McConaughey thinks he wants to become a lawyer and enrolls at the University of Texas for his undergraduate degree. During the program he realizes that he is a gifted short-story writer and decides to go to film school instead. When he explains this plan to his father, a lifelong blue-collar worker who has struggled to pay the bills since the downturn in the oil industry, his father tells him not to “half-ass it,” which gives him both a sense of responsibility and the freedom to pursue his dream (Location 1126).

At film school, tanned, shirt-tucked-in McConaughey does not fit in with his pale Goth classmates. He prefers blockbusters to art house films and cuts school to gain real-world experiences such as working in a talent agency, becoming a hand-model and working at the Catfish blues bar, where McConaughey makes lifelong friends. He graduates from film school with C’s rather than A’s, but feels he learned more about life for not working so hard at school. One day, after work, McConaughey goes to the Hyatt hotel, where the producer Don Phillips also happens to be drinking. At the end of a drunken night, Don offers him the opportunity to audition for the part of Wooderson in a movie called Dazed and Confused.