Interview: Author Melissa Maerz on high school movies, oral histories, and ‘Dazed and Confused’
In Maker’s Dozen, we ask film industry folks 12 questions and have them ask one of us.
Melissa Maerz is the author of Alright, Alright, Alright: The Oral History of Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused. Published in 2020, the book featured in-depth interviews with hundreds of people involved with making Dazed and Confused the iconic film it is today. We talked with Melissa about why Dazed resonates across generations, how it fits into the pantheon of high school movies, and what she’s learned about it since the book was released.
This interview has been edited for content and clarity. Find the movies mentioned in this article on Letterboxd.
1) When did you first see Dazed and Confused and what was your initial reaction to it?
I saw it when I was going into my first year of high school, and for me that was ninth grade. To me—even though it was a movie that was set in the past, in the ‘70s, and I saw it in ‘93 when it came out—it felt like a movie about my future. It was the fall of my first time in high school. I had no idea what high school is going to be like. And looking at this movie, I was like, Oh yeah, it’s gonna be all parties with older kids and, you know, hanging out in the woods and smoking weed. It just looked both really exciting to me and kind of scary. The hazing stuff obviously sucks. But it’s just interesting that a movie about the past could feel so much like the future to me then.
2) Filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino and Paul Thomas Anderson have cited Dazed as one of their favorite movies ever, and it’s generationally beloved by millions. What’s one aspect of Dazed that resonates with so many people?
The thing that came up in almost every interview I did, whether it was crew or cast or the extras, is that everybody says that the more specific it gets, the more universal it feels. Everybody had a version of Slater at their high school. Everyone had a version of Wooderson. Everyone had a version of what the older kids did to the younger kids that sucked. A lot of people had a version of the Moon Tower. And it’s interesting, too, how specific it gets of people telling me, “I had the same shirt that Wiley Wiggins wears at night in that movie” or “That was the shirt that every boy at my high school wore for picture day.” It’s just strange. You would think that the more generic things about high school would have the broadest range. But it really seems to be with this movie that the really arcane things are the ones that people glom onto.
“The more specific it gets, the more universal it feels.”
3) This month we’re talking about high school movies. Which other movies do you think are in the pantheon of high school movies? And how do you think Dazed fits in relation to those?
I remember feeling that, before I saw Dazed, what you thought of for high school movies was John Hughes. But that was really the only big high school genre I could think of. And John Hughes was a real specific thing. Those movies are really about class a lot of the time. They’re about the rich kids and the poor kids, and the characters are very specific. It’s like you have a character that’s either a nerd or a popular kid—there’s not a lot of blurring of the lines. What was cool about Dazed to me was that there’s characters who are jocks who also smoke weed, and there’s characters who are political nerds who hang out with the popular kids. I think that’s really how it is in high school. There’s a lot more blurring of lines, and I think that made it feel more real to me. Now we probably have more nuanced high school movies, but at the time that really felt revolutionary.
4) You’ve talked about how much you identify with the Tony character in Dazed. What’s something you would tell your high school self now?
Hmmm. You know, all through high school I was really into writing and always wanted to write, but I think I assumed that I couldn’t make it full-time as a writer. And I love journalism—obviously journalism is a big part of my nonfiction writing anyway. But I think I would tell myself it’s OK to just try and start writing a book instead of having like a “real job” where you get a salary and benefits and stuff. It’s a little scary not to have benefits, but I think I might have started that earlier.
“There are characters who are jocks who also smoke weed, and there are characters who are political nerds who hang out with the popular kids. I think that’s really how it is in high school. There’s a lot more blurring of lines, and I think that made it feel more real to me.”
5) What were some of your favorite movies in high school?
