Two films premiered on Independence Day weekend in 1991: “Terminator 2,” the first film to surpass a budget of $100 million, and a $23,000 indie experiment with no plot and virtually no professional actors. “Slacker,” which turned 35 on Sunday, follows a revolving door of eccentrics, most of them played by director Richard Linklater’s musician friends, through a lazy summer day in West Campus. Over endless cigarettes and beer cans, job-averse conspiracy theorists, anarchists and wannabe philosophers hold court at long-gone haunts. 

Austinites, Sean O’Neal wrote in his own “Slacker” retrospective for Texas Monthly, carry an indefinite attitude of “you just missed it.” It’s not hard to feel some kind of longing while watching the film’s endearing wanderers stroll through West Campus in an era that actually seems to embody the anti-establishment, outsider ethos Austin is struggling to hold on to through its Silicon Hills transformation.

The Daily Texan stopped by some of the filming locations to find out what we just missed — and what’s still standing.



From “Slacker” directed by David Linklater, publicly accessed on YouTube.
The Castilian is pictured on July 6, 2026. (Ysa Mendoza)

Linklater opens the now cult-classic with a rant to his cab driver (R.I.P. Roy’s Taxi) about a dream he had on the bus.

“Every choice or decision you make — the thing you choose not to do fractions off and becomes its own reality and just goes on from there forever,” Linklater’s character, listed in the cast as “Should Have Stayed at Bus Station,” says in the film. 

In a 2004 commentary on the film, Linklater said when conceptualizing “Slacker,” he asked himself, “what if characters just spoke their interior monologues out loud?”

From “Slacker” directed by David Linklater, publicly accessed on YouTube.
The corner of 24th Street and Nueces is pictured on July 6, 2026. (Ysa Mendoza)

At Nueces and 24th streets, a man runs his mother over and speeds off before a couple of unhurried passersby discuss what to do next. Linklater, often inspired by stories he encounters in real life, said he got the idea for the scene from a local legend tying a matricidal hit-and-run to the famous Janis Joplin house, where he lived with “Slacker” cinematographer Lee Daniel at the time. When the police show up to arrest “Hit-and-Run Son,” he complies with the same unbothered affect that gives the movie’s many “slackers” their puzzling charm.

From “Slacker” directed by David Linklater, publicly accessed on YouTube.
The steps of University Baptist Church are pictured on July 7, 2026. The musician, played by songwriter Keith McCormack, plays “A Disturbed Young Man With a Tan” in the movie, one of Linklater’s favorite songs. (Ysa Mendoza)
From “Slacker” directed by David Linklater, publicly accessed on YouTube.
An empty lot on Guadalupe Street, which used to house Captain Quack’s Bakery and Coffeehouse, is pictured on July 6, 2026. Director Linklater claims most of the “Slacker” cast were Quackenbush regulars. (Ysa Mendoza)

Before it was an empty lot, the block above Guadalupe and 21st streets was home to the beloved record store Sound Exchange and Captain Quackenbush’s, a coffee shop downstairs from the original location of Linklater’s Austin Film Society, now in a plaza off Interstate 35 in North Austin.

Inside, “Dostoyevsky Wannabe,” played by Linklater’s former roommate Brecht Andersch, delivers the film’s thesis.

“Who’s ever written a great work about the immense effort required in order not to create,” he said. “Could it be that in this passivity, I shall find my freedom?”

From “Slacker” directed by David Linklater, publicly accessed on YouTube.
704 22nd Street, previously a student co-op, is pictured on July 6, 2026. (Ysa Mendoza)

On the way from Captain Quackenbush’s to a co-op at 704 W. 22nd Street, Jerry Delony, or “Been on the Moon Since the 50’s,” gives perhaps the most memorable of the film’s unsolicited monologues, spouting moon landing conspiracies Linklater borrowed from an off-center screenwriter friend. 

Such one-sided interactions, Linklater said, were not uncommon on the Drag in those days, when “dragworms” would launch into wild, but ultimately fascinating, rants without warning.

From “Slacker” directed by David Linklater, publicly accessed on YouTube.
The “Hi, How Are You” mural is pictured on July 6, 2026. The couple in “Slacker” pass in front of the wall that would become Daniel Johnston’s iconic mural. The wall is from Sound Exchange, which was an independent record store and live music venue that closed in the early 2000s. (Ysa Mendoza)
From “Slacker” directed by David Linklater, publicly accessed on YouTube.
The corner of 24th and San Antonio streets are pictured on July 6, 2026. (Ysa Mendoza)

In front of Les Amis Café at 24th and San Antonio streets, now a Starbucks, the late Charles Gunning, a “notorious character around Austin,” according to Linklater, who worked the door at a number of music joints in town, bums a couple cigarettes and takes questions from a small interview crew. 

“To hell with the kind of work you have to do to earn a living,” Gunning says. “All it does is fill the bellies of the pigs who exploit us. Hey, look at me. I’m making it. I may live badly, but at least I don’t have to work to do it.”

From “Slacker” directed by David Linklater, publicly accessed on YouTube.
The UT tower is pictured on July 6, 2026. Linklater based the botched burglary scene on a short story by friend Jack Meredith. Mike Laird, who plays the burglar, was a former student of Mackey’s at UT. (Ysa Mendoza)

When “Old Anarchist,” played by the late Louis Mackey, a former UT philosophy professor, finds a hapless burglar in his home, he assures the would-be thief he has nothing of value to steal before offering to take him for a walk instead. As they pace in front of the main building, Mackey lectures on anarchy, lamenting his absence during Charles Whitman’s 1966 mass shooting carried out from the top of the UT Tower.

“This town has always had its share of crazies,” Mackey said. “I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else.” 

Linklater said he felt an apocalyptic undercurrent in the art of the ‘80s. “Slacker,” though seemingly indicative of general disinterest in politics on first watch, ultimately captures that mindset in the context of Austin’s left-wing counterculture, featuring characters preaching anti-capitalism, distaste for mass incarceration and, of course, anarchy. 

“Withdrawing in disgust,” a character listed as “Cadillac Crook” reads off an “Oblique Strategies” card, “is not the same thing as apathy.”

From “Slacker” directed by David Linklater, publicly accessed on YouTube.
The side of Lamberts on Guadalupe Street is pictured on July 7, 2026. Local singer and DJ Wammo claims there’s a rumor Madonna stormed out of a movie theatre when that scene played during a trailer for “Slacker”. (Ysa Mendoza)

In front of one of the many warehouses that used to populate Second Street, now a hub of hotels and upscale restaurants, Teresa Taylor of legendary Austin oddball punk group, The Butthole Surfers, tries to sell a Madonna pap smear to Stella Weir and Scott Marcus of then ultra-hip indie band, Glass Eye. Taylor, who passed in 2023, became the face of the film as it gained cult status. 

Like so many of the vignettes in “Slacker,” the scene stitches together stories and ideas Linklater heard in passing with the easy charisma of his novice actors to create a particularly Austinite magic.

“There’s cinema everywhere,” Linklater said. “You just have to capture it.”