The Dudes Abide: The Coen Brothers and the Making of The Big Lebowski

44 Pages·2014·0.45 MB·English

by  Alex Belth

THE DUDES ABIDE
The Coen Brothers and the Making of The Big Lebowski
By Alex Belth
Copyright © 2014 by Alex Belth
PART ONE
Joel and Ethan Coen were waiting for John Goodman to finish taking a
leak. It was just after lunch on December 10, 1996, and Joel, who’d turned 42 a
few weeks earlier, was looking out a large window at the Hollywood Hills. It
was raining again.
“That’d be just our luck, Eth,” Joel said. “Spend a whole winter in
Minnesota and it doesn’t snow, then we come here and it fucking rains.”
Joel, older by three years, stood with his hands in his sweatshirt pockets.
His black hair tied in a ponytail, small round glasses across his nose, he could
have passed for the Ramones’ long-lost brother — the one who went to graduate
school.
“The fucking rainy season,” he said.
On this rainy afternoon in L.A., Goodman and Jeff Bridges were meeting
for the first time to read through a new Coen brothers screenplay called The Big
Lebowski. Bridges was still stuck in traffic when Goodman returned from the
can. He sat on the edge of the couch, legs open, his belly hanging so low it
looked like he was sitting on the floor, and started quoting lines from Fargo.
Goodman, a friend of the Coens since he worked with them on their second
movie, Raising Arizona, laughed about the scene where William Macy tried to
escape out of a motel window, only to be dragged back inside by the cops.
“Macy in his underwear,” Goodman said, giggling.
“That’s our answer to everything,” Ethan said. “You need a dramatic fall,
put a character in his undies.”
Joel told Goodman about re-recording dialogue for the profanity-free
television version of Fargo. They rewrote the line, “I’m fucking hungry now” to
“I’m full of hungry now.”
“Why didn’t we write it like that originally?” said Joel. “It’s funnier.”
Goodman said, “Who else is coming on this show?” (In Los Angeles,
movie people call a movie a “show.”)
There was Steve Buscemi as Donny, Julianne Moore as Maude, Jon Polito
as Da Fino.
Joel said, “Our friend Luis, who was an assistant film editor on Hudsucker,
will be playing the enraged Mexican.”
“Yeah, you’ll like Luis,” Ethan said in a creaky voice. “He makes a big
statement.”
“Turturro is coming in to play the pederast,” Joel said. “He said he’d do his
best F. Murray Abraham.”
Much of the cast was in place save for Bunny and Brandt and, critically, the
Big Lebowski. You know, the other Jeffrey Lebowski, the tycoon whose
Pasadena mansion is both miles and worlds away from the Dude’s rundown
bungalow. With just over a month left before filming began, the Boys — as Joel
and Ethan were known by colleagues and friends — weren’t close to casting the
title role.
The trouble was that most of the actors they wanted were dead. Raymond
Burr? Dead. Fred Gwynne? Dead. Anthony Perkins, Marty Balsam, Chuck
Connors? All dead. Brian Keith was ill (he died less than a year later). Jason
Robards was said to be having health problems.
The original Lebowski list was dubbed “Mussburger lists” — referring to
Paul Newman’s character from The Hudsucker Proxy. It included Tommy Lee
Jones (too young), Robert Duvall (not interested, didn’t get it), Anthony Hopkins
(not interested, wouldn’t play an American), Gene Hackman (not interested,
wanted a vacation), and Jack Nicholson (not interested, only wanted to play
Moses).
Another Lebowski wish list followed, a wild collection of names that
included Norman Mailer, Jerry Falwell, Gore Vidal, William F. Buckley,
Jonathan Winters, and General Norman Schwarzkopf. Also, venerable actors
like Fred Ward, Carroll O’Connor, Hoyt Axton, Ned Beatty, Peter Boyle,
Richard Mulligan, Michael Caine, Jackie Cooper, Bruce Dern, and Paul Dooley.
