dood, just get a bogus yahoo account if you don't like registering with your real e-mail... but here ya go...
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Bummer, Man
Portrayed as Potheads In 'Dazed,' Trio Has A New Joint Venture: Suing the Filmmaker
By Peter Carlson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, December 8, 2004; Page C01
HUNTSVILLE, Tex.
When we last saw them, Wooderson and Slater and "Pink" Floyd were stoned out of their gourds, driving into the East Texas sunrise in Wooderson's souped-up Chevy Chevelle, off on a sacred quest for Aerosmith tickets and smoking a breakfast joint as the Foghat song "Slow Ride" played and the end credits of "Dazed and Confused" began to roll.
But that was a long time ago, man, and it was just a movie anyway -- a made-up story with actors playing Wooderson, Slater and Floyd. Right now -- 11 years after the movie came out -- the real Wooderson, Slater and Floyd are here, sitting at this long, shiny conference table in a Huntsville law office, looking older and less hairy and a bit peeved. They're explaining why they recently filed suit against their old high school acquaintance Richard Linklater, who made "Dazed and Confused" back in 1993, for "defamation" and "negligent infliction of emotional distress."
"Like, for example, the scene that shows me showing somebody how to make a bong in shop class," says Andy Slater, now 45. "I did not do that. I never did that. But they used my name and they show me making a bong in shop class."
Slater pauses for a second, then smiles. "I don't sit around the house making bongs -- dammit."
He laughs. So does Bobby Wooderson, 47. And Richard "Pink" Floyd, 46.
But their lawyers aren't laughing. The lawyers are trying to keep this whole thing very serious.
And it is serious. It's extremely serious. There are important legal principles at stake here -- such as the right to privacy, specifically as it relates to the right to avoid having everybody know what a knucklehead you were back in high school. That's why the lawyers get frustrated when all anybody wants to know about this case is: Did you guys really smoke that much dope back in high school in 1976?
Slater smiles slyly when he answers that question. "Well, I wouldn't say it didn't happen," he says. "But I don't think there was any more here than anywhere else."
"Certainly those things happened at that time," interrupts attorney T. Ernest Freeman, "but that aspect of the movie was really exaggerated, particularly with respect to our clients."
Well, of course. Making bongs in shop class -- that is a tad far-fetched.
"Oh, no, they did that," says Slater. "But it wasn't me."
Dazed and Not Amused
To fully comprehend the subtle legal issues of the case of Wooderson et al. v. Universal Studios Inc. et al., it helps to have seen "Dazed and Confused" six or eight times. Which is no problem because the movie is, like, awesome. It's an "American Graffiti" of the '70s, man.
Written and directed by Linklater, who grew up in Huntsville, it was made on a tiny budget with a cast of unknowns, including future stars Matthew McConaughey and Ben Affleck. Linklater himself was nearly unknown then, having directed only one movie -- "Slacker," a quirky comedy made for less than $30,000.
Set in an unnamed Texas town on the last day of school in 1976, "Dazed and Confused" is, among other things, a delightfully comic anthropological study of adolescent behavior. These kids smoke dope. They drink beer. They drive around. They hang out. They make out. They smoke more dope. And they engage in a quaint hazing ritual: High school seniors torment freshmen by beating their butts with paddles made in the same shop classes that also produced those bongs.
Former Texas teenagers who can still remember those days say the movie is pretty accurate. It certainly captured the feel of the era: Boys wearing overalls, shoulder-length hair and chin-length sideburns. Girls wearing puffy peasant blouses and bell-bottoms so tight you had to zip them up with pliers. Eight-track tapes blaring Black Sabbath, Kiss and Lynyrd Skynyrd. And almost everybody saying man in almost every sentence, man.
When the movie came out in 1993, critics raved:
"The ultimate party movie, socially irresponsible and totally irresistible," said Rolling Stone.
"The most slyly funny and dead-on portrait of American teenage life ever made," said Entertainment Weekly.
When the movie came to Huntsville, Richard Floyd -- known as "Pink" since high school -- was eager to see it. He'd known Linklater a bit in school -- in fact, he remembers paddling Linklater's butt in that hazing ritual -- and he heard that the movie was about the local high school. So Floyd went to Huntsville's Cinema 10 to see the movie with his wife, his brother, his sister and his cousin, Bobby Wooderson.
