The character Walter Sobchak from TBL was actually based on John Milius, Director
John Goodman as Walter Sobchak, a Vietnam veteran, the Dude's best friend, and bowling teammate. Walter places the rules of bowling second in reverence only to the rules of his adopted religion, Judaism, as evidenced by his strict stance against "rolling" on Shabbos. He has a violent temper, and is given to pulling out a handgun (or crowbar) in order to settle disputes. He says the Gulf War was all about oil and claims to have "dabbled" in pacifism. He constantly references Vietnam in conversations, much to the annoyance of the Dude. Walter was based, in part, on screenwriter and director John Milius.[12]:189
John Frederick Milius (born April 11, 1944) is an American screenwriter, director, and producer of motion pictures. He was one of the writers for the first two Dirty Harry films, received an Academy Award nomination as screenwriter of Apocalypse Now, and wrote and directed The Wind and the Lion, Conan the Barbarian and Red Dawn.
Milius has long claimed to be an outsider in Hollywood. In 2001 he stated:
I've always been considered a nut. They kind of tolerate me. It's certainly affected me. I've been blacklisted for a large part of my career because of my politics—as surely as any writer was blacklisted back in the 1950s. It's just that my politics are from the other side, and Hollywood always veers left.[32]
He wrote a number of iconic film lines such as "Charlie don't surf" and "I love the smell of napalm in the morning," from Apocalypse Now, and the famous Dirty Harry one-liners delivered by Clint Eastwood, including "Go ahead, make my day" and "Ask yourself one question, 'do I feel lucky?' Well, do you punk?". Milius also had a hand in the USS Indianapolis monologue in the film Jaws;[26] the sequence was performed by Robert Shaw. When Spielberg asked him to punch up the screenplay for Saving Private Ryan, Milius suggested the Normandy cemetery bookends where Ryan, now an elderly hero of World War II, in a moment of survivor guilt, asks his wife "Did I live a
