screenplay as "a man in whom casualness runs deep." He lives a peaceful beach existence in a run-down bungalow in Venice, pretty much content to spend his time bowling with his buddies. They are Walter, a pompous security-store owner and amateur military historian, and Donny, a mild-mannered ex-surfer.

The Dude's peace and quiet is shattered, however, when he's terrorized by two thugs who warn him that he's responsible for his wife's debts to a shady character named Jackie Treehorn. But, in fact, the Dude's not married; it turns out that he's been mistaken for someone else named Jeffrey Lebowski, an aging millionaire who lives in Pasadena. When Walter persuades the Dude to contact this other Jeff Lebowski, our hero and his friends become embroiled in a series of underhanded, not to mention criminal activities.

Just as in the Chandler novels, the story of "THE Big Lebowski" is set in Los Angeles, and the plot--again as in Chandler--moves among the different social classes and different types the Dude runs across as the story unfolds.

"I suppose the 'THE Big Lebowski' is specifically about L.A. in the way 'Fargo' was about the Midwest," says Joel Coen. "Certainly the story takes place in the L.A. that we're familiar with, and many of the characters in the film are based on people that we know and people we've met here.

"But we've placed it all in a Chandleresque kind of context. We have a voice-over narration, and elements of double-cross and deception that exist on several levels among people whose motives are devious and obscure, and many of these characters deliberately recall types you'd run across in Chandler. In 'The Big Sleep,' for instance, there's a sophisticated older sister and a younger one, who's a tart. In 'THE BIG LEBOWSKJ,' the sophisticated female character is the millionaire Lebowski's daughter, Maude, and the immoral figure is Bunny, his young wife.

"We've written the story from a modern point of view and set it very precisely in 1991 during the Persian Gulf War," Ethan adds, "which also has a direct effect on the Dude and his friends. In the end, the amateur sleuthing of these guys unearths the secrets of the plot and solves a case that might have challenged a professional private eye like Philip Marlowe... if he had lived in the Los Angeles of the nineties and been an avid bowler and a pothead."

Although the leading character of "THE Big Lebowski" is the Dude, the Coens were prompted initially to write the screenplay in order to create something for John Goodman. He always impressed them as a major talent whose gifts haven't been fully explored on the big screen.