What was Lee High School's 1976 football record? Did Randy Floyd play? Who did Randy Floyd take to the senior prom? Why didn't Jason London have a bigger career? How good was that Aerosmith concert?
Lee High School's 1976 record is guessed at 9-3 or 10-3: not going to state, but in the mix after making the tournament in the last week; the program was big enough for a real football coach with coordinators and a player personnel liaison pushing the oath, but not Friday Night Lights-level national emergency stakes.
Randy Floyd is believed to have played, since he came back; his senior prom date was probably Joey Lauren Adams, unless they broke up over Jodie making a move, though monogamy was fluid and Jodie irresistible; Joey Lauren Adams was so drunk the night she and Parker Posey fell down together that she may never have gotten that information.
Why Jason London did not have a bigger career: he is a cipher, fine in an important part but not someone you leave wanting to see more of; being great in a high school movie does not translate to playing people in their 20s or 30s, since those parts let you play a type with your own personality without being an antihero, so many John Hughes and Dazed actors never had huge careers.
A counter: one host's wife loves Randy Pink Floyd, character and actor alike, says she is not alone and did not understand why he lacked a bigger career, and the host adds a call for justice for Pink; in the movie he was a game manager like Ryan Tannehill, never asked to do too much though he is the thread to everyone, after earlier comparisons to Fran Tarkenton and Johnny Manziel.
Hypotheticals of a better actor as Pink: Mark Wahlberg as a Texas quarterback would have given Randy Pink Floyd an edge in the woods; Leo, in the perfect age range, would have been great but would have overpowered the movie and made it about Pink, and part of the film's perfection is that so many of its actors never went on to sully it with later fame; still, it is argued that it is a better movie with Leo in it and they win if Leo is in it.
How good was that Aerosmith concert: 1976 was two months after Rocks came out and the band was headed to the Cotton Bowl, so it would have been awesome; research confirmed Aerosmith played Texas three times that year, so Linklater must have checked, and the Back in the Saddle era explains the obsession with tickets.
1976 was a top-four music year with many artists at the music version of Apex Mountain, and concerts mattered because they were the only way to see anything; much popular music, like Stevie Wonder and funk, is absent because the setting is Texas; the cars probably had 8-tracks rather than cassettes, which is what the imagined ZZ Top record would have played on.
Driving around with that many beer bottles in the trunk, and the drunk driving; continuity errors about who is in which car; 13-year-old Mitch buying beer so easily; Jodie's run at Pink with no payoff; the oath as the source of dramatic tension
Mitch Kramer's pitching has already been picked; the next nit is whether you could drive around with that many beer bottles in the trunk without them going everywhere, and the drunk driving in general.
One host has done a version of it, with a hundred beers: line the trunk with a garbage bag and pack it tight with ice so nothing moves; the talk turns to college years in upstate New York and western Massachusetts where there was nothing to do, the others tease about dark years and the middle of nowhere, and the Wu Tang and Black Rob era is invoked.
Nitpicks are hard because the movie is so in the flow and loved; there are continuity errors about how a person in one car ends up in another, such as Don being in the car when the man with the gun nearly kills them and then turning up somewhere else, and like Amy Adams in Sharp Objects, driving would become impossible for these guys at some point.
Mitch Kramer buying beer so easily at 13 is defended as very 70s.
Jodie's run at Randy Pink Floyd, bringing him into the woods to make out, has no real setup or payoff beyond showing that the quarterback can hook up with anyone and appeals to many kinds of people; she matters because she warns the guys not to be too hard on Mitch, which introduces him into the movie.
Michelle Burke is the champ of the pod and the one the hosts wanted Pink to end up with, Jodie Kramer being cool; in a Maxim oral history she recounted having some shots at an anniversary event and remarking about having kissed Jason London without realizing his wife was there.
Signing an oath in high school was weird and is probably a nitpick: the movie's dramatic tension revolves around an oath everybody is supposed to sign, yet it has been established that nobody in 1976 cared about anything and everyone was getting drunk at the Emporium every night, so it is a stretch.
Mitch's pitching scenes apparently needed a double; the cast lived and partied together at a Radisson; Linklater wanted Led Zeppelin's Rock and Roll for the end credits but Robert Plant refused; the beer was real except for the minors; 'man' is said 203 times; Mitch touches his nose 42 times; Linklater made character mixtapes; classmates sued over the film and lost; Wooderson's Ted Nugent t-shirt; Sean Andrews's part was phased out as McConaughey's grew
The first, garbled item seems to concern Mitch's pitching scenes and a double, with the view that when you need a double for a sports scene you should hang it up; the cast all lived together at a Radisson in a free-for-all party hookup, like Survivor with showmances and alliances.
Linklater originally wanted Led Zeppelin's Rock and Roll over the end credits; Jimmy Page agreed but Robert Plant denied him, which draws abuse for Plant as the kind of guy who likes money.
The beer in the movie was real, though the minors did not drink; Cole Hauser's ten-second bit of trying to stand up hammered, burping and sitting back down is one of the best in the film, and he may really have been drunk.
'Man' is said 203 times and Mitch touches his nose 42 times, yet another arrow against Mitch Kramer; the Jovovich and Sean Andrews annulled marriage is recalled from earlier.
Linklater made individual mixtapes for the actors' characters, Adam Goldberg's being Elo (as transcribed) and the like; he was later sued by classmates who said the film disparaged them, as someone named O'Banion might feel, and the suit was thrown out.
Wooderson's t-shirt is a Ted Nugent album cover, and the shirt can be bought online; a host recounts two absurd days in their early twenties hunting with Nugent outside Auburn Hills, Michigan, while he hosted a hunting reality show, stocking his acres with wildlife, killing it and butchering it in real time, simultaneously the worst person the host had ever met and a really nice guy; Nugent is now a controversial hard-right figure, but his records in the film are great.
Nugent has two songs in the film, Stranglehold and Hey Baby.
Sean Andrews, who played Pickford and married Mila Jovovich, is key in the first 20 to 25 minutes but had his part phased out during filming because nobody in the cast liked him, he feuded with Jason London and he isolated himself with Jovovich; the film opens on the two of them in that incredible car.
As the cast turned on him, Linklater, a who's-vibing-with-whom director willing to add scenes and ad libs, kept giving scenes to McConaughey, who was supposed to be in only two since Wooderson is not in the class but was clearly a movie star; the driving at the end and the final football-field scene were supposed to be Sean Andrews's, and McConaughey is in the last 15 minutes instead.
Nicky Cat (as transcribed), already a pretty cool actor, stands next to McConaughey in the car-hood scene when he was basically an extra, and may have wondered about it, though they were both in A Time to Kill in 1996; the most memorable Wooderson scenes were improvised or written on set, including the spelled-out L.I.V.I.N. and the Top Notch invitation to the nerds, making Wooderson the glue and the second most important character despite not being there from the beginning.
