By Chip Chandler — Digital Content Producer
From indie filmmaker to Oscar nominee, Texas-born writer-director Richard Linklater has helped change the face of American movies.
He'll be profiled in Richard Linklater — dream is destiny, debuting at 8 p.m. Friday, Sept. 1, on American Masters. The film will be available to stream the following day on Panhandle PBS's website, pbs.org/americanmasters and PBS OTT apps.
Co-director Louis Black, an Austin Chronicle editor and SXSW co-founder, and Karen Bernstein, an American Masters producer, get an intimate look at Linklater's career, using early writings from Linklater’s journals, telling interviews shot at his home and cinéma vérité footage from the set of Everybody Wants Some!! to reveal his fearless approach and the extent to which his filmmaking existed, and continues to exist, decidedly outside of the production power bases of Hollywood and New York.
Clips from his most beloved films, including Slacker, Dazed and Confused, the Before trilogy and Boyhood, and new interviews with actors and collaborators Matthew McConaughey, Patricia Arquette, Ethan Hawke, Jack Black, Julie Delpy and Kevin Smith, as well as colleagues and friends, including Kent Jones, John Pierson and the late Jonathan Demme, demonstrate his collaborative spirit and process.
“This film is not just about Richard Linklater and his films but the spirit and need of independent filmmakers and films, emphatically saying to all: just do it! Go and make your film!” Black said.
“Having worked for American Masters in the 1990s, I knew that Richard Linklater would add new meaning to that pantheon of greatness in the arts, and am grateful to Michael Kantor and his staff for recognizing this as well,” said Bernstein, who produced American Masters documentaries on Lou Reed, Ella Fitzgerald, Juilliard and others.
“Since bursting on the scene 26 years ago, Richard Linklater keeps reinventing the form of feature filmmaking. His astounding work has inspired not only audiences, but a whole independent film movement,” said Michael Kantor, American Masters series executive producer.
"One of the most enriching and enjoyable docs about a filmmaker in recent memory, Louis Black and Karen Bernstein’s Richard Linklater — dream is destiny reveals the peculiar pairing of modesty with artistic ambition that has allowed the director to thrive in an industry that doesn't cotton to his sort of artist," wrote The Hollywood Reporter's John DeFore after the film's debut at Sundance in January.
Launched in 1986, American Masters has earned 28 Emmy Awards — including 10 for Outstanding Non-Fiction Series and five for Outstanding Non-Fiction Special — 12 Peabodys, an Oscar, three Grammys, two Producers Guild Awards and many other honors.
The series’ 31st season on PBS features new documentaries about artistTyrus Wong (Sept. 8), author Edgar Allan Poe (May 19) and entertainer Bob Hope (Dec. 29).
To further explore the lives and works of masters past and present, the American Masterswebsite offers streaming video of select films, outtakes, filmmaker interviews, the American Masters Podcast, educational resources and In Their Own Words: The American Masters Digital Archive: previously unreleased interviews of luminaries discussing America’s most enduring artistic and cultural giants. The series is a production of Thirteen Productions for WNET.
Chip Chandler is a digital content producer for Panhandle PBS. He can be contacted at Chip.Chandler@actx.edu, at @chipchandler1 on Twitter and on Facebook.
