Richard Linklater’s contribution to the Texas film community has been consistent over the length of his career, with continued involvement in Texas-based production and his stewardship of the Austin Film Society. Linklater’s career is often held as an exemplar of the contributions made to build a thriving regional film community.

Linklater’s first feature film, It’s Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books (1988), is rather obscure unless one has closely tracked Linklater’s career. His second feature, however, is heralded as one of the visionary standards of the 1990s American independent film movement and was recognized in 2012 by the U.S. Library of Congress’s National Film Registry as a “work of enduring importance to American culture.” Slacker was released in 1990 to alternatingly positive and negative critical attention. The film, shot during the hot summer months of 1989, roamed around Austin from character to character without much plot, and this observational piece became representational, in title, structure, and execution, of the independent film spirit that emerged in the early 1990s. As Linklater described, a slacker is “a Texas nickname for the type of non-student who clusters around the University of Texas campus eking out a marginal income while living a quasi-collegiate existence.” The term was soon applied to Gen Xers as a way to describe the disaffected generation in early adulthood at this time. As such, Slacker has since been used to represent a generation, a city, a mindset, and a way of life, and captured a fictional slice of life that, for many audiences looking back, emphasized the location just as much as the characters.

Austin seems to spark a great deal of nostalgia for the city that once was, as it has undergone quite dramatic changes over the past three decades. The massive growth of the high-tech sector, in addition to its flourishing music, film, and video game industries, have changed the city from a somewhat sleepy, quirky town into a bustling metro area of two million people. Other results include high cost of living, traffic headaches, sprawling suburbs, urban gentrification, and displacement of some of Austin’s (mostly marginalized) residents.