Fun Facts, Observations and Quotes

Most of the movie was shot in sequence, so one of the last scenes committed to film were the football field 50-yard line scenes. 

Linklater is nothing if not a slave to accuracy.  The Aerosmith concert wasn’t made up for the script.  The band played the Sam Houston Coliseum in Houston, Texas on June 24^th, 1976, approximately 3.5 weeks after the last day of school.  As Wooderson tells Cynthia, “Hey, Aerosmith. Three weeks. Front row seats, babe.”

Linklater’s very first idea was 4 guys in a car cruising around listening to ZZ Top’s live album Fandango on 8-track on repeat, specifically “Thunderbird”, a song from 1961 by a band from Dallas named The Nightcaps (which was one of the first songs Stevie Ray Vaughan ever learned to play and was a staple of his sets in his early career).  The whole movie would be a view looking inside the car and looking out from the inside of the car, with various characters encountered along the way – pulling up next to people, going thru the drive-through, etc.

As this was Linklater’s first big studio movie, he wanted to use his people who were mostly locally based in Austin and had worked on Slacker.  Universal insisted that he use some outsiders (so they could keep control and monitor what was going on).  The tension between the Austin-based crew that had mostly worked on Slacker and the Hollywood folks that Universal brought in was palpable.

Actors turned down for roles in the movie:  Claire Danes as Sabrina, Ashley Judd tried for the role of Jodi, and Elizabeth Berkley, Mira Sorvino, Ron Livingston, Jon Favreau and Vince Vaughn all went out for various parts.  They liked Vaughn for the Benny role, but felt he looked too similar to Affleck and decided to go with Cole Hauser.  Renee Zellweger tried for Darla but Parker Posey was just too good.  Renee appears several times in the film (she walks across the screen right around the time Wooderson delivers the “get older” line, and holds the beer bong for Darla at the beer bust, but she has no lines).

Marissa Ribisi was 17 at the time and her legal guardian attended the set with her.  The weird part is that her legal guardian was actor Jason Lee, her boyfriend at the time.  He wasn’t acting yet, he was a pro skateboarder and 4 years older. 

Cole Hauser (Benny) is the son of veteran character actor Wings Hauser.

Linklater: “I still have PTSD when I think of how difficult the shoot was”

When shooting Mike’s fight with Clint, Adam Goldberg (Mike), spontaneously and even surprising himself, began to cry at the end of the scene.  He had listened to Neil Young’s “Cowgirl in the Sand” repeatedly to get ready in the trailer.  I assume it was the sonic vibe of the song and not the lyrics that inspired him.

I love the way Slater’s insane and bullshit soliloquy during the beer bust about George Washington ends with him saying that Martha made sure the weed was sold because they “had to make ends meet” and then quickly diverts to the “spooky stuff” on the dollar bill…”and it’s green, too!”

The word “man” is said 203 times and Mitch touches the bridge of his nose 42 times.

Although the geographical setting of the movie is never mentioned, it’s fairly clear that it’s set somewhere in the South (Robert E. Lee High School).  The only specific nod to Austin is the moontower.  No other city in America has a moontower except Austin.

Quentin Tarantino lists Dazed as one of his top 12 films of all time.  “It’s my favorite movie of the 90s.  Maybe the only movie that three different generations of college students have seen multiple times.”  While making Pulp Fiction, the only two movies Tarantino made an effort to see in the theaters were Carlito’s Way and Dazed and Confused.

The film did indeed get 2 thumbs up from Siskel and Ebert.  If you know who they are, great.  If you need to google it, go right ahead.  It also made Peter Travers’ 1993 year-end list of top 10 movies in Rolling Stone. 

“You know, the ’68 Democratic convention was probably the most bitchin’ time I ever had in my life. Hey guys, one more thing: This summer, when you’re being inundated by all the American bicentennial Fourth of July brouhaha, don’t forget what you’re celebrating, and that’s the fact that a bunch of slave-owning, aristocratic, white males didn’t want to pay their taxes.” – Ms. Stroud

Linklater’s “appearance” in the movie is audio only – he’s the voice that yells from a passing car in the scene right after Hirschfelder gets busted.

