CHAPTER FOUR
ARE WE ALONE? OR, HOW THE BIG LEBOWSKI BECAME A CULT CLASSIC
Each year, billions and billions of films are produced and distributed to theaters, living rooms, and street vendors throughout the world. And among those, if just one in every million were produced without the mainstream audience in mind, and just one in every million of those films had the ability to sustain the attention of some unsuspecting viewer late at night, and just one in every million of those viewers were the type of person to snub Pearl Harbor, then there would literally be millions and millions of cult movie fans out there, shaking their fists at the mainstream, white-noise, money-making machines.
No, my friend, we are not alone.
And since we are few, but not alone, it is our job, our duty, to reach out to each other and make contact with our fellow fandom friends. We must join forces and, through numbers and our influence on DVD sales, let it be known that we, the brotherhood of cult movie fans, are discontent as hell, and we’re not going to … hey, was that Goonies? Go back. Pass the popcorn.
Where were we? Oh, yeah, money-making machines, or marketing them, or the lack thereof. Take for instance the tagline …
Times Like These Call for a Big Lebowski?
Look at any of the original posters from The Big Lebowski’s theatrical release, and that’s the tagline you’ll find. Not “Mark It 8, Dude.” Not “The Dude Abides.” Not “The Story Is Ludicrous,” or any of the movie’s other gems. But “Times Like These Call for a Big Lebowski.” In terms of capturing the movie’s essence, you couldn’t do much worse.
But if you did go looking for worse—say, if your curiosity got the best of you and you couldn’t help but wonder, “If there was a worse way to pitch The Big Lebowski, what would it be?”—you would actually be in luck. You wouldn’t need to look any further than the case from the movie’s original DVD release, which stated that the Dude’s “carpet” really “made the room hang together.”
Fuckin’ amateurs.
As is widely known throughout the Lebowski galaxy, the Dude’s rug really tied the room together. If you’re not yet a huge fan of the movie, you’re probably muttering, “What’s the big deal?” But that’s the point. To true Achievers, that’s the equivalent of quoting Darth Vader as saying, “Luke, I am your mother.”
Looking back, though, it’s understandable that they missed the mark. Here you had a movie that was referencing and reshaping noir classics like The Big Sleep and The Long Goodbye without being obvious about it. The Coen brothers took the plot of a hard-boiled, Chandleresque crime caper but replaced the sure-footed, ball-swinging private investigator who would normally star in such a movie with a lovable, jellies-wearing stoner. They buddied him up with a hotheaded Vietnam vet and set them loose to bicker like an old married couple. There were no exploding helicopters, no epic battle scenes. Just a ’73 Torino, a bag of dirty undies, and a severed toe.
Add to that the fact that The Big Lebowski was released on the heels of Fargo, which had become an unlikely financial hit: It had earned two Oscars and helped certify the Coen brothers as more than fringe auteurs. The pressure was on for The Big Lebowski to enjoy the same kind of success, and the studio was looking for some way—any way—to help it connect with a mainstream audience.
And so the studio did what any Marketing 101 textbook will tell you to do. They came up with the least abrasive, most consumer-friendly tag they could muster: “Times Like These Call for a Big Lebowski.”
But if the people responsible for marketing The Big Lebowski didn’t seem to get the movie’s true appeal, they weren’t alone. Most of the people who went to see it in the theater didn’t get it, either. Released on March 6, 1998, The Big Lebowski ambled out of the gates, pulling in just over $5 million at the box office its opening weekend. That put it well behind the weekend’s other big openers—U.S. Marshals, Twilight, and Hush (all part of your DVD collection, right?)—and still further behind Titanic, which sucked down $20 million in its twelfth week of release. Dismissed by many critics as a forgettable mess, The Big Lebowski would go on to barely earn back its $15 million budget at the theaters, pulling in much less than Fargo even though it cost twice as much to make and played on more screens.
Although few (if any) people realized it at the time, in disappearing so quickly from theaters, The Big Lebowski had actually vanished down a rabbit hole that would eventually deliver it into the underground world of cult phenomena.
That, and a Pair of Testicles
What makes a cult movie, Mr. Lebowski? We didn’t know, sir. But we did have an Internet connection and a healthy ability to suspend disbelief.
