(Indie film producer, producer's rep, and BIG LEBOWSKI inspiration Jeff Dowd, above.)Ten Years After Lebowski, The Real Dude Still Abides
by Jon Zelazny
Editor’s note: This article originally appeared on EightMillionStories.com on September 26, 2008.
September 9th saw the release of a new 10th Anniversary Special Edition DVD of the Coen brothers’ cult favorite The Big Lebowski, their “Raymond Chandler on acid” saga of two middle-aged L.A. slackers (Jeff Bridges & John Goodman) who get caught up in a Byzantine kidnapping plot.
It used to be a little show biz secret that Jeff Bridges’ amiable character, Jeff “The Dude” Lebowski, was based on the Coens’ real-life friend and colleague, indie film producer and producer’s rep Jeff Dowd, but that began to change in 2002 when four Lebowski fanatics in Louisville, Kentucky promoted the first annual Lebowski Fest, an event so successful, they’re now staging three a year in various cities.
Jeff Dowd has attended several Lebowski Fests over the years, and managed to turn his unique cult status into an actual side business, making personal appearances, speaking at colleges, and writing his memoirs. The real-life Dude will happily talk Lebowski ‘til the cows come home, but that’s just the tip of the Jeff Dowd anecdotal iceberg, as I discovered at the Santa Monica Airport’s Spitfire Grill:
In one of The Dude’s scenes with Julianne Moore, he tells her, “You ever heard of the Seattle Seven? That was me. And six other guys.” I was surprised to learn that’s a fact taken from your actual life. I was just talking with Robert Forster about his experiences at the 1968 Democratic National Convention; as an anti-Vietnam war activist, that must have been a galvanizing event for you as well?
JEFF DOWD: I wasn’t there. My father was, but my SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) chapter at Cornell University had voted not to attend. I certainly watched it on TV, and it was a seminal moment for all of us. It was essentially a big electoral reaction against the war. There were all kinds of reactions, but one of the biggest was the candidacy of Eugene McCarthy, who had done very well initially; he’d won the New Hampshire primary that year.
McCarthy was more anti-war than Robert Kennedy?
Much more so. Kennedy wasn’t anti-war for a long time. He was way behind the curve there, and a lot of people in New York State were very disappointed by that. But what happened—and this is one the great reasons I’ve always remained an optimist—is that Kennedy changed. He actually changed, and not just for opportunistic political reasons, though that was part of it. When Johnson decided he wouldn’t seek reelection, Kennedy threw his hat in the ring against McCarthy. And he brought in his whole machine, and his union backing; it was a more middle-of-the-road, charismatic campaign. McCarthy was more of an intellectual type.
And there’s little doubt in my mind that Kennedy would have been nominated, but after he was assassinated, the Democratic Party put up Hubert Humphrey as, really, a pro-war candidate, you know, this old establishment/machine politics nominee. Vietnam was the Democrats’ war: started by Kennedy, expanded tenfold by Johnson, so that’s why the anti-war movement targeted their National Convention; that was the place to make our stand against the party. And then it turned into the televised spectacle of a police riot; not only police clubbing protesters in the street, but charging into hotel lobbies and clubbing McCarthy delegates in ties.
What kinds of things did SDS do at Cornell?
My anti-war efforts began when I was in high school in Westchester County. A bunch of my friends had joined the service, like there were maybe 150 guys who volunteered from the high school class ahead of me. And I was set to follow them. The cultural pull was just so heavy then; that manly-man tradition—even among guys who were listening to the Rolling Stones, or even Bob Dylan. But I started getting letters from my friends in Vietnam saying how bad the war was. Not only that it was mismanaged, but that we were on the wrong side even. All the anti-war material I saw was from U.S. Marines! Then some people who went started getting killed. One of my good friends was killed two weeks after he got there! That made a huge impression on me. So instead of 150 guys from my class signing up, it dropped to maybe three or four; y’know, no one’s little brother wanted to go. Then I spent a year in Europe, and that kind of took me out of the brainwashing bubble of America, the one young men are particularly susceptible to. When I came home, I very quickly got active in the anti-war movement.
