The Big Lebowski

Plot

In 1991, slacker and bowler Jeffrey "The Dude" Lebowski, is attacked in his Los Angeles home by two enforcers for porn kingpin Jackie Treehorn, to whom a different Jeffrey Lebowski's wife owes money. One enforcer urinates on the Dude's rug before they realize they have the wrong man, and leave.

After consulting his bowling partners, Walter Sobchak, a Vietnam veteran with PTSD, and Donny Kerabatsos, the Dude visits philanthropist Jeffrey Lebowski ("the big Lebowski"), who is paralyzed from the waist down and uses a wheelchair, requesting compensation for the rug. Lebowski refuses, but the Dude tricks his assistant Brandt into letting him take a similar rug from the mansion. Outside, he meets Lebowski's much younger trophy wife, Bunny, and her German nihilist friend, Uli. Soon afterward, Bunny is apparently kidnapped, and Lebowski hires the Dude to deliver a ransom. That night, another group of thugs ambushes the Dude, taking his replacement rug on behalf of Lebowski's daughter, Maude.

Convinced the kidnap was a ruse by Bunny, Walter fakes the ransom drop. He and the Dude return to the bowling alley, leaving the briefcase of money in the Dude's car. While they are bowling, the car is stolen. The Dude is confronted by Lebowski, who has an envelope from the kidnappers containing a severed toe, supposedly Bunny's. Maude asks the Dude to help recover the money her father illegally withdrew from the family's charity foundation.

The police recover the Dude's car. The briefcase is missing, but the Dude finds a sheet of homework, signed by a teenager named Larry Sellers. Walter learns that Larry is the son of Arthur Digby Sellers, a writer for the television show Branded, which Walter reveres. The Dude, Walter, and Donny visit Larry but get no information from him. An enraged Walter destroys a Corvette he thinks is Larry's with a crowbar, only to find out it belongs to a Mexican-American neighbor, who vandalizes the Dude's car in retaliation.

Treehorn's thugs abduct the Dude and bring him to the porn kingpin, who demands to know where Bunny is. The Dude says Bunny faked her kidnapping and Larry has the money, then passes out from a spiked drink Treehorn gave him. He is briefly arrested while wandering intoxicated in Malibu. On his way home, Bunny, all of her toes intact, drives by, unnoticed by the Dude.

Cast

Credits from the British Film Institute collections.

Production

Development

The Dude is mostly inspired by Jeff Dowd, an American film producer and political activist the Coen brothers met while they were trying to find distribution for their first feature, Blood Simple. Dowd had been a member of the Seattle Seven, liked to drink white Russians, and was known as "The Dude". The Dude was also partly based on a friend of the Coen brothers, Peter Exline (now a member of the faculty at USC's School of Cinematic Arts), a Vietnam War veteran who reportedly lived in a dump of an apartment and was proud of a little rug that "tied the room together". Exline knew Barry Sonnenfeld from New York University and Sonnenfeld introduced Exline to the Coen brothers while they were trying to raise money for Blood Simple. Exline became friends with the Coens and in 1989, told them many stories from his own life, including some about his actor-writer friend Lewis Abernathy (one of the inspirations for Walter), a fellow Vietnam vet who later became a private investigator and helped him track down and confront a high school kid who stole his car. As in the film, Exline's car was impounded by the Los Angeles Police Department and Abernathy found an 8th grader's homework under the passenger seat.

Exline also belonged to an amateur softball league but the Coens changed it to bowling in the film, because "it's a very social sport where you can sit around and drink and smoke while engaging in inane conversation". The Coens met filmmaker John Milius when they were in Los Angeles making Barton Fink and incorporated his love of guns and the military into the character of Walter. Milius introduced the Coen Brothers to one of his best friends, Jim Ganzer, who also served as a source for creating Jeff Bridges' character. Also known as the Dude, Ganzer and his gang, typical Malibu surfers, also served as inspiration for Milius's film Big Wednesday.

