Dude, get real
Submitted by dtomko on Tue, 2006-08-22 21:07.Dude, get real
Jeff Dowd, who inspired The Big Lebowski, on his book, bowling and f-bombs.
By Sarah Baicker
Philly EDGE Correspondent
Mention The Big Lebowski to almost anyone who has seen the film, and many fans will quickly rattle off some of the great contributions the 1998 Coen Brothers’ work has made to the pop culture lexicon — bowling, White Russians and a carpet that “really tied the room together.”
Only true fans will mention Jeff Dowd.
Dowd, a film producer from Santa Monica, California, is the real-life inspiration for the cult film’s hero, Jeffrey “the Dude” Lebowski.
The Big Lebowski has developed a generation of extremely loyal fans, helped rekindle interest in bowling nationwide and even spawned its own annual event, known as “Lebowski Fest.” At the Fest, which will celebrate its fifth anniversary Sept. 29 – Oct. 1 in Louisville, fans from across the country gather to watch and re-watch the film, listen to live music, party hard and—of course—bowl to their hearts’ content.
Dowd is now 56, “but still rockin’,” he says. He has two daughters, ages 11 and 14, and though he’s grown out of the slacker, “whatever, man” persona of the Dude (and, alas, didn’t utter a single “man” during our hour-long conversation) it wasn’t hard to imagine that the breezy-voiced, yet thoughtful, guy on the other end of the phone as the bulky, shaggy Dude from the film.
Though his schedule is overflowing with his film work, speaking engagements and the process of writing his autobiography, he was more than happy to squeeze in an interview just in time for National Bowling Week (Aug. 26-Sept. 1).
Philly EDGE: So, describe a normal day in the life of Jeff Dowd?
Jeff Dowd: I go swimming first thing every day; an anxious habit, you could say. Then, usually, I hit the office and face a barrage of calls. I have a plan of what I think I'm gonna do each day, and it's kind of a split. One thing I do is work on scripts. We rewrite them and rewrite them and rewrite them until they're great—all the scripts go through 15, 16, 17 drafts. There's no purpose in making a movie that's not great, you know?
Then I'll work on movies in post-production. There’s a movie on Schwarzenegger we’re working on in post-production now, trying to make it a better movie. Then there are the movies I'm trying to sell. My work is a combination of different acts of film production and marketing. I'll be working on a film from creation to post-production, and then selling the film and marketing it. I’ll work 10 to 12 hours a day sometimes.
PE: When you actually do have free time, how do you spend it?
JD: I don’t work nights—I can’t. If I allowed the people I worked with to contact me after hours, these guys would be hounding me all night. But one of the great things about
I'm reading this great book right now called How Soccer Explains the World by Franklin Foer. I'm not a huge soccer fan, but my younger daughter’s been playing and I've been sitting on the sidelines of her games for five years; I'm the kind of person that'll watch championship games and the World Cup, that’s it. The book’s subtitle is “An Unlikely Theory of Globalization,” and it takes countries like Italy and England and various religions and has chapters on each of them that follow players or team owners, giving you this wonderful historical and cultural take on those countries and religions and the push toward globalization. ‘Cause you know, teams like Real Madrid are made up of players from all over. I also read a lot of travel writing and narratives by great writers like Hunter Thompson—I read a lot of non-fiction these days because it helps me with my book that I'm working on.
PE: Tell me a little more about your book.
JD: It's called The Dude Abides: Classic Tales and Rebel Rants. I was fortunate enough to be in the right place at the right time, and meet a lot of people who changed the political and social landscape to a great degree. There are a lot of chapters about my adventures during the ‘60s, a lot of interesting stuff to do with music. It’ll be a best seller–I’m almost sure of it. And if I can concentrate enough, it’ll be out next spring.
PE: Was The Big Lebowski good for your career?
JD: In a lot of ways, yeah. On a personal level, for a big, burly guy like me, it kind of breaks down that expected barrier, ‘cause people are friendly right away. They feel an affinity with the character from the film. On a professional level, if you think about it, virtually every professional athlete, every band member, every member of the armed forces, everyone on Wall Street—everyone who works hard, but has leisure time, they’ve seen the movie. In a professional sense, it helps in a certain way in that America is about celebrity, so that little bit of iconic status I’ve been given has definitely helped me out.
PE: How did you come to know the Coen brothers?
JD: I happened to be in New York, at the 20th Century Fox offices dressed up in a suit and all that, when in they came, all grungy and smoking cigarettes, with a movie they’d made called Blood Simple. And I’m there looking like this dude from Fox, so I don’t think it went well from their perspective. But later that night I was walking to Greenwich Village and I bumped into them again. And even more fortunately, later on that night we met again at a party in the East Village, and we had some drinks and talked more. And from the minute I saw Blood Simple, I knew these were serious filmmakers.
