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Much of the set from that 1998 film remained at Hollywood Star Lanes and Foster wrote a check for $25,000 and the demolition contractor gave him a week to get everything out. It’s also where they filmed the cult classic The Big Lebowski, starring Jeff Bridges. Open for more than 40 years, it was seized by the city for the Los Angeles Unified School District.
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The Dude abides! Cult classic film The Big Lebowski is embedded into the origins of Lucky Strike (literally, considering lane seven was taken out of the former Hollywood Star Lanes where the movie was filmed and repurposed as the bar at Lucky Strike’s first location).Īnd with a strike of luck that’s more suited for a Hollywood movie than reality, Foster got a phone call while Lucky Strike was under construction from a friend who was representing an old-school bowling center called Hollywood Star Lanes. When a space became available in the same building, they jumped at the chance to build what would soon become Lucky Strike. No one had really done it in a hospitality-oriented way.”Īt the time, he’d been working with Seventeen magazine on a teenage nightclub in Hollywood. “Bowling had been league-centric and competition based,” he explained. “What’s the next reinvention in interactive food and beverage venues?” “We’ve done roller skating and we’ve done billiards,” Foster said he thought at the time. Jillian’s became a social hub that had 40 locations in 20 states at its peak.īy 2002, the Fosters had moved to Los Angeles. It turned the male-centric pool hall idea into an environment for all. That was an upscale billiards operation that also launched in Boston. Spinoff made roller skating a social endeavor and copycats quickly sprouted up and the roller disco trend exploded during the late ’70s and early ’80s (much like the video game boom).Īs that trend waned, the Fosters and business partner Kevin Troy (also a founder of Lucky Strike) opened Jillian’s in 1988. “That’s where we fell in love with creating a space where people could be entertained.” “Roller disco did not exist before that,” Foster said. It was quite the unproven concept at the time. He’d previously been living in Manhattan and said he had the idea in Central Park: “What if we took roller skating indoors?”
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Steven Foster told RePlay he quit practicing law to open the business and his partner thought he was out of his mind. In the late 1970s, they opened a roller skating rink called Spinoff in Boston right behind historic Fenway Park. They continue to put their spin on things today with Lucky Strike, the energetic boutique bowling venue founded in 2003. Steven Foster, founder of Lucky Strike, has a long history of introducing unique entertainment concepts.įirst with roller skating and then billiards, Steven and Gillian Foster are no strangers to introducing the industry to unique entertainment concepts.