Linklater wanted Schlitz beer, but of course that didn’t fly with with the owners of Schlitz (Stroh’s at the time of filming), so generic/defunct labels were used.  The one seen most often is “Grand Prize” beer which is a defunct brand out of Houston, to the point that when Mitch goes into the Centennial to buy Melvin his 6-pack (which appears to be branded “Murphy’s”), there is a “Grand Prize” branded clock on the wall next to the door.  Also, the clerk that believes Mitch has just graduated high school also plays a liquor store clerk as a tribute/throwback in Linklater’s wonderful film Boyhood.  Probably his best line to the obviously pregnant woman is not the health advice he gives her, but the subtler “See you tomorrow night” that he ends the conversation with.  I also enjoy the vintage metal cans of Planter’s peanuts behind him in the shot.  Additionally, I love that when Melvin gives Mitch one of the beers from the six pack, the shot also shows the sign behind them on the wall in the Emporium declaring that “It is illegal for minors under the age of 18 to consume alcohol”.

Mitch: “Uh, Mr. Payne, sir, you know, eh, every second that you could let us out early would really 

increase our chances of survival.”

Mr. Payne: “It’s like our sergeant told us before one trip into the jungle – Men, 50 of you are leaving on a mission.  25 of you ain’t coming back.”

Linklater has a strong link to the game of baseball.  He played backup QB in grades 9-11 at Hunstville High School, and the team was ranked #1 in the state his junior year.  But he was better at baseball and the family moved to Bellaire, TX because the Bellaire baseball coach was well known.  He went on to play baseball at Sam Houston State University starting in 1980 (ask me about his “spiritual successor” to Dazed, titled Everybody Wants Some, based on this time in his life).  Linklater also made a film in 2009, Inning By Inning: A Portrait of a Coach, look inside the world of University of Texas baseball coach Augie Garrido, the winningest coach in NCAA Division I history in any sport.

Linklater obviously wrote the character of Mitch with himself in mind, and incorporated baseball into the script.  The producers asked Wiley Wiggins if he could play baseball convincingly, and Wiley said yes because he wanted the part.  In reality, Wiley had never thrown a baseball in his life, and had never even had a baseball glove on his hand.  They had to do a lot of work to make the baseball scenes convincing.

Linklater on Wooderson’s famous line about high school girls: “It concerns me that I could write such a line.”

Anthony Rapp: "Honestly, when I was first auditioning and reading the script, it was hard to tell exactly what it was going to be," he said. "It's a film that's so much about the quiet moments between people, that slice of life, so it's not exactly like an action-packed screenplay. I couldn't get a real sense of what it was. … Then when we were in rehearsal, the way that all of those textures came together, then I'm like, 'Oh my God, I love this.' And then that came through onscreen when I saw the film. So, it was an evolution of falling in love with it. At first, I was just happy to do anything, and then it turned into something -- and I'm not just saying this because I'm here tonight -- but it is the film that I'm the most proud of being a part of."

The older man that approaches the car with the gun at Ballard’s Grab N Go over the smashed mailbox is actually Fred Lerner, the stunt coordinator for the film.  Fred had a long list of credits and performed stunts on Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Dirty Harry, The Towering Inferno, Smokey and the Bandit, E.T., TRON, Beetlejuice, Die Hard, Total Recall, and The Rock.

Linklater wanted the drive-in food establishment to be Sonic, which is what he experienced back in the day in Huntsville, TX.  But again, Sonic corporate would not approve and they went with the local establishment, The Top Notch (a lot cooler, actually).  Only one Top Notch ever existed, but they treat it like a franchise in the film because Tony says, “I can’t believe I’m doing this, I swore I’d never come to a Top Notch”.

Linklater:  "There was a guy who died, and this old perv had a tape that looped Wiley getting spanked/paddled. It was just creepy, creepy, creepy. And that's the only time I'll say that aloud!"

Linklater on the opening scene: "This idea I got when I was in a dentist chair. I was under Nitrous Oxide. These two ideas, the Aerosmith song and slow motion GTO shot, they just popped into my head under drugs. Legal drugs. ... The opening song, 'Sweet Emotion,' was like $100,000. Four times the budget of my previous movie, eclipsed in the first 30 seconds."

Goldberg (Mike), Katt (Clint), McConaughey, Rory Cochrane (Slater), and Cole Hauser (Benny) were all living in LA as aspiring actors when the film was released, and they often hung out and went to see the movie during its theatrical release.  Adam Goldberg: “We showed up for a screening at the Beverly Center.  We were the only people in there and we were smoking and drinking beer.  It was just like we couldn’t get enough of it.  And I think that goes for everybody (in the cast).  We were talking about it for the entire year that it took to come out.” 

