Slacking Off
by Sep 13, 2004The following excerpt dates from 1996, five years after Slacker was “officially” released and not too long after Before Sunrise. It’s all still true, only more so...
Synopsis
Richard Linklater’s Slacker presents a day in the life of a loose-knit subculture of marginal, eccentric, and overeducated citizens in Austin, Texas. Shooting film on 16mm for a mere $3,000, writer/producer/director Linklater and his crew of friends eschewed a traditional plot, choosing instead to employ long takes and fluid transitions to create a tapestry of over a hundred characters, each as unique as the last, culminating in an episodic portrait of a distinct vernacular culture and a tribute to bohemian cerebration. Slacker is a prescient look at an emerging generation of aggressive nonparticipants, and one of the key films of the American independent film movement of the 1990s.
Cast
| Should have stayed at the bus station | Richard Linklater |
| Anarchist’s daughter | Kathy McCarthy |
| Taxi driver | Rudy Basquez |
| Roadkill | Jean Caffeine |
| Jogger | Jan Hockey |
| Running late | Stephen Hockey |
| Hit-and-run son | Mark James |
| Grocery grabber of death’s bounty | Sam Dietert |
| Officer Bozio | Bob Boyd |
| Office Love | Terrence Kirk |
| Street musician | Keith McCormack |
| Walking to coffee shop | Jennifer Schaudies |
| Been on the moon since the ’50s | Jerry Delony |
| Pap smear pusher | Teresa Taylor |
| Quotes Hitler | Dan Burrows |
| Conspiracy A-Go-Go author | John Slate |
| Old anarchist | Louis Mackey |
| Post-modern Paul Revere | Kendal Smith |
| Smoking writer | Regina Garza |
Credits
| Director | Richard Linklater |
| Screenplay | Richard Linklater |
| Producer | Richard Linklater |
| Cinematography | Lee Daniel |
| Editing | Scott Rhodes |
| Production manager/casting | Anne Walker-McBay |
| Dolly grip/ assistant cameraman | Clark Walker |
| Sound | Denise Montgomery |
| Script supervisor | Meg Brennan |
Disc Features
DIRECTOR APPROVED DOUBLE-DISC SET:
- New high-definition digital transfer, with restored image and sound supervised by director Richard Linklater and director of photography Lee Daniel, made from original 16mm film elements
- Three audio commentaries featuring Richard Linklater and members of the cast and crew
- It’s Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books (1988), Linklater’s first full-length feature, with commentary by the director, available here for the first time on home video
- Casting tapes featuring select “auditions” from the over one-hundred-member cast, with an essay from production manager/casting director Anne Walker-McBay
- An early film treatment
- Home movies
- Woodshock, an early short 16mm film made by Linklater and Lee Daniel in 1985|
- “The Roadmap,” the working script of Slacker, including fourteen deleted scenes and alternate takes
- Ten-minute trailer for a documentary about the landmark Austin café, Les Amis, which served as location for several scenes in Slacker
- Stills gallery featuring hundreds of rare behind-the-scenes production and publicity photos
- Footage from the Slacker tenth-anniversary in Austin, Texas, in 2001
- Original theatrical trailer
- Slacker culture essay by Linklater
- Information about the Austin Film Society, founded in 1985 by Linklater with Daniel, including early flyers from screenings
- English subtitles for the deaf and hearing impaired
- PLUS: A 64-page booklet featuring essays by author and filmmaker John Pierson (Spike Mike Reloaded: A Guided Tour Across a Decade of Independent American Cinema) and Michael Barker, head of Sony Pictures Classics, as well as reviews, production notes, a complete cast and crew listing, and an introduction to It’s Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books by director Monte Hellman (Two-Lane Blacktop, The Shooting)
From the Current
Slacker’s Oblique Strategy
by Sep 13, 2004One of my favorite things about this column is the opportunity it gives me to put in a word on behalf of an overlooked or underrated classic: a book or film that may have gotten respectful attention when it came out, but deserves more now. Deserves not just celebration for the way it’s “held up...
Slacker:
Freedom's Just Another Word for Nothing to Do
by
Sep 13, 2004
About a year and a half ago, a friend and I found ourselves exiled to a cold Midwestern city, where we spent most of our time missing the lazy Texas college town that shaped our idea of the good life. One night we stood in a crowded club and tried to figure out why the smiling, well-fed Midwesterners...
Slacker: Looking Back
by Sep 13, 2004What I’ve found in the many years that I’ve been in the film business is that you often find the best films under the oddest of circumstances. The independent film maven John Pierson invited me to speak at a film workshop offered in Rockport, Maine one summer. When I arrived to meet him at the...
On It’s Impossible to Learn to Plow
by Reading Books
by
Sep 13, 2004
Fifteen years ago I received a letter from a young film director in Texas, who enclosed a tape of his first film, with the unlikely title It’s Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books. It might as well have been called It’s Impossible to Learn to Make Movies by Reading Books.
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A Quick One While He's Away......
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