Editor’s note: This story was intended to commemorate the 25th anniversary of The Big Lebowski, in 2023, but the actors’ strike temporarily prevented the cast members from being interviewed.
Sam Elliott was in Texas, shooting a Western, when his agent called to tell him Joel and Ethan Coen wanted him to read their new script. The news couldn’t have come at a better time for Elliott, who was then in his mid-50s and who’d started to worry that he’d be typecast as a cowboy for the rest of his career. A longtime fan of the Coen brothers, Elliott thought this could be the perfect opportunity to break free and show Hollywood that he could do more than shoot a gun and ride a horse.
When the script arrived the following day, Elliott went to his hotel room and started to read:
EXT. CALIFORNIA – DAY
We float up a scrubby slope. We hear male voices gently singing “Tumbling Tumbleweeds” and a deep, affable, Western-accented voice—Sam Elliott perhaps.
“What the fuck?,” Elliott recalls thinking. “Another cowboy!”
But he kept reading. And laughing. “I don’t think I’ve ever laughed more while reading a script,” Elliott says. This was much more than another cowboy role, he realized. It was a chance to be part of a “masterpiece of comedy,” and Elliott wanted in.
With that, he signed on to narrate the story of Jeff “the Dude” Lebowski (played by Jeff Bridges), a lifelong slacker with a fondness for weed, bowling, and White Russians whose efforts to replace a soiled rug thrust him into the middle of a kidnapping plot that he describes as having “a lotta ins, a lotta outs, a lotta what-have-yous.”
Released in 1998, the movie did poorly at the box office and was dismissed by most critics.
The Los Angeles Times’s Kenneth Turan was of the view that the Coens’ films are “alternative universes that amuse the brothers to no end but are not guaranteed to connect with anyone else.” Writing in The New Yorker, Daphne Merkin concluded that the movie “lacks what even the most unhinged comedies must have in order to work: the recognition that out there, beyond the pratfalls and wisecracks, lurks the darkness.” David Denby of New York magazine described the Dude as “so slack-brained he can’t finish a sentence.”
“I thought it was going to be a big hit,” Bridges said in The Hollywood Reporter. “I was surprised when it didn’t get much recognition. People just didn’t get it.”
Within a few years, however, the movie had become a cult classic, not to mention an actual cult. A little more than a quarter-century on, The Big Lebowski is widely regarded as one of the funniest movies ever made.
“A Cool Cat”
A Hollywood executive named Pete Exline provided the initial inspiration for the Dude. Exline, a friend of the Coens’ and a born raconteur who served in Vietnam, once told the brothers about having a rug that “really tied the room together,” as well as a story about how he and a fellow vet named Lew had retrieved his stolen car from a Los Angeles impound lot.
“The car is pretty beat up and the left front tire is gone, the back seat of the car is filled with fast food wrappers, Burger King, and a Hard Rock San Francisco sweatshirt,” Exline later recalled. Then “Lew reached under the passenger seat and pulled out a kid’s homework.” The amateur-sleuths pair put the homework in a plastic baggie, drove to the address written on it, and interrogated the kid in his parents’ living room, where an elderly man was lying in a hospital bed.
The Coens also drew on their relationship with Jeff “the Dude” Dowd, a political radical and film-industry veteran who’d helped them find distribution for their first film, Blood Simple. The Coens even made the Dude a member of Dowd’s 1960s anti-war group, the Seattle Seven, and added that he was also one of the authors of the Port Huron Statement—“the original … not the compromised second draft.”
“He’s a cool cat,” Bridges says of Dowd. “I appreciated the brothers turning me on to him.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever laughed more while reading a script,” Sam Elliott says.
Meanwhile, Exline’s bitterness about his time in Vietnam (“We were winning when I left,” he told the Coens) was channeled into the Dude’s best friend, Walter Sobchak, played by John Goodman. A dedicated bowler and an observant convert to Judaism (he refuses to “roll on Shabbos” and describes his chosen religion as “3,000 years of beautiful tradition, from Moses to Sandy Koufax”), Walter is also a Vietnam veteran with a hair-trigger temper, quick to pull his pistol out and invoke his tour of duty.
Another component of Walter’s character was derived from macho filmmaker John Milius, who co-wrote Apocalypse Now and came up with the line “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.” A beefy, outspoken libertarian and gun lover, Milius reportedly requested several antique firearms as part of his compensation for the Robert Redford film Jeremiah Johnson. “Whenever we saw him, he’d invite us over to his house to look at his guns,” Ethan Coen said of Milius.
“I knew gasbags like [Walter],” Goodman says. “I was a gasbag myself. I didn’t have to do much of anything. I just got the guy.”
The Big Lebowski is, at once, a buddy picture, an L.A. story, a stoner’s quest, and a Buddhist parable, all contained within a neo-noir mystery. Like Howard Hawks’s 1946 movie, The Big Sleep, the movie revolves around a wheelchair-bound tycoon and the two very different women in his life: in this case, title character Jeffrey Lebowski’s promiscuous young wife, Bunny (Tara Reid), and his sophisticated artist daughter, Maude (Julianne Moore), whom the Coens envisioned as a cross between Yoko Ono and “action painter” Carolee Schneemann, who frequently worked in the nude.
Toss in some German nihilists, a porn king, and a showboating bowler named Jesus (John Turturro), and you’ve got yourselves a Coen brothers movie.
“One can understand why they’d be into something like this with a whole lot of characters,” Dowd says. “Joel and Ethan really like characters.”
“This Wasn’t American Pie”
After finishing the script, the Coens chose to make Fargo instead, a typically offbeat project that, to their surprise, won the Oscar for best original screenplay. “If a movie like Fargo succeeds, then clearly nothing makes much sense,” Ethan Coen concluded, so “you might as well make whatever movie you want and hope for the best.”
