I’m A Lebowski You’re A Lebowski Read online

  They have neither our blessing nor our curse.

  —The Coen brothers, in reference to the writing of this book

  CONTENTS

  INSTRUCTIONS FOR ENJOYING THIS BOOK

  FOREWORD: SAYING WHAT CAN’T BE SAID BY JEFF BRIDGES

  INTRODUCTION: LOTTA INS, LOTTA OUTS, LOTTA WHAT-HAVE-YOUS

  CHAPTER 1: I WON’T SAY HERO,’ CAUSE WHAT’S A HERO

  Quiz: How Dude Are You?

  How to Dude-ify Your Office Space

  How to Dude-ify Your Car

  How to Dude-ify Your Living Space

  At Least It’s an Ethos

  Duderonomy: Rules to Live by, and Sometimes Break

  Dude Libs

  CHAPTER 2: PARTS, ANYWAY. THE ACTORS AND THEIR ROLES

  Jeff Bridges—The Dude

  John Goodman—Walter Sobchak

  Julianne Moore—Maude Lebowski

  John Turturro—Jesus Quintana aka the Jesus

  Sam Elliott—The Stranger

  Philip Seymour Hoffman—Brandt

  David Huddleston—The Big Lebowski

  Peter Stormare—Nihilist #1/Uli Kunkel/Karl Hungus

  Jack Kehler—Marty the Landlord

  Jon Polito—Da Fino (Private Snoop)

  Jimmie Dale Gilmore—Smokey

  Tara Reid—Bunny Lebowski/Bunny La Joya/Fawn Knudsen

  Asia Carrera—Sherry in Logjammin’

  Jesse Flanagan—Little Larry Sellers

  Jim Hoosier—Liam O’Brien (The Jesus’s Bowling Buddy)

  Jerry Haleva—Saddam Hussein

  Robin Jones—Ralphs Checkout Girl

  Steve Buscemi—Donny

  CHAPTER 3: WAY OUT WEST. ORIGINS AND INSPIRATIONS

  A (Not Quite) Interview with the Coen Brothers

  Jeff “The Dude” Dowd: He’s the Dude. So That’s What You Call Him

  Peter Exline: His Rug Really Tied the Room Together. His Car Was Also Stolen. (Separate Incidents.)

  “Big” Lew Abernathy: “We’ll Brace the Kid. Should Be a Pushover.”

  Jaik Freeman: The Real Little Larry

  John Milius: An Inspiration for Walter. He’s Not Housebroken

  CHAPTER 4: ARE WE ALONE? OR, HOW THE BIG LEBOWSKI BECAME A CULT CLASSIC

  Times Like These Call for a Big Lebowski?

  That, and a Pair of Testicles

  Shut the Fuck Up, Donny!

  And We Do Enter the Next Round-Robin

  Zat’s Why Zay Sent Me… I Um Exphurt

  CHAPTER 5: THE ACHIEVERS. AND PROUD WE ARE OF ALL OF THEM

  Patton Oswalt—Los Angeles

  Oliver Benjamin—Chiang Mai, Thailand

  Tony Hawk—Carlsbad,California

  Craig McCracken—Los Angeles

  Johnny Hickman—Fort Collins, Colorado

  Alysha Naples—San Francisco

  The Academic Symposium—Louisville, Kentucky

  CHAPTER 6: LEBOWSKI FEST. IF YOU WILL IT, DUDE, IT IS NO DREAM

  First Annual Big Lebowski What-Have-You Fest

  Second Annual Lebowski Fest

  Lebowski Fest West, Las Vegas

  Third Annual Lebowski Fest

  Lebowski Fest West, Los Angeles

  CHAPTER 7: REFERENCE MATERIALS. A BY-YOUR-SIDE GUIDE TO WATCHING THE BIG LEBOWSKI.

