Like many IT-projects, this one was built to scratch an itch. For years, I wanted to have an easy way of finding my favorite quotes from The Big Lebowski. I had found the script online and would awkwardly search through it to find that one particular piece of text from the movie. Now I finally have that easy tool, and I am happy to share it with the rest of the world.
If you have to ask, then I'd suggest you watch the movie a few more times. Over the 26 years since this movie came out in 1998, it has become an absolute cult favorite. It has a regular get together in the Lebowski Fest and it has its own church. This site has 1.122 lines from the movie, and when you go through them, you quickly realize that this must be one of the most quotable movies ever. For the first time (as far as I know), the quotes have been connected to stills from the movie. Looking at the stills, you cannot miss the incredible beauty of this movie. And suddenly things that were in the background can come to the foreground. The Coen Brothers meticulously had every part of film designed, nothing that you see is based on chance.
There are small disparities between the script and the actual movie. I have been pragmatic and mostly followed the script. This means that there are some quotes on this site that don't exist in the movie (like this one). Some parts from the movie where missing from the script but obviously had to be included on this site. The most important ones were the tenets of national socialism and the whole scene with Knox Harrington, the video artist.
This site is in no way affiliated with the owners or creators of the The Big Lebowski. Universal Pictures holds the copyright of the movie, so please buy the movie from them if you are interested in seeing it.
The material from the movie is used under the fair use doctrine. This site has a purely nonprofit and educational purpose. It only shows a small portion of the movie at any single time and it doesn't inhibit the copyright owner in exploiting the original work.
Information about the quotes can also be accessed programmatically via an API. Please read the documentation to see how.
This site does not process any personal information, it doesn't use cookies, and no access logs are kept. Basically, this means that I have no idea about how often this site is used. I'll abide regardless.
Even though the site uses Google Fonts, they are not loaded from Google's CDN. No part of your visit is ‘leaked’ to any third party other than my hosting provider (currently Hetzner).
It is bad security practice to share what software you use. However, I think it is important to acknowledge that it wouldn't be possible for me to make this website without the incredible and freely available work of many others. With security always being a trade-off, here goes…
Firstly, the website is hosted on Ubuntu Linux, with nginx as the webserver, free SSL certificates from Let's Encrypt, PHP, and SQLite.
The PHP project makes use of Flight as a PHP framework and includes the PHP dotenv and Medoo libraries (which might rely on other libraries that I won't mention but do appreciate). Composer manages the dependencies.
Bulma is used for the frontend, making the site fully responsive. Font Awesome icons are used throughout the site, and the quote pages use Holtwood One SC and Merienda One from Google Fonts. Highlight.js is used for syntax highlighting the API documentation.
I made extensive use of Aaron Ackerman's lebowski.me API, allowing me to access the lines from the script in an easier way. I wouldn't have been able to make the site without ImageMagick's image wrangling capabilities.
But most thanks should of course go to the incredible people who made this movie. Without them, the world would truly be a place with less joy.