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It’s Good Friday night and we’re crammed into the Knitting Factory, a sweaty nightclub on Hollywood’s gum-covered Walk of Fame. Buzzed on adrenaline and second-hand pot smoke, I’m surrounded by a throng of shaggy-wigged burnouts, nihilists, Jesus freaks, and gun-toting John Goodman lookalikes.

The crowd is mostly Caucasian guys in their thirties but, on the bright side, at least there’s a young female Valkyrie here tonight. Her long, black braids are tucked under a horned golden helmet, and the top of her matching gold dress is a bra made from spray-painted plastic bowling balls. Tipsy and giggling, she pokes me with her three-pronged trident, then nudges me aside so she can suck back her $7 White Russian.

A tall black-clad nihilist swings his sword at a bearded Mexican in a bald cap. In a vaguely German accent, the nihilist asks the Mexican, "You want me to cut off your Johnson?!" So the Mexican whips out a crowbar, smacks the sword aside, and retorts, "What the fuck joo doing, mang? I jus’ bought deez fuckeen car lass week!"

Lost? Confused? High? Welcome to Lebowski Fest, a vodka-fueled celebration of The Big Lebowski film, the infamous mistaken-identity caper from Minnesota brothers Joel and Ethan Coen.

If you happen to be a fan of the film, you know the movie is set in Los Angeles in 1990, just before George Bush Sr. launched America’s first attack on Iraq. (You may also want to skip the next four paragraphs.) The story begins as a stoned middle-aged slacker wearing sunglasses, a bathrobe, and Bermuda shorts, drifts into Ralphs supermarket to buy half-and-half cream for his favorite cocktail, the White Russian. This is Jeff "the Dude" Lebowski, played by Jeff Bridges in a career-high performance. The cowboy narrator (don’t ask) describes the Dude as a lazy man, "quite possibly the laziest in Los Angeles County...which would place him high in the runnin' for laziest worldwide."

When the Dude gets home, he’s jumped by two thugs who dunk his head in the toilet and demand a fat stack of cash. But they’re shaking down the wrong Lebowski. Turns out the Dude has the same last name as a fat millionaire whose wife owes money to the thugs’ porn-producing mob boss. Realizing their mistake, the thugs pee on the Dude’s carpet before leaving in a huff.

The Dude complains to his bowling partner, Vietnam vet Walter Sobchak (played with gun-nut gusto by John Goodman). Walter convinces the Dude to try and talk the elder Lebowski into replacing his soiled rug because "it really tied the room together." But the millionaire’s trophy wife has been kidnapped by bloodthirsty nihilists, so the rich Lebowski hires the Dude to deliver a million clams in ransom money. The Dude promptly loses the cash, when his car gets stolen by a kid flunking sixth-grade social studies.

Perpetually stoned, and egged on by Walter, the Dude gets sucked into L.A.’s seedy tanned underbelly. Like a modern Philip Marlowe, the Dude lazily pursues his "leads," getting cold-cocked and strong-armed by a colorful gallery of rogues. He’s mickey-finned by pornographer Jackie Treehorn, rents bowling shoes from Saddam Hussein, threatened by Jesus, kicked by a cop in shorts ("Stay out of Malibu, deadbeat!"), tailed by a bald private eye, giggled at by a video artist, bounced out of a taxi for complaining about the music ("I’ve had a rough night, and I hate the fucking Eagles, man"), tricked into impregnating the millionaire’s daughter, who paints in the nude, and haunted by castrating nihilists who cut off the trophy wife’s toe, then throw a screaming marmot into the Dude’s bath water as they threaten to cut off his "Johnson."

Pretty loopy, huh? The Big Lebowski was released to puzzled audiences on March 6, 1998, just twelve months after the Coens’ most celebrated film, Fargo, won Academy Awards for Best Actress and Best Original Screenplay. Fargo proved a hard act to follow. Despite hilarious performances from Bridges, Goodman, and John Turturro as the hot-blooded Latino bowler/pederast ("Eight-year-olds, Dude"), The Big Lebowski was just too weird for mainstream audiences. Even the Coens’ fans called it a misfire, and The Big Lebowski become a short-lived box-office bummer.

