They’re also where Linklater and his filmmaking partner Lee Daniel found much of the film’s on-screen talent, drawn from the actual baristas and waitstaff. Most of the cast’s stories revolved around long-gone institutions-primarily the coffee shops Les Amis and Captain Quackenbush’s Intergalactic Dessert Company and Espresso Café on the Drag, where Slacker’s overeducated, underemployed characters hold forth on Dostoyevsky and the subtext of Scooby-Doo over endless coffee and cigarettes. Austin made Slacker, and it’s had to cope with it ever since-watching as the zeitgeist swell it created overtook the city, then spending three decades grieving what was lost, forever looking back. “You make a film, it exists, and you’ve gotta deal with it the rest of your life,” as Linklater told the Paramount audience. As is so often the case, celebrating Slacker also offered the occasion to mourn Austin itself. Not just among the cast, although a post-film “In Memoriam” confirmed several more had passed since even the last anniversary. Just as he did at Slacker’s tenth anniversary in 2001, Linklater likened the occasion to “a high school reunion where you actually want to see everybody.” (The recycled line still got a laugh.) And as with any reunion, nostalgia soon mingled with talk of the dead. And in many ways, that group included everyone else who moved to the city in the film’s wake, drawn by its dream of gloriously squandered youth. It encompassed the many friends there who hadn’t actually made it into Slacker, but had lived the lifestyle that the film now preserves as a kind of historical curio.

But their circle extended into the sold-out crowd, too. There were a lot of them-37 in all, taking turns recounting how they’d become part of Austin and indie film history, way back in the summer of 1989, when production began. Director Richard Linklater kicked off the thirtieth-anniversary screening of his debut, Slacker, by welcoming members of the film’s cast and crew to join him on the Paramount Theatre stage on July 13.

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