I represented Blood Simple and worked on marketing it, too. We had this premiere in L.A. where I lived, and I thought it might be a good idea to have a release party in this bowling alley in Santa Monica. And this was in 1984, when people weren’t really into bowling like they are now.
PE: Is that where they got the idea of “The Dude” as a bowler?
JD: Yeah. I’m not even a great bowler. But that night we’d had several hundred people at that party, and a band, and people were drinking a lot. And I’d probably rolled a couple of games. That’s where the idea came from.
PE: How’d you get the nickname “The Dude?”
JD: I had the nickname from sixth-grade on. A couple guys, Dave and Dan, who I used to play baseball with always called me Dude. In seventh-grade, when I moved to the New York area, all my friends there called me Dude, too—it was just riffing off Dowd, I think. When I was involved in the Vietnam resistance (to the war), it really caught on. We’d go to these conventions, and I was this 19-year-old, wild, good-looking guy, and it sort of gained national exposure. That’s what Joel and Ethan [Coen] read about me—they’re voracious readers. They had read something about it in some book. And here’s the really cool thing: in doing research for my book, I discovered that my family name, Dowd, has origins in the 10th century as Dubhda, which is pronounced Dooda!
PE: What are the biggest similarities between you and The Dude in the movie?
JD: The body language is totally me. All the mannerisms, the dress. When my kids first saw a poster of the movie—they must have been four or five—they said, “Where’d they get your clothes, daddy?” Obviously, they weren’t actually my clothes, but they were totally on target…Not that I wore a white robe much!
They got the “screw you,” anti-establishment attitude part, too, how Lebowski was his own man. That’s me. And the hanging out with friends is me, too. There was a time in the ‘70s, after the political activism of the ‘60s and before we all went back to work, where we were just hanging out. We went to clubs, to the racetrack, anything that was slacker-like activity, we did it. People did a lot of hangin’. The script really got that level of friendship, of people who got along really well but were constantly arguing, like with Donny (the Steve Buscemi character) and The Dude. And that part with Maude (Julianne Moore) seeking The Dude out as the potential daddy of her children—they got that right, too.
PE: What about the biggest differences?
JD: They chose not to show that I was so very politically active, and active in the film business. Also, I drove a Chrysler LeBaron convertible, but Goodman was too big to shoehorn into it! They couldn’t do the shots properly, so The Dude in the movie had to drive a bigger car.
PE: So you were politically active during the Vietnam War era?
JD: While I was auditing classes at Cornell University, I joined something called the Resistance, which was a group made up of students who had chosen to turn in their draft cards, to refuse induction and go to jail. We’d go to speak to groups like churches, colleges, unions and women’s schools, telling them why we’d want to go to jail when we didn’t have to.
We were strong believers that the war was really wrong for a multitude of reasons, we were very much informed by friends who had been there. But also, I read a lot. In the spring of ’69, at a speech at Vassar College, they tried to arrest us. I heard years later that G. Gordon Liddy was the one behind it. That fall, a bunch of us moved to Seattle and became part of the Seattle Seven—a group that led protest activities in 1970 and 1971.
PE: Do you continue to be politically active?
JD: I'm very politically active, particularly in the movie business. I've been doing a lot of work on documentaries with people like Neil Young, like his Greendale and Heart of Gold. One of the movies I’m working on, called The Ground Truth, is about (veterans of the war in Iraq). It’s an incredibly wonderful and powerful film—to hear the troops themselves talking about Iraq. You’d think the Bush administration would actually support our troops—they don’t.
I’m also working on films about immigration and the “Intelligent Design” debate.
PE: Getting back to the movie—do you think Jeff Bridges did a good job playing you?
JD: He did a fabulous job.
PE: Did he “study” with you to get the part down?
JD: He spent a little time with me, but he just got it naturally. Bridges and I are the same age, we’re literally born a couple weeks apart. His brother used to call him Dude, too, and he grew up near me, near the same beaches, same neighborhoods. I’m just a quick and easy person to satire—Jane Fonda even does a riff on me in the movie Nine to Five with Lily Tomlin and Dolly Parton, where they all get stoned and Jane does this imitation of me. A lot of people do; I guess I’m just an easy, fun person to imitate.
PE: The Dude drops a lot of “f-bombs” in the movie—is that true to life?
JD: Yeah. That’s me. Joel and Ethan [Coen] wrote it into the script something like 138 times (Ed. Note: 281 times total).
Have you seen the two-minute version of The Big Lebowski on YouTube? It’s called The Big Lebowski—The Fucking Short Version, and it’s just everyone saying “fuck” back and forth. I gotta tell you, YouTube is a great, great democratization of the film industry. (See the clip at www.youtube.com/watch?v=gU2ZgaQ_H-Y).
PE: Is anything else from the movie actually taken from real life?