So I grew up in Portland, Oregon, and there’s a street here called 23rd Street. When I was in junior high I used to just hang out there with my friends and kinda look in shops. There was one time I was there with my friend and we were waiting for our parents to pick us up, and I think just to kill some time we thought we’d go to this movie theater Cinema 21, which is still here, and go see whatever was there. We knew nothing about the movies that were there. It ended up being a movie called In the Soup, a black-and-white movie with Steve Buscemi and Jennifer Beals, and it just kind of blew me away. I was pretty young, maybe like seventh grade, and it was not like any movie that I remembered seeing. It’s about this guy who’s trying to get a film made, and there’s this thuggish mobster guy who wants to produce it. It had a real lyrical quality to it, and I’m sure most of it just went way over my head. But for whatever reason I thought, I want to see more movies like this.
6) Your book has been out for almost two years now. What have you learned about Dazed and its surrounding fandom since the book was released?
So I have an email address associated with it and I put it in the book, and a lot of people have emailed me. I try to respond to it as much as I can. Sometimes I forget, but it’s been awesome, the response. People have written me to tell me all the things they identified with, and the movie.
The biggest thing that seems to be resonating with people is that I couldn’t track down Jason O. Smith. So many people have written me to ask if I ever found him. In fact, this morning I checked that email account for the first time in a long time, and this guy thinks that he’s found his mugshot. He sent me a Reddit thread where people are still discussing this. So obviously people still really wanna track him down. I never did hear from him. I did hear from his brother, which is the closest I’ve gotten. His other family members have not returned my emails and calls. His brother has not seen him in a very long time. I don’t think there was a single other person that I wasn’t able to track down. I just hope he’s out there and I hope he’s OK. But yeah, the fact that people two years later are still writing me on that email address is pretty cool.
7) As you were winnowing the book down, was there a section or thread you had to cut that you really miss?
That I had to cut? Yes. I cut a ton. That I really miss? I think the stuff that got cut out needed to be cut out. I mean, I think the first draft of this book was like 650 pages, and no one’s gonna want to read 650 pages. The main big chunk I cut out was a section about the founding of the Austin Film Society. A lot of these friends who went on to make Slacker and Dazed first met through the Austin Film Society. I love that section of the book because it really showed me why these people got interested in film in the first place, in this kind of DIY way of, Let’s form a film society and let’s figure out ways to get these films that aren’t normally distributed and let’s screen them in our apartment. There’s a little of that in the book, but not the full story of it. But I think it needed to come out. In fact, even when I told Richard Linklater I took that out of the book, he’s like, “Why did you want to put that in there?” [laughter] So it’s probably good that it came out.
“Linklater really allowed the cast insight into the filmmaking process and allowed them to feel like they were a part of that filmmaking process in a way that was rare for actors at that time.”
8) What was an unexpected hurdle to getting the book done?
Well, I think most of the hurdles honestly were expected. Like I suspected that Shawn Andrews was not gonna talk to me because I knew that everybody kind of hated him. And I kind of feel for him. I wrote him letters. I tried to call. I tried to contact him in all sorts of different ways. I really do feel like he would have come across better in the book if he’d given me an interview in the book. Because we’re all kinda young and dumb and arrogant at that age. I’d be interested to see how he reflected on that time, but unfortunately it just didn’t happen.
I thought it would be hard to get Ben Affleck and Renee Zellweger, and they were the two last interviews that I got. In fact, I got Ben Affleck’s cell phone number and he agreed to be interviewed for the book pretty early on, but then just never answered when I called until the very end, which was maybe a year after I first contacted him. But I actually think he’s one of the most surprising interviews to me, because I can’t believe that for a guy who has won multiple Academy Awards, Dazed and Confused is still one of only two movie posters that he has displayed in his house, and that he called it one of the most profound creative experiences of his life. I don’t think I realized or was prepared for how much the movie would mean to him. But I think it’s because he became a filmmaker himself, obviously, and I think Richard Linklater really allowed the cast insight into the filmmaking process and allowed them to feel like they were a part of that filmmaking process in a way that was rare for actors at that time. It’s probably still rare now.
9) What other movies do you think deserve a book-length oral history treatment?
