Director Richard Linklater has an attractive film-industry track record. His successes include the “Before Sunrise” trilogy, “School of Rock,” and then his 2015 film “Boyhood” was nominated for a Best Picture Oscar.
To Linklater devotees, arguably his best (and surely most quoted) production is 1993’s cult hit “Dazed and Confused,” a semi-autobiographical film about high-school life in the 1970s. “Dazed” helped launch the careers of Oscar winners with names like Ben Affleck, Matthew McConaughey and Renee Zellwegger.
Despite Linklater’s impressive resume, his efforts to secure funding for the newly released “Everybody Wants Some!!,” the “spiritual sequel” to “Dazed and Confused,” lasted more than a decade. Movies are risky bets for investors, and by extension film finance is quite the challenge for even the most successful filmmakers.
As producer-extraordinaire Brian Grazer recounted in his 2015 book “A Curious Mind,” Hollywood is the land of “no.” Though Grazer’s bio includes box-office triumphs like “Splash,” “Parenthood” and “A Beautiful Mind,” he laments that his attempts to find financial backing for his projects end in rejection “90% of the time.”
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