If you’ve seen the movie (which I highly recommend) the characters in question are the quarterback played by Jason London (“I may play football but I will never sign that”), the stoner played by Rory Cochran (“Martha Washington was a hip, hip, hip, hip lady, man”) and the brilliant Matthew McConaughy character, Wooderson ("That’s what I like about them high school girls man, I keep getting older, they stay the same.’)
These guys are saying the movie used their real last names but insist that they are not really like the characters in the movie.
It seems paradoxical to me to claim that the characters are not based on them but then to insist they’ve somehow been used without permission.
This movie came out in 1993, btw, so I don’t know why it took eleven years for these guys to decide they’d been wronged.
I strongly suspect that this is just a charade to try to wring some money out of Linklater and I hope it gets dismissed.
Besides, all writers use real life people as inspiration for characters. Huck Finn was based on a real childhood friend of Mark Twain. Charles Schulz’s Peanuts characters were based on real kids he knew as a child. There’s even a real Kramer. Where does this end? I hope these guys get nothing.
Dazed and Confused was a brilliant film and part of the reason was its uncanny realism. You can’t expect an artist not to let real people and events influence his writing and characters.
These last names scream COMMON so how can they even prove that they’re the Wooderson, Floyd and Slater that Linklater used for inspiration?
And I somehow doubt these three morons are getting approached for autographs by fans. Unless they’re going around telling people “the three guys from Dazed and Confused are based on us!” It’s here that their lawsuit falls apart.