The role of the Big Lebowski proved one of the most difficult roles to cast. The Coens contacted Robert Duvall (who did not like the script), Anthony Hopkins (who was not interested in playing an American), Gene Hackman (who was taking a break from acting), and Jack Nicholson. They then floated a long list of experienced actors as well as non-actor public figures such as Jerry Falwell and Norman Schwarzkopf, with Marlon Brando as their ideal, before deciding on David Huddleston within a month of filming. Charlize Theron was considered for the role of Bunny Lebowski. David Cross auditioned for the role of Brandt.

According to Julianne Moore, the character of Maude was based on artist Carolee Schneemann, "who worked naked from a swing", and on Yoko Ono.

Screenplay

The Coen Brothers wrote The Big Lebowski around the same time as Barton Fink. When the Coen brothers wanted to make it, John Goodman was filming episodes for Roseanne and Jeff Bridges was making the Walter Hill film Wild Bill. The Coens decided to make Fargo in the meantime. According to Ethan, "the movie was conceived as pivoting around that relationship between the Dude and Walter", which sprang from the scenes between Barton Fink and Charlie Meadows in Barton Fink. They also came up with the idea of setting the film in contemporary L.A., because the people who inspired the story lived in the area. When Pete Exline told them about the homework in a baggie incident, the Coens thought that that was very Raymond Chandler and decided to integrate elements of the author's fiction into their script. Joel Coen cites Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye as a primary influence on their film, in the sense that The Big Lebowski "is just kind of informed by Chandler around the edges". When they started writing the script, the Coens wrote only 40 pages and then let it sit for a while before finishing it. This is a normal writing process for them, because they often "encounter a problem at a certain stage, we pass to another project, then we come back to the first script. That way we've already accumulated pieces for several future movies." In order to liven up a scene that they thought was too heavy on exposition, they added an "effete art-world hanger-on", known as Knox Harrington, late in the screenwriting process. In the original script, the Dude's car was a Chrysler LeBaron, as Dowd had once owned, but that car was not big enough to fit John Goodman so the Coens changed it to a Ford Torino.

Pre-production

PolyGram and Working Title Films, which had funded Fargo, backed The Big Lebowski with a budget of $15 million. In casting the film, Joel remarked, "we tend to write both for people we know and have worked with, and some parts without knowing who's going to play the role. In The Big Lebowski we did write for John and Steve, but we didn't know who was getting the Jeff Bridges role." The Coens originally considered Mel Gibson for the role of the Dude, but he did not take the pitch too seriously. Bridges was hesitant to play the role as he was worried it would be a bad example for his daughters, but his daughter Jessica convinced him to take it after a meeting. In preparation for his role, Bridges met Dowd but actually "drew on myself a lot from back in the Sixties and Seventies. I lived in a little place like that and did drugs, although I think I was a little more creative than the Dude." Bridges went into his own closet with the film's wardrobe person and picked out clothes he thought the Dude might wear. He wore his character's clothes home because most of them were his own. He also mimicked Dowd's physical form, including the slouching and ample belly. Originally, Goodman wanted a different kind of beard for Walter but the Coen brothers insisted on the "Gladiator" or what they called the "Chin Strap" and he thought it would go well with his flattop haircut.

For the film's look, the Coens wanted to avoid the usual retro 1960s clichés like lava lamps, Day-Glo posters, and Grateful Dead music and for it to be "consistent with the whole bowling thing, we wanted to keep the movie pretty bright and poppy", Joel said in an interview. For example, the star motif, featured predominantly throughout the film, started with the film's production designer Richard Heinrichs's design for the bowling alley. According to Joel, he "came up with the idea of just laying free-form neon stars on top of it and doing a similar free-form star thing on the interior". This carried over to the film's dream sequences. "Both dream sequences involve star patterns and are about lines radiating to a point. In the first dream sequence, the Dude gets knocked out and you see stars and they all coalesce into the overhead nightscape of L.A. The second dream sequence is an astral environment with a backdrop of stars", remembers Heinrichs. For Jackie Treehorn's Malibu beach house, he was inspired by late 1950s and early 1960s bachelor pad furniture. The Coen brothers told Heinrichs that they wanted Treehorn's beach party to be Inca-themed, with a "very Hollywood-looking party in which young, oiled-down, fairly aggressive men walk around with appetizers and drinks. So there's a very sacrificial quality to it."