  ¿Parla Usted Achiever? An English–Achiever Translation Guide

  In the Parlance of Our Times

  The Big Lebowski Ultimate Soundtrack

  Lebowski Locations

  The Best of the Eagles

  Image Credits

  FOREWORD

  SAYING WHAT CAN’T BE SAID

  People often ask me if I’m surprised at the amount of attention The Big Lebowski has received over the past few years. They usually seem to expect me to say “yes,” but my answer is always “no.” What surprises me is that it didn’t do as well as I thought it would when it first came out. It was so damn funny, and the Coen brothers had just won the Academy Award for Fargo—I thought people would flock to this thing. To tell you the truth, I was sort of disappointed. But now … well … I’m glad people are digging it … that it found its audience.

  Diehard fans will sometimes ask me, “What is it about this movie? I can’t figure it out—how come people like it so much?” Well, that one’s a little tougher to answer. I usually point them toward the script, to what the Stranger says at the end of the movie. I think the Stranger’s enjoyment of the story sums up what most people like about it:

  THE STRANGER

  … I don’t know about you, but I take comfort in that. It’s good knowin’ he’s out there, the Dude, takin’ her easy for all us sinners. Shoosh. I sure hope he makes the Finals. Welp, that about does her, wraps her all up. Things seem to’ve worked out pretty good for the Dude’n Walter, and it was a purty good story, dontcha think? Made me laugh to beat the band. Parts, anyway. Course—I didn’t like seein’ Donny go. But then, I happen to know that there’s a little Lebowski on the way. I guess that’s the way the whole durned human comedy keeps perpetuatin’ itself, down through the generations, westward the wagons, across the sands a time until—aw, look at me, I’m ramblin’ again. Wal, uh hope you folks enjoyed yourselves.

  What’s great about that is how it says it all without really saying anything. Maybe that’s one reason people dig the movie and are able to watch it over and over again. It’s like picking up a kaleidoscope. You see something new each time.

  Then there’s this perspective. A few years ago I met a guy named Bernie Glassman. Bernie started an organization called the Zen Peacemakers and has founded a number of Zen centers in the United States. He calls his brand of Zen Farkatke Zen. He’s a Jewish fella … a wonderful cat.

  Anyway, we got to talking, and he said, “You know, a lot of folks consider the Dude a Zen Master.” I said, “What are you talking about … Zen?” He said quite a few people had approached him wanting to chat about the Dude’s Zen wisdom. I’d never heard of that.

  I never thought of the Coen Brothers as Zen guys. They never talked about it. I don’t think the word Zen was ever mentioned … or Buddhism … or Judaism, for that matter. I don’t think of the Dude as a fancy spiritualist or anything like that. But I can see what these folks are talking about. There’s enough room in the movie that a lot can be read into it.

  I often take these little walks in the evening at sunset and listen to different things. Recently I played some Alan Watts, and it reminded me of my conversation with Bernie and how Zen relates to Lebowski. Watts says, “The whole art of poetry is to say what can’t be said.” I suppose that’s true for any art, including filmmaking. He goes on to say that “Every poet, every artist feels when he gets to the end of his work, that there is something absolutely essential that was left out, so Zen has always described itself as a finger pointing at the moon.” The Big Lebowski is a bit like that.

  The guys who wrote this book say the Coens have kept clear of them entirely, and that tickles me. Like all of you reading this, I’d be interested to know what the Coen brothers think, but it’s kind of beautiful that they don’t want to say anything definitive. Let ’em be the pointing fingers.

  For me, the Dude has a certain type of wisdom. I like to call it the “Wisdom of Fingernails”: the wisdom that gives you the ability to make your hair and fingernails grow, your heart beat, your bowels move. These are things that we know how to do, but we don’t necessarily know how we know how to do them, yet still we do them very well. And that to me is very Dude. It’s not like he’s a know-it-all, the Dude. He’s not a guy who has figured out the way to be or anything like that, but he is comfortable with what he’s got,
and, as the Stranger says, things turn out pretty well for him. I guess we can all take comfort in that because … who knows? … things may turn out pretty well for us, too.

  Recently someone asked me, “How would you feel at the end of your career if the role you were most famous for was the Dude?” “I’d be fucking delighted,” I told him.

