Matthew McConaughey Read online

  Sadly, McConaughey’s father died on 17 August 1992, during the making of the film, just five or six days into shooting. He died while having sex with his wife on a Monday morning. ‘On Monday mornings, he and I often said goodbye by making love,’ Kay told Us Weekly in 2008. ‘But one day, all of a sudden, it just happened… I knew that something was wrong, because I didn’t hear anything from him. Just nothing. But it was just the best way to go!’

  McConaughey was back on set just two days after the funeral. ‘I remember walking around with Rick,’ McConaughey told Texas Monthly’s John Spong, ‘trying to figure out how to take the time to mourn but also get to the future quicker. I told him, “I can still have a relationship with my dad, but I’ve got to keep him alive. He’s got to just keep livin.”’

  McConaughey wasn’t just an actor on the film but also a hired hand, always offering assistance to director Linklater whenever he needed it. Linklater would refer to McConaughey as the cast’s team captain, so whenever there were concerns, McConaughey was there to help and act as the intermediary between the cast and crew. A crisis happened regarding the script on the last night of shooting and McConaughey was there to offer immediate help. They had no money left to extend the shoot and the sun was coming up, which would disrupt filming. Shot in a typically indie fashion with improvised dialogue, the main arch of the story – whether quarterback Randall ‘Pink’ Floyd should sign an anti-drug petition – had not been resolved. It was an internal argument and the character’s great source of angst. McConaughey suggested what advice his character Wooderson would give to Pink for the climax at an after-party with lots of pot at the fifty-yard line of the high school football pitch. McConaughey uttered that now famous line ‘You just gotta keep livin’, man, l-i-v-i-n.’

  Everybody who knew McConaughey’s dad called him Pop whether they were family or not. He was a friendly and likeable man, and a beer-loving raconteur. He used to wear a pair of baby blue shorts every day. He loved to hang out with his buddies and watch sports on Sundays, drinking beer. Matthew owes his dad a lot for all the advice that was handed down from father to son. ‘I remember my father telling us very early the birds and bees part,’ McConaughey said to Total Film. ‘He goes, “You’re gonna kiss, and it’s gonna go further. If you ever, ever sense the slightest bit of resistance, when you’re approaching or trying to, you know, get under their shirt… if you feel the slightest sense of resistance, you stop.” And he goes, “You will also have many times that girl, after you feel the resistance, telling you, ‘No, no, no, – it’s OK.’ But do not go any further.”’

  McConaughey struggled to cope with his father’s death and developed the personal mantra ‘Just keep livin” – that now iconic line spoken by his character in the film. Sadly, his father never saw him as a screen actor, but he would have been very proud. ‘I found all these old paintings and pottery he had done,’ McConaughey said to the Independent’s Lesley O’Toole. ‘I said: “Mum, when was he doing this?” So there was something artistic in the blood line that I didn’t know about. It was neat to find out those things.’

  Released in the US and UK in September 1993, Dazed and Confused was played in 183 cinemas across the States and grossed just $918,127 on its opening weekend. The film made less than $8 million at the US box office, barely breaking even, though it has since gained a huge cult following on video and DVD with total sales coming in at around $30 million. Sales of the soundtrack have since topped two million units, which was massively helpful to the filmmakers given how expensive the rights to purchase the songs were. The film was very popular in college towns where word of mouth spread like wildfire – here’s a film about a bunch of college kids, driving around in cars, smoking pot and listening to Edgar Winter songs on the last day of summer back in the mid-1970s. What’s not to like about it?

  In a 2002 Sight And Sound poll, Pulp Fiction director Quentin Tarantino listed it as the tenth best film of all time and Entertainment Weekly magazine voted it third in their list of the ‘50 Best High School Movies’. EW also voted it tenth in their ‘Funniest Movies Of The Past 25 Years’ poll. Newsweek called it a ‘crushingly funny and knowing ode to misspent youth.’ It was the perfect film for McConaughey to kick-start his acting career.