I joined a group called The Resistance, and we all turned in our draft cards. And what happened was they reclassified us from 2S, which was a deferment, to 1A, meaning we could be called up. So our group decided that if called up, we would refuse to be inducted, and from the time we refused induction to the time we’d be sent to jail—a court process that would take a year or so—we would go around and talk about why we were willing to go to jail for five or ten years. We saw this action as a part of what’s called the Moral Witness tradition. So there we were, foolish enough, in some sense, to be willing to go to jail to protest the war. And we went all over New York—Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, Plattsburg—and talked about the war. Church groups, student groups, community groups. We were very effective at it. And within a year, we became part of SDS, which had begun in the civil rights movement of the early sixties. So then we traveled around nationally, speaking on behalf of SDS.
Was civil rights still a big part of their agenda, or was it just about the war?
SDS was all about fighting racism in America, ending poverty, and ending the war. My father was part of the early civil rights movement.
So the Seattle Seven came out of SDS?
A bunch of us from Ithaca moved to Seattle, late ’69, early ’70. Pretty wild times; the Weathermen had started going underground, and bombing, and we were very opposed to all that. We started The Seattle Liberation Front; the idea was to have these independent groups—collectives, we called them—which had anywhere from five to a hundred people—and each group would do what they wanted. One group was very environmental, another worked with the unemployed—Boeing had laid off over 100,000 people, so Seattle was decimated by unemployment. You could buy a nice house for about seven or eight thousand dollars, became people were just streaming out of there in droves. Some collectives did health care stuff. Clinics. One of the best clinics there today was started by one of our collectives.
Then we got indicted. Eight of us. We were charged with Conspiracy, Destruction of Federal Property—
This came from your February 17th, 1970 protest? Was that a situation like Chicago? A peaceful protest where the police turned aggressive?
That was one of many demonstrations all over the country that day to protest the Federal indictments of the Chicago Seven. There was some mayhem; some protesters smashed windows at the courthouse, and maybe of some office buildings downtown. The police arrested 89 people, but hardly any of them were with the demonstration, most were just bystanders. So it was not that big a deal; there wasn’t going to be any larger local repercussions. It was the Nixon Administration that decided to indict us… and they did it without even informing the local Federal prosecutor! Eight people, some of us didn’t even know each other, or had just met once, and they lumped us together and said we were “conspirators.” Four of them were Weathermen, who we didn’t even get along with.
The Weathermen were already a known terrorist cell at this point?
Good question. The main point was that these indictments were literally an Oval Office decision, by Attorney General John Mitchell, and John Ehrlichman, who were sending a message to the anti-war movement that they could really tie us up, and it didn’t much matter to them if anybody was actually guilty of anything. They picked Seattle because it was a remote location, and not a media center.
We were indicted on seventeen counts of Overt Conspiracy, meaning none of our supposed illegal activities was done in secret: they were done in public, sometimes with hundreds of people present! What were these seventeen acts? We were making speeches! Which were all covered by the press—who happened to include Frank Herbert and Tom Robbins, by the way. They both worked for the morning paper. Frank had the education beat, so we saw him just about every day.
We were also charged with Crossing State Lines to Incite a Riot, which was totally absurd: we’d left Ithaca on December 6th, arrived in Seattle on December 21st, and “incited a riot” on February 17th. When we left Ithaca, we’d piled into a car with fifty bucks, and didn’t even know if we’d make it to Seattle! It was a throwaway charge.
So there we are, just young guys—21, 22 years old—and we’re suddenly on the front lines of Nixon’s national war of repression against the anti-war movement! What did we do? Well, we put up a hell of a defense. We got great lawyers—the head of one of the top firms on Wall Street actually led our defense, all for free—because even these kinds of people were truly freaked out by what Nixon was doing.
