From 'Slacker' to 'Dazed and Confused,' Fort Smith filmmaker helped make 1990s indie hits

It was the day after Thanksgiving in 1986. Clark Walker was hunting in his grandparents' tree stand on their ranch near Foreman, Arkansas, where he was just waiting for a buck to walk by. Walker was 22 years old.

He'd studied film and art at the University of Oklahoma, but he was back in Arkansas, finding his creative voice, he said. It had been six months he had not been in school, though, and he did not have a job. A cousin found him in the tree stand that day and expressed some family concerns about his future staying in the southwest corner of Arkansas.

They didn't want him to become a slacker.

"I was in that tree in Arkansas deer hunting when my first cousin came to get me and said, 'Your parents are worried about you.' You know it was the day after Thanksgiving and I had been in Arkansas for six months doing nothing but hanging out at my grandfather's ranch. 'They are concerned you're never going to make it out of Foreman, Arkansas. They want to talk to you,'" Walker recalls. "So I went to see them and they said, 'It's not too late to join the Army.' I already had the idea that I wanted to write and make films and they were not really understanding that I was here to commune with who I was and find my writer's voice."

But his parents could only see that he was not really applying himself and were worried he would end up in the same small town, Walker said.

So, he came up with a quick answer.

"Uhhh, I was thinking about going to film school in Austin. And they said, 'Oh, good, because your other cousin is going there tonight and you can go with him."

He rode to Austin in his camouflage coveralls with his cousin.

Meet Richard Linklater

On the wall of The Omelettry restaurant on Airport Boulevard in Austin was a flyer from a local film club. There was a French art film showing. Walker called the number on the flyer.

Richard Linklater answered and told him, "We're just doing this to get into the film world. We want to make films someday but for now we are just going to present them, see them, study them, and all that sort of stuff," Walker said. "So that turned out to be the first guy I met in Austin was Richard Linklater."

Walker would find his voice through a camera. Even by hauling the heavy ones around on film sets he would help create a film called "Slacker" that would become a cult classic that led to the Universal Pictures hit "Dazed and Confused" for filmmaker Linklater in 1993. Walker's career would last more than two decades with Linklater. He also worked on Linklater's 2014 film "Boyhood" that starred Ethan Hawke.

The making of 'Slacker'

By the summer of 1988, Walker was working on films in Austin, Texas, and in San Francisco. He continued to write scripts and talk with Linklater about ideas.

Austin at the time was "coming into its own as a cultural moment in those years and fading from its cosmic cowboy era, even in a transition period from the punk rock era to the grunge period. Generation X, which is what we ended up being called at the same time," Walker said.

Ideas for the first film continued to gel.

"We were corresponding back and forth and I asked when could any of us get something together and make a movie? I was writing scripts and he was trying to raise money and we came up with this scenario that summer we were going to do it," Walker said.

Finally, plans came together to collaborate on a 16-millimeter, low-budget project. The film was Linklater's idea, and it would feature people in the college town of Austin on the streets in a city with a lot of college graduates who had not left for careers, or other longtime students.

In World War I, the word for someone who avoided military service was "slacker," Walker said. It was a word that fit the project.

"We were using the phrase in an ironic way because everyone depicted in the film, everyone who worked on it, was also holding down a job, having a creative project or running some sort of operation to build that community they were in," Walker said.

"We all made sandwiches and delivered lunches in the meantime to make money," he said.

He did not think the project was going to make money.

One early scene in the movie featured a girl walking on the sidewalk trying to sell a "Madonna" Pap smear. The woman was played by Teresa Taylor, the drummer of punk band The Butthole Surfers. A taxi rider in the movie has a conspiracy theory about how the Earth has really been on the moon since the 1950s. The movie fell into the comedy or independent film aisles when it hit mainstream video stores. Walker did not expect anything to end up on a bigger screen.

"I thought we were making a 120-minute experimental film that we would watch a few times in our garage with our friends and take the lessons from it and apply to the next film," Walker said. "But I was very excited to see that the director (Linklater) always believed in it and always believed that it would have an audience."

Dazed days

"Slacker" was released in 1990 and is today known as a cult classic, Walker said. It did well at some film festivals and did poorly at others, he said.

It didn't make a lot of money, but it made an impact at the same time that other filmmakers were starting to make an impact, including Spike Lee and Jim Jarmusch, he said.

And "Slacker" got the attention of Universal Studios. Linklater had an idea for the next film that would be called "Dazed and Confused" about a high school in Texas in 1976.

It was a non-narrative film, Walker said.

Walker did some of the heavy lifting, of the camera equipment. He was a cameraman, electrician, the grip, the dolly grip. "And basically lifting heavy objects and loading cameras and things like that, moving tripods around, moving the cameras."

"Slacker" was Linklater's film and concept, Walker said. "His good method was to create a system where everyone could do their best work and anyone can contribute ideas."

The film is the story about a day, a place and a time, he explained. The ideas came from experimental filmmakers.

Debut in Fort Smith

Walker, 59, has roots that run deep in Arkansas. He was born in Texarkana, Texas. He moved to Fort Smith in August and has since been absorbed by the growing film community here.

Walker moved to north Fort Smith. He has also recently contributed photos and videos for local news for the Times Record.

He said he has been impressed with the work of Brandon Chase Goldsmith, where the Fort Smith International Film Festival has doubled in size this year. Goldsmith is working on the Goingsnake Massacre movie and book about the 1872 shootout in the Cherokee Nation that involved U.S. deputy marshals from Fort Smith.

The Fort Smith Film Festival had over 800 attend in person and online this year.

He said Goldsmith reminds him of Linklater in the 1980s.

"He's (Goldsmith) interested in making films, but before he's necessarily going to be able to do that he's also working hard to surround himself with film and to meet other filmmakers and to present films," Walker said. "Because if you know a film audience, you are that much closer to being able to give a film audience what they want from yourself. So he is running a great film festival. This year it doubled in size and next year it is going to double again. I think we'll lose him to the director's chair soon."

This article originally appeared on Fort Smith Times Record: Fort Smith filmmaker helped create cult classic 'Slacker' movie