  Famed Chicago Sun-Times film critic Roger Ebert wrote: ‘The film’s real inspiration, I think, is to depict some high school kids from the 1970s with such unblinking attention that we will realise how romanticised most movie teenagers are. A lot of these kids are asking, with Peggy Lee, “Is that all there is?” Linklater’s style is to introduce some characters, linger with them for a while, and then move on to different characters, eventually circling back so that all the stories get told simultaneously.’

  San Francisco Chronicle’s Michael Snyder said: ‘The movie’s episodic view of a collection of interesting friends, sweethearts and cliques often rings so true that it might be a documentary… It’s so right, you might think Linklater has mastered time travel.’

  Obviously McConaughey had not yet become a star so reviews of the original release barely, if at all, mentioned him, but retrospective reviews have since occasionally referred to his name, such as Simon Kinnear’s piece on the 2011 DVD release in Total Film. He said: ‘Team Austin’s triumphs are more muted: Linklater’s relationship with the mainstream continues to blow hot and cold, and even the film’s biggest stars, Matthew McConaughey and Ben Affleck, have had careers that can be filed under “dazed” and “confused”, respectively.’

  Steven Beard wrote of the DVD release in Empire magazine: ‘A commercial failure in the US, despite generally good notices, it hung around in limbo waiting for a UK release for more than a year. Characterised in some quarters as the American Graffiti for the slacker generation, this is in fact a very clever piece of retro seventies anti-nostalgia, which scrupulously avoids sentimentality. It just wants to tell us how genuinely strange the seventies were.’

  McConaughey later reprised his role as Wooderson in Butch Walker and The Black Widows’ 2003 music video for their song ‘Synthesizers’. It seemed as if McConaughey’s character took on a life of his own.

  Dazed and Confused, along with Linklater’s previous project Slacker, sparked a subgenre of similarly themed films throughout the 1990s generally referred to as ‘slacker films.’ New Jersey filmmaker Kevin Smith became a proponent of the genre with titles such as Clerks and Mallrats. These films are generally about aimless or disenfranchised high school or college kids and dropouts, who hang around shopping malls or liquor stores, smoking dope and listening to music. Many of these films were also influenced by the John Hughes classics of the 1980s such as Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, The Breakfast Club, Some Kind of Wonderful and Sixteen Candles.

  ‘For me personally, Dazed fans are my favourite fans,’ McConaughey told Texas Monthly’s John Spong in 2003. ‘They never want anything. They like to come by, say the first half of a line, and wait for me to finish it: “…It’d be a lot cooler if you did.” Then they walk off giggling. Just giggling.’

  McConaughey was far from a slacker, though; he set his mind on the entertainment industry. Sure, he originally wanted to be a filmmaker but once he’d dipped his toes into acting his mind was set and he dedicated himself to the craft. McConaughey is the sort of man who sets his heart and mind on something and pours everything he’s got into achieving that goal. There was still a great deal of work to achieve but things were coming along nicely.

  With his good looks and Texan charm, he appeared in TV commercials, including one for the Austin-American Statesman, a Texan daily newspaper based in Austin, which gave him one of his earliest speaking roles in front of the camera. He said: ‘How else am I gonna keep up with my “Horns?”’ – a reference to the Texas Longhorns, his beloved sports team.

  Another one of his earliest parts was playing Larry Dickens in an episode of the NBC TV series Unsolved Mysteries, Episode #5.12, which originally aired in December 1992. But of course, this was filmed after his first film acting a
ppearance on camera in Dazed and Confused, but because films take much longer to get released than TV episodes do to get broadcasted, he appeared on TV before he was on film. Unsolved Mysteries was hosted by Robert Stack and used a documentary-style format to profile real life mysteries often concerning the unexplained and paranormal such as ghosts, UFO, alien abductions as well as government conspiracies and missing persons.

  McConaughey’s next film role was as Guy #2 in the cheesy low-budget horror film My Boyfriend’s Back, released in 1993, but even though it was filmed after Dazed and Confused it was released before it, so My Boyfriend’s Back was his actual theatrical debut. Such is the nature of B-movies that they are quick to make and quicker to distribute. An actor can star in multiple films and one can have a release date sooner than another that was made before it, which can often create a rather confusing chronology.

