1990 – The Year SLACKER Broke: Hear the Whole Story from Linklater & Friends

Richard Linklater’s film SLACKER, made in Austin on a minuscule budget with a huge cast of local performers, is bound to be on anyone’s short list of most important Texas films, and is certainly the most Austin of all Austin movies. It was a national breakout hit – as these things go – and quite literally changed the national cultural dialogue in a lot of ways both substantial and trivial after it was released by Orion Classics on July 5, 1991.

But, and this is the part of the story you may not have heard before, it almost never broke nationally. Only a few festivals accepted it, distributors didn’t think they could promote it, and, as you will hear him say in the new video that follows, he had downsized his expectations considerably, and was ready to execute a fallback plan of selling VHS tapes of SLACKER “in the back of Film Threat magazine.”

But he wasn’t done yet. In the absence of national distribution, he took the movie to Scott Dinger, owner and manager of the Dobie Theater on the edge of the University Of Texas campus. Dinger agreed to play the film a couple of times a day and it became a sensation, selling out dozens of shows in the 200 seat auditorium. The secret, other than the high quality of the film, was the promotional efforts that Linklater and his cohorts made – inspired by several years of promoting film screenings for the Austin Film Society, which Linklater founded in 1985.

At the same time, John Pierson, the producers’ representative who was shopping the film, was making headway in convincing the heads of Orion Classics that the film could find an audience, with the box office totals from the Dobie run as a convincing piece of evidence. The deal was done, and the rest is history.

Here is a new, original video about the events of 1990 featuring interviews with Linklater, Dinger, and writer Alison Macor, whose 2010 book Chainsaws, Slackers, And Spy Kids covers the whole story as part of an overview of 30 years of Austin film history. Special thanks to the RICHARD LINKLATER: DREAM IS DESTINY filmmakers for originally finding much of the b-roll footage and photographs here. Enjoy.