Eddie Chung, a former philosophy student who is accustomed to pondering life's deepest mysteries, is still stumped by something that shapes lives by the thousands: Why has "The Big Lebowski" become the most popular and all-consuming cult film since "The Rocky Horror Picture Show"?
"I don't think," said Chung, a 38-year-old Southland filmmaker, "that's an answerable question. It's like asking, 'Why did Britney Spears become popular?' "
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Saturday, August 01, 2009 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 4 National Desk 1 inches; 34 words Type of Material: Correction
"The Big Lebowski": An article in Thursday's Calendar section about a documentary on the fans of the 1998 film "The Big Lebowski" misspelled the name of the filmmaking duo the Maysles brothers as Mayles.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Thursday, August 06, 2009 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 4 National Desk 2 inches; 70 words Type of Material: Correction
'The Big Lebowski': An article in the July 30 Calendar section about a documentary on the fans of the 1998 Coen brothers film "The Big Lebowski" said the fans call themselves "achievers" in an ironic contrast to the lead character's lack of ambition. The moniker is also popularly considered to be a reference to a charity in the film named after the millionaire Lebowski, called the Little Lebowski Urban Achievers.
Maybe so. But as with Spears, the 1998 Coen brothers film is now an undeniable pop-cult force: For many it is a way of life. The mystery of the film's resonance is something Chung has pondered for five years now, since he walked into a Lebowski Fest in Las Vegas in 2004.
He and a friend arrived a bit early, and Chung began to wonder if the celebration was for real. "By then, there was no proof that anyone was gonna show up for this."
But they did: The event -- a bout of bowling, trivia and white Russian consumption following the kind of screening in which audiences talk back to the screen -- drew nearly 1,000 people and sent Chung on a journey from which he's only just now emerging.
"The Achievers: The Story of the Lebowski Fans," Chung's documentary on this cinematic subculture, will play at the Laemmle Sunset 5 tonight through Saturday. This comes in the middle of a two-month tour of Lebowski Fests that included two nights in San Diego earlier this week.
As one of the festival founders says in "The Achievers": "It's all of my nerdiest dreams come true."
It seemed an unlikely candidate for immortality. When "The Big Lebowski" opened in 1998, the Coen brothers, fresh off the success of the Oscar-winning "Fargo," were among the hottest filmmakers in America, and expectations were high.
The movie, though, ended up with mixed reviews and only six weeks in theaters. It didn't exactly bomb -- Roger Ebert called it "a genial, shambling comedy about a human train wreck" (by which he means the SoCal slacker played by Jeff Bridges). Though "Lebowski" has since been critically reevaluated and is now considered among the filmmakers' best, at the time, even Coen fans were puzzled by the movie's tossed-off plot and string of non sequiturs, and the film barely made back its budget.
The movie is a tangled tale of mistaken identity between Bridges' the Dude -- who lives for white Russian-fueled bowling sessions with his oddball friends -- and a powerful man with whom he shares a name (Jeffrey Lebowski) and little else.