As it happened, the Coens had a deal allowing them to make whatever movie they wanted, without a meeting, so long as the film remained within a relatively modest budget; The Big Lebowski cost $15 million.
When they began casting, the Coens’ first call was to Goodman, who’d appeared in Raising Arizona and Barton Fink. The role of the Dude was originally offered to Mel Gibson, who didn’t seem to like or understand the humor in the script, before the Coens moved on to Bridges, who immediately grasped the character.
“It’s like they spied on me in high school,” he says.
The Coens dreamed of Marlon Brando playing Jeffrey Lebowski and would make each other laugh by imitating the actor, as Don Corleone, uttering lines like “Condolences, the bums lost” and “By god, sir, I will not abide another toe!” Jack Nicholson, Gene Hackman, Robert Duvall, and Anthony Hopkins all passed on the part. The Coens considered Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, Jerry Falwell, William F. Buckley, Jonathan Winters, and Andy Griffith, before casting David Huddleston, a prolific television actor.
“If a movie like Fargo succeeds, then clearly nothing makes much sense,” Ethan Coen concluded, so “you might as well make whatever movie you want and hope for the best.”
Tara Reid was called in to audition for the part of Bunny Lebowski and arrived to find Charlize Theron and Liv Tyler waiting to read for the role. “This wasn’t American Pie,” Reid says. “Every girl in town wanted to work with the Coens.”
Most of the Dude’s wardrobe was sourced from the closet of Jeff Bridges, including his signature full-zip Westerley sweater, a pair of jelly sandals, and a three-quarter-sleeve baseball shirt bearing the image of Japanese baseball legend Kaoru Betto that he’d swiped from his brother, Beau.
Prepping himself for the role, Bridges says, he became “like a sponge,” watching people everywhere he went, hoping to find anything that might be “a good Dude move.” He and Goodman made a practice of getting into character five minutes before the camera started rolling, as a way of getting into what Bridges describes as “the reality of the scene.”
“That made a great deal of difference,” Goodman says. “We got to sit around and read, Steve [Buscemi], me, Jeff, and Turturro. We had the opportunity to get the dialogue up to speed that way. People think we improvised so much, but we didn’t, because the script was so good. Even the stage directions had me laughing my ass off.”
“Every ‘fuck’ and ‘man’ was in the right place,” according to Bridges.
In fact, Goodman says, the only line improvisation he can recall is when the Dude refers to Jeffrey Lebowski as “human paraquat.”
In 1987, the Coens saw Turturro in a play called La Pura Vida at the Public Theater in New York and later cast him in both Barton Fink and Miller’s Crossing. They wrote the character of Jesus Quintana with him in mind but gave the actor a lot of freedom.
“I came up with outrageous shit I thought they’d never use,” Turturro says, “and they used every single thing I did,” including the goatee, the hairnet, the lascivious licking of the bowling ball, and the Muhammad Ali–inspired victory dance. “With [the Coens] it’s like making your friends laugh in third grade.”
When it came time to shoot the scene near the end of the movie where the Dude and Elliott’s character encounter each other in a bowling-alley bar, the Coens had Elliott do take after take, without providing any feedback. Eventually, Elliott began to think that somehow he wasn’t getting it right.
John Goodman says the only line improvisation he can recall is when the Dude refers to Jeffrey Lebowski as “human paraquat.”
“We did the scene 15 times,” Elliott says. “Every time sounded great to me, and when we got to the 15th, I said, ‘What the fuck am I doing wrong? What do you want?’”
“Oh, shit. We had it on the first take,” one of the Coens replied. “We just like watching you do it.”
After production wrapped, the film’s “musical archivist,” T Bone Burnett, suggested that the Coens use Townes Van Zandt’s cover of “Dead Flowers,” by the Rolling Stones, at the end of the movie. Discovering that the song rights belonged to rock manager Allen Klein, they approached him to see how much it would cost them to use the song in the film.
Klein replied that he wanted $150,000.
Then Klein saw a rough cut of the film and was particularly struck by a scene in which a seemingly defeated Dude is in the back of a cab where “Peaceful Easy Feeling,” by the Eagles, is playing on the radio. When the driver refuses to turn off the music, the Dude tells him, “Come on, man. I’ve had a rough night, and I hate the fucking Eagles, man!”
Klein, who apparently shared the Dude’s hatred of the Eagles, told him they could have the song for free.
Lebowski 2024
In 2008, The Washington Post contacted the major critics who’d disliked the film, and almost all of them (apart from Turan) had changed their tunes.
“I was afraid someone would dig this up,” said Alex Ross, who panned the movie on Slate and now writes about classical music for The New Yorker. “The bottom line is that I missed the point.”
Merkin not only changed her mind but contributed an afterword for the movie’s 20th-anniversary-edition fan guide, I’m a Lebowski, You’re a Lebowski.
Numerous books and even scholarly papers have been written about the film, many with a spiritual focus. There is The Dude De Ching, The Tao of the Dude, The Abide Guide (which has a German edition entitled Der Dude und Du), and The Dude and the Zen Master, written by Bridges and Buddhist Zen master Bernie Glassman. There are now more than 600,000 ordained Dudeist priests and a Lebowski Fest, not to mention Lebowski-themed barbecue aprons and bucket hats, T-shirts, coffee mugs, and Lebowski 2024 campaign merchandise.
The film’s most enduring legacy, however, is the Dude, a mythic American hero no less than the private detective or the cowboy.
Josh Karp is the author of A Futile and Stupid Gesture: How Doug Kenney and National Lampoon Changed Comedy Forever and Orson Welles’s Last Movie: The Making of The Other Side of the Wind
