The Dope on Director Richard Linklater

Yet as Jethro Tull sang, nothing is easy, and the same went for Dazed and Confused, which was budgeted at a paltry $6 million. Finding used GTOs in the Austin area wasn't a problem, but the first costume designer left after disagreements with Linklater over the outfits. Her replacement, Kari Perkins, was handed a few 1976 high school yearbooks and what was left of the costume budget—$1,000.

Luckily, Perkins found shelves of mint-condition brushed-denim bell-bottoms in a local five-and-dime. "We bought about 20 pairs for $1 each," she recalls. "They were like, 'Why do you want these?'" Even then, it took a few days for the cast—most of whom weren't even born when Grand Funk's "We're an American Band" was released—to get used to period garb like quilted shirts. "They kept complaining, 'Why are the pants so tight?'" Linklater says bemusedly.

Linklater also wanted a soundtrack heavy on eight-track anthems like Aerosmith's "Sweet Emotion," Bob Dylan's "Hurricane," and Deep Purple's "Highway Star." And he got it—but for a price. Thanks to high licensing rates (especially for Aerosmith and Dylan), he ended up spending $750,000—over a tenth of his budget—on the music alone. If dealing with the music business didn't annoy Linklater enough, a scene showing a hand sticking an eight-track of ZZ Top's Fandango!into a car tape deck had to be re-edited because one of the songs on the album is involved in a legal dispute.

Something else 16-year-olds did at the time (and still do, hence the film's timeliness) was ingest Trans Ams-full of pot and beer, so no one involved was surprised when the MPAA slapped an R rating onto the movie. "It's not their kind of movie, and I take that as a good sign," sniffs producer Daniel. Adds Linklater, "They said the rating was for pervasive and continual teenage drug and alcohol use. I remember those exact words—pervasive and continual. But if we had taken out all the pot stuff, it would have been the most expensive short ever made."

With Dazed and Confused in the bag—shot in a super-efficient 38 days—Linklater has demonstrated he can make a movie with commercial potential for a major studio. Now what? "Richard has the goods to make it—the vision, the toughness, the ego," says Daniel. Linklater may be a paradox: a slacker with ambition. Still, like any '70s kid, he remains distrustful of authority figures—that healthy cynicism again—and he wears his unease with Hollywood like a WIN button. He says he's embarrassed by the Dazed ad campaign, which emphasizes silly drug puns, and he remains a free agent, having only signed with Gramercy for one movie. "Everyone in Hollywood is used to doing things by phone," he says. "But I send faxes, and I keep the copies."

As dusk fades, it's time to escape the biz talk. Linklater has been invited to a preview screening of True Romance at a local megaplex. The brakes of his Cutlass are on the fritz ("I keep meaning to have them fixed"), so he goes in the reporter's rental car. Naturally, Linklater is suspicious of industry-designed sneak previews. "At one of the previews for my movie, one guy said, 'It was great—one of those movies where you don't have to think while you watch it!'" He laughs approvingly. "That's brilliant. And someone else said it was an indictment of public education." Once in the theater, he slouches in his seat and yuks it up with kids in backward baseball caps—suburban slacker chic—as Patricia Arquette sets a mob thug on fire. For a few hours, he's another heartland teenager again, hanging out and waiting for something to happen in the wasteland.

One more thing: Despite its title, Dazed and Confused contains no Led Zeppelin songs, though not for lack of trying. In the movie's first cut, the final scene was set to Zep's "Rock & Roll." Robert Plant, touchy about being associated with the past, nixed the idea—even as Jimmy Page was voicing his approval. "Page sent me back a letter saying he realized how important the song was to the artist's vision," Linklater says. Then he adds, almost casually but with the slightest discernible glimmer in his eyes, "Jimmy Page called me an artist." It's a '70s thing—you wouldn't understand.