Now, I’m the biggest Coen Brothers fan there is (before Intolerable Cruelty, of course). Their second film, 1987’s highly successful Raising Arizona, a rollicking baby-napping comedy, inspired me to become a filmmaker. So my expectations were sky-high when I saw The Big Lebowski on opening day. But I left the theater disappointed and mildly depressed. I expected a sharp and fast-paced caper. Instead, I got a rambling character-driven buddy film with a pointless narrator, over-the-top characters, and an ending that drifts away like a tumbleweed in a warm breeze.

But when it came out on video, my roommate forced me to watch it again. He warned me that if I didn’t enjoy it a second time around, our friendship was over and I should find a new apartment. So I watched it again. And I discovered (as the Dude would say) that "there are a lot of facets" to this motion picture, as "new shit comes to life." Each line of dialogue began to sparkle like a tiny perfect gem as each subsequent screening unveils more of its hidden charms, its web of subtle themes, and the ornately complicated plot (inspired by Raymond Chandler’s noir classic, The Big Sleep) becomes easier to follow. Also, it’s funny as hell.

Lebowski Fest’s "founding dudes," Will Russell, 29, and Scott Shuffitt, 33, came up with the idea for Lebowski Fest three summers ago when they were selling clothes at a Kentucky tattoo convention. Will, smiling and boyish, says they were puzzled by the popularity of "a convention where the highlight of the weekend was people hanging by their ass piercings." To kill their boredom, they started "spouting off lines from The Big Lebowski, and the other vendors began to join in. It turned what was gearing up to be one sucky weekend into quite a good time." As Will told The Guardian, "Scott and I were like, man, if they can have this goofy tattoo convention we should have a Big Lebowski convention. It just kind of clicked."

So on October 12, 2002, they staged the inaugural Lebowski Fest (officially titled the 1st Annual Big Lebowski What-Have-You Fest) in Louisville, Kentucky. It was held at a Baptist-run bowling alley, which, according to Will, "didn’t allow drinking or cussing" – ironic considering that, according to the script, the movie characters shout "fuck" or its variants exactly 251 times.

Hoping to break even by convincing thirty-five friends to attend, Will and Scott were surprised when 150 rabid fans of the Dude rolled in. Inspired by Will and Scott’s Web site, they came from as far afield as Tucson, Arizona, and Buffalo, New York, to mingle, drink White Russians, smoke some J’s, bowl some frames, and yell ‘Lebowskionics’ quotes such as, "Your phone's ringing, Dude," "Over the line!" and, of course, Jesus Quintana’s infamous bowling threat, "You flash a piece out on the lanes, I'll take it away from you and stick it up your ass and pull the fucking trigger til it goes click."

In 2003, Spin magazine put the second-annual festival on the map when they proclaimed it "one of this summer's 19 events you can't miss." Flowering under the media’s glow, the founding dudes started staging festivals in New York and Las Vegas. And thanks in part to their colorful Web site (Lebowskifest.com) and clever posters, T-shirts, and bumper stickers, Lebowski Fest is now surfing a tidal wave of publicity.

The L.A. Times called Lebowski Fest a "chaotic celebration of the human spirit." Playboy dubbed the cult film’s fan base "Achievers," after the film’s ‘Little Lebowski Urban Achievers’ (inner-city children from whom the rich Lebowski steals a million dollars). Even the buttoned-down Wall Street Journal proclaimed Lebowski Fest "one hell of a party."

This Easter weekend, for the first time in its three-year history, Lebowski Fest has traveled to its spiritual home, California. Here in the Knitting Factory, it’s clear that tonight’s event (the first in a two-night festival) is an emotional homecoming for Lebowski fans. The film was shot entirely on location in the City of Angels, and the Achievers, 800 of them, are out in full force.

I meet two ecstatic California teenagers, Nick Thiel, 18, from Huntington Beach, and his buddy Blake Thompson, 19, a former Marine who lives in Riverside. Blake’s wearing pyjama pants and on his T-shirt a photo of Walter aiming his gun over the word "Psycho." The front of Nick’s T-shirt reads, "This aggression will not stand, man – Lebowskifest.com," and on the back, "VOTE! WHILE YOU STILL CAN, NOVEMBER 2, 2004."

