Slacker (Screenplay). By
Richard Linklater. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992. pp. 154 + vi.
The published screenplay of Richard
Linklater’s seminal Slacker, a film
that gave a sense of identity to a generation of anti-establishment,
anti-mainstream twenty-somethings growing up in the 1990s, is not your average
screenplay. In the opening pages Linklater is sure to acknowledge how ‘[l]ike Slacker the film, this book would not
exist without the help of enthusiastic and talented collaborators.’[1]
Indeed, that is what makes this book so unique: Linklater taking his synergetic
filmmaking style and adopting it to a project that combines memoirs, Q &
As, articles, profiles and photographs to form a collage of the creative
process involved in the making of Slacker.
Douglas Coupland providing the
foreword for this composite collection of materials is as suitable as it is
entertaining. Credited with paving his own form of marginal identity apart from
the late capitalist model of an ‘Eisenhower-based reality’[2],
Coupland’s Generation X, released the
same year as Linklater’s Slacker, shared
a similar vision of a creative life free from the burden of work; a world of
‘dreamers out on the edge…characters out of key, in and out of love, drifting,
slightly twisted, still willing to listen…’[3]
What is most remarkable about this
book is just how personal it feels. Slacker
itself being a labour of love for Linklater and his Austin-based
collaborators, the inclusion of diary entries from the director’s notebook
scattered sequentially throughout the screenplay allow one to ascertain a
fuller, more intimate understanding of the process involved in getting a film
that, one excerpt reveals, has ‘been in [his] head for over five years’[4]
from the page to the screen. Moreover, nothing is left unturned in this
scrupulous study of this creative process. Whether it be directorial notes to
actors, a description of the casting method, notes from the crew or reports of
early responses to the film – one highlight being the observation that “[t]hey
don’t DO anything!”[5] as
overheard by Linklater – no stone is left unturned; a thoroughness that avoids
being onerous and is instead pleasantly revealing.
In the centre of this plethora of
sources is the screenplay itself, one that paved the way for a new type of
contemplative filmmaking that captures the philosophical musings and
frustrations of the disenfranchised youth of America. Profiles of the cast –
with information including preferred Italian city, last book read and formative
experience – highlight what it was they brought to a stage that Linklater
created for their voices to be heard on. What becomes apparent is that these
individuals are expressing the same sentiment that Linklater describes in his
introduction to the book: a transformation ‘from thinking (as I had been told
over and over again) that my generation had nothing to say to thinking that it
not only had everything to say but was saying it in a completely new way.’[6]
It is thanks to this film, and the works of writers such as Douglas Coupland,
that such a large, creative and marginal group of individuals were given a
platform at all above the ubiquitous currents of the mainstream.
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