The world keeps getting older, but the kids partying through a '70s Austin night in Richard Linklater's beloved 1993 comedy Dazed and Confused stay the same age. Melissa Maerz's oral history of Linklater's shaggy slice-of-life covers Dazed's scripting, casting, shooting, initial box-office failure and welcome ascension to canonical status. For the actors, making Dazed was a summer camp for up-and-comers, a mad season of drugs, crushes, hook-ups and reveling in their own promise--they believed they'd be stars after this. For Linklater, who kept detailed diaries, the shoot was a battle with producers, who didn't understand or support his vision.
Revealing and sometimes riotous interviews with cast, crew and Linklater's high school friends illuminate how Linklater and company captured so much true teen feeling in a movie that the studio, Universal, wanted to be a sex comedy. (Linklater recalls producers offering to bump up Dazed's minuscule budget if he would agree to shoot some nudity.) Like the film itself, Maerz's book boasts a laid-back, hang-out vibe, both innocent and foul-mouthed, as her interviewees dish, reminisce and occasionally contradict each other.
Alright also shares with Dazed a breakout performance from Matthew McConaughey. McConaughey's stories of landing and crafting the role of his cosmic Texas horndog creep mod are gratifyingly weird and longwinded. Still, for all the high spirits, and the film's eventual success, a sense of disappointment clouds Linklater's own feelings about it. He believes Dazed fails in one crucial way: he intended the film to expose the misery of the '70s, not its alluring chillness. --Alan Scherstuhl, freelance writer and editor