Ernest Borgnine was included, as were Larry Hagman, James Coburn, Andy
Griffith, and Lloyd Bridges.
The choices narrowed — Rod Steiger, George C. Scott, Charles Durning,
Pat Hingle. Then, the impossible dream: Brando. It was a good dream, too,
though unlikely. Brando had certainly grown into the role but he was eccentric,
expensive, and didn’t much like to work. Still, the idea amused the Boys no end,
and for weeks they quoted the Big Lebowski’s lines in a Brando accent:
“Condolences, the bums lost,” Joel said with his jaw pushed out to look like
Brando in The Godfather.
“Strong men also cry,” Ethan replied.
But their favorite was, “By God, sir, I will not abide another toe.”
*
In New York, the top filmmakers — Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen, Sidney
Lumet, Mike Nichols, Jonathan Demme, Spike Lee, Jim Jarmusch, the Coen
brothers — had regular crews, and I hoped to break in with one of them. It was
1993 and I was 22 years old. My first job out of college was interning Ken
Burns’ Baseball documentary. When the project wrapped, I waited tables for a
year until I got work as an apprentice editor. I broke in on a Miramax movie
called Wishful Thinking and then stepped up in class with a Woody Allen
confection called Everyone Says I Love You. My experiences with Burns and
Allen were enticing but I also understood that even after you’d already made it
through the door, there was no guarantee you’d stick.
I got another gig on a nonunion feature that was cutting in the grubby
rooms at the Technicolor building on 44th Street. That’s where I saw Tricia
Cooke, who had worked with the Coens on Miller’s Crossing and later married
Ethan. One day, as she took a break from cutting a movie down the hall, she told
me the brothers were heading to California in a few months to shoot their next
movie. At this point they edited their own movies — under the pseudonym
Roderick Jaynes — and there was a chance that I could apprentice on it when
they returned to New York the following spring. That was almost a year away.
In the meantime, they were looking for a personal assistant. Would I be
interested in interviewing with them?
*
The Coens arrived on the scene in 1984 with Blood Simple, their
independently financed debut. Was it a deadpan noir or a grisly horror movie?
Regardless, it had style and the movie was a critical hit. They followed that with
the slapstick comedy Raising Arizona, another surprise success.
Their third movie, Miller’s Crossing, an homage to Dashiell Hammett,
inspired yet more good reviews. Then Barton Fink, an oddball comedy about
writer’s block, won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival — landing them
in the top rank of independent filmmakers, admired for their distinctive genre
bending.
In 1994, a decade after their debut, the brothers went for commercial
success with their first big-budget, studio-backed effort, a screwball comedy,
The Hudsucker Proxy, starring Paul Newman. It flopped. “Eleven people went to
see it,” Ethan told me. “Worldwide.”
Next up was supposed to be The Big Lebowski, a movie they had written in
part for John Goodman. But he couldn’t break away from his schedule on
Roseanne. Licking their wounds from the Hudsucker failure, the Boys returned
to what they did best
Fargo was a vicious little crime drama shot on a shoestring budget. Ethan’s
college friend, William Robertson, begged the brothers not to make it: You’ve
just had a huge flop, now you want to make a crime drama set in North Dakota?
Nobody will watch it, he reasoned. They made it anyway. Released in the spring
of 1996, Fargo was their most restrained, conventional-looking movie and their
biggest critical and financial success to date.
After six films, the Coens had a following but no interest in being
celebrities. These were not personalities. They looked like a Jewish Mutt and
Jeff. Joel was the tall one with a neatly trimmed goatee, Ethan the short one with
a scraggly beard and a Jewfro. I’d see Joel on the street on the Upper West Side,
lost in thought, or Ethan in the Brill Building elevator looking at his shoes.
Neither was rude or friendly. They struck me as pensive, and I couldn’t tell if
they were brooding, shy, or preoccupied.
Their office was in a ground-level, two-bedroom apartment on Riverside
Drive in the 100s, a few blocks from where I’d lived as a kid. It had been Joel’s
first apartment when he came from Minnesota to attend NYU. Margo Hayes
greeted me at the door. An old friend of the Boys, she managed their business
affairs while she went to graduate school for physical therapy.
