Texas hasn’t gotten its due as a major piece in the complex puzzle of American art. We’re here to rectify that. Every three weeks, H. Drew Blackburn will conduct a thoroughly scientific analysis of the 254 integral (one for every county) books, movies, tv shows, albums, podcasts, songs, and magazine articles — you name it — that best exemplify the Texas spirit. These texts, products of immense talent, dig into the marrow of our being. When it’s all said and done and we’ve built The Texas Voyager collection, we’ll (figuratively) head to the Johnson Space Center in Houston and shoot it beyond the atmosphere, into the cosmos. A wise person once posed the question: “What if the aliens are hot?” Hold onto that hope — this is our chance to impress ‘em.
A few things are certain in life — death and taxes, a billionaire’s quest to evade both, and locals bemoaning the death of a city they once knew. You’ve heard this song before: “This place has lost its charm,” or “The energy’s gone.” Yet whenever the old guard catches a glint of nostalgia in their eye, you often have to consider that just maybe the catalyst of those halcyon days was youth. That old man yelling at the cloud could be lamenting fading memories of a time when friendship was effortless, and vitality and adventure felt endless.
Anyway, that’s true of many cities. But if the gripe’s about Austin, fair play — after all, with age comes wisdom.
Today’s Austin is almost unrecognizable from the town of legend — the one where dive bars weren’t always a hair’s breadth away from closure, and earnest misfits and cheap housing reigned supreme. Enter Richard Linklater’s “Slacker,” shot in spring 1989 and now marking the 35th anniversary of its initial theatrical run on one of the now-defunct Dobie Theater’s two screens on July 27, 1990. The film was shot on a shoestring ($23,000) budget and radiates endless vitality and adventure. Linklater eschews convention, as “Slacker” does not unfold like any (or at least for the time) conventional narrative feature and instead plays out more like a guided tour through the city and its denizens.
Film historian and former University of Texas lecturer Alison Macor (and author of “Chainsaws, Slackers, and Spy Kids: Thirty Years of Filmmaking in Austin, Texas”) was right in the thick of this lo-fi portrait of Austin life. “In the month that ‘Slacker’ was filming, I moved to West Campus to start my graduate work at UT. On the next street or the next corner, they were filming,” she told The Barbed Wire. “I was moving into my little house and had no clue.”
That Macor, who would one day chronicle three decades of Austin filmmaking, hardly noticed history being made in her backyard is both serendipitous and a testament to the film’s guerrilla ethos. “Slacker” didn’t blend into its environment; it was the environment. With no real script, just a loose outline, the film was pieced together by improvised vignettes in cinéma vérité style, blurring the line between truth and fiction. (For true Linklater fans, this will all sound very familiar.) Macor points to the DIY bona fides of “Slacker” as an element that elevated the film. “It really got a conversation going about how you tell a story, about the narrative structure,” she said. “Do those things still work? Do they feel stale? I think ‘Slacker’ got people talking about what makes a movie good, appealing, and interesting.”
One of the most resonant DIY approaches from the “Slacker” playbook was Linklater’s choice not to use trained actors, instead opting for friends, acquaintances, and random people he saw as beacons of strangeness. As he said in an honest-to-God interview with himself in the Austin Chronicle from 1991, the not-so-much actors were incredibly “creative and courageous,” because “it’s not easy to be yourself on purpose take after take.” Even tougher than acting natural in front of a camera for multiple takes is what “Slacker,” itself, achieved — altering the course of independent cinema.
“As a historian, I’m always hesitant to point the first, but I do think ‘Slacker’ and then ‘Pulp Fiction’ captured a feeling — a sense of play and exploration,” Macor said. “I’m not saying it hadn’t been done before. I’m just saying perhaps it was a rejuvenation at that time, especially as the landscape was changing, you know, financially, from a business perspective.”
Indie film had a rich history before “Slacker” was released.
Stateside, people like John Cassavetes, Robert Downey Sr., Jim Jarmusch, and Spike Lee helped forge a culture of telling boundary-pushing stories outside the studio system. Then, the 1990s — in my opinion, cinema’s greatest decade — brought a vibe shift.
By the mid-’90s, Linklater, Tarantino, Kelly Reichardt (“River of Grass”), Kevin Smith (“Clerks”), Steven Soderbergh (“Sex, Lies, and Videotape”), Julie Dash (“Daughters of the Dust”), and Cheryl Dunye (“The Watermelon Woman”) had all produced vital works that redefined what independent film could look like. As far as indie film in the Lone Star State, 1974’s “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” blazed a trail, but “Slacker,” as Macor put it, brought Texas film to a larger audience and evolved the idea of it. “‘Slacker’ made it more contemporary; it showed how it was still about place. I feel like ‘Chain Saw,’ ‘The Whole Shootin’ Match,’ and other films made by Texas filmmakers were about place too,” she said. “It might not have been the primary element, but it was definitely there.” It also helped pave the way for another Texas-bred indie sensation, Robert Rodriguez, who maxed out credit cards to fund his iconic 1992 shoot-em-up, “El Mariachi.”
Thirty-five years later, Texas’ film scene is in good shape.
In June, the legislature passed a law that will see $1.5 billion in incentives funneled into the industry. Festivals like SXSW and community hubs thrive — including the Austin Film Society, which Linklater founded in 1985. It’s hard to point to a more consequential Texas filmmaker than him, whose filmography is the definition of range, spanning everything from thought-provoking philosophical dramas to earnest coming-of-age stories to boundary-breaking dramas, like “Boyhood,” which was filmed over 12 years — a hell of a feat.
There are many memorable things about “Slacker.” Of course, the poster woman Teresa Taylor of Butthole Surfers fame’s unhinged scene where she tries to sell an alleged Madonna Pap smear comes to mind. The old-man anarchist and the JFK conspiracist are delights, too, but the star of the show is truly the city of Austin.
The second film we added to The Texas Voyager collection, “Office Space,” was also set in Austin, but dressed up as an Anywhere, USA version. This makes sense. Judges’ movie was a premonition, rather than a celebration, like Linklater’s. Judge is a cynical artist and Linklater a romantic one. What’s celebrated on the screen is now an artifact of a mythical town populated by lovable misfits. “It used to be horizontal, and now it’s vertical. I know that sounds really childish and simplistic, but that, to me, is the difference,” Macor said of how Austin’s changed in the 30-plus years since Linklater shot “Slacker” and she landed on West Campus.
“As you move through the city, there’s a different feeling,” she added. “People can’t afford to live here anymore.”
I’ve heard tales woven about the days of Austin yore from OGs, about how its spirit was a little oasis smack dab in the middle of Texas where hippies and rednecks might share some reefer or go topless at Barton Springs.
That spirit has been chased away by cranes (and exploding rockets) in the sky. But, if you want a little taste, there’s always “Slacker.”