JD: The idea behind the movie was to put me in a sort of Raymond Chandler film on acid, so it’s mostly the Coens’ fabrication. But I think we all know characters like Walter (John Goodman). I know characters like Walter, in terms of Vietnam vets that are still living it, and can’t get out. Of course it’s usually much heavier that it’s portrayed with Walter in the film. The Coens decided to go the humorous, satirical route with that one.
PE: Is a White Russian really your drink?
JD: Well, it has become one that I drink fairly frequently. When people recognize me—which is a lot—everyone really wants to buy me a White Russian, but I tend to drink vodka and cranberry or vodka and Red Bull. I also like dark rum. And I like Maker’s Mark. But there was a period where we went through a few kinds of drinks. And we went through a White Russian phase, then onto a darker variation of it called a Dirty Mother.
PE: Do you go to the Lebowski Fests?
JD: I’ve been to most of them. At first, I was extremely leery of them—for anybody who’s seen the classic Saturday Night Live sketch with William Shatner and the Star Trek convention, I thought it was going to be like that. But it turns out that the people who go are really cool and amazing people. Lebowski Fest brings people together from afar, and they get to hang out together and meet other cool people that like to drink and party and all that. And they’re all like me: they’re better drinkers than they are bowlers
PE: What do you like best about the Fest?
JD: The second night of the festival, many people dress up in costume. Not only do they come dressed as Walter, The Dude or Maude, but they actually come dressed as lines from the movie. There was this guy with dirt and mud smeared across his face, and he was “the guy that laid face down in the muck in ‘Nam,” and these other guys came with huge stuffed-animal camels, humping away at them—no pun intended!—and these guys were “the camel fuckers.”
But you know, it’s not only the fun stuff that’s so great. The day the Vegas fest was, I learned my stepfather had died. But I couldn’t catch a plane to New York to be with my mother until very late that night, and I had the choice of going to New York, getting there at midnight, or going to Vegas for Lebowski Fest. So I thought about it, and I decided to go to the Fest and fly out early the following morning to New York. And you know, it was great because I was amongst friends at Lebowski Fest. I was feeling very down and sad, and the Fest put me in such better spirits. And another thing like that, once I got this letter from a September 11th fireman who said that—after suffering so much knowing that so many of his friends and associates hadn’t survived—watching the Lebowski DVD was the first time he was able to smile and laugh again. That’s the thing about the movie—it’s guaranteed to put a smile on your face.
National Bowling Week
It has been almost two decades (decades!) since the last National Bowling Week.
And we consider ourselves a civilized nation.
Saturday marks the start of National Bowling Week (Aug. 26-Sept. 1), which is sponsored by the Bowling Proprietors' Association of America, International Bowling Pro Shop and Instructors Association, Professional Bowlers Association, Strike Ten Entertainment and the United States Bowling Congress.
Just in case you haven’t been to your local alley lately, Philly EDGE wanted to revisit a few places that may not have been around the last time you had a ball in your hands.
City
North Bowl (909-915 North Second St., Philadelphia; 215.238.BOWL)
This brand new space in the Northern Liberties just opened last Friday (Aug. 18) with 17 lanes on two levels. As you can see from the photos, retro bowling gear blends with modern fixtures to give the alley an updated, but classic look.
“I wanted to create a place where all sorts of people mix, each bringing something unique and ever-changing to the space,” said owner Oron Daskal, who handled much of the contracting himself.
Lucky Strikes (1336 Chestnut St., Philadelphia; 215.545.2471) These tres trendy lanes opened June 16 with 24 lanes, six pool tables, a sports bar, the city’s largest roof deck, and the latest in ball return technology (hehehe). It serves a full menu, with Tomato and Cheese S’mores, Bite Size Mac and Cheese Balls and more, until 1 a.m.
Suburbs
Thunderbird Lanes (three locations in NE Philadelphia, Willow Grove and Warminster; check www. phillybowl.2gobowl.com)
Three locations and a heart of gold for this bowling alley business. During “Thunderbird Lanes Carnival Fun Days” August 25 to August 27, one-half of all bowling revenues will be donated to participating police departments to help with community initiatives.
Lans Bowl (606 East Main St., Lansdale; 215.855.1611)
Thirty-two lanes, rock and bowl every Friday and Saturday nights and the BEST bowling sign in Montgomery County.
Morrisville Lanes (625 Nolan Ave. Morrisville; 215.295.5526)
Three hours of bowling each Friday with lights, smoke, lazers and music. Nice.
Slocum's Bowl-O-Drome (1675 Pennington Road, Ewing, NJ; 609.882.0661)
Bowl-O-Drome… say it, SAY IT! You need to bowl here just to say you’ve been at the Bowl-O-Drome. Synthetic lanes, a bar and a grill.
Joe Student