A little digging uncovered the idea that the cult phenomenon is as old as humanity itself. Recent studies of cave drawings, for example, have demonstrated that they were actually crafted as part of stage plays put on at midnight by cavemen in fishnet stockings … and then there’s the Bible—who saw that one coming? And then three thousand years of beautiful tradition, from Stonehenge to crop circles, tattoos to ironic haircuts … the list is virtually endless.
Applied specifically to film, the idea of a cult movie entered the parlance of our times in the late 1960s. A time warp back to that era reveals the concept being used both as a term of appreciation for older movies like Casablanca and Citizen Kane, the staples of art houses, and as a term of respect for newer movies like El Topo and Pink Flamingoes that were too weird or disturbing for your average Brad and Janet but were adored by a fanatical minority.
The publication of Danny Peary’s book Cult Movies in 1981 gave the movement a clearer definition.* A collection of the top one hundred cult films at the time, the book included a foreword that described the cult-movie phenomenon in a way that has yet to be surpassed: “The typical Hollywood product has little potential for becoming a cult favorite because it is perceived by everyone in basically the same way … On the other hand, cult films are born in controversy … Cultists believe they are among the blessed few who have discovered something in particular films that the average moviegoer and critic have missed—the something that makes the pictures extraordinary.”
Peary went on to describe the unique way in which movies come to achieve cult status: “While word of mouth certainly plays a large part in the growth of cults for individual films, what is fascinating is that in the beginning pockets of people will embrace a film they have heard nothing about while clear across the country others independently will react identically to the same picture. There is nothing more exciting than discovering you are not the only person obsessed with a picture critics hate, the public stays away from en masse, and film texts ignore.”
Discovering that passage, we felt as if new shit had not just come to light but smacked us in the forehead. Placed in that context, The Big Lebowski’s indifferent performance at the box office was not really a failure at all. It was an essential ingredient to its later success.
At the same time, it was stupefying to realize that what we’d been experiencing the past few years was actually part of a larger phenomenon that had been repeated numerous times over the past few decades.
Shut the Fuck Up, Donny!
To begin with, “clear across the country,” others were, in fact, reacting in just the same way that we were. In July of 2002, at almost exactly the same time that we hatched the idea for Lebowski Fest at the tattoo convention in Louisville, Santa Cruz–based Steve Palopoli was the first journalist to recognize in print The Big Lebowski’s burgeoning cult status. Although we didn’t learn of it until a year later, he wrote an article for Metro Santa Cruz describing a growing base of fanatical Lebowski fans that was beginning to connect with itself.
When we caught up with Palopoli by phone, he talked about seeing The Big Lebowski when it first came out in the theaters, and then a few times on video, but he said that it wasn’t until he attended a midnight screening in 2000 at the New Beverly Cinema in L.A. that he glimpsed what was beginning to happen. “Suddenly it was like I was connecting with Lebowski fans in all sorts of unlikely places. And ‘Shut the fuck up, Donny!’ was the gateway quote. You’d say, ‘Shut the fuck up, Donny!’ as part of your conversation, and the other person would look surprised and say, ‘Lebowski! Shut the fuck up, Donny!’ and there would be this instant bond. And it was exciting because it was so random.”
Two years later he’d moved to Santa Cruz and begun writing for a paper there. The article that he eventually dedicated to The Big Lebowski was originally meant to focus on the musician Robert Earl Keen. He loved Keen but had written about him several times before and wanted a new angle. While talking to a musician about The Big Lebowski (which by then had become a not-unusual occurrence), he discovered that Keen watched the movie all the time and quoted it on his tour bus. During his interview with Keen he asked about The Big Lebowski, and Keen did it, too—the same gateway quote, “Lebowski! Shut the fuck up, Donny!” After trading a few quotes, Keen said, “You should really talk to my bassist, Bill Whitbeck. He’s watched it well over a hundred times. He wants someone at his funeral to give the Donny eulogy—and his name isn’t even Donny!”
With such an entertainingly fanatical fan to use as a hook, Palopoli took his chance to write a Lebowski article and vent about his own love for the movie. The response amazed him: letter after letter from people telling him how much they loved Lebowski, and how great it was to know they weren’t alone.