  Directed by Bob Balaban and produced by Friday the 13th creator Sean S. Cunningham, My Boyfriend’s Back is about a teenage boy named Jonny Dingle who returns from the dead as a zombie to meet the girl he’s in love with, Missy McCloud, for a date. Poorly received, My Boyfriend’s Back grossed just $3,335,984 in box office receipts after its August 1993 US release and has faded into B-movie obscurity, though it also featured Lost actor’s Matthew Fox’s first film role. Renée Zellweger’s only scene was cut from the film and the late Philip Seymour Hoffman also had a part as Chuck Bronski. Needless to say, reviews of My Boyfriend’s Back were poor and, though some genre fans may have a soft spot for its cheesiness, it is a dreadful film.

  *****

  McConaughey had finally graduated college in the spring of 1993 with a Bachelor’s degree in Radio-Television-Film originally thinking he would become a filmmaker, but not an actor. Before he left Texas for the bright lights of the City of Angels he read for a small part in the trashy Return of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. He didn’t get it. McConaughey was instead offered the lead role as the villain opposite fellow Texan, Renée Zellweger. After already appearing together in cult classic Dazed and Confused and that long forgotten B-movie My Boyfriend’s Back, McConaughey and Zellweger both had similar experiences with bit parts, B-movies and cult indie films. It was good training and helped McConaughey gain notable contacts in the industry, both in Texas and out in LA.

  McConaughey moved to LA in August 1993 and signed with the William Morris Agency, and took a job as a PA on a Coen Brothers film, which never happened because he met casting director Hank McCann and some parts came his way. One day, while crashing on the couch of casting director Don Phillips, he was sent scripts for Angels in the Outfield and Boys on the Side, his first Hollywood auditions. It all seemed to work out for him and it was easy money. However, he lost out on sturdy parts in The Quick and The Dead, Assassins and The Great White Hype.

  Despite some minor setbacks, due to the critical success of Dazed and Confused, his good looks, Southern drawl and easygoing personality, McConaughey was quickly noticed in LA and soon picked up some small roles in low budget films. He dashed between California and his home state of Texas getting jobs in both cities. Some of the stuff he did was trashy but everything he did earned him a dollar. He needed cash to pay the rent. The irony is, although he never intended to be an actor when he’d made up his mind, the roles came easily enough. He was going to be the next James Dean or Marlon Brando. He hoped.

  Now living in the City of Angels and focusing on films set or at least filmed in California, he was cast in Angels in the Outfield, a remake of the 1951 film of the same name, but while the original focused on the Pittsburgh Pirates the remake is about the California Angels, a team which had not been created at the time of the 1951 original. The remake stars Danny Glover, Tony Danza and Christopher Lloyd.

  Matthew McConaughey plays the Angels outfielder, Ben Williams, and future stars Adrien Brody, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Neal McDonough also appear in the film. Released in the US in July 1994 by The Walt Disney Company, which had a minority ownership of the California Angels at the time, the film received mixed reviews and grossed $50 million in box office ticket sales in the US. It wasn’t released in the UK until May 1995. Two direct-to-video sequels were later released, Angels in the Endzone and Angels in the Infield.

  With these bit parts McConaughey felt he was getting away with something he shouldn’t be getting away with, and having a great time into the bargain. His projects could not have been further apart; he was appearing in a diverse range of films. There was no focus to his career other than getting whatever parts he could manage.

  Reviewing the original release the late critic Roger Ebert wrote in the Chicago Sun-Times: ‘The movie then reduces itself to a formula, alternating between baseball action (angels appear, work miracles, and announcer goes into ecstasy) and human redemption (the manager becomes more of a human being). The baseball action isn’t very interesting because the angels (led by Christopher Lloyd) manipulate the outcomes. And the human interest stuff is canned and unconvincing. The only character who really rings true is the comeback pitcher played by Danza.’

