Around nine at night, my friend and co-worker Vincent Pereira closed up R.S.T. Video for the evening and joined me at Quick Stop, to stock the milk and mop the floors before heading off. We got to talking about movies, as per usual, and I told him about a review I’d read in the Village Voice for a film called “Slacker” that was playing up at the Angelika Film Center, in New York City. This was a film we’d seen a trailer about a week or so prior, after Vincent and I had read about an Angelika midnight screening of “The Dark Backward” which Judd Nelson and Bill Paxton would be in attendance for and “Pig Newtons” (a prop food item that featured prominently in the flick) would be distributed at. The “Slacker” review talked about a scene in which Madonna’s pap smear was discussed, and that captured both of our imaginations. Since we two Jersey ‘burb boys had successfully gotten into and out of the city for the “Dark Backward” screening with our virtue intact once before, we decided to tempt fate with a second trip into the city that night, to check out this “Slacker” picture. And so, after closing up Quick Stop at 10:30pm, Vincent and I drove from Leonardo, NJ to the Angelika Theater on Houston in New York City to see a little movie from Austin, Texas.

This was the moment that changed my life forever.

Richard Linklater’s “Slacker”, you see, was the film that made me want to be a filmmaker too. As that flick unspooled before the wide eyes of a freshly minted twenty one year old version of me, possibility was first introduced into my sphere of influence. This film was at once remarkable and unremarkable, and I viewed it with a mixture of awe and arrogance.