399 - Slacker, United States, 1990. Dir. Richard Linklater.
Sometimes you tap into the zeitgeist.
Consider 1989. Polish Solidarity. The Fall of the Berlin Wall. Tiananmen Square. Havel in in Czechoslovakia. Ceausecu out in Romania. The Collapse of the Soviet Union. The Birth of Al Qaeda. The Dalai Lama wins the Peace Prize. The Heidi Chronicles (Wendy Wasserstein). The Joy Luck Club (Amy Tan). The Satanic Verses (Salman Rushdie). A Brief History of Time (Stephen Hawking).
James L. Brooks and Matt Groening debut an animated series entitled The Simpsons. Nancy Cartwright does the voice of the boy Bart Simpson (a role which she continues to this day, along with half a dozen fellow voice actors, logging 28 years, 635 episodes, and counting), and the character Bart becomes a national sensation and popularizes the term underachiever.
In a little over a year Douglas Coupland is going to publish Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, giving a generation a name they did not ask for and which they do not want.
In a couple years Cameron Crowe will come out with the film Singles, which looks at the Seattle grunge scene.
Louis Black has recently co-founded South By Southwest in Austin, Texas.
Austin, Texas.
An American mid-sized town with a university. Smart people in coffee shops. People with low-paying jobs, or no jobs, who read books and play in bands. Or write books and listen to bands. Or both.
Richard Linklater lives in Austin. He has grown up around here. Dreamed of playing football here. Dreamed of being a novelist here. Now he is going to make movies.
Slacker is technically his second film. His first was the 8mm It's Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books (1989).
Now he is up to 16mm. He has amassed $23,000 and a small crew. He asks Austin residents, mostly members of bands and a few academics, to join him. Swing by if you want. You can play the role. If not, we will get a grip to do it. People swing by on the way to work. They say some lines on camera and go on about their day. Louis Black joins them.
The finished product looks like an amateur film.
At the 25:18 mark the boom mic dips into the frame. This may be the only Criterion movie with a boom mic in the frame.
The sound has problems. You can hear when the voices shift from live to ADR (recorded in a studio) and back, and you can hear the changes in ambient sound (room tone).
The non-actors used in the film often do not fit their casting and are prone to give unconvincing performances.
The lighting is whatever is available--the sun or lights in the room. People's faces are splotchy and blotchy with light and shadow.
It violates many of the rules required to get a film accepted into a film festival.
And yet . . .
It made it into Sundance.
And was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize - Dramatic.
And got a nationwide theatrical release by Orion on a 35mm transfer print.
And grossed $1.2 million.
And the critics loved it.
And it helped launch the independent film renaissance of the 1990s. Just ask Kevin Smith.
And it launched Linklater's career.
Linklater captures conversations in one take without much intercutting.
He follows a character and lets that character speak. Then he follows the next character and then the next in a perpetual relay.
Roger Ebert compares this structure to Luis Bunuel's The Phantom of Liberty (1974). We have seen it before in Max Ophuls' La Ronde (1950).
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Richard Linklater carries the first baton in the relay as he plays the opening character Should Have Stayed at Bus Station.
He gets into a taxi and tells the driver his theory that each choice you ever make creates an alternate reality of the choices that you did not make. When Dorothy and the Scarecrow take one yellow brick road at the intersection, they create an alternate reality of the other yellow brick road they did not take, and an alternate movie.
In that spirit each character expresses his own personal philosophy about something.
And one of the most delightful things about the film is the list of character names in the closing credits.
Richard Linklater states that a Slacker is not a lazy person. A Slacker is someone full of energy, full of enthusiasm. He is just pouring that energy and enthusiasm into things that interest him rather than into a traditional job. Such as playing in a band or writing a book or working on a car or making a documentary or collecting video footage or any of the many arts and hobbies that people in the film have.
Linklater states, "We are always quick to categorize and judge others. We give ourselves a lot of latitude."
A snapshot.
The spirit of the age.
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