How do you even begin to cope with that kind of pressure?
Well, y’know… we’d already turned in our draft cards. We were already prepared to go to jail. Some of my friends did. One reason I didn’t is that the day of my induction, I was on trial in Seattle for Conspiracy! The judge had to write them a note.
So because you were already fighting The Man, the indictments just felt like an escalation in an ongoing battle?
I think it’s like when people go off to war. You know, you adopt a mentality... I’d been prepared to give my life for my country as a teenager. And I knew how bad it got in the civil rights movement. My father was shot at. People were killed. So we just kept fighting, and we were winning the trial, so they gave us a mistrial, and then found us in Contempt of Court. I ended up doing about six months in jail.
What kind of facility was it?
Five or six different places. They kept moving us around.
Were you with your friends, or did they put you in general population?
In King’s County it was just me and my friend Joe Kelly for awhile. We were with this heroin dealer named Owlface Larry, who was always complaining about his Cadillac being seized by the IRS. Fascinating character. And the head Hell’s Angels guy.
Then I ended up at McNeil Island Federal Penitentiary for a while. The first week, I was in Solitary. No windows, no shoes. The only books I had were the Bible, and, of course, Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People. So the guy would come by once a day with the food, and I’d go, “Gee, you really look like you know what you’re doing! You’ve got a great understanding of all this… uh, you got a smoke?” Then, before we went into general population, the warden called us in, and gave us a talk: “You guys were protesters, but now you’re in the Big House, so watch your ass,” that kind of thing. I think my mother had called him too, or something.
He had to be careful, I imagine. You’d had national attention; it wasn’t like you could just vanish into the system.
Right. So he gives us this big warning, we walk out of there, and start down the row between these three tiers of cells… and hundreds upon hundreds of cigarette packs came down! That was their currency, like a buck a pack, so it was like getting a standing ovation. Why? Well, we’d been on the front page of the paper every day during our trial. And our judge was this notorious hanging judge—he gave ten years to a soldier who’d just come back from Vietnam, and stolen some diapers from a 7-11—like Nic Cage in Raising Arizona. Every con in McNeil hated that judge. Then they all read in the paper, or saw on the local TV news, that we were just continually giving this guy shit every day. So they loved us.
By the way, it came out later about this judge—who was this grumpy old guy, who could never keep our names straight; every day, it was “You’re Jeff Dowd?” “No, I’m Joe Kelly, he’s Jeff Dowd.” Well, a few years after he died, his widow came forward, and said he’d had Alzheimer’s the whole time! That explained a lot! Like, even the reporters who covered the trial eventually all ended up siding with us because they were constantly correcting him in the paper; he’d say all kinds of things that were flat-out wrong… and everybody just thought, well, y’know, he’s a cranky old man.
That sounds surreal enough to get us back to The Big Lebowski. So you got into the movie business, and around 1983 you worked on landing a distribution deal for the Coen brothers’ first feature, Blood Simple. You remained friends with them over the years, and one day they called you up and said they were writing a movie with a lead character based on you. What was that conversation like?
I knew it before hand; one of their producers had told me. When they called, they told me it would be John Goodman and Jeff Bridges as these two Hollywood guys. And, y’know, I’m a big guy, so I thought it would be Goodman playing me, as some kind of Hollywood ne’er-do-well; that the story would be some kind of modern Barton Fink.
They didn’t tell you it was a riff on the detective genre?
They showed me the script at some point. And here was the entire description of me: “The Dude: his casualness runs deep.” That was it!
You’ve said The Dude is an accurate portrait of you in an earlier period in your life, like in the mid-1970s.
After I got out of jail, I traveled around South America for a year, and when I got back the anti-war movement was pretty much over. Watergate had finished. It was a time in our lives before we all went back to work in a serious way. I was driving a cab two or three days a week. A lot of guys did that. We were just hanging out pretty heavily.
(Jeff Bridges as the Dude, above.)
A lot of people are like that at that age. Why did the Coens decide Lebowski would feature two middle-aged men?
