In March we told you that Richard Linklater was working on a ‘spiritual follow-up’ to Dazed & Confused, a movie that wouldn’t be a sequel but would be a similar tale of kids growing up (this time in college). Since then there hasn’t been much word on the film – and possibly with good reason. It seems like Linklater can’t get it funded.
It isn’t that the script is bad. In fact The Risky Biz Blog is reporting that it could be the director’s most commercial film since that original breakout (and they’re reporting that the title is That’s What I’m Talking About); the problem is that the economy remains in the shitter.
Says the Blog:
There were financiers interested, but after
seeing the rocky finished-film market, they didn’t want to board the
project until a distributor had signed on too.
And distributors — as the market at Cannes and many other places
showed — are disinclined to board a movie at the script stage no
matter how good a script it is. That Catch-22 was enough to freeze the
project.
We can talk all day about how the economy is affecting the car industry or whatever, but this is the kind of thing that chills a movie nerd like me to the bone. It’s already tough enough to get indie films made – is it about to become impossible?