Just off the entrance was a small room to the left, Margo’s office; straight
ahead was a nice-sized living room, and off that a kitchen, with a diner-style
booth. Past the living room was a bedroom where Joel and Ethan wrote.
I sat on the couch in the living room as the Boys finished a conference call
in the back room. Behind me was a shelf filled with videotapes, framed pictures,
books, and copies of their screenplays, published and unpublished. There
seemed to be a dozen original scripts of theirs that had yet to become movies. A
promotional snow globe from Fargo with a figure feeding a leg into a wood
chipper caught my eye. The stock tickertape machine from The Hudsucker Proxy
was across the room, not far from an elegant photograph of Akira Kurosawa; a
small, framed black-and-white portrait of John Goodman from Barton Fink was
placed next to the bathroom door; a vintage barber shop poster displaying
different hairstyles was near Margo’s room; and a painting of Dan Hedaya from
Blood Simple hung in Joel and Ethan’s office.
When the Boys finished their call, they came in to talk. Joel sat in a chair
facing me and Ethan paced, chewing a swizzle stick. I told them about working
for Woody Allen and how his assistant gave me Woody’s tickets to the Knicks a
few times. Then I imitated Woody talking basketball, “Y’know, UUUewing is
good, but Fraahziah and MonROW were something else.”
They laughed easily. I could see why actors loved working with them. They
were a good audience and took pleasure in coaxing more out of me. Their laugh,
the way they went from a chuckle to a belly laugh, sounded like they were
hyperventilating, a cross between Robert Carradine in Revenge of the Nerds and
Eddie Murphy’s hoarse guffaw. When they really got going, they snorted, too.
Their voices sounded scratchy as if they needed a drink of water. This tone, and
the cadence of how they spoke was infectious, and many people close to them
adopted it for themselves.
We talked about the Upper West Side and how the old neighborhood had
changed. Then they told me about their new movie and said I could come along
with them to L.A. as their personal assistant. They would pay for my flight if I
could find a place to live and rent a car. Best of all, when filming began, maybe I
could move to the cutting room and sync the dailies, a promotion from
apprentice to assistant editor.
They offered me $400 a week, less than I was making as an apprentice. I
asked for $500. Ethan made a gagging noise. He looked at his brother and Joel
said that they’d get back to me. A few days later, Margo left a message on my
answering machine. “I guess they like you enough to give you what you want.”
*
On my first day working for the Coens, a promo copy of the Fargo DVD
arrived. They checked out the first few minutes of the movie to make certain the
color correction was right. Standing a few feet away from the television, where
Harve Presnell winced in pain watching a hockey game, Joel and Ethan cracked
up. Nothing made them laugh as much as watching people in pain. Even seeing
someone mildly irritated was amusing. They fast-forwarded and laughed at
William Macy’s pitiful Jerry Lundegaard. The Coens were like two kids who’d
been granted a wish to make up stories to be turned into movies for which they’d
get paid.
Unlike Woody Allen, Joel and Ethan enjoyed making movies. They
gobbled up Hollywood stories and dug telling them, too. If I asked them about a
director or an actor, they were happy to tell me who was cool and who was a
pain in the ass. Jack Nicholson — listed as “Uncle Jack” in their phone book —
was a benign madman. Tim Burton had lousy table manners. Mel Gibson’s
manager called one day and said that Mel wanted to take the Boys to lunch.
When they got back to the office after lunch with him, I asked what Gibson
wanted to talk about. They shrugged and said they still weren’t sure.
The most important part of my job was to know which people the Boys
wanted to talk to and which ones I should take a message from. That was the
whole job right there. Talking on the phone was how I got to know their
families. Their parents, Ed and Rena, still lived in Minnesota and were
professors. Ed was an economics professor at the University of Minnesota. Rena
was an art historian at St. Cloud State University. The Boys grew up with
paintings on the walls and I figured they must have gotten some of their sense of
visual appreciation from her. Perhaps they got their economic sense from Ed.
