Daily Inspiration Quote by Richard Linklater

There is a quiet accusation packed into Linklater's sigh: the campus used to be an engine of taste, not just a delivery system for credentials. When he says "interesting films", he is not nostalgically pining for arthouse purity; he's talking about the infrastructure that once let non-mainstream work find a room, a screen, and an audience willing to be challenged. The heartbreak in "used to" is economic as much as aesthetic.

Campuses were a crucial middle layer in American film culture: cheap venues, curious students, faculty programmers, 16mm prints, modest honorariums, post-screening arguments that mattered. Linklater came up in a world where cinephilia was communal and place-based. The subtext is that streaming replaced scarcity with abundance but also dissolved the rituals that make discovery feel consequential. You can technically watch everything now, yet fewer people watch the weird thing together, at the same time, and then turn it into a conversation.

"Those places are all gone" lands like a pronouncement about public life itself: spaces that once encouraged experimentation have been hollowed out by budget cuts, risk management, and the corporate logic of entertainment. It also hints at a broader shift in what universities think they're for. If campuses increasingly behave like brands courting donors and avoiding controversy, the "interesting" becomes a liability. Linklater isn't just mourning lost screens; he's pointing at a culture that made room for curiosity, and then quietly decided it was inefficient.