Oh, it’s funny, I’ve had so many people write me now on that email account: “I wanna write about X movie, how do I go about doing this?” I think there’s so many that would have interesting backgrounds. Every time someone writes me and says “I’m thinking of writing about this,” I’m like, “Great, there’s probably an audience.” I’m not a book agent, so they would know better than me. But I think what’s surprising is that it might not be the blockbuster movies that deserve the oral histories always. Sometimes it’s just the movies that people care deeply about. And sometimes those are the blockbuster movies; sometimes those two things coincide.
But yeah, I think it really just depends on what the movie is that you’re really passionate about. Dazed is a prime example. It didn’t do as well at the box office as I think the studio had hoped that it would, and yet look at all these people writing me being like “This is my favorite movie. I have seen it more than anybody else has seen it. I watched it every day of summer break during my junior year of high school,” or whatever it was. So I think there’s probably room for a lot of oral history.
“It might not be the blockbuster movies that deserve the oral histories. Sometimes it’s just the movies that people care deeply about.”
10) What sort of advice do you give people who ask you about doing an oral history?
Everyone does it differently. I think one thing that helped me was that every time I did an interview, I immediately had it transcribed and started to block out the structure of the book. From the very first interview, because otherwise I think you are drowning in so many transcripts and you don’t remember things. My husband is a journalist, too, and he always says that the thing you should write about is, you know, when you get back from the interview and someone says, “How was it?”—the first thing you wanna tell someone. I think sometimes people go against their instincts with that. They think, “The story should be something else,” or the thing I gossip about with my friends after the interview is not the thing that should go on the page. But if it’s the first thing you want to tell your friends, it probably should be the thing that you have in the piece, or find some way to put in the piece. I think you lose that the more time you let elapse from the interview.
11) Which movie were you most excited to show your kids? Or something you still want to show them?
There’s so many. My daughter’s still pretty young, but showing my son Tim Burton movies and having him get excited about that, I was just like, “Oh yeah, buckle in. Let’s watch all of these!” There’s still a couple that he can’t watch yet but that was exciting. I think I am really excited to show him Wes Anderson movies. He’s seen Fantastic Mr. Fox. I was asking my husband the other day, “Do you think he’s old enough for Rushmore?” And he’s like, “Probably not yet.” Miyazaki movies. There’s just so many things that I’m excited about that when he gets older will be good to show him. I’m trying to think of stuff that I’ve already shown him that he’s loved. The Nightmare Before Christmas. Corpse Bride. Frankenweenie. Stuff like that has been nice for us to bond about.
12) What do you think would be an ideal double feature with Dazed?
It’s a good question. I mean, so many things. A lot of people brought up Over the Edge. Linklater said that it was one of the movies that inspired him. It’s about kinda young, aimless kids. That seems like if you wanna go back, that’s a good one. The focus on cars, the style of it: there’s a lot of things that you can see correlations between Dazed and that.
People have said this a million times before so I’m not saying anything original, but Booksmart feels like a really Dazed movie to me. Like the whole movie is them waiting to find the ultimate party and there never really is. I mean, I guess they do, but it’s never really like what they think it’s going to be. So if you’re looking backward, probably Over the Edge, and if you’re looking forward, probably Booksmart.
13) What question do you have for us?
What do you think is the most underrated or underseen high school movie that you love?
Me personally (Chad), my pick would be October Sky. Jake Gyllenhaal was 17 when they filmed it, so he was an actual high schooler. He did a couple of movies before that, but I think this was kind of his big starring turn, with Chris Cooper and Laura Dern as well. It’s just this really well done coming of age story, based on a true story. But it’s about a lot of things. It’s about family. It’s about living in this coal mining town in 1950s West Virginia. But it’s ultimately about this teenager with a dream. I’m sure the others in Cinema Sugar have different answers, but that’s my go-to answer for that.
Oh, that’s interesting. I’ve never seen it, but I will definitely have to check it out.