Popular Culture Review Vol. 13, No. 1, January 2002 | Page 78

74 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