CUT US SOME SLACK
Paramount sets the stage for Slacker anniversary screening and cast and crew reunion
In what is possibly the most Austin-y event to take place in decades, the Austin Film Society and the Paramount Theatre will present a special screening of our town’s most influential and generation-defining indie film, with its lauded director, cast, and crew in attendance.
On Tuesday, July 13, the Paramount will host a screening of the film Slacker, writer and director (and Austinite) Richard Linklater’s 1990s flick that sparked an independent film craze in the U.S. and showcased for the world just how weird Austin really is.
Part of the Paramount’s Summer Classic Film Series, the Slacker screening will include appearances by Linklater and more than 25 members of the original cast and crew in celebration of the film’s 30th anniversary (!), as well as a can’t-miss Q&A session following the screening.
Tickets are available to purchase at austintheatre.org.
For Austin newbies, young’uns, or the outright unenlightened slackers among us, there is no excuse for not being intimately familiar to this flick.
Akin in its level of significance to Austin as much as Willie Nelson, Longhorn football, Barton Springs, and Austin City Limits, Slacker provides a day-in-the-life glimpse at Austin’s offbeat subculture of “overeducated and underemployed college-town misfits” in the late 1980s, features cameos from some of Austin’s most noted indie musicians of the time, and became an iconic standard for the soon-to-be-dismissed Generation X.
Shot in Austin during the summer of 1989 on a shoestring budget and released in theaters in the summer of 1991, Slacker was presented in a meandering, often ludicrous (and as it turns out, brilliant) film style that perfectly captured generational curiosity, angst, and apathy — and begged the all-important question: Was that really Madonna’s Pap smear?
The Slacker screening comes just days before the Austin Film Society — which was founded by Linklater back in 1985, by the way — reopens its art-house theater, AFS Cinema after a pandemic closure and successful crowdfunding campaign that raised $150,000 from 700 donors in about a month’s time.
A full schedule of AFS Cinema’s summer lineup is available on the AFS website.