Blake, who installs solar panels, says he’s seen the film "at least once a week" since it came out on video. That’s over 300 times. "And the funny thing about Big Lebowski is it gets better every single time you watch it," he says. Like many cult fans, he feels a sense of ownership to The Big Lebowski, because so few Americans have even seen it. Nick adds, "This movie is so underrated, it’s not even funny. It’s the greatest movie ever made. Fuck Fargo, man."

Blake first saw the film in seventh grade, when he was twelve. Short and strong, he’s got the rough grip of someone who's always worked with his hands. "Y’see, The Big Lebowski is related to the common man," says Blake. "I took to the movie because the people in The Big Lebowski were the kind of people I grew up with, the bums that just hung around the bowling alleys, got in fights, drawing out their .45s just because they got pissed off. I grew up in Hemet, California. It’s a really shitty-ass town."

Nick thinks the film speaks to young guys because "it’s vulgar, full of partying, with a great lifestyle amounting to nothing. Which is great because the Dude gets to do whatever he wants. And in today’s society you have to work and function like an automaton. And the Dude, he doesn’t follow that. He doesn’t have a care in the world. All he wants to do is bowl and drink White Russians." I ask him how the Dude can afford to live this way. They both laugh and say, "Welfare!"

John Farley and Sean Power have come all the way from New Jersey for Lebowski Fest and are dressed sort of like the Dude and Walter. I ask Farley how they prepared for this weekend’s Lebowski Fest. "We were Dude and Walter before this movie existed," says Farley. "This film was made for us and speaks directly to us. This is the next Woodstock. It’s a meeting of the crowds, man, of the byouth and yeauty," he slurs. I ask Power how they prepared for tonight. He thinks about this for a minute, then says, "Well, we’re drunk."

Suddenly he’s eclipsed by the commanding presence of Dan Prall, 64, who hails from Carollton, Texas. And, man, is he intimidating. With his beer gut, dyed red beard, orange aviator shades, and booming voice, Prall is a dead ringer for Walter. Prall shows me his dog tags, which read, "Sobchak, Walter" above Prall’s blood type (A negative). "See? I am Walter Sobchak. John Goodman played me in the film," barks Prall.

Prall’s been working on his costume for over two months. He shows me his combat boots and says they were issued to him in Vietnam when he was a U.S. Army airborne artillery captain in ’67 and ’68. A retired senior forensic chemist after twenty-five years in the Drug Enforcement Agency, he now enjoys "side trips to Amsterdam for forbidden pleasures. At my age, forget the hookers and hook up the hookah."

Prall pivots, whips out a real-looking handgun, and aims it at a passing nihilist. He yells, "Fucking nihilist, those are the rules!" My stomach lurches. It feels like somebody dosed me with mushrooms and I’ve stepped right into the movie. Somebody says, "That’s really John Goodman!" Prall chuckles. Behind him, I see the spark fade from Power’s eyes. He’s just realized he’s not going to win the trophy for Best Walter tomorrow night.

Near the mainstage, somebody’s selling bumper stickers with Zen-like phrases from the film: "I’m unemployed," "Not on the rug, man," "What day is this?", "The Dude Abides," "Nice marmot," and the nihilists’ mantra "We believe in nothing."

Onstage, the nihilist band ‘Autobahn’ finishes assaulting our ears by threatening, "We will cut off all your Johnsons." Next up is a white-haired actress in her sixties, Dr. Lu Elrod, who is introduced to huge applause. She played the stern waitress in the film who tells Walter to quiet down because "this is a family restaurant." Besides acting, Lu is also a standup comic/ventriloquist. To prove it, she tells the crowd to "quiet down" because "this is a family restaurant." Big laughs. Then she invites two young guys onstage to lip-synch "If I Loved You," a romantic duet from Broadway’s Carousel, while she surreptitiously sings their parts. It’s hysterical and the guys ham it up like it’s their job. The tattooed crowd loves her, and she exits blowing kisses.

