The Big Lebowski

An Illustrated, Annotated History of the Greatest Cult Film of All Time

Jenny Jones

• Publisher: Voyageur Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781610586528
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Historia y crítica cinematográficas

Whether contending with nihilists, botching a kidnapping pay-off, watching as his beloved rug is micturated upon, or simply bowling and drinking Caucasians, the Dude—or El Duderino if you're not into the whole brevity thing—abides. As embodied by Jeff Bridges, the main character of the 1998 Coen brothers' film The Big Lebowski is a modern hero who has inspired festivals, burlesque interpretations, and even a religion (Dudeism). Film author and curator Jenny M. Jones tells the full story of the Dude, from how the Coen brothers came up with the idea for a modern LA noir to never-been-told anecdotes about the film's production, its critical and commercial reception, and, finally, how it came to be such an international cult hit. Achievers, as Lebowski fans call themselves, will discover many hidden truths, including why it is that Walter Sobchak (John Goodman) is so obsessed with Vietnam, what makes Theodore Donald "Donny" Kerabatsos (Steve Buscemi) so confused all the time, how the film defies genre, and what unexpected surprise Bridges got during filming of the Gutterballs dream sequence. (Hint: it involved curly wigs and a gurney.) Interspersed throughout are sidebars, interviews with members of the film's cast and crew, scene breakdowns, guest essays by prominent experts on Lebowski language, music, filmmaking techniques, and more, and hundreds of photographs—including many of artwork inspired by the film.

PART I

B.L.: The Coens before Lebowski

The Coen Brothers: The Early Years

atives of St. Louis Park, at the time an undeveloped Jewish suburb of Minneapolis, Joel and Ethan Coen (born 1954 and 1957, respectively) grew up with a traditional, self-proclaimed “mundane” existence. Their grandparents observed the Jewish Sabbath (like Walter Sobchak, they wouldn’t “drive on Shabbos”), and their parents were both professors, Edward Coen of economics and Rena Coen of art history. Early on in their childhood, the boys became aficionados of the locally produced Mel Jass Matinee Movie television show, which broadcast wildly disparate films, from a Fellini movie one day to a Hercules flick the next. Such contrasting viewing fare cultivated their taste for both the high- and lowbrow, serious art-house and simple entertainment and informed the filmmaking efforts of their youth.

The boys mowed lawns to cobble together enough money for a Vivitar Super-8mm camera, and the stars were born. Joel and Ethan first experimented with their calling by literally filming the television screen (while a Raymond Burr jungle movie, Tarzan and the She-Devil, played). From there they branched out into other areas, sometimes filming their antics—going down slides, jumping out of trees—while playing with neighborhood kids. Joel has since characterized their earliest films as surreal: “In winter, Minnesota, where we were born, resembles a frozen wasteland. There were fields covered with snow and the scenery was very abstract” (Positif magazine, from an interview reprinted in The Coen Brothers Interviews). Using whatever props and locations they had around them, they produced such early classics as Lumberjacks of the North (making the most of their wardrobe of plaid shirts) and Zeimers in Zambezi, a remake of Cornel Wilde’s 1966 adventure film The Naked Prey that starred their pal Mark “Zeimers” Zimmering. Also included in their early filmography was a five-minute, silent adaptation of the 1959 Allen Drury novel Advise and Consent (they had neither read it nor seen the 1962 Otto Preminger film adaptation, but had heard the story from a friend); a lark about shuttle diplomacy called Henry Kissinger, Man on the Go (set at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport and starring Ethan in the titular role); and a remake of Lassie Comes Home called Ed . . . A Dog (named for their father). There were many movies with chase scenes, and much attention was paid to honing vomit special effects. For all of these early works, the brothers hadn’t yet grasped the concept of postproduction editing, and thus they edited the works in camera—that is, rather than cutting the footage together, they would film it, then stop and run over to a new position and shoot from another perspective.

“I don’t know where the boys come up with these ideas.”

—Mrs. Coen, after seeing The Big Lebowski, to John Turturro

The Coen brothers’ upbringing in the wintry wasteland/wonderland of Minnesota gave them ample time for moviewatching, and their tastes were far-flung. Brought up on a steady television diet of Walt Disney features, Joel and Ethan adored Dean Jones and Kurt Russell, as well as Doris Day, Bob Hope, and Jerry Lewis. They spent hours with Tony Curtis, Steve Reeves, and the various actors who played Tarzan and appreciated the madcap stylings of directors Preston Sturges, Billy Wilder, and Frank Capra. Ethan has cited All Hands on Deck, a 1961 farce with Pat Boone and Buddy Hackett, as his earliest favorite film, while Joel has listed the more erudite Akira Kurosawa classic The Seven Samurai as his childhood favorite—although depending on the day, such pronouncements can vary.

