Popular Culture Review Vol. 13, No. 1, January 2002 | Page 78
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Popular Culture Review
gambling house to the accompaniment of a ragtag Mariachi band.
As in Putney Swope and Pound, Downey continued his often-baffling
use of “repetition humor'’ in Greaser's Palace. Allan Arbus’s Christ character
continually asks, “what’s going down here?” for no discernible reason at all, and in
another scene, a card shark tells Vernon Greaser to “pick a card, any card.. .don’t
show it to m e...now put it back in the deck. Is this the card?” Greaser replies,
“no.” “Is this the card?” “No.” And on and on and on, all during a long tracking
shot in the desert, for at least five minutes. Shot on location on over seven weeks
for $800,000, Greaser's Palace added to Downey’s maverick reputation, but the
film failed to click at the box office (perhaps due to its cheerfully blasphemous
theme), and Downey was once again looking for work.
Downey’s next venture was a television adaptation of David Rabe’s
controversial Vietnam anti-war play Sticks and Bones. CBS backed the project
sight unseen, which was produced by Joe Papp of the Public Shakespeare Theatre.
Amazingly, no one at CBS had ever heard of the play, nor did they bother to read
the screenplay, which was brutally critical of US involvement in Vietnam. The
project was shot on 2” videotape and then transferred to 35mm film. Videotape
editing was still fairly primitive in 1972, so Downey cut the film on a 35mm KEM
flatbed, mixing the sound in a conventional dubbing studio. The end result was
then transferred back to 2” tape, giving the project a raw, funky look. Downey was
entirely satisfied with the venture. CBS, however, was not. “It was on CBS, and
when they first saw it, they panicked. They couldn’t get anybody to buy any
commercials, so it went out commercial-free...CBS financed it because they
thought, ‘if it’s Joe Papp, it’s gonna be Shakespeare’ and they didn’t even bother to
read the thing. I liked it. And I liked that there were no commercials for two hours.”
But Pounds Greaser's Palace, and Sticks and Bones marked Downey
indelibly as an outsider, not one of the crowd, much the same position that Preston
Sturges found himself in during the latter stages of his career. Offers of work dried
up. Intentionally or not, Downey had managed to alienate Hollywood studios (with
Pound for United Artists), independent producers (Cyma Rubin was reportedly
disappointed that Greaser's Palace wasn’t a greater financial success), and network
television (CBS). It was the beginning of hard times.
Between 1972 and 1980, Downey did little work, because, by his own
admission, “I was a mess on drugs. In the 70s, I was a m ess.. .a lot of coke and pot;
it was a disaster. Coke is such a waste of time.” In 1980, Downey landed a gig as a
writer on Chuck Barris’s The Gong Show Movie. In 1980 he also directed the lowbudget teen comedy Up the Academy, which failed to make a dent in the commercial
marketplace; by his own admission, he hated making the film. At the same time,
Downey’s son, Robert, Jr., was rocketing to stardom as one of the 1980s and 90 s
most bankable and mercurial stars. Downey Sr., on the other hand, was stuck