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| Two fans show off at the Napoleon Dynamite festival, staged annually in Preston, Idaho. Courtesy of Preston Chamber of Commerce |
Lights ... Camera ... Obsession!
Fan conventions aren't just for sci-fi buffs anymore. Films such as 'The Big Lebowski' and 'Napoleon Dynamite' are inspiring off-line communities, too.
from the August 31, 2007 edition
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Jenkins attributes the boom in fan culture largely to the Web, which empowers aficionados to network and exchange ideas. Indeed, untold numbers of cult-movie discussion boards or MySpace tribute pages span cyberspace and allow fans to connect in unprecedented ways.
The Lebowski convention, however, started off-line. Six years ago, two friends selling posters at an extreme tattoo and piercing convention in Kentucky began quoting lines from "The Big Lebowski" to pass the time. Other vendors joined in and began to bond.
At that point, Will Russell and Scott Shuffitt had a revelation. "If they can have this tattoo convention, why can't we have a Lebowski convention?" says Mr. Russell, who peppers his speech with phrases and the lingo of "The Big Lebowski."
So Russell and Mr. Shuffitt decided to organize a Lebowski Fest in their hometown of Louisville, a locale that has nothing to do with the film. The duo expected 20 friends at the first fest in 2002. They were thrilled when 150 people showed up.
Compelled to make the event a tradition, the two created a website for the festival and unbeknownst to them, Spin, a popular music magazine, listed the event in their annual calendar. Attendance at the next festival jumped to 1,200 people from over 35 states, says Russell. They've since hosted Lebowski Fests in New York, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles (the latter included a visit from The Dude himself, Jeff Bridges). They even ventured abroad to England and Scotland. But they plan to keep the main event in Louisville.
While science-fiction movies like "Star Wars" can build fan cultures around the fantasy element, films about everyday life, or at least not set in outer space, often attract disciples because their protagonists aren't traditional heroes.
"For people in our culture, it's not always Tom Cruise and Bruce Willis who get their motor running. It's people like them," says Peter Exline, a film professor at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles who inadvertently inspired the Coen Brothers' creation of "The Big Lebowski." "They're drawn in by the attitude that [characters like Napoleon Dynamite and The Dude] have toward the conventional, materialistic, success-driven world."
Lounging on the lawn outside the Executive Strike and Spare bowling alley, home to this year's sixth annual Lebowski Fest, Pat O'Keeffe says, "There are people who get it and people who don't." On the flight to Louisville, Mr. O'Keeffe, who traveled to the event from Lancaster, Pa., with his 15-year-old son, Jack, says that people unaware of the festival approached him and his son to talk about the movie when they spotted the duo's "Big Lebowski" T-shirts.
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