  McConaughey’s next released film saw him return to his home state. Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation is a loose remake and sort-of-sequel to the 1974 slasher classic, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, written and directed by horror movie master, Tobe Hooper. Directed by Kim Henkel, who co-wrote the original with Hooper, the film is about a group of teenagers who end up in a remote area of forest on their prom night and come across a family of murderers, one of whom is the chainsaw wielding bogeyman of horror cinema, Leatherface.

  Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation was filmed in Pflugerville, Texas in 1994 with a budget of just $600,000. It had a very convoluted history with various re-edits and reissues along with a long and laborious post-production which finally wrapped up in 1994, and was later screened under its original working title of The Return of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre at a few select cinemas in October 1995 and at the famed South By Southwest Film And Media Conference in 1995. Columbia agreed to distribute the film both theatrically and on VHS but the film had to be re-edited numerous times and the title was changed from its original production name The Return of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre to Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation.

  Producer Robert Kuhn said that Columbia rescheduled the film’s release to await the forthcoming coming release of Renée Zellweger’s new film, Jerry Maguire, starring Tom Cruise and directed by Cameron Crowe, which was slated for 1996. The filmmakers did not argue thinking it would add to the box office receipts.

  In a 1997 interview with The Austin Chronicle, producer Kuhn stated: ‘Well, we definitely feel that Columbia/TriStar has not done what they agreed to do in terms of trying to market this film in the best possible fashion. They have not tried to exploit this film to monetarily benefit as they should have. They’ve just low-keyed it. They don’t want to be guilty of exploiting Matthew because of their relationship with CAA, which is the strongest single force in Hollywood these days. You get on the wrong side of them, you’re in trouble. So I understand their problem, but at the same time, they should have either given the film back to us or they should have done the best release they could have done. And they haven’t done that.’

  It was shelved for three years, re-cut and released via Columbia Pictures and Cinepix Film Properties as Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation in 1997, by which time both McConaughey and Zellweger had become huge Hollywood stars on the back of A Time to Kill and Jerry Maguire, respectively. The film was very poorly received by critics on its release and is generally considered to be the weakest film of the franchise.

  In effect, the film was McConaughey’s first major starring role and, while many critics had either not reviewed it or tried to immediately forget about it, as soon as McConaughey and his co-star Zellweger became huge stars they revisited the film and respective reviews were as equally bad as the original write-ups.

  Entertainment Weekly’s Owen Gleiberman said: ‘Renée Zellweger and Matthew McConaug
hey try to out-bad-act each other in the luridly abysmal third sequel to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.’

  The New York Times’ Luke Y. Thompson wrote: ‘McConaughey’s over-the-top performance is brilliant, but not a single person actually gets killed with a chainsaw.’

  USA Today’s Mike Clark on the film: ‘The kind of cinematic endeavour where you suspect both cast and crew were obligated to bring their own beer.’

  Nevertheless, it was a case of onwards and upwards, and both starring actors put the film behind them as new acting pursuits were already being lined up with gusto.

  McConaughey was next cast as Abe Lincoln in the comedy drama Boys on the Side, released in February 1995. It was directed by Herbert Ross, his final film as director before his death in 2001, and stars Whoopi Goldberg, Drew Barrymore and Mary-Louise Parker as three very different women, each with their own problems, who travel cross country on a road trip to sunny California seeking different things in life. Averagely received by critics and a modest success at the box office, the film earned back its budget costs through box office receipts and video sales and rentals. It was entered into the nineteenth Moscow International Film Festival.

  Peter Travers, Rolling Stone’s resident film critic, wrote a damning review of the film and said: ‘The film itself loses all sense of shame with courtroom and deathbed histrionics that slide inexorably into camp. Who wouldn’t want to see a rich, complex movie about women who keep friendship first and boys on the side? This isn’t it.’

  The New York Times’ Janet Maslin was rather more positive. She wrote: ‘Boys on the Side, a three-woman road movie with a wonderful cast and an awful title, doesn’t need courtroom drama, so it manages at such moments to seem clumsily contrived. What matters more is that Ms. Goldberg, along with her co-stars Mary-Louise Parker and Drew Barrymore, is so sharp, funny and wholehearted that this film creates an unexpected groundswell of real emotion.’