13. Dazed/“Sweet Emotion”, You're on an Airplane

13 Dazed/“Sweet Emotion”

I was a fan of Rick Linklater’s before we shot Dazed and Confused — we all called it Dazed. He made the movie Slacker, the seminal Generation X movie, and no one had seen characters like these in movies before. Nothing seemed to happen in the film, because there wasn’t a real plot, but if you were the black sheep, or the white sheep, or the “weird cousin” in your family who wasn’t conforming to what everyone else was doing but was instead philosophizing about how weird everything was, then you could’ve been in Slacker.

I got a call from my agent at the time, Brian Swardstrom, who said Rick was casting a movie he was directing about kids in high school in 1976. I was excited about it; the nineties had a seventies counterculture nostalgia and I already had platforms and bell-bottoms of my own to wear. I was also really young, twenty-four, and confident.

Don Phillips was the casting director for Dazed, and he’d cast Fast Times at Ridgemont High and was a character; so much so that he was made into one in David Rabe’s play Hurlyburly, which I ended up acting in years later. Eddie was his character’s name; the one with the heart and coke problem. Don is pretty special—they broke the mold when they made him. A good casting director is like the vibrant aunt or uncle to a film, or maybe even more so the godfather, since they’re the ones with connections to the agents. If your agent and the casting director have some vendetta between them, then you don’t even get “into the room” with the Don.

I belonged in the room and had the right attitude. I remembered the seventies really well because I looked forward to growing up when I was little and still loved the music. We talked a lot about music in that first meeting. Rick said a lot of the budget was going toward getting the rights for songs like Bob Dylan’s “Hurricane” and Aerosmith’s “Sweet Emotion,” and most everyone knows the title of the movie is taken from the Led Zeppelin song. I told them I wanted to play Darla, the main hazer, because I wanted to be a bad girl. I wasn’t one in high school but loved Rizzo in Grease and that’s what they said the Darla part was akin to. My aunt Peggy had some hazing stories, which I told them about—like having to swallow oysters knotted together by dental floss, only to have them pulled out of her stomach by one of the seniors. There were the Farrah twins, from back home, who’d keyed some cars of ex-boyfriends in high school, which I thought was crazy and pitched the idea, I guess. None of us, or at least none that I could remember, were rich kids; we were all more likely to have grown up around Harleys and good music.

So, they flew me to Los Angeles for callbacks and that’s where I met Joey Lauren Adams, who played Simone; and Deena Martin, the blonde in the movie who could barely zip her jeans, who had lived around the corner from me in Chelsea; and Marissa Ribisi, who played Cynthia, and liked to sew and make things. We all hung out. Anthony Rapp played Tony, who was best friends with Adam Goldberg’s character, Mike Newhouse. Marissa would be their best gal pal and she was already sporting a cute red ’fro. Nicky Katt played Clint, Adam’s nemesis in the movie, and I’d meet his mom later that year. She had a parrot and was a free spirit living in California. After we were cast, Rick sent us all mixtapes of the music he wanted in the movie. I still have it somewhere. I think it starts with “Cherry Bomb.”

Dazed shot in Austin and we all stayed in that hotel by the bridge next to the Four Seasons—I forget the name of the place, but now it’s something else anyway. I was on As the World Turns at the time, fresh from dropping out of college after three and a half years on probation, mainly for a bad attitude because I didn’t like rehearsing scenes, preferring instead to wing it. I had a lazy attitude for things I didn’t feel were important, like circus class. I didn’t have the guts to be a real clown and already knew how to juggle. I skipped class to clown around and kept my probation letters in the freezer, for some reason—an act of self-preservation, maybe.

There were around twenty of us in that hotel in Austin, and for the first two weeks of rehearsals and cast bonding I was hardly ever there because I was doing the soap. I’d gotten cast in World Turns on April Fools’ the year before, so I flew back and forth several times. It made sense for the character anyway, since she was a bad girl with a rough upbringing, I decided. She made her friends do things they’d regret the next day, like drink too much and say something they wished they hadn’t—or go to the drugstore and swap the hair dye in the boxes, or put Ex-Lax in a batch of brownies, or Nair her dad’s hairy back while he was passed out, drunk. She was one of those “my feelings are facts” people—one of those drama queens.

If she and her best friend, Simone, weren’t on-screen for the party, they were in the woods, kickin’ it with the older crowd. Joey and I wrote a casual scene where we were squatting in the woods to relieve ourselves but it was shot wrong; they were supposed to fake that our pants were down but you could see that they weren’t. I don’t remember if there was a scene with one of the guys going in the woods but we’d never seen a girl go (in a movie) and of course we had in real life. Joey and I were best friends for a while and we both had strong father figures, which makes girls more like tomboys and less like girly-girls.

She lived in LA and liked building things, like a platform for her bed and a swing that hung from the ceiling in her living room. The vibe was Topanga Canyon–like and she’d helped a boyfriend of hers build a shack there, so Joey knew her way around a hardware store. Joey’s character was the girlfriend of Pink, played by Jason London; she’s the pretty blonde who says, “Fry like bacon!” to the freshman girls as they shake on the ground. We were like sisters, and since neither of us had one, that was nice. We listened to Leonard Cohen with Rory Cochrane, who played Slater, and watched the bats come out from under the bridge at sunset. Chrissy Harnos, who played Kaye, would join, as would anyone else who was around. The hotel was like a dorm, really. We went dancing down Sixth Street on weekends, and ate Tex-Mex breakfasts early in the mornings after we wrapped. Typically, the girls hung with the girls and the guys with the guys. They shot guns at the firing range and we decorated our rooms with scarves from the thrift stores. Here’s a bit of synchronicity: After Wiley Wiggins, who played Mitch (the younger kid whom Pink takes under his wing), finished working on Rick’s animated film Waking Life (like eight years after Dazed), he worked as a troubleshooter for Apple. Jason London had just gotten a new Mac. Wiley answered the phone—“Hello, I’ll be your helper, this is Wiley”—and Jason goes into his software troubles and Wiley’s like, “Jason, is this you? Jeremy’s twin brother? Dazed and Confused Jason?” And they’re both like “What?!” It’s all connected, man, cheers. Come on and take a free ride, yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah.

