In 1972, a movie production crew arrived in Huntsville to film in and around the state prison. The spectacle made quite an impression on a young Richard Linklater.
“I was in 5th grade, and [director] Sam Peckinpah, Steve McQueen and Ali MacGraw all came to my hometown,” Linklater says. “It felt like they were there for weeks — shooting the prison sequence at the beginning of The Getaway. I had friends whose dads were extras in the movie, and McQueen was staying at the Holiday Inn! It got me thinking, ‘That’s cool.’”
That experience planted the idea in Linklater that movies can be made in Texas, not just in Hollywood. But it wasn’t until years later that another spark ignited his full-blown passion for films. While attending Sam Houston State University, he heard that an English professor, Dr. Ralph Pease, was hosting film viewings and discussions about filmmaking. He attended one of Pease’s programs and was hooked, leaving college for Houston and working on an offshore oil rig while learning everything he could about films.
That ultimately resulted in a move to Austin in the 1980s, where Linklater began seeking out opportunities to view movies of all genres. At that time, it was difficult to find rare films and almost impossible to see them on the big screen. So to gain access to those films — and local theaters — he founded the Austin Film Society in 1985. The AFS essentially became Linklater’s support system, providing him with the resources to learn the art of filmmaking and a network of people with the skills necessary to make a movie a reality.
His first feature film, Slacker, in 1991, showcased Austin’s special kind of weird, along with Linklater’s ability to create an unconventionally entertaining feature film. To almost everyone’s surprise, the movie was a low-budget hit, made for just $23,000 but grossing over $1 million. “I knew it was watchable and that a lot of people who live in the kind of world it portrays would relate to it,” Linklater said at the time, “but its appeal is much wider than I ever thought it would be.”
More telling, the movie was unlike anything that had come before it. Critic Roger Ebert, while praising the film and its director, said Slacker’s appeal was “almost impossible to describe” while the Washington Post applauded “a work of scatterbrained originality, unexpected and ceaselessly engaging.”
In interviews, Linklater displayed a sophistication and sensitivity almost at odds with the alienated college graduates, neo-beatniks and assorted eccentrics depicted in Slacker. “There’s always been this part of the population that was on the margins, that was intentionally outside society,” Linklater told the New York Times. “They’ve been pretty much ignored for the past 20 years.” In an Austin Chronicle interview, he added, “Slackers might look like the left-behinds of society, but they’re actually one step ahead, rejecting most of society and the social hierarchy before it rejects them. They’re not wasting their time in a realm of activity that has nothing to do with who they are or what they might be ultimately striving for.”
Linklater had captured the attention of the film world, prompting Universal to back his next effort, 1993’s Dazed and Confused, a coming-of age film set in 1976 that grossed $8 million and received plaudits from Entertainment Weekly, which ranked the film 10th on its list of the “Funniest Movies of the Past 25 Years,” and director Quentin
Tarantino, who said it was one of the best films of all time. Rolling Stone singled out Linklater as a “sly and formidable talent, bringing an anthropologist’s eye to this spectacularly funny celebration of the rites of stupidity.”
The film also introduced viewers to Matthew McConaughey — though it might not have. When Linklater was casting Dazed, McConaughey, an unknown local Austin actor (and Uvalde native) approached him about a part. “I initially thought Matt was too good-looking for the role and passed on him,” Linklater said in a 2012 interview. “Then he grew this little mustache, slicked his hair down and sent me a photo of himself in character. I knew then he was the one.” The film helped launch a number of other acting careers as well, including those of Ben Affleck and Parker Posey.
Given the success of Dazed and Confused, Linklater suddenly began to be viewed, oddly, as an industry insider, and many expected that he’d pack up and move to Hollywood. But those people didn’t know Linklater: the ultimate out- sider chose to remain in Texas.
When he talked to people “on the coasts” about his home state, however, he noticed they’d often hold stereotypical views, thinking everyone was a cowboy and that people weren’t intellectu- ally curious. “I always want to depict that other part of Texas,” Linklater says. But to do that he had to convince people it was possible to make quality films here. “In Hollywood, I told people I wanted to film in Austin,” Linklater recalls, “and they’d say, ‘How can you film there?’ So I showed them.”
