The actor:	Wyatt Russell
The character:	Willoughby
The film:	Everybody Wants Some!!
The line:	“Well, boys: here for a good time, not a long time, right?”

I guess Willoughby listened to Trooper, right?

It used to be that many of our great film directors in this country were real macho sportsman types, and not just because women were actively shunned from directing studio pictures for several decades. Howard Hawks, appropriately enough for a Phillips Exeter man, was a terrific tennis player in his youth. John Ford was “Bull” Feeney in high school because of his play on the football field. William A. Wellman played hockey and was a holy terror in school. John Huston overcame illnesses in his childhood to box competitively. You get the picture. The “movie brats,” as they called George Lucas and Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg, fairly ruined that trend. Ford and Huston got into the movie biz because of family members, not because they were such great lovers of cinema. Spielberg and Peter Bogdanovich got into the movie biz because they’d been devouring movies since they were little kids. I think it shows in the movies, too. The Last Picture Show is a great film, but the people of Anarene are more like movie characters than real people. Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. aren’t quite the depictions of divorced suburbia they get lifted up as because of the whole alien thing. Even Scorsese’s way of showing real people like Jake LaMotta or Henry Hill is maximalist rather than realist. I firmly believe that no matter how fake the studio system was that propped up Hawks or Huston or Wellman, the people in their movies generally seem more like people than most of the folks in the movie brat films.

Richard Linklater, whose movies are not really like any of the people I’ve mentioned so far, is a blend. It’s not an overstatement to say that the Austin film scene, including SXSW, owes much to Linklater’s activity. Linklater was also a talented athlete when he was a kid, playing football and baseball in high school before going to Sam Houston State to play baseball there. Linklater makes movies drawn from his own experience about as often as any major director in this country, and with that in mind it’s no wonder that so many of the guys in Dazed and Confused are football players. Everybody Wants Some, with its lovable idiot baseball players, is even more Linklater. Of the filmmakers who rose in the early 1990s, only Linklater could have made Boyhood. Quentin Tarantino, a videocassette brat, couldn’t conceive of it because he’s been living in a self-made fantasy land for his entire life. Spike Lee, with his love of symbology, couldn’t do it. Steven Soderbergh, with his impatience and succinctness, couldn’t get there. Say what you will about high school sports, but the communal experience of those team sports doesn’t just linger. It throbs in a person for years and years after.

This is a very long-winded way of saying that Linklater has a wonderful capacity to imbue literal moments with metaphorical power. The team finds out that Willoughby, one of their pitchers and a new transfer to boot, has to be dismissed. He’s thirty years old. He does not have any more college eligibility; he wants to keep playing college ball and transfers from school to school in order to work the cover-up. Willoughby gets pulled aside during a practice and isn’t heard from again. He looks at the dugout, where a few of the younger players are looking at him, afraid like kids are secretly afraid when someone they think of as more mature gets called to the principal’s office. Here for a good time, Willoughby says with some resignation in his voice, not a long time.

It means everything that Willoughby is not an outfielder or a second baseman, but a pitcher. It means that he has to come off the mound. In the early 1980s, there were two ways to get replaced as a pitcher during a baseball game. Either you left the mound after completing an inning and someone else got sent out afterwards (pinch hitting, reliever, whatever), or the manager came out to get you because he no longer trusted you to get the outs you needed to get. The former doesn’t necessarily mean some kind of triumph, but there’s dignity in it nonetheless. The latter, even if the situation isn’t really your fault because of errors or a bad beat, means ignominy. It means that you have been found wanting, that there is an insufficiency in you that you cannot overcome. The power to change your situation as an agent is stripped from you; someone else tells you that you aren’t good enough and sends you to the showers. The thirty-year-old, holding court with freshmen ball players, taking his taped episodes of The Twilight Zone and his weed from campus to campus, is taken off the mound. Everyone has to come off that mound eventually. Time, especially in sports, cannot be overcome.