Set in an unnamed Texas town on the last day of school in 1976, "Dazed and Confused" is, among other things, a delightfully comic anthropological study of adolescent behavior. These kids smoke dope. They drink beer. They drive around. They hang out. They make out. They smoke more dope. And they engage in a quaint hazing ritual: High school seniors torment freshmen by beating their butts with paddles made in the same shop classes that also produced those bongs.
Former Texas teenagers who can still remember those days say the movie is pretty accurate. It certainly captured the feel of the era: Boys wearing overalls, shoulder-length hair and chin-length sideburns. Girls wearing puffy peasant blouses and bell-bottoms so tight you had to zip them up with pliers. Eight-track tapes blaring Black Sabbath, Kiss and Lynyrd Skynyrd. And almost everybody saying man in almost every sentence, man.
Andy Slater, left, Rick Floyd and Bobby Wooderson say the negative attention they still get irks them.
(Mark Matson For The Washington Post)
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When the movie came out in 1993, critics raved:
"The ultimate party movie, socially irresponsible and totally irresistible," said Rolling Stone.
"The most slyly funny and dead-on portrait of American teenage life ever made," said Entertainment Weekly.
When the movie came to Huntsville, Richard Floyd -- known as "Pink" since high school -- was eager to see it. He'd known Linklater a bit in school -- in fact, he remembers paddling Linklater's butt in that hazing ritual -- and he heard that the movie was about the local high school. So Floyd went to Huntsville's Cinema 10 to see the movie with his wife, his brother, his sister and his cousin, Bobby Wooderson.
"I watched the movie, and I felt like they'd kicked me in the stomach," says Wooderson, now a computer systems engineer and a divorced father of two.
He was stunned to see a character named David Wooderson, played by McConaughey -- a heavy-lidded Lothario in a Ted Nugent T-shirt who graduated from high school years ago but is still hanging around, smoking weed and chasing high school chicks.
Floyd says he was shocked to see a character played by Jason London called Randall "Pink" Floyd, the school's star quarterback, who wonders if he'd rather smoke weed and drink beer than play football. Floyd had been a second-string offensive lineman on the school team, but the cinematic promotion to star quarterback didn't make him feel any better about all the dope the Pink character smokes in the movie.
"My wife said, 'Oh, my God! What are we gonna tell people?' " recalls Floyd, now the service manager at a Huntsville Dodge dealership and the father of two sons. "Huntsville is a small town, so you know the majority of people are gonna see this movie, and I'm portrayed as a dope-smoking fiend."
When Andy Slater saw "Dazed and Confused," he was peeved about the character named Ron Slater, played by Rory Cochrane -- a stoner in a pot-leaf T-shirt who makes bongs and inhales deeply and launches into a stoned rap about how George Washington used to toke up, smoking righteous weed in pipes packed by our first first lady, Martha Washington.
"Who knows? I might have said that," says Slater, a bachelor and a building contractor in Huntsville. "I said a lot of things. I was quite outspoken back then. That's probably why Rick Linklater might have chosen me as a character -- because I disagreed with marijuana laws and I was vocal about that even in high school. But I was never walking around with a marijuana leaf on my shirt or handing out joints. I was not that character in that movie."
Slater says he had only a nodding acquaintance with Linklater, who was several years younger. "He never hung out. I never saw him at any of the beer busts. . . . Maybe he was hiding in the bushes taking notes."
Shortly after the movie came out, Slater happened to meet Floyd and Wooderson -- who were old acquaintances from high school days -- in a Huntsville steakhouse. The three men repaired to the bar to discuss "Dazed and Confused."
