marmont, the legendary hotel where Old Hollywood royalty often stayed, and sent a limo to take Linklater around town. Such luxuries weren’t really Linklater’s style, but when he met Jacks, he thought they might work well together. “Jim looks the exact opposite of what I thought a Hollywood executive would look like. He’s large, no tie, not well-dressed—my kind of guy,” Linklater wrote in “Dazed by Days,” a month-by-month diary that chronicled his experience making Dazed. (It was published in the Austin Chronicle in 1993.)

  Jacks and Daniel were just as excited about the idea of a partnership. “They seem to really like the project and think it will be fun,” Linklater wrote in the diary. “But why do so many of the movies that come out of this system suck so bad? I’ll find out along the way.”

  Richard Linklater: I never wanted to work on the fringes of the industry. You hear about these directors who work their way up from being a PA [production assistant], but I thought, heaven forbid I become a good editor or something. I’d never get my own films made! By the time I was doing it, the path was much more open to make your own weird indie film, and then go make a low-budget studio film after that. I was born at the right time.

  Russell Schwartz: American independent cinema had started really booming in the mid-’80s. We had Spike Lee’s first movie, She’s Gotta Have It. We had Luc Besson’s first movie, Subway. Kiss of the Spider Woman was a big movie. There was a whole birth of young filmmakers that were starting to come out, and all of a sudden, they became big award contenders. People started realizing film festivals might be the way to go to get your independent movie out there. I think Sundance had a lot to do with that, particularly in the late ’80s and early ’90s. It became a place where filmmakers would aspire to be.

  John Pierson: There was a modest way to prove yourself as you moved up the ladder into the studio world. You had to take a leap of faith when you gave Bryan Singer the money to go from his little Sundance film [Public Access] to The Usual Suspects, or Spike from She’s Gotta Have It to School Daze, or Rick from Slacker to Dazed and Confused. Those were still tremendous leaps, but it wasn’t like, “Here’s a hundred million.” And Jim Jacks was a hero for giving numerous people their first
studio chance after they’d made their mark independently or at Sundance. Jim had a long trail of those $6-million-dollar-type second features that marked the true beginning of some really impressive, sustained careers.

  Jim Jacks: What happened with Dazed was, I was talking to a good friend of mine, Gary Arnold, who was a film critic for the Washington Times, and he mentioned that he had met Rick.

  Gary Arnold: Rick had been on a promotional tour for Slacker, and I interviewed him. I asked if he had any projects brewing, and the first thing he mentioned was the concept that became Dazed and Confused. That little bit of history is on tape.

  TRANSCRIPT FROM RICHARD LINKLATER’S INTERVIEW WITH GARY ARNOLD

  August 8, 1991

  Richard Linklater: It all takes place in one night, like the last day of school. And the music’s right, but I kind of want to capture the moment-to-moment reality of being a teenager. Everything’s a big deal. It’s like junior high kids going into high school and juniors becoming seniors in high school; there’s a lot of bullshit going on. This is kind of what I remember of this high school I went to. You know, give teenagers a little room, that they’re not all stupid, that there’s a lot of thought going on there, a lot of urgency. It’s all in your mind, too. Your mind’s about to explode but you’re kind of stuck in the same town, you live with your parents; it’s just all the oppressiveness of that environment, but you kind of have to create your own environment, too.

  Kahane Cooperman: He also had a movie about guys working a drywall job, and he was working on an adaptation of a [Knut Hamsun] novel, Hunger, and he’d always wanted to do a baseball movie. There was always other stuff brewing.

  John Pierson: Whenever you’re coming off a festival success, you’re always told to have that next thing ready to pitch to people. And if you’ve got a whole script for it, better yet. Dazed had a pretty commercial sound to it—or potential commercial sound to it. If Rick had brought in Before Sunrise, they would have not done that. That’s clear.

  Richard Linklater: Within a week of being interviewed by Gary Arnold, maybe even days, I got a call from Jim Jacks. He was like, “I saw your movie Slacker at Sundance. I thought it was charming, but . . .” He said Slacker was a weird, arty film, but the one I’d told Gary I wanted to do next sounded like it could be a “real movie.” So that started that relationship of Jim trying to short-rope me up into more commercial thinking.

  I never had any bias against the studio world. In my ideal world, I’d be like Spike Lee: you make your $6 million film, it does great, and then you make more, and the budget goes up a little. I wanted a rich benefactor!

  Jason Davids Scott: Jim was the “studio guy,” even though he worked independently. He looked like Michael Moore, but way more schlubby. He was a portly guy with glasses. Generally a little uptight.

  Richard Linklater: He was a card-carrying nerd with all the usual tropes. He would wear the same shirts, the same pants, every single day. Someone saw his closet once, and it was all the same shirt, just a bunch of them.

  John Cameron: Jim was a larger-than-life character in Hollywood. He was quirky and loud and a super-messy eater, but it was because he was talking the whole time about movies. He could be crazy and irritating, but the number one fundamental essence of Jim was that he loved movies.

  Nina Jacobson: I worked under Jim Jacks at Universal. I have always done well working with prickly men, and I was the only junior executive who could tolerate his eccentricities. One thing he loved to do was to recite large chunks of dialogue from movies. By memory. Verbatim.

  Richard Linklater: Quentin Tarantino says the guy in Inglourious Basterds—the German who loves films so much—was based on something I said about Jim. I said, “How can you hate a guy who loves movies so much?” And Quentin made that into a thought about a Nazi.

