By Erin Free
In the often-privileged world of Hollywood, Texan-born Richard Linklater is something of a rarity. “I’m from a kind of poor, working class background,” he told FilmInk in 2006. “I was an offshore oil rig worker for two years in my early twenties, so I know what it’s like to have a crappy job. A lot of people running the film industry don’t. They’re of a certain class, you know? They probably had a summer internship, and they graduated from The Ivy League and then they entered a large corporation. They do work hard, but they don’t know that kind of work. The thought of that kind of work would make them very depressed. It’s an upper class industry, by and large. But every liberal, progressive-thinking person imagines themselves to be close to the working class, despite the fact that they don’t actually know anyone from the working class.”
Richard Linklater has for a long time sought to get that working class on the screen (“I had a script about a guy who works in a factory,” he says. “I always tried to get films like that made”) but has met with constant resistance. Even the forward thinking US cable station, HBO (famous as the home of The Sopranos, Game Of Thrones, and many other critical darlings) wouldn’t come to the party. Linklater’s 2004 TV pilot, $5.15/Hr. – which was named for America’s minimum wage rate, and followed the misadventures of a guy working in a restaurant and scrounging to get by – was passed on by the network. “They thought it was depressing,” Linklater explains. “And I said, ‘No! It’s funny! It’s a comedy!’ The thought that you actually have to work for minimum wage…they just couldn’t deal with it. In other words, they don’t want to make films about people working, and people don’t want to see films about people working. If you look at the media landscape, there’s a whole world out there that doesn’t exist.”
The ever laidback Linklater, however, doesn’t feel snubbed…even by a TV network that purports to specialise in the type of show that he made for them. “It’s still entertainment,” he says of HBO. “It’s got to be sexy. But I’m glad they didn’t pick it up because I wouldn’t have been able to make [the 2006 animated film] A Scanner Darkly. The way things work out is usually okay. You roll with it.”