The basic idea is they’re buddies, right? And in every buddy movie, one guy is always getting the other guy in trouble: Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon in Some Like It Hot (1959), Mel Gibson and Danny Glover in Lethal Weapon (1987)—
Sideways (2004). Swingers (1996).
Right. So one guy drives the movie, and in Lebowski, that’s John Goodman as Walter. The Coens took these two buddy types: Walter, who’s still fighting the Vietnam war everyday in his head, and The Dude, who’s in this post-60’s bliss of some kind, and they moved them forward to 1991. So that’s why they’re older.
So really, they took a slice of your life, and sort of projected what you might have become, not what you did become. It’s like your Road Not Taken. You were The Dude we see in the movie, but you did not remain that way.
Right.
I know you spent some time with Jeff Bridges before the shoot—
And a lot of time on the set.
Do you know if meeting you in any way altered his take on the character?
Well, he picked up all my body language. I think that’s 100% me; you can see it just sitting here. But he and I are the exact same age; we went through the same cultural experiences. Some of the traits he brought in. Like the jellies. I never wore jellies.
So he knew that guy on some level. He didn’t have to meet you to understand—
He was that guy, to some degree. He’s said so. I think the key to understanding The Dude—and I got this from Phil Cousineau, who’s one of the leading experts on modern myths—I asked him what’s the mythological significance of The Dude, and he said, “That’s easy. He’s the Holy Fool. Full of heart.” In the tradition of Saint Francis of Assisi, or the court jester; the one guy in the king’s court who’s allowed to tell the truth. Stephen Colbert. John Stewart. Holden Caulfield. These are our modern day holy fools.
Watching it again last night, what struck me is that he’s a man with no pretense about him… in a world where everyone else is operating almost totally on pretense.
I think for a huge amount of people who go to work every day, it’s a theatrical act. When you put on a coat and tie, x amount of your day is a performance; it’s not who you really are. If you’re selling something, or part of a corporate bureaucracy, or any kind of position where you’re not using your brain as much as you could or should be. People who do that often appreciate somebody who doesn’t have to do that, or just doesn’t do it.
It also struck me that old man Lebowski is a dead ringer for Dick Cheney! That monologue, where he calls The Dude a bum, who ought to hoist himself up by his bootstraps and all that… it’s a classic Republican riff.
Yeah. It’s very timeless in that sense.
The Dude also reminds me of Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, especially how Elliot Gould played him in The Long Goodbye (1973). He’s always got some smart-ass answer for authority figures, but he says it half under his breath. Dick Powell played Marlowe like that too: a smart-ass, but a very subdued smart-ass.
That’s Joel and Ethan too. They love the feeling of all that stuff.
I read that John Goodman’s Walter was based on Hollywood director John Milius. Do you know John Milius? Would you really hang out with a guy like him?
If there was gunplay involved, sure.
I ask because Walter is such an abrasive asshole, I have trouble believing The Dude would really be friends with him.
Joe Kelly was one of my closest friends going back to Ithaca, and the reason we ended up moving to Seattle was that Joe wanted to hunt in Washington State. Joe showed up at my wedding with these kill pictures; you know a picture of his wife field-dressing a moose! He moved his family up to Alaska for a while; he was our John Milius. But who doesn’t have a friend like Walter, who may be kind of an asshole, but that you continue to love and support? I think we all have a Walter in our lives.
(John Goodman as Walter and Jeff Bridges as the Dude, above.)
What was your first reaction when some guys from Louisville called you and said they were throwing a “Lebowski Fest?”
My first thought was of the famous William Shatner sketch on SNL, when he addresses the Trekkie convention, and tells them all to get a life! But it really surprised me; it was totally different. With all due respect to the Trekkies and the Rocky Horror folks—whom I’ll confess I only know from afar—Lebowski fans are just incredibly smart. They get Joel and Ethan’s sense of humor: the irony, the satire, the double and triple entendres. They make the kind of connections you’ve been making. They connect the dots.