"I watched the movie, and I felt like they'd kicked me in the stomach," says Wooderson, now a computer systems engineer and a divorced father of two.
He was stunned to see a character named David Wooderson, played by McConaughey -- a heavy-lidded Lothario in a Ted Nugent T-shirt who graduated from high school years ago but is still hanging around, smoking weed and chasing high school chicks.
Floyd says he was shocked to see a character played by Jason London called Randall "Pink" Floyd, the school's star quarterback, who wonders if he'd rather smoke weed and drink beer than play football. Floyd had been a second-string offensive lineman on the school team, but the cinematic promotion to star quarterback didn't make him feel any better about all the dope the Pink character smokes in the movie.
"My wife said, 'Oh, my God! What are we gonna tell people?' " recalls Floyd, now the service manager at a Huntsville Dodge dealership and the father of two sons. "Huntsville is a small town, so you know the majority of people are gonna see this movie, and I'm portrayed as a dope-smoking fiend."
When Andy Slater saw "Dazed and Confused," he was peeved about the character named Ron Slater, played by Rory Cochrane -- a stoner in a pot-leaf T-shirt who makes bongs and inhales deeply and launches into a stoned rap about how George Washington used to toke up, smoking righteous weed in pipes packed by our first first lady, Martha Washington.
"Who knows? I might have said that," says Slater, a bachelor and a building contractor in Huntsville. "I said a lot of things. I was quite outspoken back then. That's probably why Rick Linklater might have chosen me as a character -- because I disagreed with marijuana laws and I was vocal about that even in high school. But I was never walking around with a marijuana leaf on my shirt or handing out joints. I was not that character in that movie."
Slater says he had only a nodding acquaintance with Linklater, who was several years younger. "He never hung out. I never saw him at any of the beer busts. . . . Maybe he was hiding in the bushes taking notes."
Shortly after the movie came out, Slater happened to meet Floyd and Wooderson -- who were old acquaintances from high school days -- in a Huntsville steakhouse. The three men repaired to the bar to discuss "Dazed and Confused."
"Somebody said, 'I'm pretty [peeved],' and everybody else said, 'Me, too,' " Slater recalls.
The guys asked each other: Did Linklater call you? Did you give permission to use your name? Did you get any money out of it? The answer to every question was: No. No. No.
They never mentioned suing Linklater that night, they say, because they figured this low-budget, limited-release movie would just fade away.
"People ask, 'Why did you wait to sue?' " says Wooderson. "Well, I just wanted it to go away. Nobody knew who McConaughey was. Nobody knew who Affleck was. Nobody knew Rick Linklater from Adam. It was a low-budget, low-rent movie and we figured it would just go away."
But "Dazed and Confused" didn't go away. Instead, it became a cult hit. McConaughey and Affleck became big stars and Linklater became a respected director, creator of "School of Rock" among other movies. And "Dazed" became a favorite of high school and college kids, who rent the video for parties, smoking and drinking along with the characters and uttering their favorite lines from memory.
Web sites devoted to the movie multiplied like bunnies, some with "Dazed and Confused" drinking games: "Take one drink every time that the following happens in the movie -- Slater smokes a joint, Pink is handed the pledge sheet, Wooderson says the phrase 'All right.' "
As "Dazed" became a cult classic over the last decade, Slater, Floyd and Wooderson found themselves semi-famous, their names recognized by "Dazed and Confused" fans who want to par-tay!
"I was skiing in Colorado one time," says Wooderson, "and I turned in my skis and said, 'Wooderson,' and the kid goes, 'Wooderson? Like in "Dazed and Confused"?' I didn't say anything, but somebody with me says, 'Yeah! This is him!' And the kid says, 'Dude, you need to come party with us!' "
Floyd has similar stories. "I have a nephew who was getting married in Bangor, Maine, so we went up for the wedding," he says. "My nephew's in his late twenties and he has all these friends and we get out of the car and one of 'em yells, 'Pink Floyd!!' It was good-natured fun on their part, but I'm there with my wife and kids and it was rather embarrassing to me, especially when they go, 'Man! "Dazed and Confused!" Love that movie! Let's go burn one!' "
A couple years ago, Wooderson went to visit his son, who is a student at Harvard, and when the Ivy League scholars heard Wooderson's name, they mobbed him, asking for his autograph.