There was an actor in the film you may have heard of, named Matthew McConaughey? Well, we were a few weeks into production when I flew in and went straight to work from the airport for an all-night shoot. Jean Black was our makeup artist and there were Polaroids of some of the actors taped to the makeup mirror. What can I say but wow? This Polaroid of Matthew was freaking great: Ted Nugent meets daredevil Evel Knievel and just as gorgeous as Jesus Christ. We died. Jean had her arms in the air like she was the next contestant on The Price Is Right, like a Baptist taken by the Holy Spirit, and we screamed with laughter at how genius his whole look was. That guy, yes! I got made up as quickly as possible and went straight to set to meet him in person. I asked Rick if I could stand outside the pool hall for Wooderson’s entrance into the party scene. The scene was set to Bob Dylan’s “Hurricane” and I loved that song. I listened to all his albums as a kid—my love for Bob Dylan’s music was one of the best things my father gave me. We’d talk about the stories of those songs and I’d sit on the floor, close to the record player, and listen to his albums repeatedly, holding and pressing those huge padded headphones to my ears, though they were too big for my head. “Hurricane” is about an African-American boxer named Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, wrongly accused and convicted of murder. It’s almost nine minutes long and a masterpiece. Oh man, I’m such a fan of Bob Dylan. Well, I guess it’s just something you have to grow up with.

Rick’s laid-back. He’s from Texas and lives in Austin. He’s charming and nice, and he’s a dude’s dude, a sports guy, and a dad and the real deal as a filmmaker. So, yeah, I ran to set and asked him if he could throw me into the scene and he said yes. I introduced myself to McConaughey and explained Darla real quick—that she grew up with older brothers in a broken home and is tough but fun. We rolled soon after and when he and his posse strolled in, he came into the joint and slapped my ass and said, “Hey, Darla.” That’s what guys did back then, and in those days, it was a compliment.

I called my agent Brian right away and told him he had to sign this guy, that he was going to be huge star, but he didn’t listen. I see Brian every few years and mention McConaughey so we can share a rueful moment.

Wrapping Dazed was bittersweet and the experience gave me the meaning of the word. It was the high school we felt we belonged in. When we weren’t working we watched the other actors and everyone was just so good. I’m thinking now of Adam Goldberg and Nicky Katt during their fight scene, the shot of Jason London looking around when he was on the football field at the end and the music that made it all what it was. Rick called the music another character in the movie but it was the soul.

In 2003, there was a ten-year reunion for Dazed in Austin, and around twenty of us from the cast were there. It was a trip, and a few thousand people showed up. Joey hit the mic with “Fry like bacon” and I shouted out “Air raid!” McConaughey breezed onstage and everyone flipped out. The screening was in a park and people brought blankets to sit on and partied with the movie; some even stood up to dance when a song came on.

We all sat clumped together on the grass and there was one scene, of Mike and Tony and Cynthia getting out of their car, that had a boom mic in the reflection of the windshield. I looked over at Rick, who noticed it as well, and ran over to him. He was laughing and said, “I made a drive-in movie!” like it had just occurred to him. The extreme close-up of the keg was especially funny, as people got on their feet to cheer at it.

Rick was in New York in early 2016 for his “spiritual sequel” to Dazed, called Everybody Wants Some!! I was invited to the premiere by the publicists, and they put me down as one of the hosts. I walked the twenty minutes it took to get there, in the fast stride that the early spring gives you. I caught up with Rick for a few minutes and said hi to Ethan Hawke, who was there to introduce the movie. After posing for some pictures, Ethan said, “You should come onstage with me,” and I said something like, “I would start talking and then say too much.”

I walked over to the after-party, which was in a small Mexican restaurant on the Lower East Side, with David Cross joining me, who’s always been too cool for school. I met Maria Semple almost immediately when I got there. Rick’s new movie, Where’d You Go, Bernadette, is based on her book. My agent had been “pursuing the project,” “chasing it,” “tracking it.” Making sure I was “on everyone’s radar.” I ordered a drink and was eating the chicken quesadilla and nachos that were sitting on the bar. She asked me what I was working on, and I said, “Other career options, new media ideas, new forms, courage, a positive attitude, gratitude.” I told her I loved her script, and how rare it was to read something where the characters feel like you and your friends. She was super nice and said I was on the list of actresses to play the nemesis of Bernadette. I was more right for the lead, I told her, but knew how the system worked. She mingled away after that, which was a defeat to my bad attempts at mingling. You can’t be direct while mingling because that’s not what mingling is and I’ve never been good at it.

I got pulled over by the publicist to take a photograph with Rick in front of a mural of McConaughey, airbrushed onto a brick wall. He was leaning against his car, as Wooderson, and Rick and I leaned against the wall to join him there. After the shots, Rick asked what I was working on, which is the same as “How are you?” in showbiz-speak. I said, “Other career options, gratitude, courage . . .” I felt like crying, for so many different reasons, and sensed he caught a tinge of the particular pain that comes with love or nostalgia. He has nice, kind eyes. “Aw, Parkey,” he said. “I hope we get to work together again.”

During my walk home, I found “Sweet Emotion” on my iPhone and wished I still had my Rollerblades. There’s no better intro to a song. Where did those Rollerblades go? Did they leave without me?

We’re cruising at the right altitude to take our seat belts off.