Both parents wrote — Rena told me she and Ed were “scribblers.” Joel and
Ethan called their parents Rena and Ed, not Mom and Dad. There was an older
sister, Debbie, as well, but I never spoke with her.
Ethan’s wife, Tricia, called a few times each day, as did Joel’s wife, the
actress Frances McDormand. It was the second marriage for each of the guys.
Tricia wasn’t much older than me, and we already had a rapport; Joel met
Frances years earlier when she auditioned, and landed, the lead role in Blood
Simple. Tricia worked with the guys in the editing room and served as the script
supervisor during production; Frances was enjoying the biggest recognition of
her career for her starring role in Fargo. They both had young sons.
I’d known people who worked as personal assistants to the stars and knew
the role could require round-the-clock attention. That wasn’t the case with the
Coens. They didn’t call me at home in the middle of the night to complain about
aches and pains, real or imagined. In fact, they never called me at home. They
arrived at the office around 9 each morning and they left at 5. During my first
week with them, I spilled a garbage can in Margo’s room, the floor littered with
paper cut-outs from the hole puncher. Ethan, who’d been standing in the
doorway, came over without hesitation and helped clean up.
My duties were light. I answered the phones, took care of hotel and travel
arrangements, and made copies of The Big Lebowski script. I got Ethan coffee at
Starbucks and Joel coffee from any place other than Starbucks because he
fucking hated Starbucks.
I was also put in charge of making lunch. Joel stood next to me one
afternoon and looked over my shoulder as I made spaghetti carbonara. He
appreciated that I’d worked in editing rooms because that’s how he started. He
told me about working on horror movies and about their friend the director Sam
Raimi, and how much both he and Ethan liked Preston Sturges’ movies,
especially The Palm Beach Story.
I remember walking back from the grocery store one day in early
September, the leaves beginning to turn, struck by my good fortune: I’m getting
paid to shop and cook for two of the best filmmakers in America. The Coens ate
whatever I put in front of them, usually some kind of pasta. When they finished
they’d say, “That’s some good shit.”
I was thin, almost gaunt, and still had a teenager’s metabolism, but the
Coens were cautious of things like calories and cholesterol and mindful of
advice from doctors. Joel jogged regularly along Riverside Drive; Ethan went to
the gym almost every night. It was only after a month or so that they gently
suggested that I make something other than pasta.
Margo was sometimes around during the day. Usually she was gone by the
time we arrived in the morning, returning as we were about to go home. She
used the apartment during the evenings to give massages. I took to staying late to
chat with her and, about once a week, to have a massage. Joel and Ethan never
took her up on a standing invitation. “They don’t like being touched like that,”
Margo said.
The Coens were definitely Jewish and definitely New Yorkers, but they
weren’t Jewish New Yorkers. These were not huggers and smoochers. I couldn’t
imagine either of them shouting or dancing or doing a cannonball into the pool.
I adapted to their mood, which — while never unpleasant — could be
distant. They were comfortable in silence. Sometimes Joel would come in my
office, bum a smoke, and we’d sit there without saying a word. Ethan had a
similar sense of outward calm, though beneath that he had the energy of a
hyperactive child who shouldn’t be left alone with sugar, caffeine, or matches.
He’d be sitting there, a blank expression on his face, snap his head around, eyes
squinting in a comic pose for a brief moment, and then go back to the blank
look. The Boys spent a lot of time sitting in a room, thinking. They knew each
other so well that they didn’t waste time with small talk.
*
Because it was to be directed and produced by its authors, the Lebowski
script was different from any screenplay I’d read. It was precise in a way that
most scripts are not. Stage directions included details like the beer foam on the
Dude’s mustache, or Walter waving both arms as if conducting a symphony
when he says, “Kill that poor woman.” Or the tape cassette cover that read,
“Venice Beach League Playoffs, 1987.”
John Lyons, the Boys’ casting director, told me that Raising Arizona was