Cinematographer Roger Deakins discussed the film's look with the Coens during pre-production. They told him they wanted some parts of it to have a real and contemporary feeling and other parts, like the dream sequences, to be very stylized look. Bill and Jacqui Landrum did all the choreography. For his dance sequence, Jack Kehler went through three three-hour rehearsals. The Coens offered him three or four choices of classical music to pick from and he chose Modest Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition. At each rehearsal, he went through each phase of the piece.

Principal photography

Filming took 11 weeks in January to April 1997, with location shooting in and around Los Angeles, including all the bowling sequences at the Hollywood Star Lanes (for three weeks) and the Dude's Busby Berkeley dream sequences in a converted airplane hangar. According to Joel, the only time they ever directed Bridges "was when he would come over at the beginning of each scene and ask, 'Do you think the Dude burned one on the way over?' I'd reply 'Yes' usually, so Jeff would go over in the corner and start rubbing his eyes to get them bloodshot." Julianne Moore was sent the script while working on The Lost World: Jurassic Park. She worked only two weeks on the film, early and late during the production, while Sam Elliott was on set for two days and did many takes of his final speech. During the latter stages of shooting, Moore became pregnant with her son, who was born in December.

Joel Coen said that Bridges was upset there was no playback monitor and made them get one at the end of the second week of production.

The scenes in Jackie Treehorn's house were shot in the Sheats-Goldstein Residence, designed by John Lautner and built in 1963 in the Hollywood Hills.

Deakins described the look of the fantasy scenes as crisp, monochromatic, and highly lit in order to afford greater depth of focus. Of the Dude's apartment, Deakins said, "it's kind of seedy and the light's pretty nasty" with a grittier look. The visual bridge between these two looks was how he photographed the night scenes. Instead of adopting the usual blue moonlight or blue streetlamp look, he used an orange sodium-light effect. The Coens shot much of the film with wide-angle lens because, according to Joel, it made it easier to hold focus for a greater depth and it made camera movements more dynamic.

To achieve the point-of-view of a rolling bowling ball the Coen brothers mounted a camera "on something like a barbecue spit", according to Ethan, and then dollied it along the lane. The challenge was figuring out the relative speeds of the forward motion and the rotating motion. CGI was used to create the vantage point of the thumb hole in the bowling ball.

Soundtrack

The score is by Carter Burwell, a veteran of all the Coens' films. The Big Lebowski (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) was released on Mercury Records on February 24, 1998, and was jointly produced by the Coens and the film's music supervisor, T Bone Burnett.

Reception

Box office

The Big Lebowski premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on January 18, 1998, at the 1,300-capacity Eccles Theater. It also screened at the 48th Berlin International Film Festival before opening in the United States and Canada on March 6, 1998, in 1,207 theaters. It grossed $5.5 million on its opening weekend, finishing with a gross of $19.5 million in the US and Canada. It grossed $28.8 million outside the US and Canada (including $2.6 million in the United Kingdom), bringing its worldwide gross to $48.3 million.

Critical response

On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 80% based on 191 reviews, with an average score of 7.40/10. The website's critics consensus reads, "The Big Lebowski's shaggy dog story won't satisfy everybody, but those who abide will be treated to a rambling succession of comic delights, with Jeff Bridges' laconic performance really tying the movie together." Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, has assigned the film a score of 71 out of 100 based on reviews from 46 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of B on an A+ to F scale.

