Slacker (film)

Slacker (1991) is an influential American independent film written and directed by Richard Linklater, who also appears in the film. Slacker was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize - Dramatic at the Sundance Film Festival in 1991.

Plot summary

Slacker is a uniquely-structured and seemingly plotless film, following a single day in the life of an ensemble of mostly twenty-something bohemians and misfits in Austin. The film follows various characters and scenes, never staying with one character or conversation for more than a few minutes before picking up someone else in the scene and following them. The characters include Linklater as a miscreant who just steps off a bus, a UFO buff who insists the U.S. has been on the moon since the 1950s, a JFK conspiracy theorist, an elderly anarchist who befriends a man trying to burglarize his house, a serial television set collector and a woman trying to sell a Madonna pap smear. The woman selling the pap smear appears on the movie poster, and was played by Butthole Surfers drummer Teresa Taylor.

Production

The film was shot on location in Austin, Texas with a budget of $23,000, and released on July 5, 1991. It did not receive a wide release but went on to become a cult film bringing in a domestic gross of over $1,000,000.

The movie was released to DVD worldwide on January 13 2003. A two-disc Criterion Collection boxed-set edition was released on August 31, 2004 in the USA and Canada only. The set has many "extras", including a book on the film and Linklater's first feature film, It's Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books, on DVD for the first time. A different book (also titled Slacker) containing the screenplay, interviews, and writing about the film was published by St Martin's Press in 1992.

Impact

The release of the film is often taken as a starting point (along with the earlier sex, lies, and videotape) for the independent film movement of the 1990s. Many of the independent filmmakers of that period credit the film with inspiring or opening doors for them, perhaps most famously Kevin Smith, who has said on numerous occasions that the film was the inspiration for Clerks. The movie also popularized the use of "slacker" to describe "a person regarded as one of a large group or generation of young people (especially in the early to mid 1990s) characterized by apathy, aimlessness, and lack of ambition". Linklater, however, has said that he wanted the word to have positive connotations.

References

External links

• Criterion Collection essay by John Pierson
• Criterion Collection essay by Ron Rosenbaum
• Salon.com retrospective article