And unlike the stereotype Trekkies, Lebowski fans are not nerds, or couch potatoes. They’re totally social people; people that really like to hang out, party, meet new friends, and get together and do things actively. In San Francisco last weekend, you had twenty scantily-clad women, dancing, carrying bowling pins, and it took them forty five minutes to get to the stage through a thousand people because everybody was dancing with them—that’s the Lebowski crowd!
Lebowski Fest is drawing a thousand people?
Four thousand, even. They’d get more, but it peaks out at whatever the venue can hold. So if it’s at a bowling alley, it’s usually about a thousand.
So you’ve really seen it grow over the past six years.
I don’t go to every one. And I do not get paid for them; it would be very un-Dude-like to get paid to hang out with old and new friends. You know who’s really into this movie? Virtually all bands and sports teams have watched it over and over again on the tour bus. It’s like the de facto compromise of choice for what to watch on tour buses.
Why?
I think it’s because you can channel surf into it at any point, and it works. It’s not so much about the plot, which, like The Big Sleep (1946), is kind of hard to figure out--
That’s true. Some of the reasons I’ve never been that crazy about it are the same reasons I wasn’t crazy about No Country For Old Men (2007). They both introduce a lot of elements that are never really addressed or resolved in a way I’d consider satisfying.
You realize when you say that, you’re saying “I’m old school. I like to be manipulated by the story in the traditional way.”
Yeah, I’d have to agree with that. As a screenwriter, if I introduce something into the story, it’s important that I—
Pay it off. Set ups and payoffs.
And the Coens certainly know how to do that. But I think in some films they do it extremely well, and in others, like these two, I’m just not as—
That’s the point.
An example I noticed last night is the introduction of Ben Gazzara as this porn king in Malibu, a very stylish guy with this great house. In any other detective story, this would be one of the main villains. But the Coens make all this fuss about setting him up, and then they never go back to him.
But those kinds of red herrings are in Chandler as well. People like that.
Yeah, I can see that, to a degree, but…
See, you have to forget the plot.
I guess my main complaint about Lebowski is that it’s overstuffed. There’s just too much going on in it.
But that’s what people like about it.
What about when it veers from satire to silliness? Like those three German guys; they’re just too silly for this kind of story. The dream sequence looks like something out of Michael Powell—
It is! And that’s a legitimate dream. I have flying dreams like that all the time—
But for a detective story? I would’ve loved it in Raising Arizona (1987), because that was the tone of that movie.
But it’s Raymond Chandler on acid, not Chandler straight up.
So as a guy with these hang-ups, I’m curious: what do the fans really enjoy the most about it?
It makes them feel better. I run into families all the time who’ve told me they watch this movie every Thanksgiving, or at Christmas! All three generations—and I’m not talking about hippie families either. There’s thousands and thousands of families that do it. I ask them why, and that’s what they say: “It makes us feel better.” I got a great letter from a New York City fireman who said he sunk into this deep depression after 9/11. You know, a lot of his friends had been killed, and he just shut down. Then one day he put in The Big Lebowski, and started laughing again. After seven months, he said, it cut right through his pain. I think it’s like in Sullivan’s Travels (1941), when Joel McCrea realizes his dopey comedies are lifting the spirits of all those hopeless convicts, or when Woody Allen watches that Marx Brothers clip in Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), and it kind of zaps him back to life.
That’s how I feel about Duck Soup (1933) myself… another totally off-the-wall comedy that didn’t do very well when it was first released, then developed a huge cult following. We should start a Duck Fest!
Duck Soup, Sullivan’s Travels, The Big Lebowski; it’s all the same thing. These movies are like drugs that take away people’s pain.
Check out the official promo for The Big Lewbowski 10th Anniversary DVD:
http://www.biglebowskidvd.com/
Check out Jeff’s website:
jeffdowd.com
Check out Jeff’s father’s website:
http://www.dougdowd.org/
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