Dazed and Confused

Richard Linklater's Slacker caught the eye of Universal producer Jim Jacks at Sundance in 1991, and Jacks got the studio to put up $6 million for whatever Linklater did next. What he wanted was a film that captured the moment-to-moment reality of being a teenager, drawn from his own adolescence in Huntsville, Texas, and set on one day in the spring of 1976. An early version took place entirely in a car with the characters listening to ZZ Top's Fandango!; the script that emerged followed a whole town's worth of kids instead, with several character names lifted from people he grew up with.

The cast was mostly undiscovered. Vince Vaughn nearly got the bully O'Bannion before Ben Affleck did, and Matthew McConaughey, then a film student, was not cast at all until he struck up a conversation with casting director Don Phillips in an Austin hotel bar. Wooderson was written as a small local part; McConaughey improvised his way into the film's breakout role. Shooting began in July 1992 with the young cast living in a downtown Austin hotel that, by Affleck's account, ran about as wild as the movie. Linklater made mixtapes for each character, and nearly a tenth of the budget was set aside for music rights; he bribed Jimmy Page with LaserDiscs for Led Zeppelin's "Rock and Roll," but Robert Plant said no.

Gramercy Pictures marketed it as a stoner comedy, over Linklater's objections, with rolling papers in the press kit and taglines like "see it with a bud." It opened on September 24, 1993, in 183 theaters and made under $8 million in North America. Linklater published his frustrated production diary in the Austin Chronicle.

Home video rescued it. After a laserdisc in January 1994 and VHS two months later, it became a fixture of dorm rooms and basements, a 1976 movie adopted wholesale by 90s teenagers. Quentin Tarantino put it on his 2002 Sight & Sound top ten, Entertainment Weekly ranked it the third-best high school movie ever, and Criterion gave it a two-disc edition in 2006. In 2016 Linklater made Everybody Wants Some!!, which he called its spiritual sequel.