Many critics and audiences have likened the film to a modern Western. Others dispute this, or liken it to a crime novel that revolves around mistaken identity plot devices. Peter Howell, in his review for the Toronto Star, wrote, "It's hard to believe that this is the work of a team that won an Oscar last year for the original screenplay of Fargo. There's a large amount of profanity in the movie, which seems a weak attempt to paper over dialogue gaps." Howell revised his opinion in a later review, writing in 2011, "it may just be my favourite Coen Bros. film."

Todd McCarthy wrote in Variety magazine, "One of the film's indisputable triumphs is its soundtrack, which mixes Carter Burwell's original score with classic pop tunes and some fabulous covers." USA Today gave the film three out of four stars and wrote that the Dude was "too passive a hero to sustain interest" but that there was "enough startling brilliance here to suggest that, just like the Dude, those smarty-pants Coens will abide."

In his review for The Washington Post, Desson Howe praised the Coens and "their inspired, absurdist taste for weird, peculiar Americana—but a sort of neo-Americana that is entirely invented—the Coens have defined and mastered their own bizarre subgenre. No one does it like them and, it almost goes without saying, no one does it better."

Janet Maslin praised Bridges's performance in her review for The New York Times: "Mr. Bridges finds a role so right for him that he seems never to have been anywhere else. Watch this performance to see shambling executed with nonchalant grace and a seemingly out-to-lunch character played with fine comic flair." Andrew Sarris, in his review for the New York Observer, wrote, "The result is a lot of laughs and a feeling of awe toward the craftsmanship involved. I doubt that there'll be anything else like it the rest of this year." In a five-star review for Empire, Ian Nathan wrote, "For those who delight in the Coens' divinely abstract take on reality, this is pure nirvana" and "in a perfect world all movies would be made by the Coen brothers." Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film three stars out of four, saying The Big Lebowski was inferior to Fargo but nonetheless "a genial, shambling comedy" that was "weirdly engaging". In a 2010 review, Ebert raised his original score to four stars and added the film to his "Great Movies" canon. He called its plot almost irrelevant and the film a triumph of visual style and eccentric character performances anchored by Bridges's role: "The Dude is in a sense Philip Marlowe—not in his energy or focus, but in the code he lives by."

Legacy

Since its original release, The Big Lebowski has become a cult classic. Ardent fans of the film call themselves "achievers". Steve Palopoli wrote about the film's emerging cult status in July 2002. He first realized that the film had a cult following when he attended a midnight screening in 2000 at the New Beverly Cinema in Los Angeles and witnessed people quoting dialogue from the film to each other. Soon after the article appeared, the programmer for a local midnight film series in Santa Cruz decided to screen The Big Lebowski and on the first weekend they had to turn away several hundred people. The theater held the film over for six weeks, which had never happened before.

An annual festival, Lebowski Fest, began in Louisville, Kentucky, United States, in 2002 with 150 fans showing up, and has since expanded to several other cities. The festival's main event each year is a night of unlimited bowling with various contests including costume, trivia, hardest- and farthest-traveled contests. Held over a weekend, events typically include a pre-fest party with bands the night before the bowling event as well as a day-long outdoor party with bands, vendor booths and games. Various celebrities from the film have attended some of the events, including Jeff Bridges who attended the Los Angeles event. The British equivalent, inspired by Lebowski Fest, is known as the Dude Abides and is held in London.

Dudeism, a religion devoted largely to spreading the philosophy and lifestyle of the film's main character, was founded in 2005. Also known as The Church of the Latter-Day Dude (a name parody of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints), the organization has ordained over 220,000 "Dudeist Priests" all over the world via its website.

"The Big Lebowski and Philosophy: Keeping Your Mind Limber with Abiding Wisdom," published in 2012 by Wiley, is a collection of 18 essays by different writers analyzing the movie's philosophical themes of nihilism, war and politics, money and materialism, idealism and morality, and the Dude as the philosopher's hero who struggles to live the good life in spite of the challenges he endures.