Not long after Palopoli’s article came out, the programmer for the local midnight movie series in Santa Cruz decided to run The Big Lebowski. “The first weekend they played it, they turned away several hundred people,” Palopoli said. “They held it over, which they had never done, for six weeks. It was like an old-fashioned movie experience. People were yelling quotes before it even started. It sold out every weekend for a month.”
And We Do Enter the Next Round-Robin
In his article, Palopoli went beyond just describing The Big Lebowski’s growing popularity. He also explained that what made The Big Lebowski’s cult popularity so surprising was that it came at a time when cult movies as a whole were floundering. He detailed how the growing success of a few cult movies led to a chain reaction over the next two decades in which “cult movies became so cool (and such potential cash cows in the profit-recycling world of home video) that every studio wanted one.” Meanwhile the introduction of video rentals, cable, and the Internet allowed mainstream audiences to become increasingly more tuned in to life on the fringe so that “offbeat movies like … The Blair Witch Project, which once would have been relegated to cultdom, became massive, overhyped hits.” With studios clamoring to cash in, and audiences seeming increasingly receptive, it was only a matter of time before we were flooded with “ready-made weirdness like Liquid Sky or camp like Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama, all of them so self-aware of their cult potential they made you wince.”
By the late nineties, this had all proceeded to backfire quite nicely. Studios began to realize that cult movies were no longer the gravy train with biscuit wheels they had once hoped for. Audiences, justifiably jaded, adopted an attitude of, “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, you … you … you won’t fool me again.”
Zat’s Why Zay Sent Me … I Um Exphurt
“Joel and Ethan did not make The Big Lebowski with the intention of making a cult film.”
That voice of familiarity and authority, believe it or not, does not belong to us. Like Bunny with her broken cable, we realized we had reached the limits of our resources and decided to call in ze exphurt.
And so, graciously if a little grudgingly (as if a university professor had been asked to substitute-teach seventh grade), Ben Barenholtz agreed to help us clarify the cult-movie phenomenon and The Big Lebowski’s place within it.
A film-industry legend with a career spanning more than forty years, Barenholtz not only originated the midnight-movie format at his Elgin Theater in New York City in the early 1970s; he also spotted the originality and potential of the Coen brothers’ first film, Blood Simple, and produced their first three pictures.
“The one element about a cult movie,” he goes on, “is that you cannot intentionally create a cult movie or a midnight movie. You cannot start out with that intention. Those things are created by the audience.”
The first movie that Barenholtz played at midnight at the Elgin Theater was El Topo in January 1971. “I convinced [the filmmakers] to open it at midnight without advertising, strictly through word of mouth, because I knew that in wide release it would’ve lasted about a week. I ran it seven nights a week, and by the second week we were selling out six hundred seats by word of mouth. I would not screen it for critics. It ran for six months that way, and then John Lennon saw it and decided he wanted to buy the film. And they bought the film and opened it in wide release. I remember seeing a huge ALAN KLEIN PRESENTS EL TOPO sign in Times Square—Alan Klein was their manager—and it did last about a week. And they were so embarrassed that they didn’t show it again for years.”
Barenholtz continues with stories of Pink Flamingoes, Eraserhead, The Harder They Come, and Night of the Living Dead, an essential history of cult movies from their birth to the present, delivered in the space of a few breaths.
“All of these films, they are really all different,” he sums up. “They are not cookie-cutter films. Also, I think when you look at those films in retrospect, they also very much reflect their times and what their audience is into at that time. I realized that if El Topo had opened ten years later, it wouldn’t have lasted a day. The element of timing is huge with these kinds of films, and each one is different.”
Crazy as it seemed, what he was saying was that The Big Lebowski’s marketing machine had it right all along: Times like these really did call for a Big Lebowski.
“In that kind of film, the people you have to talk to are the ones who are seeing it ten times or twenty times. They are more the definition of the cult film. It’s the audience that does it.”
We couldn’t agree more. And so we’ve devoted the next chapter to The Big Lebowski’s fans—to looking at why they’re so devoted to the film, but also to giving them the credit they’re due.
And we’re talkin’ about the Achievers here. Sometimes there’s a fan who … well, they’re the fan for their time ’n’ place. They fit right in there.
The Stranger Says …
“The ringer cannot look empty.” The ringer toss was filmed in reverse so that they could get the arc just right.
* Peary, Danny. Cult Movies. New York: Gramercy Books, 1981.