I talk with Dr. Elrod backstage about the significance of Lebowski to America. She laughs as she gives her take: "Everybody knows people like the Dude and Walter who are good guys, nice people, but just losers. Everything they do goes wrong."

Then Dr. Elrod gets very quiet. She says the movie’s characters "remind you of people wandering around on Venice Beach. Anybody who’s been around long enough, remembers Vietnam. And [the film] is kind of a reaction, even forty years later, to the sadness of that whole thing. So many lives wasted. And yet you love these guys. You just want them to come out on top."

The nihilist’s girlfriend passes by, so I ask her why there are so few women here tonight. "Probably because you have to give up a toe to get in," she says. I look down and, à la her Lebowski character ‘Nihilist Woman’, there’s a bloody gash where her toe used to be.

Onstage, the band Blonde From Fargo does its best to entertain us with its sludge rock. But the audience is distracted. Rumor has it that, prior to the midnight movie screening, there will be a surprise musical guest appearance.

Sure enough, at precisely 11:55 p.m., the curtain rises to reveal a rock band fronted by the Dude himself, Jeff Bridges! The crowd goes positively bat-shit. "Yeahhhh! It’s a gas to abide with all of you!" says Bridges. Then he strums on his acoustic guitar, grinning and singing Bob Dylan’s "The Man in Me."

Bridges is wearing parachute pants and see-through jelly sandals, just like in the movie. He rests his foot on a speaker. A large woman in the front row, as if on pilgrimage, stretches way out to touch his exposed toes. Nick and Blake are astounded that Bridges has come to Lebowski Fest. Blake starts to weep. "I see the character that I want to just emulate my life over," he says. "It’s just so awesome!"

After his thirty-minute set, Bridges gives an impromptu backstage press conference. Asked what he thinks of the surging Lebowski phenomenon, he says, "It all feels like some weird dream I'm having." Then he invites Will to try on his jelly. Will is over the moon. He aims his stocking foot into the Dude’s golden sandal. But Bridges says, "No, no, man you gotta take your sock off." Will’s in heaven, and Scott grins from ear to ear. This isn’t even the main event – that's tomorrow night's bowling extravaganza – but Will and Scott look happier than five-year-olds on Christmas morning.

The midnight movie screening is a powerful communal experience, like a Sing Along Sound of Music for drunk straight white guys. The Achievers sits cross-legged on the bar floor, yelling each line of dialogue with eerily perfect timing. It’s like we can see into the future and realize it’ll somehow end OK. But at 2:02 a.m., with only twenty minutes left in the film, the bar lights flash on and the bouncer kicks us out. This sucks. The Achievers boo, shout, "Over the line!" and grumble at The Man as we stagger out into the night. A half-block down, I pass Jeff Bridges’s star on the Walk of Fame. I stumble back to my hotel room to watch the end of the movie on my laptop. I pass out during the closing credits, sitting upright in my chair.

At 8 p.m. the following night the action moves to the Cal Bowl, a 68-lane bowling alley in Lakewood, California. Tonight is Lebowski Fest’s climactic event: $25 gets you unlimited bowling, a trivia contest, celebrity appearances, and even a karaoke lounge.

Walking through the Cal Bowl is a head trip. Above the bowling pins, somebody has painted dreamy murals of mellow orange sunsets. It’s a truly peaceful sight. And yet, despite the film’s subtle anti-Gulf War bias, there’s a giant Stars and Stripes banner that reads, "Support Our Armed Forces." There’s a haze of pot. A crash of bowling pins. Songs from the Lebowski soundtrack are squawking through ancient speakers. They’re fighting to be heard over the din of 1,000 muttering Achievers lining up to buy more White Russians.

It’s a star-studded night. Besides the guy who played Chunk in The Goonies, there’s also a hefty Big Lebowski contingent. There’s the Saddam Hussein lookalike. There are twin blondes, one of whom, Robin Jones, portrayed the bored Ralphs checkout girl. And in front of me is David Huddleston, who played the pissed-off tycoon Lebowski. He grabs a microphone and, quoting his cranky character, shouts, "I've got news for you. The bums will always lose!" He grins as 1,000 bums cheer and high-five.

