I’d encountered Slacker during my first year of college, a time I spent slouching around my local coffee shop in Arlington before briefly bouncing up to Boston. I was another Gen-X cliché who contributed to the city’s transformation into a frayed nerve center for everyone with vague ambitions toward making art-or at least, not doing any “real” work. Speaking personally, I’ve felt low-grade guilty about it since I arrived here in 1997. Maybe you even feel a little culpable for your own hand in ruining it. If you live in Austin, it’s impossible to hear those stories and not mourn the city a little. The crew told the cops they were making a movie, Linklater said, and they just let them go. The police got involved exactly once, pulling over a car fitted with loudspeakers seen near Slacker’s end-the one driven by a guy ranting about bloody carnage through quiet residential streets. The only location fee they’d ever paid, Linklater said, was the twenty bucks he grudgingly offered to a guy whose property abutted the spot where they’d hurled a typewriter off the East MLK bridge. The film’s very existence provides evidence of the kind of looser, freer city Austin used to be, when Linklater and his crew could just take over the streets and sidewalks of West Campus, sans permits, without worry of being bothered. To many, Slacker captures a time and place when Austin really was better-or, at least, way less of a hassle. But almost immediately after its release, the film became an emblem of it, too. Slacker comments wryly on this sentiment, revealing it as myopic and defeatist. Its lyrics, Linklater said, perfectly sum up the Austin point of view: “Things were so much better before you were here / . . . So much better in the past / I had myself a real gas.” Linklater pointed to the Slacker scene where local noise rockers Ed Hall played their song “Sedrick” to a near-empty Continental Club. As Linklater pointed out in his post-show Q&A, that’s something he and his friends heard back in the eighties from all the hippie cowboys who’d seen the city’s “true” heyday in the sixties and seventies. Austinites carry a default attitude of “You just missed it”-as in, all the really cool stuff already happened. The Paramount crowd gave mournful aIf you’ve lived in Austin for more than a decade or so, you’ve become conditioned to this wistful feeling, forever playing the game of “ that used to be . . .” on newly disorienting streets.īut there’s a more philosophical bent to this lamenting, too-one that has to do with Austin’s lost spirit, or “soul.” It’s something Austin has been doing since before Slacker was even born. They’re also where Linklater and his filmmaking partner Lee Daniel found much of the film’s on-screen talent, drawn from the actual baristas and waitstaff. Most of the cast’s stories revolved around long-gone institutions-primarily the coffee shops Les Amis and Captain Quackenbush’s Intergalactic Dessert Company and Espresso Café on the Drag, where Slacker’s overeducated, underemployed characters hold forth on Dostoyevsky and the subtext of Scooby-Doo over endless coffee and cigarettes. Austin made Slacker, and it’s had to cope with it ever since-watching as the zeitgeist swell it created overtook the city, then spending three decades grieving what was lost, forever looking back. “You make a film, it exists, and you’ve gotta deal with it the rest of your life,” as Linklater told the Paramount audience.

As is so often the case, celebrating Slacker also offered the occasion to mourn Austin itself. Not just among the cast, although a post-film “In Memoriam” confirmed several more had passed since even the last anniversary.

Just as he did at Slacker’s tenth anniversary in 2001, Linklater likened the occasion to “a high school reunion where you actually want to see everybody.” (The recycled line still got a laugh.) And as with any reunion, nostalgia soon mingled with talk of the dead. And in many ways, that group included everyone else who moved to the city in the film’s wake, drawn by its dream of gloriously squandered youth. It encompassed the many friends there who hadn’t actually made it into Slacker, but had lived the lifestyle that the film now preserves as a kind of historical curio.

But their circle extended into the sold-out crowd, too. There were a lot of them-37 in all, taking turns recounting how they’d become part of Austin and indie film history, way back in the summer of 1989, when production began. Director Richard Linklater kicked off the thirtieth-anniversary screening of his debut, Slacker, by welcoming members of the film’s cast and crew to join him on the Paramount Theatre stage on July 13.

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