There aren’t many movies that change everything. Richard Linklater’s Slacker did exactly that, and this Thursday we’ll be paying tribute to the OG lo-fi Austin masterpiece.
Here’s the deal. Every day during the coronavirus lockdown, we’ve been recommending an Austin-made film to stream as part of our Now Streaming in Austin series. We’ve had everything from Hollywood-goes-ATX gem What’s Eating Gilbert Grape to deep dives into the Texas Archive of the Moving Image, and its unique record of the Lone Star State collated from home movies and personal videos.
But once a week we find a film that stands as a stone-cold Austin classic for our weekly tweet-along viewing. We started (much as Austin filmmaking did) with The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, then went for a double-bill of grindhouse fun with Death Proof and Machete. But this week we’ll celebrate the film that made Austin an indie mecca, that set in motion not just Richard Linklater’s Oscar-winning career, and proved to be a standard bearer for zero-budget, zero-star creativity – plus its pivotal role in making going to the movies cool AF – but that also changed how Austin was seen. The cosmic cowboy era had been gone for years, but it still defined how the world defined us. Slacker got w-e-i-r-d, an anti-pop-culture smorgasbord with a soundtrack (Hickoids, Butthole Surfers, the Jackofficers) that shook everyone up.
So, at 8pm CST on Thursday, April 16, we’ll be live-tweeting as we watch this landmark movie. Join us on Twitter (Screens Editor Richard Whittaker will be tweeting from his account @YorkshireTX) and join in, using the hashtag #NowStreamingInAustin. Even if all you want to do is complain about how Austin isn’t what it used to be, we’d love to have you along for the watch.
See you Thursday at 8pm!
Slacker
• Amazon Prime (Link)
• YouTube (Link)
This article appears in April 10 • 2020.