The real-life inspiration for the Dude, Jeff Dowd, is a mopheaded fifty-five-year-old film producer, writer, and producer's rep. And he’s here tonight. He really loves to bowl. He really was a ’60s radical (viva la Seattle Liberation Front). And he really, really loves to party. Dowd winds slowly through his awe-struck fans like Mahatma Gandhi on a Calcutta bender. He hugs and pounds back cocktails with the Achievers, tells them to stop nursing their drinks, poses happily for a zillion cellphone snapshots, and smokes a doob with tickled photographers. This is Dowd’s fifth straight Lebowski Fest. When Variety magazine asked why he’d come to a festival based on a film about his life, he quipped, "What, you wouldn't show up to this if you were me?"

Unlike Star Trek, Stargate, or Star Wars geek meets, Achievers are only able to celebrate a single 117-minute cultural product. There aren’t any sequels, prequels, TV series, or comic spin-offs. Therefore, since The Big Lebowski stands alone, its fans have to work that much harder to find outlets for their devotion. For example, in the film Mrs. Jamtoss was just a teacher’s name on a fifteen-year-old’s social-studies assignment. But tonight, she’s come to life as an uptight schoolteacher in a bun. My personal favorites were inspired by an offhand Dude remark. Two roommates are dressed in matching ‘We’ shirts: The shorter guy’s wearing a tiara (‘The Royal We’); the tall guy’s wearing an old-timer journalist’s hat (‘The Editorial We’).

Suddenly, at 12:10 a.m. on Lane 50, an Achiever named Derek Shackleton drops to both knees and asks his girlfriend, Faeren Adams, to marry him. She says yes and they embrace. Seconds later, the happy couple are surrounded by reporters, who jam microphones in their faces and ask them how they feel. I ask the journalist next to me, "By writing about Lebowski Fest, am I spoiling the thing I love?" He says, "Will we make Lebowski Fest bigger by writing about it? Yes. Will we make it better? No."

To nobody’s surprise, the sixty-four-year-old Vietnam vet Dan Prall is crowned Best Walter. "I'm the king of the world," he says, and aims his gun at my camera. I ask him if he agrees that the Dude is a spoof of Democrats (e.g., aging hippies on welfare) and Walter is a spoof of Republicans (ass-kicking combat vets who leap into battle over the smallest of slights). He replies, "I believe that question is simple-minded total bullshit." Later, Prall threatens me by e-mail, and warns me that I’d better not misquote him, or else. He says, "You fuck with the truck, you get run over."

The booze is taking charge now and the dwindling crowd is turning edgy. A fat sweaty hairy guy strips off his shirt and spin-dances like a hippie twit, bumping into people and spilling White Russians on their bowling shoes. Two other guys almost get into a fistfight. Around them, everyone says, "You're being very un-Dude, dude!'"

By 1 a.m., the lanes are finally empty. Lebowski Fest has fizzled out like the ending of the film itself. Out in the parking lot, I run into nineteen-year-old Blake, the ex-Marine who cried when he saw Jeff Bridges. He’s crying again now. He tells me that, as a Marine under George W. Bush, he led over 100 men at bases in San Diego and Camp Pendleton. Eight of these men attempted suicide. As first man on the scene for five of these attempts, Blake had to take their razor blades away. "When they passed out from blood loss," he told me later, "I wrapped my T-shirt around their wrists to stop the bleeding."

As it is for thousands of Achievers in this era of Bush, bombs, and Abu Ghraib, watching The Big Lebowski has been therapeutic for Blake. "I used to be an angry person, but now I just accept everything and am at peace with myself, just like the Dude." Maybe so. But tonight Blake seems far more like tough-guy Walter, who weeps when his friend Donny has a heart attack in the final reel.

He’s also not much different from a lot of guys we know – loyal, competitive, principled, emotional – brothers in arms dressed in Gap khakis, and wishing they were the Dude: Mellow. Buddha-like. Free as the tumbleweed. As the Cowboy narrator says, "It’s good knowin’ he’s out there, the Dude, takin’ her easy for all us sinners." And as I drive away from Lebowski Fest, I realize I’m content with my inner-Walter. Even the Dude needs a little wind to propel him into the sunset.

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