Two species of African spider are named after the film and main character: Anelosimus biglebowski and Anelosimus dude, both described in 2006. Additionally, an extinct Permian conifer genus is named after the film in honor of its creators. The first species described within this genus in 2007 is based on 270-million-year-old plant fossils from Texas, and is called Lebowskia grandifolia.

Spin-off

The Coen brothers have stated that they will never make a sequel to The Big Lebowski. Nevertheless, John Turturro expressed interest in reprising his role as Jesus Quintana, and in 2014, he announced that he had requested permission to use the character. In August 2016, it was reported that Turturro would reprise his role as Jesus Quintana in The Jesus Rolls, a spin-off of The Big Lebowski, based on the 1974 French film Going Places, with Turturro starring, writing, and directing. It was released in 2020. The Coen brothers, although having granted Turturro the right to use the character, were not involved, and no other character from The Big Lebowski was featured in the film.

Stella Artois commercial

On January 24, 2019, Jeff Bridges posted a 5-second clip on Twitter with the statement: "Can't be living in the past, man. Stay tuned" and showing Bridges as the Dude, walking through a room as a tumbleweed rolls by. The clip was a teaser trailer for an ad during Super Bowl LIII which featured Bridges reprising the role of the Dude for a Stella Artois commercial.

Use as social and political analysis

The Big Lebowski has been interpreted from a variety of social and political perspectives by academics and pundits.

In September 2008, Slate published an article that interpreted The Big Lebowski as a political critique. The center piece of this viewpoint was that Walter Sobchak is "a neocon," citing the film's references to then President George H. W. Bush and the first Gulf War. The article says Sobchak's aggressive and impulsive attitude, which always results in catastrophe, is an allegory of neoconservative foreign policy and its supposed consequences.

An article by Brian Wall, published in the feminist journal Camera Obscura, uses the film to explain Karl Marx's commodity fetishism and the feminist consequences of sexual fetishism.

In That Rug Really Tied the Room Together, first published in 2001, Joseph Natoli argues that the Dude represents a counter narrative to the post-Reaganomic entrepreneurial rush for "return on investment" on display in such films as Jerry Maguire and Forrest Gump.

The movie has been interpreted as a carnivalesque critique of society, as an analysis on war and ethics, as a narrative on mass communication, and US militarism and other issues.

Home media

Universal Studios Home Entertainment released a "Collector's Edition" DVD on October 18, 2005, with extra features that included an "introduction by Mortimer Young", "Jeff Bridges' Photography", "Making of The Big Lebowski", and "Production Notes". In addition, a limited-edition "Achiever's Edition Gift Set" also included The Big Lebowski Bowling Shammy Towel, four Collectible Coasters that included photographs and quotable lines from the film, and eight Exclusive Photo Cards from Jeff Bridges' personal collection. A "10th Anniversary Edition" was released on September 9, 2008, and features all of the extras from the "Collector's Edition" and "The Dude's Life: Strikes and Gutters ... Ups and Downs ... The Dude Abides" theatrical trailer (from the first DVD release), "The Lebowski Fest: An Achiever's Story", "Flying Carpets and Bowling Pin Dreams: The Dream Sequences of the Dude", "Interactive Map", "Jeff Bridges Photo Book", and a "Photo Gallery". There are both a standard release and a Limited Edition which features "Bowling Ball Packaging" and is individually numbered.

A high-definition version of The Big Lebowski was released by Universal on HD DVD format on June 26, 2007. The film was released on Blu-ray in Italy by Cecchi Gori Home Video in 2010.

On August 16, 2011, Universal Pictures released The Big Lebowski on Blu-ray. The limited-edition package includes a Jeff Bridges photo book, a ten-years-on retrospective, and an in-depth look at the annual Lebowski Fest. The film is also available in the Blu-ray Coen Brothers box set released in the UK; however, this version is region-free and will work in any Blu-ray player.

For the film's 20th anniversary, Universal Pictures released a Ultra HD Blu-ray version of the film on October 16, 2018.