Over the next two decades he continued to make critically acclaimed films, some that made money (School of Rock, Bernie and the trilogy consisting of Before Sunrise, Before Sunset and Before Midnight) and some that didn’t (The Newton Boys, Bad News Bears, Me and Orson Welles). He received Academy Award nominations in the Best Adapted Screenplay category for Before Sunset, in 2004, and again in 2013 for Before Midnight.
Then came his landmark 2014 movie, Boyhood, for which he earned his most impressive accolades, including three Oscar nominations — for Best Original Screenplay, Best Director and Best Picture.
True to his idiosyncratic nature, Linklater adopted an ambitious and previously unheard- of approach, filming the movie over 12 years at numerous locations around Texas, following the life of Mason (portrayed by actor Ellar Coltrane) from early childhood to his arrival at college. Linklater teamed again with Ethan Hawke (from his Before trilogy), as Mason’s father, and Patricia Arquette, who won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, as Mason’s mother. The movie’s budget was, reportedly, less than $4 million, while the film grossed more than $50 million worldwide.
GROWING PAINS Linklater on the set of Boyhood, which traced the evolution of the main character — he’s at left in both photos — over a 12-year period, an ambitious approach that earned the filmmaker an Oscar nomination for Best Director.
Early in his career, Linklater received support from the Texas Film Commission, created in 1971 but given a boost in 2007 when House Bill 1634 established the Texas Moving Image Incentive Program. That program allowed the commission to administer grants to films produced in Texas while at the same time establishing a workforce training program.
“A lot of us locals can manage to some degree on our own,” Linklater says, “but once the incentive program started, we deal more with the Film Commission. They’re always there with location pictures. It’s a big job for our state, so they’re important … they’re helpful.”
Linklater knows that when a movie production comes to town, the impact is more than just financial. “A lot of cities have their own film com- missions, too, and they can be helpful, depending on where you’re filming,” he notes. “I’ve filmed in the Bastrop region quite a bit — they have local reps there, like liaisons. People like it when you’re filming in their community, even though you might tie up a road or something. It’s fun to see your own town depicted in a movie.”
One other way that Linklater’s success is being used to promote local economies across the state is the Texas Film Commission’s Richard Linklater Trail. The program encourages fans to visit locations where his movies have been filmed. “I’ll be driving with my daughters somewhere, and I’ll go, ‘Oh, I filmed there once.’ It feels like all of Texas is my back lot. I’ll be at Minute Maid Park soon, for the World Series, and I’m like, ‘They let me film here once.’ I’ve done so many movies now, covering so much ground. I’d like to see that trail myself.”
As for the Texas film industry, Linklater is optimistic. “Our film culture is strong — always has been, hopefully always will be,” he says. “The industry today is kind of depleted, because our government isn’t encouraging the industry by supporting it. That’s just a choice current elected officials have made, and I can’t really speak for their motives — it’s ideological to some degree — but what they’re doing is exporting our industry. It’s heartbreaking.
“You see all of these movies set in Texas, but they’re shot in New Mexico, like Hell or High Water. The producers say, ‘Well, we got as close as we could to Texas.’ So who’s creating that border, and for what reason? That’s our lawmakers. You vote these guys into office, and you have to live with their priorities. But I think that will come back around.”
A number of film commentators have noted that Linklater’s style closely resembles documentary filmmaking. “It’s all scripted, but film has always had that documentary quality, particularly mine,” Linklater says. “Movies are definitely documents — they document a time or a place or a kind of a feeling of what you’re trying to say.”
His most recent film, Last Flag Flying, opened in November. It tells the story of Larry “Doc” Shepherd, a grieving father (portrayed by Steve Carell) going to bury his son, a young Marine killed in the Iraq War. The movie fol- lows Doc as he reunites with two Vietnam War veteran buddies to accompany him to Dover Air Force Base to retrieve his son’s body.