  Sean Daniel: Nobody except Jim spent all weekend, every weekend, at the movie theater, sitting in that same seat, down on the right. Every single Friday, Saturday, and Sunday! In the same seat! To watch every movie opening that weekend!

  Nina Jacobson: He was the type of executive that honestly doesn’t exist anymore. It was a very different time at Universal. There was no Searchlight or Focus or anything like that for indie films, so you had a major studio making a variety of movies, including these very indie movies. Universal wouldn’t have made those indie movies without a relentless figure like Jim Jacks pushing for them. He was a bull in a china shop.

  Russell Schwartz: Jim was the auteur-driven producer. Sean was the commercial guy. That’s why they probably did so well together.

  Richard Linklater: Jim was emotional and Sean was practical. So they were a good partnership.

  Sean Daniel: When I was an executive at Universal, I was in charge of a number of movies that were part of what became defined as “youth culture”: Animal House, Sixteen Candles, Breakfast Club, Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Because I’d been an executive for so long and president for five years, Jim and I had a deal with Universal that allowed us to operate somewhat independently with the studio’s funds. We had a development fund. So we said, “We want this guy Richard Linklater to come to L.A.”

  Richard Linklater: I wrote about our first meeting in my diary.

  Excerpt from Richard Linklater’s “Dazed by Days” Diary

  Los Angeles, September 1991

  The first-class ticket, the limo, the Chateau Marmont . . .

  I’m having lunch at the Universal dining room with Jim Jacks. We’re going to have a more official meeting with more people later but, for now, we’re just shooting the shit . . .

  “This sounds like it could be fairly low-budget, like eight or so?”

  That’s millions. “Yeah, it shouldn’t have to cost more than that,” I say nonchalantly.

  “That’s good. At that price the studio can’t really lose money, but (glancing around the plush surroundings) the studio isn’t in the business of breaking even. Anyway, can’t wait to hear your pitch.”

  Uh-oh. My pitch.

  Of course it’s Hollywood—they’re expecting me to hop up on the desk, get all serious, squint my eyes and peer through the rectangular movie screen ratio I’ve formed when I put my thumbs to my index fingers and then declare, “I see . . .” I can talk forever about this film, I just can’t act like some goofy salesman or cheerleader. I end up not having to do too much of a song and dance as we just kind of discuss the story.

  We’re joined by producer Sean Daniel, who used to be head of production at Universal for many years (The Player position) and now has his own company within the studio. I sense what everyone wants to talk about is the film’s inherent commercial potential and then hear me tell them how much it means to me personally. That’s always the correct Hollywood order—money, money and then maybe a decent movie that might mean something to you too.

  We talk about teen movies we’ve liked—I soon have to drop Over the Edge, River’s Edge and certainly Los Olvidados from my list of favorite teen movies. Rule No. 1: never like or discuss in positive terms a movie that didn’t make lots of money. A great movie that, maybe, breaks even isn’t any good until a decade later. And never mention that you might like foreign films—you’re an immediate suspect. So, for now, it’s the obligatory American Graffiti/Fast Times at Ridgemont High/Breakfast Club references. I kind of like being in a genre. It’s working for me.

  These guys are probably about as cool as it gets here in this town and I have to admit I wasn’t looking forward to shopping the project around endlessly. They seem like guys who could get this thing pushed properly through a studio—they were (are) the studio. Sean talks about how they did Animal House when they were all very young and the studio just gave them a little money and said “What the hell, we don’t really get it, but go do it.”

  Something seems like it’s meant to be. We decide to proceed. I’ll get them a finished script as soon as I can.

  Richard Linklater: We had just had lunch when Jim introduced me to Tom Pollock, the head of Univers
al. We walked over to his table, and he was like, “Oh yeah, Slacker. That made some money, right?” I don’t think he’d seen it, but he recognized the title from looking at Variety.

  And I was like, “Yeah, it was a success! I’m Mr. Money. When you think of me, think of positive box office money!”

  Meeting the head of the studio was like seeing Jesus. Those were the days when you’d still see [former MCA chairman] Lew Wasserman walking by, and executives were like, “My job was to take Alfred Hitchcock out to lunch once a week.” It was New Hollywood, but it still had a whiff of Old Hollywood.

  Gosh, it would have been great to be a studio director in the ’40s and ’50s and have one of those careers, to be an A-list director at MGM or something. There was a handful of people—Vincente Minnelli, John Huston, Billy Wilder, Howard Hawks, Victor Fleming—who had these incredibly supported careers from the heyday of studios where you could be a studio man and get a lot of films made. But that was two generations past by the time my generation was coming of age. By the time I got there, you were on your own.

  The first script I sent to Jim was the 165-page version of Dazed, and he was like, “It’s long, but it’s good. Congratulations.”

  I got a check for $25,000 for the script. I owed a lot of money after Slacker. So when I got paid for Dazed, I wrote checks for $24,000 in one afternoon and paid off all the accumulated debt I owed. I had horrible credit. I wanted to get a loan to buy some equipment for Dazed, and I told the banker, “When you put it in my name, smoke’s going to come out of the machine, but I assure you, I don’t owe any money anymore. And I just got a contract for $6 million that will be running through your bank.”

  Jim Jacks: Rick had told me he wanted to make an American Graffiti for the ’70s. I thought that was a good idea.

  Sean Daniel: All of us were inspired by American Graffiti. Tom Pollock had been George Lucas’s lawyer, and was instrumental in getting the financing for American Graffiti as a young attorney.