1990 - The Year Richard Linklater’s SLACKER Broke

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 in 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 T