Book Details
| Title: |
|
Alright, Alright, Alright |
| Author: |
|
Melissa Maerz |
| Times Read: |
|
1 |
| Last Read: |
|
01.20.21 |
Other Books Read By This Author (0)
Notes History
| Date Read |
Note |
| 01.20.21 | An oral history about the film Dazed and Confused. This is one of my favorite movies... I can't help but think of it whenever I drive past Top Notch or see a moon tower and it may have been a motivating factor for me wanting to move to Austin. As such, I kinda thought I already knew a decent amount about it. I'd read the Texas Monthly piece, saw a bunch of b-roll footage from the 10th Anniversary screening that I'd just missed before moving to town, hell... at one point, during the height of my Alamo patronage, I was friendly with Wiley Wiggins. So... while there was no doubt that I wanted to read this book, I did kinda think it was going to be slightly akin to watching their recent script read-through: a fun time hanging with old "friends" but not really anything new. Fortunately for me, this book delivered on everything that I could possibly ask an oral history to do. I learned all the details about Linklater's own highschool, heard from his friends (with familiar names) about what he was like back then, connected all the dots about how the movie came about, dished in all the gossip about what it was like to be in town shooting it, lived through each studio battle as a first-time big-budget feature, and felt some melancholy as everyone had to leave this experience behind. I also got to hear how life was afterward for most folk: a golf-swing follow-through that most oral histories forget. This is where having 400 pages really comes in handy, because there's more in here than anyone would want packed into a special feature or documentary film, but the book still presents snippets of early- and shooting-scripts, third-party voices like Soderbergh, Kevin Smith, and the Duplass/Zellner brotherses. As a superfan of the movie, I am completely satisfied. Well, almost. There are a couple notably absent voices that, while I can definitely understand why they chose not to participate based on what everyone else had to say about them, I still missed hearing their side of the story. One of the things that this book does so well is discuss the friction between Linklater and Universal from both his and the producers/executives points of view. I would've really liked to hear how Milla Jovovich and Shawn Andrews look back on that time, just to complete the picture. Still, that's just a tiny blip in an otherwise fantastic document that I really loved reading. |
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