Dope, Dogs& Greasers
Robert Downey, Jr., delivered his first spoken line in a feature-length motion picture at the age of five. He played a puppy in Pound, written and directed by Robert Downey, Sr.
Born Robert Elias in 1935, Downey Sr. was fifteen when he dropped out of the ninth grade and used his stepfather’s surname to enlist in the army. During his time in uniform he reputedly managed to get himself thrown in the brig three times. Once was when he was stationed in Alaska, when he and a buddy, drunk at their radar scopes, faked a Soviet missile attack. By 1960 Downey was in Greenwich Village writing Off-Off Broadway plays. When he read a Village Voice column in which Jonas Mekas declared that anybody could be a filmmaker, he rented a camera and started making low-budget underground films. He hung out with Mekas and other filmmakers at the Charles Theater on Avenue B, where one night a week anyone could screen their work.
From the start he combined avant-garde technique and do-it-yourself impudence with a wacky sense of humor. In the 1964 Babo 73 he cast Taylor Mead as an addled President of the United States, with scenes shot guerrilla-style during a tour of the White House. The 1966 Chafed Elbows combines film and still photos in a way loopily reminiscent of La Jetee to tell the ludicrous tale of Walter Dinsmore, a young man who wanders aimlessly from the New School to the Hotel Dixie, a Times Square flophouse, like a Candide adrift in the Pop Art world. In one scene, a man on the street paints him with the initials AW, declares him a work of art, and escorts him at gunpoint to the Washington Square Gallery, where “you’ll be sold right away, because you’re very pretentious.” In another he records a gibberish pop song, “Hey Hey Hey,” flip side to “Yeah Yeah Yeah.” Tom O'Horgan, soon to be famous (or infamous) for Hair, did the music.
Downey fired Putney Swope, his first sort-of-commercial release, straight into the seething cauldron of American race relations in 1969. It’s a sometimes scathing, often just wacky satire in which Swope, the token black man at a failing Madison Avenue ad agency, is suddenly elected chairman. He fires the honkies and renames the firm Truth and Soul, Inc. Charmed and cowed, white clients literally throw bags of money at his Panther-style staff, who crank out ridiculous commercials for Ethereal Cereal, Face Off zit cream (“My man is out of sight, and so are his pimples”), Lucky Air Lines (male passengers get lucky with the stewardesses), and the Borman Six car. There’s a subplot involving the President of the United States, played by the dwarf Pepi Hermine, who played a similar role in an even stranger film released about the same time, Werner Herzog’s Even Dwarfs Started Small. Arnold Johnson, who would later play Hutch on Sanford and Son, plays Swope, but Downey dubbed all his lines in post-production using a gravelly pseudo-black voice; he claimed that Johnson had flubbed too many of them during filming. Mel Brooks and Allan Arbus have tiny roles as Mr. Forget It and Mr. Bad News.
Downey followed Swope with Pound, adapted from a play of his that he later said was “done Off-off-off-off Broadway at a movie house at midnight.” It’s about a bunch of stray dogs waiting to be adopted or put down, played by great character actors like Stanley Gottlieb, Don Calfa, Antonio Fargas and Charles Dierkop. A reporter for the magazine Show who spent time on the set during the filming noted a lot of pot smoking; Downey Jr., who was born in 1965 and grew up in the Village, has said that his problems with drugs go back to his childhood, when his father gave him his first puff on a joint. Junior’s first recorded line of dialogue, addressed to Lawrence Wolf, the bald actor playing a Mexican Hairless, is the immortal, “Have any hair on your balls?”
Pound was rated X for its foul language, and the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops denounced its “gross crudities played simply for irreverent and tasteless humor in a style that is more asinine than canine.” It premiered in New York City on a double bill with Fellini’s Satyricon and then vanished.
Downey followed it with the film that may be his magnum opus, the psychedelically weird Greaser’s Palace (1972). Allan Arbus plays a zoot-suited Jesus figure who drops into a Surrealist Wild West. Other characters include the eponymous Seaweedhead Greaser, his son Lamey Homo, the bearded prairie drag queen Spitunia, and a villain with possibly the most preposterous name in the history of filmmaking, Bingo Gas Station Motel Cheeseburger With A Side Of Airplane Noise And You’ll Be Gary Indiana. Reviewing it in the New York Times, Vincent Canby, who’d been a fan of Swope, panned Greaser’s Palace as “a big-budget mistake” (it cost around a million dollars) and unfavorably compared it to Alejandro Jodorowsky’s El Topo, another psychedelic Western that had preceded it by a few years, which most critics also didn’t get or like.
Meanwhile Downey was directing plays for Joe Papp’s Public Theater; when he directed David Rabe’s antiwar play Sticks and Bones for a planned CBS broadcast, the sponsors backed out at the last minute. Since then Downey has gone on to a fitful, iconoclastic Hollywood career that has included goofball stoner comedies like Rented Lips and the more seriously offbeat Hugo Pool. In recent years Mekas’ Anthology Film Archives has worked with Martin Scorsese’s Film Foundation to restore, screen and archive some of Downey’s earliest underground films, which hadn’t been seen for decades.
by John Strausbaugh