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The Dude and the Spaceman: A new buddy picture?

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I’ve always loved the idea of putting bigger-than-life people together with each other, sort of in the way Tom Stoppard’s ‘Travesties’ imagines James Joyce, Lenin and Tristan Tzara hanging out with one another in 1917-era Zurich, Switzerland. Today’s equivalent? How would you like to roam around modern-day Boston with Jeff Dowd and Bill Lee?

Dowd, a.k.a. ‘the Dude,’is one of the great iconoclasts of the motion picture world, the wild-eyed film producer and marketing expert who inspired Jeff Bridges’ Dude character in ‘The Big Lebowski.’ Lee, a.k.a. ‘the Spaceman,’ is the famously colorful Boston Red Sox pitcher from the 1970s who feuded with his managers, sang Warren Zevon songs in the locker room, touted Greenpeace and school busing in Boston and claimed that his marijuana smoking made him impervious to bus fumes while traveling to Fenway Park each day.

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Is that a marriage made in hipster heaven or what? As it turns out, the Spaceman tracked down the Dude, who’s been helping him work on a distribution plan for ‘High and Outside,’ a new documentary about Lee’s exploits in baseball and afterward. But the guys hit it off so much that about a month ago they met up in Boston, where they filmed a video about the roots of the first American Revolution and the possibility of a new second American revolution. The film, now up on YouTube, shows them walking along Boston’s Freedom Trail and offers a rambling portrait of two graying but eternally optimistic activists still eager to change the world.

How did it happen? Trying to get the Dude to offer a concise, focused explanation is a lot like trying to steer a Category 4 hurricane away from the Gulf Coast, but here’s what he had to say:

On Bill Lee: ‘I’m totally in awe of him. He’s a phenomenally smart, imaginative guy, sort of like a cross between Mark Twain and Lewis Black. He’s this great commentator on American culture, but he has the sensibility of a comic who looks at society through psychedelic glasses. I guess he’s the living equivalent of George Carlin. He’s still a hero in Boston. You can’t walk 10 feet with him in Boston without someone saying, ‘Bill, we love ya! Screw Don Zimmer!’’ [Zimmer was the Red Sox manager who benched Lee and later traded him to the Montreal Expos in 1978 for a utility infielder. After the trade was completed, Lee told reporters that he was happy to leave the underachieving Red Sox, saying, ‘Who wants to be with a team that will go down in history alongside the ’64 Phillies and the ’67 Arabs?’]

On what the men are trying to accomplish: ‘The original American revolutionaries took a real risk in founding our country. It’s about time we took some chances too. No matter how you look at it, we’re living in another revolutionary time, a time of major change in the world. We’re at the cliff’s edge. It is the best of times and the worst of times, but we have the potential to make it the best of times through taking our money and putting it back into innovative American production systems. We need to build environmentally sustainable cars, we need to rebuild our transportation systems. We need a whole new green revolution. If we’re going to gamble, we shouldn’t be throwing away our money on Wall Street casino gambling. We should be investing in our future.’

On who is more outrageous -- the Spaceman or the Dude?: ‘Oh, come one, I’m not in the same league with Bill. This guy can yack with the best of ‘em. When I’m around him, I’m not the Dude. I’m the straight man.’

Are these guys onto something? Or are they just smoking their own stash? See for yourself:

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