Essential for fans of the film but also for anyone with ambitions to work in film on either side of the camera.
A charming oral history of everyone’s favorite stoner film.
When 23-year-old Matthew McConaughey uttered the three words of the title, which weren’t in Richard Linklater’s shooting script, set decorator Deb Pastor knew that history was being made. “The minute he said that ‘alright, alright, alright’ thing,” she recalls for interviewer and archfan Maerz, “I just went, ‘Oh my god, for the rest of time, people are going to be saying everything this motherfucker says.’ ” As it turns out, McConaughey was an accidental addition of sorts, and his role expanded both when Linklater realized how good he was and when Linklater fired a couple of actors from the production, expanding the role of Wooderson. Joey Lauren Adams recalls of the director, “Rick always treated you in a nonsexual way, and for all of us women who had been treated in sexual ways for so long, to have a man who’s not like that? It’s weird.” Linklater’s film, like his debut, Slacker, tanked when it appeared in 1993, but it rode the first wave of commercial DVDs and is now a staple on cable TV. It also caused controversy during and after production: As the interviews make clear, some of the cast were resentful that Linklater didn’t use them in later films and were bitter that their careers didn’t advance further with the film. Meanwhile, three of Linklater’s high school classmates on whom film roles were modeled sued years after the fact, looking for a piece of the action. Some of Maerz’s interview subjects are regretful of behavior that was appropriate to high school but not to professional life, which just shows how far they sank into their roles. Says Linklater, who enshrined his high school years in the cult hit, “Note to actors: Get along with people you’re in an ensemble with. Especially with the director. Don’t forget who edits and controls all this, you know?”
Essential for fans of the film but also for anyone with ambitions to work in film on either side of the camera.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-290850-6
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
There’s an abundance of love and gratitude in this wildly entertaining, utterly charming memoir.
A look at the life of one of pop music’s most enduring stars.
Pop star and American Idol judge Richie opens his memoir with an account of his 2015 appearance at the Glastonbury Festival in England, where more than 175,000 people gathered to watch him perform some of his many hit singles. The singer reacts with disbelief to the crowd’s enthusiasm: “Did I dream all of this up? If not, I mean—How in the world did this even happen?” His book, marked with wide-eyed disbelief about his own success, aims to answer that question. Richie movingly tells the story of his childhood in his “forever home” of Tuskegee, Alabama; he was a “painfully, awkwardly, horribly shy” boy who struggled with anxiety and undiagnosed ADHD. While a student at Tuskegee Institute, he joined the funk band the Commodores, who in short order became a sensation, playing residencies at Smalls Paradise in Harlem and opening for the Jackson 5 on tour. With no small amount of gentle self-deprecation, Richie writes about his hit singles with the band, including “Easy” and “Three Times a Lady.” He left the band in 1982 and embarked on his solo career, which saw him take the top of the charts with songs including “You Are,” “All Night Long,” and “Hello,” which cemented his status as a worldwide icon. Richie’s book is infused with gratitude; while the reader gets the sense that he is aware of his talent, there is nothing in the book that comes off as bragging, and he still seems star-struck when writing about celebrity friends such as Stevie Wonder and Gregory Peck. Richie is refreshingly open in the book, which functions as both a fun memoir and a love letter to music and his beloved Tuskegee.
There’s an abundance of love and gratitude in this wildly entertaining, utterly charming memoir.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2025
ISBN: 9780063253643
Page Count: 496
Publisher: HarperOne
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.
In which the veteran humorist enters middle age with fine snark but some trepidation as well.
Mortality is weighing on Sedaris (Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002, 2017, etc.), much of it his own, professional narcissist that he is. Watching an elderly man have a bowel accident on a plane, he dreaded the day when he would be the target of teenagers’ jokes “as they raise their phones to take my picture from behind.” A skin tumor troubled him, but so did the doctor who told him he couldn’t keep it once it was removed. “But it’s my tumor,” he insisted. “I made it.” (Eventually, he found a semitrained doctor to remove and give him the lipoma, which he proceeded to feed to a turtle.) The deaths of others are much on the author’s mind as well: He contemplates the suicide of his sister Tiffany, his alcoholic mother’s death, and his cantankerous father’s erratic behavior. His contemplation of his mother’s drinking—and his family’s denial of it—makes for some of the most poignant writing in the book: The sound of her putting ice in a rocks glass increasingly sounded “like a trigger being cocked.” Despite the gloom, however, frivolity still abides in the Sedaris clan. His summer home on the Carolina coast, which he dubbed the Sea Section, overspills with irreverent bantering between him and his siblings as his long-suffering partner, Hugh, looks on. Sedaris hasn’t lost his capacity for bemused observations of the people he encounters. For example, cashiers who say “have a blessed day” make him feel “like you’ve been sprayed against your will with God cologne.” But bad news has sharpened the author’s humor, and this book is defined by a persistent, engaging bafflement over how seriously or unseriously to take life when it’s increasingly filled with Trump and funerals.
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.Pub Date: May 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-39238-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
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