  Abidingly,

  Jeff Bridges

  INTRODUCTION

  LOTTA INS, LOTTA OUTS, LOTTA WHAT-HAVE-YOUS

  On a random week-end in June a few years back, we’d rented a booth to sell T-shirts at a tattoo convention. The convention was the worst kind: slow, but not slow enough to justify packing up and going home. It was held in a Holiday Inn conference room, and the entertainment consisted of two naked people hanging, suspended by their ass piercings*, from a contraption on the makeshift stage. Our booth happened to be the closest one to the stage. We were out of our element.

  To pass the time, we engaged in our usual method of entertainment, quoting lines from The Big Lebowski. We’d had lots of practice. Whether breaking down gear after a show by our now-defunct band** or killing time vending at music festivals, we would always find ways to work in a line. One person would yell, “You want a toe?” and someone would automatically respond with, “I can get you a toe! There are ways, Dude. You don’t wanna know.” Sometimes we even had enough restraint to leave the follow-up line up for grabs so that the lucky recipient would get to finish it off with, “Hell, I can get you a toe by three o’clock—with nail polish!” The more we watched the movie, the more we found ourselves quoting it. We found it to be a natural, zesty enterprise.

  That day at the tattoo convention, we’d been trading lines for a while when, it being Saturday, one of us said, “Shabbos, Donny, is the Jewish day of rest.”

  And then a voice came out of nowhere: “That means I don’t work, I don’t drive a car, I don’t fucking ride in a car, I don’t handle money, I don’t turn on the oven, and I sure as shit don’t fucking roll!” We were befuddled. Had someone called Sobchak Security to take care of the ass-people?* But it turned out the voice belonged to a guy in the booth next to us.

  We turned to look at him and one of us chimed in with the obvious: “Shomer Shabbos!”

  He raised a fist, Black Panther–style, and nodded. “Shomer fucking Shabbos.”

  As if we’d just completed a previously unknown ritual of initiation, we felt an instant bond. We began sharing quotes and trivia related to the movie. Eventually a few people walking by joined us. Soon we had a small group gathered around our booths, everyone trading lines and laughing. It was our first experience of spontaneous Lebowski, our first glimpse that there were others out there like us.

  On Sunday afternoon we paused from packing up our booth to watch as they unhooked the ass-people for the final time. Confronted with that sight, a thought occurred to us: If these guys can have a tattoo convention, there’s no reason—there’s no fucking reason—why we can’t have a Big Lebowski convention. We rode that wave of inspiration for about ten more seconds. By the time we stopped to take a breath, we’d managed to piece together what would become the basic formula for Lebowski Fest.

  The idea was simple: Get fans of The Big Lebowski together in a bowling alley, and then turn them loose to bowl, drink White Russians, dress in costume, watch the movie together, and celebrate all things Lebowski.

  If You Will It, Dude, It Is No Dream

  Having the idea was one thing. Backing it up with time and energy was another. Who knew if anyone would actually come? So, being good Americans, we took a poll. When our friends said, “Mark it!” we scoured Louisville for the cheapest bowling alley we could find and hit secondhand shops in search of old bowling trophies to use as prizes.

  A beacon of virtue surrounded by a sea of strip clubs, liquor stores, and trailer parks, the Baptist-owned and -operated Fellowship Lanes opened its doors to the First Annual Big Lebowski What-Have-You Fest** on October 12, 2002. Giant signs at the entrance proclaimed, NO CUSSING and NO ALCOHOLIC BEVERAGES ALLOWED, and below these signs was a sign that stated, READ THE SIGNS!

  Considering that the word fuck and its variations are spoken 281 times in the film and that “getting limber” is a central theme, it could not have been a stranger choice, but in true Dudelike fashion, the crowd largely ignored the rules and refused to let them spoil their fun. The dialogue quoting and bowling, and the trivia and costume contests gave the night the same sense of bonding we had felt at the tattoo convention. Although we’d expected a small crowd of about thirty friends, nearly 150 people showed up, including some who made the trek to Kentucky from as far away as Tucson and Buffalo.

  Encouraged by that success, we opened the doors of LebowskiFest.com in December 2002. Word spread quickly as dedicated fans of The Big Lebowski began to realize they were not alone. These fans, who began to self-apply the name “Achievers,” connected around the globe, trading lines of dialogue on the forum, spending hours in chat, and spreading the word through T-shirts and bumper stickers.

