Robert Downey Sr.

Robert Downey, Jr., delivered his first spoken line in a feature-length motion picture at the age of five. He played a puppy in a film called Pound, written and directed by his dad, whose other prodigiously weird films include the scathing satire Putney Swope and the psychedelic Western Greaser’s Palace… Excerpted from my book, The Village.

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Transcript

Robert Downey, Jr., delivered his first spoken line in a feature-length motion picture at the age of five. He played a puppy in a film called Pound, written and directed by his dad. 

Born Robert Elias in Manhattan 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 that declared that anybody could be a filmmaker, he rented a camera and started making low-budget underground films. 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 Warhol superstar Taylor Mead as an addled President of the United States, with scenes they secretly shot guerrilla-style during a tour of the White House. 

The 1966 Chafed Elbows combines film and still photos to tell the ludicrous tale of Walter Dinsmore, a young man who wanders aimlessly from Greenwich Village to the Hotel Dixie, a Times Square flophouse, like a boho Candide. 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 a gallery, where, he says, "you'll be sold right away, because you're very pretentious." In another scene, Dinsmore records a gibberishpop song, "Hey Hey Hey," the flip side to "Yeah Yeah Yeah." Tom O'Horgan, soon to be famous for Hair, wrote them.

Downey fired his first sort-of commercial release, Putney Swope, straight into the seething cauldron of American race relations in 1969. It's a sometimes scathing, often just zany satire in which Swope, the token black man at a failing Madison Avenue ad agency, is suddenly elected chairman of the board. He promptly fires all the honkies and renames the firm Truth and Soul, Inc. White clients literally throw bags of money at his Panther-style staff, who crank out ridiculous commercials for Ethereal Cereal, Face Off zit cream, and Lucky Air Lines, where male passengers get lucky with the stewardesses. There's a subplot involving the President of the United States, played by the dwarf Pepi Hermine, who played a similar role in Werner Herzog's equally weird Even Dwarfs Started Small. Arnold Johnson, who would later play Hutch on Sanford and Son, played Swope. 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. Giving his characters odd names was a Downey signature.

Downey followed Swope with Pound, adapted from a play that he later said was "done Off-off-off-off Broadway at a movie house at midnight." Actors play a bunch of stray dogs waiting to be adopted or put down. They include the great character actors Stanley Gottlieb, Don Calfa, Antonio Fargas and Charles Dierkop. A magazine reporter who spent time on the set noted a lot of dope smoking. Robert 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 in a movie, addressed to a 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 an inspired double bill with Fellini's Satyricon.

Downey followed Pound with what may be his magnum opus, the psychedelically weird Greaser's Palace of 1972. Allan Arbus plays a zoot-suited Jesus who drops into a Surrealist Wild West. Other characters include the eponymous Seaweedhead Greaser, his son Lamey Homo, the bearded 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 Putney Swope, panned Greaser's Palace as "a big-budget mistake" (it cost around a million dollars). He unfavorably compared it to Alejandro JodoroVsky's El Topo, another psychedelic Western that most critics alsodidn't get or like at the time. 

When Downey directed David Rabe's antiwar play Sticks and Bones for a planned CBS broadcast in the early 70s, the sponsors backed out at the last minute and it was cancelled. He went on to a fitful, iconoclastic career in Hollywood that included goofball stoner comedies like Rented Lips and the more seriously offbeat Hugo Pool, his last feature film, released in 1997. 

He had small parts in a few films in the 90s and in this century, including Boogie Nights and Tower Heist. He was 85 when he died in Manhattan in 2021. Senior, a documentary about him and his son Robert Downey Jr, came out the following year. It’s on Netflix.