As teenagers, the Coens remade the 1966 adventure film The Naked Prey in Super-8. © AF Archive / Alamy

All Hands on Deck, a childhood favorite of Ethan Coen. © AF Archive / Alamy

But it was really literature, and not movies, that had the greatest effect on the aspiring filmmakers (perhaps a result of their growing up in an academic household). The Southern Gothic writings of William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor, with their twisted elements of irony and the macabre, heavily influenced the Coens in their writing and filmmaking styles. As admirers of pulp fiction, their other main literary inspiration was the hardboiled writing of the triumvirate of great noir novelists: James M. Cain, Dashiell Hammett, and Raymond Chandler. Their films reference literature, and in some ways—for instance, in the incredible density of details and the intricacies of language—Coen brother films may resemble literature even more than other movies.

After high school, Joel, the more outgoing of the two, departed for Bard College at Simon’s Rock, a private school in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. He attended for two years, then moved to New York to study film at the famed Tisch School of the Arts at New York University (which he chose because he missed the application deadline for other schools, so he says). His thirty-minute thesis film, Soundings, centered on a woman verbally fantasizing about a roommate while having sex with her deaf boyfriend.

Ethan was the more soft-spoken, introspective one, who carried around a notebook in high school to jot down observations. (As his college friend William Preston Robertson says about the brothers, when they hear something they find amusing or interesting, they enter it into their “personal database” and it eventually reappears in a film.) Ethan also went to Simon’s Rock, followed by Princeton University, from which he received a BA in philosophy. In his thesis on the German philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (the “philosopher of poets and composers, playwrights and novelists,” according to literary critic Terry Eagleton), Ethan wrote, with characteristic wit and frankness, “I understand what it means to say that there is an omnipotent, benevolent creator, and that claim strikes me as the height of stupidity.”

The Seven Samurai, Joel Coen’s favorite film growing up. © AF Archive / Alamy

Minnesota Roots, and Will the Real Lebowski Please Stand Up?

The Coens frequently insert names from their childhood into their films, in references that only they and a handful of other St. Louis Park, Minnesota, residents might get. Their production company, Mike Zoss Productions, is named after a local amiable pharmacist from their childhood. In Fargo, the character Mike Yanagita, with an ex-wife named Linda Cooksey, meets Marge at a Radisson restaurant. At St. Louis Park High School, in the era of the Coens, there were students named Gary Yanagita and Sue Cooksey. In A Serious Man, the Gopniks’ neighbor is the sexy Mrs. Samski, the same name (if not the same physical appearance) as the Coen family’s own neighbor, Vivian Samski. And, in the Coens’ childhood neighborhood, there was a big, tall, somewhat goofy boy nicknamed “Guy” (with the French pronunciation Ghee) Lebowski—with a brother named Jeffrey Lebowski. According to William Preston Robertson, a friend of Ethan’s from college and a writer who has participated in several of their films, “There are certain names, things that they would glom onto. . . . I can actually remember several ideas, where they kept kicking around opportunities to use the name Lebowski. So the name stuck with them and was looking for just the right home.”

Although a distinctly Californian story, The Big Lebowski also includes several nods to the Coens’ home state of Minnesota, a locale of intemperate climates and a high number of residents of Scandinavian descent, mostly Norwegian. Lingonberries, ordered as a pancake accompaniment by most of the nihilists in the diner, are a staple of Scandinavian cuisine. Joel Coen once referred to Minnesota as “Siberia with family restaurants.”

The name Rolvaag, as in “Duty Officer Rolvaag,” who telephones the Dude to tell him his car has been recovered, has a Norwegian etymology, and there’s a Rolvaag River in Norway. (The Coens didn’t want to hire an actor for this voice work. Their frequent crew member Bruce Pross, the foley mixer—a specialist in sound effects—on Lebowski, had a recording studio, so he “volunteered” to fill in. His faxed instructions from Ethan included only one crucial direction: that “Rolvaag” should rhyme with “log.”)

Finally, fellow “Shamus” Da Fino—played by Jon Polito, a Coen-film regular—tells the Dude of Bunny Lebowski’s origin: she grew up on a farm in Moorhead, Minnesota, with her family the Knutsons (also a Scandinavian name). Polito recalls what he brought to the story: “I mispronounced Knutsons and called them ‘Kuh-nutsons.’ I love that I pronounced the k in Knutsons. The Coens thought that was hysterical, when I was of course thinking, ‘Hey, this guy would pronounce the k.’” Da Fino displays a photo from the Moorhead farm—a city, incidentally, located less than two miles away from Fargo; also incidentally, it is the hometown of Jeff Bridges’ wife—that exudes such bleakness, one has to question the Coens’ home-state pride. As the Dude says, “How ya gonna keep ’em down on the farm once they’ve seen Karl Hungus?”

Postgraduation, the brothers reunited in New York City. Joel entered into the world of film production, while Ethan toiled away as a typist for Macy’s, not unlike the Herman Melville hero Bartleby, the Scrivener. Joel worked as an (apparently ineffectual) prod...