McConaughey has made his appearance in this film into a cottage industry and part of his persona.  His charity is called the “Just Keep Living Foundation”.  In his Oscars acceptance speech, he snuck in “Alright, alright, alright.”  He resumed the role of Wooderson (visually, no speaking) in a music video from 2012.  In November 2019, when he joined Instagram for his 50th birthday, he posted a video featuring a Just Keep Livin hat AND shirt, and he mutters to himself "Do I have an Instagram?  It would be a lot cooler if I did...but guess what, it's now a lot cooler because I do."

Catherine Morris played Julie, Mitch’s sophomore “older woman”, but she was actually an Assistant Casting Director on the movie and had to be convinced to take the part.

Pickford: “Don, give the beer back man!”

Don: “I paid for the beer, man”

Linklater: “As for the clothing, that was even easier to acquire - it's only sixteen years in the future (when we shot). Texas is way behind the times. We could go to stores in East and West Texas and pull the stuff on the rack. A lot of the clothing was brand new and just sitting there forever. It’s the advantage of living in a backward place."

Linklater was obsessed with the music for the film.  For a moment, he had considered using Thin Lizzy’s “Cowboy Song” over the closing credits, “but that song didn’t come out until July 1976, so I didn’t use it” since the film’s set on May 28^th, 1976.

Linklater gave mix tapes (following the same rule of nothing after May 1976) designed for each character to the respective actors as preparation for the film.  Adam Goldberg: “My mix tapes? I always took umbrage with them. I was a gigantic Neil Young fan at the time, and I was getting ELO and Foghat?”

Linklater: “I wanted them to own their characters, so I gave them music to listen to. Cynthia, you’re listening to Joni Mitchell and Carole King, but Simone, you’re listening to KC and the Sunshine Band.”  After the cast arrived in Austin, he asked them not to listen to any music that wasn’t specific to the period.  The crew even delved into this, playing period correct music while setting up and building sets. 

Ribisi: “Cynthia was supposed to have a huge crush on Tony, but in real life, I just didn’t. When it came down to shooting, Rick was like, ‘I need to find another guy for Cynthia. Maybe Wooderson?’ I thought, ‘Oh, this is genius.’ He’s everything she’s against. She’s this girl with a future, kind of preachy, and suddenly she’s into this guy who only likes high school chicks. She’s so smitten she can’t speak.”

Lee Daniel, Director of Photography on many Linklater movies, came up with the idea for the FAH-Q on O’Bannion’s paddle.  Lee was also a focal point of the tension between Linklater’s Austin crew and the Universal people.  To this day, Producer James Jacks feels that Daniel was lucky to get the job and that if it had been up to him he would’ve hired someone more experienced.  But then admits, “maybe the film would have lost its energy.”  Uh, yeah, I think so.

Affleck had to be convinced to play the part of O’Bannion.  “It was the bad guy part.  I didn’t want to play the bad guy.  But I figured I’d do it anyway.”

As mentioned previously, rehearsals started in June 1992 and principal photography started in July, ending sometime during the last 2 weeks of August.  In mid-June he sent a letter to the cast encouraging experimentation and improvisation, saying “if the final movie is 100% word-for-word what’s in the script, it will be a massive underachievement.”  He encouraged the actors to work up different angles on scenes and to bring it to him.  If he liked it, he would send out the B crew to shoot it.  Affleck: “He was true to his word.  I would write stuff, and it appeared in the movie.  I felt empowered to have a voice in that, and it gave me the notion that you could make movies that way.”  Examples of this in action:  it was 2 weeks into shooting when, as mentioned above, he walked up to Marissa Ribisi (Cynthia) and said, “You know, I really want to find a love interest for Cynthia.”  The entire hood open gearhead talk scene between Wooderson and Clint was mostly improvised.  Working collaboratively and in the moment helped this film immensely.

Darla: “Lick me, all of you!”