In the week prior to the film’s Texas premier at the Austin Film Society Theater, national news outlets were reporting on the death of four American soldiers killed in Niger, in western Africa. The event became newsworthy only after President Donald Trump called the widow of one fallen soldier to express sympathy. The widow reported that the President’s words hadn’t provided comfort. The story became a political firestorm when a Florida congresswoman, and close friend of the widow, criticized Trump’s choice of words during the call. In response, White House chief of staff John Kelly defended Trump, using his personal story as a father who’s lost a son on the battlefield.
The thematic link to Last Flag Flying wasn’t lost on Linklater. “I can’t believe the movie is about to come out, and the Chief of Staff and the President are actually talking about [grieving military families],” he says. “That trip to Dover, that’s very real for these people who go through that, and this movie is a portrait of a grieving Gold Star father. Given the news, it’s more relevant today than it was a year ago when we were shooting.”
And in the end, isn’t that why the best directors make films — to document and explore the human condition? “Film is a powerful medium,” Linklater says. “Music and film are great representative art forms for their time and place, but the storytelling tradition of literature — and movies, too — is significant, and Texas has a great tradition I’m proud to be part of. Whenever you’re making a film about your friends or whatever subculture you find yourself in, you realize you’re depicting a time and a place, and that’s pretty powerful — and pretty wonderful.”
RICHARD LINKLATER: DREAM IS DESTINY
Directed by Louis Black and Karen Bernstein Arts+Labor
For a number of reasons, Richard Linklater is an Austin legend and
a local treasure who, through his hard work and artistic vision, has also earned respect and admiration on the world stage. For some, his films may be hit-or-miss, but it doesn’t take a devoted Linklater fan to appreciate the well-crafted paean to dogged determination, individualism and artistic vision that is Richard Linklater: Dream is Destiny. The documentary will leave you wanting to revisit films you’ve already seen and to watch those you haven’t.
Co-directed by Karen Bernstein, the film marks the directorial debut of longtime Austin Chronicle editor Louis Black, who was also an original board member of the Austin Film Society Linklater founded in the 1980s. Black and Linklater have had a long-running symbiotic relationship, Black having appeared in Linklater’s debut feature, Slacker, while also promoting the director in the pages of the Chronicle.
More of a love letter to Linklater and his body of work than a critical examination of his career, in this work exhibits no remove between filmmakers and subject. These are friends and peers of Linklater, lovingly and nostalgically praising his accomplishments as both a filmmaker and a champion of Austin. In the process, what comes through is a better recognition of just how much heart and soul, and maybe more importantly, hard work, Linklater has put into both crafting his films and building a remarkably vibrant film scene in Austin over the past three decades.
Having the look and ambience, in certain ways, of a Linklater film, the documentary traces Linklater’s early life and career from Slacker up through Everybody Wants Some!!, featuring a striking selection of film clips from his filmography along with interview footage with Ethan Hawke, Jack Black, Patricia Arquette, Matthew McConaughey and others. Additionally, there’s stellar footage of Louis Black sitting and interviewing Linklater while they rummage through boxes of his early career memorabilia, including journals, scripts, handbills and more.
It’s hard not to find inspiration in this story of a talented and thoughtful youth growing up in Huntsville at a time when that felt worlds away from any creative possibilities. Linklater dreamed of being a writer or a major league baseball player, never even considering the possibility of becoming a filmmaker until — thanks to the twists and turns of life — he found himself falling in love with film and coming to Austin to pursue his unique vision. The film provides an adoring view of the long-gone Austin of the late ’80s and early ’90s (revisit Slacker to see it), when rent was (relatively) cheap and creativity and individuality thrived, the perfect time and place for an independent creative force like Linklater to blossom.
The point at which you know the film has you hooked is in its build-up to Linklater losing out at
the 2015 Academy Awards for Best Director. Even if Boyhood didn’t grab you, you feel a palpable sense
of disappointment as Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s name is called as the winner (for Birdman).That’s a credit to the success of the movie in highlighting the many virtues and accomplishments, and the heart and soul, of Richard Linklater. —LINC LEIFESTE