"It embarrassed me," says Wooderson.
The incident that sparked the lawsuit came last year in Huntsville, when Slater went to a woman's house to pick her up for their first -- and, as it turned out, last -- date.
"She got in the car," he recalls, "and she says, 'My mother gave me a hard time about going out with you. She wants to know if you're still a dope dealer.' "
That did it. Slater called Houston lawyer T. Ernest Freeman and said he wanted to sue Linklater. Freeman agreed to take the case and recruited Santa Fe entertainment lawyer Bill Robins, to help him. Slater persuaded Wooderson and Floyd to join him as plaintiffs.
Robins filed the suit Oct. 8 in a state court in Santa Fe because New Mexico has a longer statute of limitations than Texas. The suit accuses Linklater and Universal Studios, which released the movie, of defaming Slater, Floyd and Wooderson, violating their privacy and causing them "severe emotional distress" and "mental anguish."
The defendants filed papers requesting that the case be transferred to federal court. Other than that, they have remained silent.
A spokeswoman for Universal Studios declined to comment on the lawsuit. Linklater -- who is currently directing a remake of "The Bad News Bears" -- declined requests for an interview, responding by e-mail through his personal assistant, Sara Johnson, who wrote: "Richard isn't able to fulfill your interview request."
Pot of Gold?
After the lawsuit was filed, Floyd checked the Internet to see what the "Dazed and Confused" community was saying about it.
"There were 700 messages," he says, sitting at that Huntsville conference table. "Some of them were positive, but most were negative. 'You losers -- stop smoking those joints!' and 'Did you just wake up and learn there was a movie out?' "
He laughs. So do Wooderson and Slater. The lawyers are less amused.
Robins and Freeman remind their clients about an article that appeared in the Daily Texan, the University of Texas newspaper, after the suit was filed. In the article, actor Wiley Wiggins, who played a freshman in "Dazed and Confused," denounced the lawsuit as "half-baked and pathetic opportunism" by "sad sacks back in Huntsville who are trying to cash in."
Wiggins told the Daily Texan that he and Linklater had previously discussed making a "Dazed" sequel that would show how the characters had degenerated into "gas-pumping hungry ghosts of their former selves."
The lawyers find that comment very interesting.
"To the extent that that conversation did take place," says Freeman, "and Linklater said anything like that, it's illustrative of the fact that they have absolutely no regard for the names and reputations of my clients."
"It's going to be interesting as we get into the discovery phase of this case," Robins adds.
In their lawsuit, the Dazed Three did not specify how much money they think Linklater and Universal should be compelled to pony up.
"I don't even think about it, really," says Slater.
"It's the principle of the thing," says Wooderson.
"It's no different from a case where your leg is cut off in an automobile accident," says lawyer Robins. "What is that leg worth?"
Really? Is being portrayed as a dope-smoking teenager in a movie really comparable to getting your leg cut off? Does having acquaintances ask you to smoke dope really cause "severe emotional distress"?
Yes, says Floyd: "It's dreadful. If I'm at a Chamber of Commerce meeting with my wife, who has a business here in town, and I'm asked about it, yes, it's going to cause me some embarrassment and some severe emotional distress."
"It's real frustrating that people I meet don't get to know me as me," says Slater. "That's all they want to talk about when they meet you. They say, 'Is that movie really true?' It's frustrating."
Signing autographs is also a pain, they say, especially if you didn't want to be famous in the first place.
"My sister works for a resort," says Floyd, "and her general manager there, he's a young guy, maybe 30, and he wanted Bob [Wooderson] and I to sign his DVD. She bought it for him for Christmas and asked us to sign it."
Floyd signed the DVD, he says, because his sister was asking. But he finds it absurd that anybody would want his autograph.
"I have a football signed by Tom Landry," he says. "I'm a big Cowboys fan and it sits on the mantel in a pristine place. But that's Tom Landry! It's not Pink Floyd."
He laughs. So does everybody else.
"My mother calls me in one day," says Floyd, "and she says, 'I just watched this movie and it had a character in it called Pink Floyd and I know people call you Pink. And they had a character called Wooderson. How true is that movie?' "
Slater laughs. So does Wooderson.
"I said, 'Well, mom, it's loosely based on facts.' "