The entire cast was put up in the Radisson (formerly the Sheraton Crest Hotel), at First Street and Congress Ave. (First St is now named Cesar Chavez St).  This is right in the middle of downtown Austin and next to Lady Bird Lake and the Congress Ave Bridge.  It's actually right across the river from the Hyatt where McConaughey and Don Phillips met.  Due to the downtown college atmosphere, the cast began to fall into cliques that mirrored the movie.  Jason London: “…it was very true that I was very much like Pink and hung out with every single group at different times.”

You can thank Editor Sandra Adair for the movie’s focus on Mitch.  Linklater’s script mostly focused on Pink, but as Adair says, “If it was in the script it didn’t reveal itself the way it did when Wiley Wiggins took on the character.”  Wiggins’s memorable performance drew the editor’s storyline away from Pink to give more time to Mitch in a very balanced way. 

Regarding editing and deleted scenes, I can only comment from my perspective.  I watched this movie many times before they released the deleted scenes.  As I watched the deleted scenes for the first time, I immediately felt that the editor did an amazing job, because not one of them is good enough to either add to the story or to supersede any final cut footage.  I’ve watched them more than once, too, and my opinion remains the same. 

Although “Slow Ride” is used twice in the film and got the closing credits slot once Zeppelin’s “Rock and Roll” was unobtainable, “Sweet Emotion”, “Free Ride” and “Low Rider” are my picks for the best songs in the movie.  “Sweet Emotion” in the opening credits provides so many iconic shots to start this movie.  “Free Ride” starts the transition from the end of the school day into the evening.  And with “Low Rider”, Linklater flips and bounces from shot to shot and clique to clique as they prepare for the night out during this song like no other portion of the film.  It’s the Randall “Pink” Floyd of the soundtrack, it fits in with everyone getting ready for the evening and starting to cruise.  Honorable mention:  a song I didn’t even know before I watched the film, “Hurricane” by Bob Dylan.  That the song playing in the background while Pink, Wooderson and Mitch make their slo-mo entrance into the Emporium elevates the scene to new heights. 

Three older classmates of Linklater’s at Huntsville High School in Texas, Bobby Wooderson, Andy Slater, and Richard Floyd, filed a defamation suit against Linklater and Paramount in 2004, claiming that they were the basis of three central characters in the film, and that the filmmaker didn’t get their permission to use their likenesses/names. Linklater also mentions in the commentary track that he had a friend named Tony who really had the Lincoln dream, so it seems many character names were based on his real schoolmates.  However, no character in the film has the same name as anyone that attended school with Linklater. 

For instance, the character of Kevin Pickford was originally Keith Pickford, but changed due to the fact that Keith Pickford was/is a real person in Linklater’s Texas high school life.  Same deal for Bobby Wooderson changing to David Wooderson, etc.  For this reason, the lawsuit from Wooderson, Slater and Floyd was thrown out of court almost immediately.

Per Linklater: “The head of Universal at the time of release called the movie 'the single most socially irresponsible movie in the history of Universal.’"

During the filming of Dazed and Confused in Texas, actress Milla Jovovich (Michelle) and actor Shawn Andrews (Kevin Pickford) eloped to Las Vegas and tied the knot. Pickford was 21 at the time, but since Jovovich was only 16, her mother had the marriage annulled.

At one point director Richard Linklater had to break up a fight between Jason London and Shawn Andrews. Thus, the ending of the film was eventually changed, as it was meant to feature Pickford instead of Wooderson (McConaughey) smoking weed with the group on the 50-yard-line. As mentioned before the film was shot mostly chronologically, so this is why the little dialogue that exists between the characters of Floyd and Pickford is found in the first 1/3 of the film.

The statues that Michelle (Milla Jovovich) paints over with KISS makeup were originally supposed to play a bigger role in the film. The statues were to be shown being stolen by Pink & Co. from in front of the local bank, before eventually being confiscated by the cops (as seen in the deleted scenes). KISS frontman Gene Simmons reportedly purchased the statues to add to his collection well after the movie wrapped, and later sold them at Butterfield’s KISS auction in 2000 for $6,000.  In the original script, instead of Revolutionary-era statues from a bank, it was a Ronald McDonald statue from a McDonald’s drive through, but again they wouldn’t clear the use of their trademark so they had to re-conceptualize to the bank motif.  And yes, in real life Linklater had a friend who helped steal a Ronald from the drive through and painted it with KISS makeup.

