Slacker

608/09 7-11-91
Richard Linklater, the twenty-eight-year-old writer and director of this scrappy and shrewdly hilarious first film, is also the first person we see onscreen. He's just stepped off a bus in the college town of Austin, Texas. In a cab, he harangues the driver with a wacko monologue about Dorothy and the Scarecrow's decision to dance off in one direction when they come to a crossroads in The Wizard of Oz. "But," he says, "all those other directions, just because they thought…

"I may live badly, but at least I don't have to work to do it," says a hitchhiker, one of many students, dropouts, freaks, anarchists and sidewalk philosophers who grab camera time in Slacker, the 1991 indie flick that put gifted Texas filmmaker Richard Linklater on the map. The scrappy, loose-limbed satire, carefully built to seem like improv, cost a measly $23,000. So a two-disc package may seem like overkill. But Linklater (School of Rock, Before Sunset) knows how to deliver fun extras,…