  Lebowski Fest celebrated its five-year anniversary in the fall of 2006, and the phenomenon continues to grow. Lebowski Fest now has a world headquarters in Louisville, complete with five time-zone clocks and a rug that really ties the room together.

  And Proud We Are of All of Them

  Over the past few years we’ve been stupefied to discover just how much love there is for the Dude and his buddies, the movie that celebrates them, and the brilliant guys who dreamed it all up. Few experiences compare to an evening of throwing strikes and gutters among a group of like-minded Achievers. The common love of the film transcends age and race, religious and social boundaries.

  The term Achiever, as it applies to fans of the movie, has a relatively short history. The term is taken, of course, from the Little Lebowski Urban Achievers (and proud we are of all of them). It started as an informal nickname on the LebowskiFest.com forum and has now become the preferred nomenclature for Lebowski fans everywhere. Playboy officially added it to the parlance of our times when they included it in the Tip Sheet of their November 2004 issue, alongside the equally noteworthy terms Pole-pox (“a rare but documented pole dancer’s malady”) and Atkins Mouth (“halitosis caused by low-carb diets”).

  Again being good Americans, we decided to make a T-shirt. We emblazoned the word Achiever in bold letters across the front and have shipped them to all parts of the world. People have sent us pictures of themselves in their Achiever shirts from places as far-flung as the Colosseum in Rome, an air base from our current situation in Iraq, a palace in India, and a suburb of Toledo. The entire collection of Achiever photos can be seen at LebowskiFest.com.

  Ever Thus to Deadbeats

  So why all the fuss? What is it about The Big Lebowski that has inspired so much interest and affection?

  Well, Dude, we just don’t know.

  We interviewed the actors from the film, some of the real people who inspired the story, and fellow Achievers in search of the answer.

  We hope you enjoy reading it as much as we enjoyed putting it together.

  * To save you the trouble, a search for “ass piercing” on Google image search does no justice to what we endured.

  ** The Blue Goat War, our science fiction nerd-rock concept band. We occasionally wowed crowds of up to four or five people in coffeehouses and church basements.

  * No.

  ** Yes, we know it’s wrong to say “First Annual.” Inaugural, please.

  CHAPTER ONE

  I WON’T SAY HERO, ’CAUSE WHAT’S A HERO?

  A·bide v

  1. to find somebody or something acceptable or bearable

  2. to endure or withstand something (archaic)

  3. to have the ability to say, “Fuck it. Let’s go bowling”

  Way back in 1996, fresh off the set of the soon-to-be Oscar favorite Fargo, Joel and Ethan Coen were gearing up to shoot their next feature film. Written with a nod to classic noir crime films such as The Big Sleep and a wink to the
Coens’ growing, spoof-loving fan base, it was to be a film about a mistaken identity, a film about a kidnapping, a film about taking a stand against aggressors—but most of all, it was to be a film about, ahem, bowling? Throw in an aging hippie, a gun-toting Vietnam vet, a vain millionaire, and a few nihilists, and you’ve got what is now hailed as one of the most quotable cult films of the past two decades, The Big Lebowski.

  You might have seen it in the theater, or maybe you caught part of it on cable a year or so later. If you’re like most people, you had no idea what was going on. Even if you caught it from the beginning, you may still have felt like you had just tuned in to an episode of Seinfeld five minutes late, and every line seemed like an inside joke. It wasn’t until the second or fifth time that you might have begun to see the layers of genius woven into The Big Lebowski.

  And at the center of it all is the Dude, played by the man born for the role, Jeff Bridges.

  It’s not often that our culture presents us with a heroic icon who is also one of the laziest men of his time and place. Superman wears a cape, not a bathrobe. Neo has no trouble dodging a swarm of bullets, much less a coffee mug to the forehead. Batman never wrecked the Batmobile while looking for the joint he dropped. Nor does he care whether his cocktail is shaken or stirred. That’s 007’s thing, man. Even Homer Simpson has a job.