Life imitates art: Michelle Burke (Jodi, Mitch’s older sister who is interested in Pink but a bit hesitant because he has a girlfriend): “At the 10-year reunion, I got completely blitzed. I’m not a big drinker, but I was doing shots and I said to Jason, ‘I’m curious, are you still as good a kisser as you used to be? Why don’t you show me?’ Which didn’t go over very well with his wife.”

Anthony Rapp (Tony): “I feel like the film has tremendous depth to it.”

At one point post-2003 but before 2011, Wiley Wiggins was working phone tech support for Apple’s Final Cut Pro software (Wiley has done a lot of different work in the tech industry, writing apps and programs, etc.).  He gets a call from a user named Jason London.  He thinks well, this name is just a coincidence.  At the same time, it actually is THE Jason London and when he gets assigned a call agent named Wiley, he’s like huh, must be a coincidence.  Then Jason hears the voice, and Wiley hears Jason’s voice, and Wiley says, “Are you Jason London from Dazed and Confused?” and Jason says yeah and Wiley says, “Hey, it’s Wiley”.  Totally 100% true.  Jason tells this story with zero hesitation, while Wiley corroborated it for the first (and possibly only time) in a 2011 interview where he stated, “I used to work at Apple doing Final Cut Pro support, and I took a support call from Jason London once—which was really humiliating. He’s like, ‘You’re a Mac Genius now?’ and I’m like, ‘No, I’m a Pro apps support specialist, Jason. It’s very different. I don’t have to wear a uniform.’ ”

“Not to worry, there’s a new fiesta in the making…” – David Wooderson

Mitch (reminding me of me in High School):

Slater to Mitch: “You cool man?”

Mitch responding: “Like how?”

Yes, Slater is always wearing that hat.  Why?  Because it’s actually a hat/wig, that hair is fake.

Slater: “Check you later!”

The fact that Mitch’s 70s shirt blends in perfectly, even camouflages, into the blanket he and Julie are lying on in the pre-sunrise dawn scene, is just amazing to me.

Goldberg: “Phenomenon? The day the movie opened, I remember going to a bar, and somebody started talking to me about that film, and that has been happening constantly ever since then.”

Dazed cast (plus Linklater) who worked together in the years after the movie:

Adams/Burke/Posey in The Coneheads

Adams/Posey in Sleep With Me

Adams/Powell in Bunny Whipped

Cochrane/Zellweger in Empire Records

Cochrane/Affleck in Argo

Cochrane/McConaughey in White Boy Rick

Cochrane/Wiggins/Zellweger in Love and a .45

Goldberg/Hauser in Higher Learning

Goldberg/McConaughey in EDtv

Goldberg/McConaughey in How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days

Goldberg/Rapp in A Beautiful Mind

Goldberg/Katt/Hauser/Linklater with Goldberg also as writer/director in Scotch and Milk

Goldberg (as writer/director) and Katt in I Love Your Work

Hauser/Affleck in Good Will Hunting

Hauser/Goldberg in Running with the Devil

Hauser/Adams in The Break-Up

Posey/Ribisi in Kicking and Screaming

Posey/Katt and Linklater (as writer/director) in SubUrbia

Wiggins/Goldberg/Katt and Linklater as writer/director in Waking Life

McConaughey and Linklater (as writer/director) in The Newton Boys

McConaughey and Katt in A Time To Kill

McConaughey and Linklater (as writer/director) in Bernie

Cochrane and Linklater (as writer/director) in A Scanner Darkly

Katt and Linklater (as director) in School of Rock

Also, Hauser/Affleck/Rapp were all in School Ties in 1992, prior to Dazed.  If the studio had their way and cast another School Ties actor, Brendan Fraser as Pink, then it would've been Hauser/Affleck/Rapp/Fraser.  Joey Lauren Adams also came kinda close to having another movie on this list, Mallrats, where she starred with Jeremy London, Jason London's twin brother.

Linklater: “There’ll always be a new generation of kids who want to discover their pop-culture history. When I was in high school, it was American Graffiti, Happy Days, and Sha Na Na. We were finding the fluffy, fun stuff in the fifties, an era we had missed out on. I wanted to rub everybody’s noses in the seventies a little bit. I tried to be anti-nostalgic, but the power of movies is that when you depict something, you create instant nostalgia. My point was that some things never change in teenagerland. I wanted to tell a story about what I remembered of being a teen, which was driving around and looking for something to do. I’m kind of amazed I got to make it.”